Brute Force

39

Our next objective wasn't complicated: to get the fuck out of the immediate area before they cordoned it off, or night was turned into day by searchlight-toting helicopters.

I wiped the blood from my face as the car weaved with the road.

I sat up as it began to narrow. Lynn made few concessions. I caught sight of his expression in the glow of the dashboard: eyes narrowed, jaw clenched, concentrating with every fibre of his being on the tunnel of light thrown by the headlamp beams and framed by the high hedges either side of the road.

The rev counter gradually fell from the red. Without as much as a sideways glance, he smiled for the first time. Fuck me, I was sharing a getaway car with Stirling Moss in stripy pyjamas.

'Where's the nearest ATM?'

'Holt. About fifteen minutes away.'

Life had to change now. I could no longer leave a trail behind me. With every new direction I took, I needed to shed my skin. First job was to draw the max from my two accounts, then bin the cards. No more money trail. Then we had to get some clothes and get the fuck out of the land of Country Pursuits.

The lane became a blur as Lynn forgot to relax his right foot again. I checked behind and saw no lights.

'Bit slower . . .'

I didn't want to end up in a ditch now we'd got this far.

Despite the gash I'd left on his pate and the streaks of mud on his dressing gown, he was completely unruffled, and so typically English it was as if we were slightly late for dinner.

'Who are they, Nick? Anyone we know?'

I shrugged. 'The Firm's still top of my list, though that doesn't totally explain the leatherwear. I was in Ireland yesterday. A device was shoved under my car. By them, I reckon; that's why they had no weapons. We've all come straight off the ferry.'

Another corner was coming up fast. He dipped the lights to check if anything was coming the other way, then switched back to full beam.

My feet kicked against some shit in the foot well. I looked down and saw a sliver of light. I reached down and recovered a laptop with a mobile phone connected to it by a cable. Sellotaped to the lid was a sheet of A4, a printout of a video grab. It was a close-up of my face from Pete's Basra footage. Would the Firm need to rely on that? They'd have far better mug shots of me on file – but maybe none that were quite so up-to-date.

I opened the top and tapped the keys to take it out of screensaver. A Google Earth map came up. The cursor hovered on the road where I'd parked the Merc, at more or less exactly the location of the lay-by.

'Has to be the Firm . . . The device wasn't the only thing they put in my car.'

'Tracker?'

I nodded. They'd probably slipped it behind the Merc's bumper or under the chassis, held in place by a strong magnet, maybe even connected to the car battery. Fuck it, who cared? Lynn, maybe – it meant both of us were targets. They were trying to kill him as well.

I pulled the mobile away from the laptop and threw it out of the window as Lynn missed the apex of another bend, confirming that the only thing he really knew how to drive was a desk. My own mobile swiftly followed.

I asked him about the Leptis message, but all I got was a blank stare. 'Why would Vauxhall Cross need to use you to lead them here? I draw a pension; they know where I live. So why not just hit you and me separately? Why the message?'

We screamed through another village. I couldn't stop myself doing some phantom braking as he narrowly missed a couple of parked cars.

A sign for Holt flashed by. The dashboard clock said nearly 2 a.m. Lynn went straight across a raised roundabout on the edge of town.

'OK, slow down. We're out of the shit, at least for the time being. Drive normally now. I need an ATM, not a fucking ambulance.'