Poseidon's Ransom

Chapter Thirty Seven

After Paris, Marseilles is the second biggest city in France. The Greeks, and Romans, used the ancient port as a centre for trade, and military expansion to North Africa, when France was known as Gaul. Nowadays it is one of the busiest container ports in the world, with cargo ships and ferries going to all parts of the Mediterranean.

Rick Washington had been here many times. He liked Marseille. There was something about this cosmopolitan, rougher-than-Paris, get-down-n-dirty city, that appealed to him. For millennia it had been a crossroads on the Med that brought the good, the bad, and the ugly, together. Washington loved that. Beirut used to be the same. So too, Istanbul. But those places were becoming respectable.

Even though Marseille had been the European City of Culture the previous year, she was still the beautiful hooker, who’d kiss you tenderly, then knee you in the balls, as she lifted your wallet.

He’d arrived late evening and checked in to the Hotel Vendome, in the upmarket Castellane district of the city. He’d eaten a late supper in the hotel’s excellent restaurant and then spent an hour or so in the trendy nightclub across the square. The girl, a cute Eurasian, had left his room a little after five.

It was now a few minutes before 10am and the elegant patio was busy with tourists and business people taking breakfast. As he drank the strong black coffee, his thoughts turned to the Templari. He was still pissed-off at their rejection, but last night’s vigorous encounter had gone a long way to soothing his anger and frustration.

He still needed to be careful, hence the reason he’d not flown out of Nice. There were better ways to leave France when one needed to be inconspicuous, and the ferry to Algiers was one of them.

In the square, six storeys below the patio restaurant, Jack and Bogdan were enjoying their breakfast in the Bistro Helene.

Bogdan had checked the underground parking and found Washington’s Audi. The pretty Russian receptionist had been more than helpful and, after Bogdan slipped her two hundred euros, confirmed Washington was indeed in residence. The bistro looked right across the square to the garage entrance, so they’d be able to see if the American left. Now they waited and quietly discussed how best to take him and get him out of France.

Jack took out his smartphone and rang Mathew.

‘Jack. You okay?’

The hustle and bustle of the square made it difficult to hear, so Jack moved to a delivery alleyway at the side of the bistro.

‘Matt?’

‘Yes, I can hear you, Jack.’

‘Okay, that’s better,’

‘So where are you?’

‘Marseille. We’re across from the Vendome, in the Castellane district. We have eyes on his car and know he’s in the hotel.’

‘Excellent work, Jack. Excellent work. If you can get him to the British Consul, we’ll extract him from there.’

‘Right. We need to be careful though, he’s a slippery bastard. Don’t want to do anything that’ll get the local police involved. We’d never get him back.’

‘That he is. But you’re right, we don’t want any local plod involved.’

Jack smiled at his brother’s uncharacteristic turn of phrase. ‘Okay, I’ll be in touch.’

‘Cheers, Jack, Be safe.’

‘Always.’

The line went silent.

In Vendome’s patio restaurant the diners were all but gone, Washington however ordered another pot of black coffee and tapped away at the screen of his smartphone. He brought up the ferry timetables and found there were four sailings a week. He smiled when he saw the next departure to Algiers was 6pm that evening.