Redemption aka A Conspiracy of Faith

31

Isabel was terrified.

Terrified by Rachel’s insane driving and her own inability to do even the slightest thing about it.

Only two or three hundred meters farther on, they would hit the toll booths of the Storebælt Bridge, and Rachel wasn’t slowing down. In just a few seconds, the speed limit would be thirty kilometers an hour, and they were doing one hundred and fifty. Ahead of them, the train with Joshua on board tore through the landscape, and this madwoman was hell-bent on catching up with it.

“Slow down, Rachel!” Isabel screamed, as the toll station loomed up in front of them. “BRAKE!”

But Rachel gripped the wheel tighter. She was in a world of her own. She was going to save her children.

Whatever else might happen was of no consequence.

They saw toll officers by the lorry bays waving their arms, and a couple of cars in front of them veered sharply out of their way.

And then they smashed through the barrier with an enormous crash, and debris was slung out to the side and on to the windscreen.

Had her Mondeo been in better condition, they would now have been sharing its interior with a pair of exploding airbags. The mechanic had told her they were defective and needed replacing, but the cost had been prohibitive. She had wanted to have the work done for a long time, but now she was glad she hadn’t. If the airbags had deployed into their faces as they hurtled through the toll station at this speed, things would have gone terribly wrong. But now the only signs of this willful destruction of government property were a huge dent in the hood and an ugly crack that spread across the windscreen.

Behind them, all hell was breaking loose. If the police had not yet been alerted about a car registered in her name having smashed through the toll barrier of the Storebælt Bridge, then someone must have been fast asleep.

Isabel exhaled sharply and pressed Joshua’s number again. “We’re over the bridge! Where are you?”

He gave the coordinates from his GPS and she compared them to her own. He couldn’t be far ahead.

“I’m not happy with this,” he said. “It’s wrong. What we’re doing is wrong.”

She tried to calm him down as best she could, though with little success.

“Call when you see the strobe,” she said and snapped the phone shut.

Approaching exit 41, they saw the train on their left. A sleek necklace of light sweeping through the darkened landscape. And there in the third carriage was a man whose heart was pounding.

When would the bastard make contact?

Isabel clutched the mobile in her hand as they pelted along the stretch between Halsskov and exit 40. There were no flashing blue lights in sight.

“The police will stop us at Slagelse, Rachel, you can be sure of it. Why did you have to demolish that tollgate?”

“You can see the train, can’t you? It would have been gone if I’d slowed down and stopped even for twenty seconds. That’s why!”

“But I’ve lost it. I can’t see it anymore,” Isabel replied frantically. She stared at the map on her knee. “Damn it, Rachel. The track veers off north here and passes through Slagelse. If he gives the signal to Joshua between Forlev and Slagelse we haven’t a chance. Unless we get off the motorway, NOW!”

Exit 40 disappeared behind them as Isabel turned her head.

She bit down on her lip. “Rachel, if he does what I think he will, then Joshua’s going to see that strobe any minute now. Three roads cross the railway before we get to Slagelse. Any one of them would be a perfect place to dump the ransom. But we can’t get off the motorway now, because we just passed the exit.”

Isabel saw right away that she had struck a chord. Rachel’s eyes became desperate again. For the next couple of minutes, the mobile chiming was the last thing in the world she wanted to hear.

Suddenly she stepped hard on the brake and pulled onto the hard shoulder.

“I’m going to reverse,” she explained.

Had she lost her mind? Isabel flicked on the hazard lights and tried to slow her pulse.

“Listen, Rachel,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Joshua will do this just fine. We don’t need to be there when he throws out the bag. Joshua’s right. The kidnapper’s going to get in touch with us anyway once he sees what’s in the bag,” Isabel said. But Rachel wasn’t listening. She had a different agenda, and Isabel understood.

“I’m going to reverse along the hard shoulder,” Rachel said again.

“Don’t, Rachel.”

But she did.

Isabel pulled off her safety belt and turned in her seat. Behind her were columns of traffic coming toward them. “You must be insane, Rachel! You’ll get us killed. What good’s that going to do Samuel and Magdalena?”

But Rachel said nothing. She sat there, the engine whining in reverse, as they tore back along the asphalt.

And then Isabel saw the blue lights come over the hill, some four or five hundred meters behind.

“STOP!” she screamed. It was enough for Rachel to lift her foot from the accelerator.

Rachel looked back at the blue lights, recognizing the problem at once. The gearbox protested audibly as she went straight from reverse into first. Within seconds, they were doing a hundred and fifty again.

“Just pray that Joshua doesn’t call in the next couple of minutes to say he’s dumped the bag. If he doesn’t, we might still have a chance. But you need to turn off at exit 38, rather than 39,” Isabel groaned. “The police will be waiting at 39. They may be there already. Get off at 38. We’ll take the main road instead, it’s closer to the railway. The train goes through farmland all the way to Ringsted, away from the motorway.”

