The Alchemist

48

The Daytona took him far and fast away from Saint-Jean, slicing through the rugged landscape, crouched low across the tank with the wind screaming around his helmet and the road zipping past under his feet. Ben’s face was hard as he rode, thinking what his next move should be. He knew in his heart that there was only one thing he could do, to find Roberta. But she could be anywhere. She could well be dead already.

He backed off the throttle on the approach to a bend, a wall of sandy rock on one side of the road and a plunging drop to the forest below on the other. The motorcycle leaned sharply into the turn, his outstretched knee almost grazing the road. On the apex of the bend he gunned the throttle and the machine straightened up as it accelerated powerfully and the engine note rose to a howl between his knees.

Sunlight glinted off metal in the distance ahead. He swore behind the black visor. Three hundred metres away at the end of a long straight, a roadblock was stopping vehicles. An army of police must have mobilized across the Languedoc by now. Murder at the Manzini villa, kidnapping, and a fugitive on the run. They would have circulated pictures of him to every cop in the region.

He slowed. Four police cars, cops with machine-pistols slung low, but ready. They’d stopped a Volvo estate. The driver was out of the car, and they were checking his paperwork. Ben didn’t have any, and as soon as they made him take off his helmet he’d be caught.

Being caught wasn’t so much the problem. It was the kind of trouble he’d bring down on himself if he resisted arrest, as he knew he’d be forced to do. He didn’t want to have to hurt them, and he could ill afford to have a thousand cops and military tearing all of southern France to pieces to find him when he needed every minute to find Roberta and finish what he’d started.

He braked and the bike halted in the road a hundred metres from the roadblock. He sat blipping the throttle for a moment. If he ran the roadblock they might shoot. It was too dangerous. He twisted the handlebar and brought the Triumph round in a tight U-turn. Opened the throttle hard and felt his arms stretch and the back wheel spin and wobble with the brutal power of the engine.

As the bike reached high speed and the road snaked towards him as fast as he could think and react, a snatched glance in the fairing-mounted mirror told him that they’d seen him and were following-headlights and flashing blue, followed by a siren. He opened the throttle harder, daring to release a little more of the Triumph’s power. The high mountain pass plunged downward in a long sweeping set of curves and the rocky landscape flashed out of sight as he plummeted into a wooded valley. The police car in his mirrors, already far in the distance, was fast shrinking to a tiny speck.

A straight opened up ahead, carrying him up a long slope between thick banks of green and gold forest. By the time he had passed through the woods and the road was climbing steeply back up towards the next mountain pass, the police car was gone.

He turned off the road at the next junction, knowing more cars would come looking for him. He rode the winding paths higher and higher until the sweep of the whole Aude river valley was laid out below him like a miniature model. The twisty lane became an unrideable rutted track. He stopped the motorcycle near the lip of a precipice, propped it on its stand, and dismounted, unbuckling his helmet and walking a little stiffly from the saddle.

Here and there in the distance he could make out the ruins of ancient forts and castles, specks of jagged grey rock against the forest and the sky. He walked close to the edge of the precipice, so that his toes overhung the brink. He looked down, a dizzying drop of thousands of feet.

What was he going to do?

He stood there for what seemed an eternity, the chilly mountain wind whistling around him. Darkness seemed to be closing in on him. He took out his flask. It was still half full. He closed his eyes and brought it to his lips.

He stopped. His phone was ringing.

‘Benedict Hope?’ said the metallic voice in his ear.

‘Who are you?’

‘We have Ryder.’ The voice waited for his response, but Ben didn’t offer one.

The man went on. ‘If you want to see her alive again, you will listen to me carefully and follow my instructions’

‘What do you want?’ Ben asked.

‘We want you, Mr Hope. You, and the manuscript’.

‘What makes you think I have it?’

‘We know what you got from the Manzini woman,’ the voice went on. ‘You will deliver it to us personally. You will meet us tonight at the Place du Peyrou in Montpellier. By the statue of Louis the Fourteenth. Eleven o’clock. You will come alone. We will be watching you. If we see any police, you will get Ryder back one piece at a time’.

‘I want proof of life,’ Ben demanded. As he listened, he heard a rustling sound of the phone being passed to someone. Roberta’s voice was suddenly in his ear. She sounded afraid. ‘…you, Ben? I…’ Then her voice was cut off abruptly as the phone was snatched away from her.

Ben was thinking fast. She was alive, and they wouldn’t kill her until they had what they wanted. That meant he could buy time.

‘I need forty-eight hours,’ he said.

There was a long pause. ‘Why? the voice demanded.

‘Because I don’t have the manuscript any more,’ Ben lied. ‘It’s hidden in the hotel.’

‘You will go there and retrieve it,’ the voice said. ‘You have twenty-four hours, or the woman dies’

Twenty-four hours. Ben thought about it for a moment. Whatever plan he might be able to come up with to get her out of there, he was going to need longer than that to put it into place. He’d negotiated many times with kidnappers and he knew how their minds worked. Sometimes they were inflexible in their demands and would execute a victim at the drop of a hat. But that was mostly when they knew they didn’t have much to gain, when the bargaining was breaking down or when it looked as though nobody was going to pay. If these guys wanted the manuscript badly enough and thought he was going to deliver it to them, it was a card he could play for all it was worth. He’d already got the guy backing down. He could push him a little more.

‘Hold on,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s be reasonable. We have a problem. Thanks to you people, the hotel is crawling with armed police right now. I’m confident I can get the manuscript back, but I’ll need that extra time.’

Another long pause, muffled conversation in the background. Then the man’s voice was back. ‘You have thirty-six hours. Until eleven o’clock tomorrow night.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘You had better be there, Mr Hope.’