So did Patrice, hearing that. It was unprofessional, but it couldn’t be helped; if Bertrand was alive, things might yet be all right. Yves was gone, of course, blasted to pieces in lunatic martyrdom, but that didn’t mean everything was over. They simply had to clean up the mess he’d left, by laying a thick cold blanket over anyone who knew who they were. That had been Yves’s real legacy. He had wanted to fulfill what he’d come to believe his destiny, but all he’d achieved had been to make it necessary to destroy all traces of his past.
Which existed only in fragments. Like Patrice, like Bertrand, like all of them, Yves had had his childhood removed even while it was happening, and replaced by qualities Frank favoured: obedience to him, and reliance on no other. Attachments were encouraged only because without them, there was nothing to purge. Patrice remembered how, for Yves’s seventh birthday, Frank had given the boy a photograph of his mother, the first Yves had ever seen. Frank allowed him to look at it for five full minutes before handing him a box of matches. Yves had not hesitated for a second. There had been glee in his eyes as he had trampled the resulting oily mess beneath his feet.
Always, he had gone further than any of them. Patrice had been frightened of Yves, a little. He sometimes wondered if Frank had been too.
Bertrand, though, had been the attachment Patrice had never purged himself of. If Bertrand was alive they could complete this mission together and get the fuck off this godforsaken island.
But “Where?” was all he said.
“St. Pancras. The Lockhead passport.”
You never asked where Frank got his information. You simply knew he had a network, the ghostly remnant of his CIA connections. Someone, somewhere, had picked up a phone when Bertrand’s passport was flagged at border control. But this in turn meant the Lockhead identity was blown . . .
These thoughts winking into place in the time it took him to say, “I’m there.”
He ended the call. No point waiting for instructions. Life at Les Arbres had taught him to grasp what needed doing, which here meant reaching St. Pancras before the action moved on. If Bertrand’s passport was flagged, there’d be security waiting. And of all the things that couldn’t be allowed to happen, Bertrand falling into the hands of MI5 ranked way up high.
What he’d been doing on the Eurostar—where he’d been and why—could stay on the burner for now. What Patrice needed was a car.
Luckily, there were a number of these in the immediate area.
River banged his head on the roof when the car struck, then again on the blonde’s head when she crashed into him. Their own car—not his, but he was identifying with it in the circumstances—had been shunted sideways into a set of railings, and the attacking vehicle had bounced back some yards and was stationary in the middle of the road, blocking traffic. He couldn’t smell smoke, but the air had turned thick with damaged-car smells: petrol and scraped metal.
The view in front of him was bendy and improbable. It took a moment to understand that the airbag had deployed.
He raised a hand in front of his eyes, and the gesture took forever. Not concussed, but inside a bubble of time that wouldn’t allow free movement. His hand looked like nothing he recognised. For a moment he was remembering a rabbit dead on a counter, but there was no clear reason for recalling this, and the next instant he wasn’t. His hand was just his hand. His head hurt, but he wasn’t concussed.
The driver gave a groan, muffled by the airbag. The woman, meanwhile, pulled herself upright and shook her head. Her perfect face was going to have one hell of a bruise, supposing they lived through the next few minutes.
Someone was getting out of the enemy car.
The blonde’s jacket had fallen open, and River could see her sidearm holster, her Heckler & Koch: he had a hand to its grip before her own locked round his wrist and she snarled, not words but angry sounds. River pulled back, and tried to open his door, but it was jammed shut by the railings. The blonde was easing her gun free in a clumsy, mechanical way. “Devon,” she said. Concussed. Or geographically challenged. And his door still wasn’t opening.
But the door on the blonde’s side was. A young man peered in, dark-featured, his leather jacket streaky with rain, and River knew him—had seen his photograph—and maybe the young man knew him too, because for a second his face creased into a series of shapes: recognition, puzzlement, disappointment. Then it became a cipher again, right at the moment the blonde woman released her gun at last and pointed it at him.
“Step back,” she said. “Then get on the ground.”
Her voice was impressively firm.
The young man wasn’t paying attention, though. He was staring at River.
The blonde released her seat belt and leaned towards the open door, her gun inches from the man’s face. “Now!”
He stepped back, hands raised, but no higher than his shoulders.
The woman climbed out of the car.