She put her belt on again and sat with her eyes fixed on the speedometer for the next ten kilometers. The blue lights behind were apparently taking no risks in the chase. Who could blame them? she thought.

As they passed exit 39, the road out of Slagelse was a ribbon of blue. The police cars would be there any moment.

Her fears were confirmed.

“They’re closing in on us, Rachel. Faster, if you can,” she urged, pressing Joshua’s number on the mobile.

“Where are you now, Joshua?” she demanded.

But Joshua didn’t answer. Did that mean he had already dumped the bag? Or had something worse happened? Was the monster on the train? The thought hadn’t occurred to her until now. Could that be it? All that stuff about flashing strobes and throwing the bag out of the window, was it all just a smokescreen? Did he already have the bag in his possession and had found out there was no money in it?

She swiveled her head and glanced at the duffel bag with the ransom inside it on the backseat.

What would the bastard do to Joshua?

They reached exit 38 just as blue lights appeared up ahead on the opposite, westbound side, too. Rachel didn’t touch the brakes as they hit Route 150 with a squeal of tires, as close to colliding with another car as they could possibly get. Had it not been for swift evasive action on the part of the other driver, they would all have been done for.

Isabel felt the sweat on her back. She was soaking wet. This woman at the wheel was not merely desperate, she was insane.

“There’s no escape on this road, Rachel. Once the police get behind us here, all they need to do is follow our rear lights,” she yelled.

Rachel shook her head and bore down so close on the still swerving car in front of them they almost locked bumpers.

“No, we won’t let them,” she said calmly, and turned off the lights. The automatic driving lights Isabel had been meaning to get fixed went out at the same time.

They saw the figures of an elderly couple through the rear window of the car in front. Terror seemed a mild interpretation of their frenzied gesticulations.

“We’ll turn off first chance I get,” Rachel said.

“You’ll have to turn on the lights again.”

“Leave that to me. You check the GPS. Where’s the next side road that isn’t a dead end? We need to get out of the way. I can see the police behind us.”

Isabel glanced back over her shoulder. It was true enough. The lights were there now, flashing blue in the dark. Maybe only four or five hundred meters behind at the motorway exit.

“There!” she shouted. “Up ahead.”

Rachel nodded. The headlights of the car in front had picked out a road sign. Vedbysønder, it read.

She stepped on the brake and veered away, lights out, into the darkness.

“OK,” she said, slipping into neutral and rolling past a barn and some farm buildings. “We’ll pull in behind the farm here. They won’t see us. You call Joshua again, OK?”

Isabel looked back over the landscape as the blue lights loomed out of the dark, an ominous aura.

Then she pressed Joshua’s number again, this time full of trepidation.

It rang a couple of times, and then he answered.

“Yes?” was all he said.

Isabel nodded to Rachel to say Joshua had taken the call.

“Have you delivered the bag?” she asked.

“No, not yet,” came his reply. His voice sounded labored.

“Is something the matter, Joshua? Are there people around you?”

“There’s one other man in the compartment besides me, but he’s working at his computer and wearing earphones. So that’s all right. But I’m not feeling good. I keep thinking about the children. It’s so awful.” He sounded short of breath and exhausted. Hardly surprising.

“Just calm down, Joshua.” She knew it was easier said than done. “It’ll all be over in a few minutes. Where’s the train now? Give me the coordinates.”

He read them out. “We’re moving out of the town now,” he said.

She was with him. It couldn’t be that far behind now.

“Get your head down,” Rachel commanded as police cars ripped along the main road and past the turning they had taken. As if anyone could see them here from that distance.

But in a moment, the elderly couple who had been in front of them would be waved in. They would tell the police about the lunatics they had encountered on the road, tailgating them with their headlights switched off, and how suddenly they had shot off down a side road. And then the police would turn back.

“Hey, I can see the train,” Isabel suddenly exclaimed.

Rachel was alert. “Where?”

Isabel pointed south, away from the main road. It was perfect. “Down there! Come on, let’s get going!”

Rachel switched on the lights, ran through the gears in five seconds, negotiating the two bends through the village in one maneuver, and within moments the chain of lights that was the train crossed the beam of the Mondeo’s headlamps in the darkness ahead.

“Oh, God, I can see the strobe!” Joshua cried into the mobile. “Oh, dear Lord and Father, please protect us and have mercy on our souls!”

“Has he seen it?” Rachel said. She had heard the sound of his cry over the phone.

Isabel nodded, and Rachel bowed her head slightly. “Mother of God. Let Thy holy light shine down and show us the way to Thy splendor. Take us unto Thee as Thy children, and warm us at Thy heart.” She exhaled sharply, then breathed in air to the bottom of her lungs as she pressed her foot down harder on the accelerator.

“I can see the strobe right ahead of me. I’m opening the window now,” said Joshua over the mobile. “I’ll need to put the phone down on the seat. Oh, God. Oh, God.”

Joshua groaned in the background. He sounded like an old man with only a few steps remaining on the path of life. Too many things left to do, too many thoughts of which to keep track.

Isabel’s eyes darted around in the darkness. She couldn’t see the light flashing. So it had to be on the other side of the train.

“The road crosses the railway twice farther along here, Rachel. I’m sure he’s on the same road as us,” she shouted, as Joshua exerted himself audibly at the other end of the phone, trying to get the bag out of the window.

“I’m letting go of it now,” said his voice in the background.

“Where is he? Can you see him, Joshua?” Isabel yelled urgently.

Now he had picked up the phone again. His voice came through loud and clear. “I can see his car. It’s pulled in by some trees where the road cuts in toward the tracks.”

“Look out of the window on the other side, Joshua. Rachel’s flashing her headlights now.”

She gave a sign to Rachel, who was hunched over the wheel, peering out of the windscreen in an effort to catch sight of something, anything at all, beyond the train in front of them.

“Can you see us, Joshua?”

“YES!” he cried back. “I can see you by the bridge. You’re coming toward us. You’ll be there any sec…”

Isabel heard him utter a groan. Then came a sound like the phone clattering to the floor.

“I can see it, the strobe!” Rachel exclaimed.

She drove on over the bridge and along the narrow road. A couple of hundred meters and they would be there.

“What’s the man doing now, Joshua?” Isabel demanded, but there was no answer. Perhaps the phone had snapped shut when it fell.

“Holy Mother of God, forgive me for whatever evil I have done,” Rachel chanted in the seat next to her as they swept past a couple of cottages and a farm at a bend, then another house on its own close to the tracks. And then the headlights picked out his car.

It was parked on a bend a couple of hundred meters ahead, perhaps fifty from the railway. And behind it there he stood, the bastard himself, peering into the bag. In a windbreaker and light-colored trousers. If they hadn’t known better, they might have taken him for a tourist who had got lost.

As the full beam of their headlights illuminated him, he lifted his head. It was impossible to see his expression from their distance, but a thousand thoughts must have been racing through his mind. What were his clothes doing in the bag? Perhaps he had already seen that there was a note on top. Certainly he must have realized that there was no money inside. And now these headlights were coming toward him at breakneck speed.

“I’ll run him down!” Rachel screamed at the same moment as the man threw the bag and himself into the car.

They were only meters away from him as his wheels found traction and pulled him out onto the road, his engine whining.

It was a dark Mercedes like the one Isabel had seen near the cottage at Ferslev. So it was him she had seen while Rachel was being sick.

The road ahead was lined by dense woodland, and the sound of their engine and the car ahead roared through the trees. The Mercedes was more powerful than the Ford. It wouldn’t be easy to keep up, and what good would it do them anyway?

She looked at Rachel, deep in concentration behind the wheel. What on earth had she in mind?

“Keep your distance, Rachel,” she yelled. “In a minute, we’ll have the police behind us with reinforcements. They’ll help us. We’ll catch him, you’ll see. They can set up a roadblock somewhere up ahead.”

“Hello?” came the sound of a voice from the mobile in her hand. A stranger’s voice. A man’s.

“Yes?” Isabel’s eyes were fixed on the rear lights of the car in front as they tore along the narrow road, but everything inside her focused now on this voice. Years of disappointment and defeat had taught her always to be on her guard, even in the most innocuous of situations. Where was Joshua?

“Who are you?” she demanded harshly. “Are you in on this, with that bastard? Are you?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean. Were you the person talking just now to the man who owns this phone?”

Isabel felt her brow turn to ice. “Yes, that was me.”

She sensed Rachel shift uneasily in the driver’s seat. Her entire being was a question mark as she tried to keep a straight course on the winding ribbon of asphalt, the distance between them and the car in front increasing all the time.

“I’m afraid he’s been taken ill,” said the voice on the phone.

“What are you saying? Who are you?”

“I was sitting here in the same compartment working when it happened. I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but I’m quite certain he’s dead.”

“Hey!” Rachel yelled. “What’s going on? Who are you talking to, Isabel?”

“Thank you,” was all Isabel could muster in reply to the man at the other end. And then she snapped the mobile shut.

She looked at Rachel and then at the blur of trees as the car hurtled along. If a deer wandered out of the woods, or if they hit a patch of wet leaves at the wrong angle, they’d be done for. The slightest thing could mean disaster. How could she find the courage to tell Rachel what she had just heard? There was no telling how she might react. Her husband had died only seconds ago and she was tearing through this darkened landscape like a woman possessed.

Isabel had often felt depressed about her life. Loneliness was an ever-present shadow. In the long evenings of winter she had often succumbed to the darkest thoughts. But now, at this moment, her mind was quite differently engaged. Now, with vengeance spurring her on, with the responsibility for the lives of two children resting in her hands, and their kidnapper, Satan personified, speeding along in the car in front of them, Isabel knew that she wanted to live. She knew that no matter how awful the world might appear, she could find her own place in it.

The issue was whether Rachel could, too.

And then Rachel turned her head toward her. “Tell me, Isabel. Tell me now. What’s happened?”

“I think your husband’s had a heart attack, Rachel.” That was as gently as she could put it.

But Rachel sensed that the sentence hung unresolved in the air. Isabel could tell.

“Is he dead?” Rachel demanded to know. “Oh, God! He is, isn’t he? Tell me, Isabel!”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me NOW! Or else…” Her eyes were wild. The car was already beginning to swerve.

Isabel reached out toward Rachel’s arm to calm her down, but then she thought better of it. “Keep your eyes on the road, Rachel,” she said. “This is all about your children for the moment, remember?”

Her words lodged inside Rachel’s soul, and she began to tremble. “NO, NO, NO!” she screamed. “NO, tell me it isn’t true. Oh, Mother of God, tell me it isn’t true!”

She gripped the wheel, sobbing violently, saliva dribbling from her lips. For a moment, Isabel thought she was about to give up the chase and stop the car, but then she jerked her body upright again and put her foot down hard on the accelerator.

Lindebjerg-Lynge read a sign that appeared at the side of the road, but Rachel did not slow for a second. The road curved through a cluster of cottages, and then everything was trees again.

Now the bastard in front was clearly under pressure. His car snaked on a bend, and Rachel cried out for Mary, Mother of God, to forgive her for breaking the fifth commandment, for she was now about to kill.

“This is insane! We’re doing almost two hundred kilometers an hour, Rachel. You’ll get us both killed!” Isabel screamed, thinking for a moment that she ought to pull the keys from the ignition.

But the thought of the steering wheel locking flashed through her mind, and instead she braced herself for the worst, her knuckles showing white as she gripped the sides of her seat.

The first time Rachel rammed the Mercedes in front, Isabel’s head lurched forward and then jerked back sickeningly. But the Mercedes held the road.

“OK,” Rachel yelled. “So that makes no impression on you, Satan?” And then she rammed his rear end once more, this time with such force that the hood of the Ford crumpled. Isabel braced herself again but was nevertheless surprised by the violent snap of her body against the safety belt.

“STOP THE CAR!” she commanded, feeling pain in her chest. But Rachel wasn’t listening. She was somewhere else altogether.

In front of them, the Mercedes hit the verge, swerving out of control for a second before correcting again on a straight stretch where the road widened slightly and was dimly lit by yellow light from a large farm.

And then it happened.

At the same moment that Rachel was about to ram the back end of the Mercedes one more time, the driver veered suddenly to the left and jammed on his brakes amid a screeching of tires.

They flew past, and found themselves in front.

She sensed Rachel’s panic. Now they were going far too fast, the Mercedes no longer there to absorb their speed in the repeated collisions. The front wheels skidded to one side. Rachel straightened up, braking slightly, though not enough, and then came the sound of crunching metal from the side, causing Rachel instinctively to brake again.

Isabel turned her head in shock toward the shattered side window and the rear door, now crumpled in against the backseat, and at the same instant the Mercedes came in from behind. The lower half of the monster’s face was in shadow, but his eyes were clearly visible. It was as though the light of sudden clarity passed over his face. As though everything at once fell into place.

All that must never happen had now happened.

And then he rammed them one last time, causing Rachel to lose control of the vehicle. The rest was pain and glimpses of a world careering by in the darkness that surrounded them.

When everything was still again, Isabel found herself hanging upside down in her safety belt. At her side, Rachel lay lifeless, the steering wheel wedged beneath her bleeding body.

Isabel tried to turn, but her muscles would not respond. Then she coughed and felt the blood well in her throat and nostrils.

Odd, how nothing hurt, she thought briefly, and then her entire body exploded in pain. She wanted to scream but couldn’t. I’m dying, she thought, and coughed up blood.

Outside, she saw a shadow approach. The footsteps on the shards of glass were measured and firm. They boded ill.

She tried to focus, but the blood from her mouth and nose ran into her eyes. When she blinked, it felt like her eyelids were sandpaper.

Only when he came close enough for her to hear what he said did she become aware of the heavy metal object in his hands.

“Isabel,” he said. “You were the last person I’d expected to see today. Why did you have to get involved? Look what you’ve done.”

He sat on his haunches and peered in through the side window. She presumed he was considering how best to deliver the final blow. She tried to turn her head to see him more clearly, but still she was unable to move.

“Other people know who you are,” she groaned, feeling pain surge violently in her jaw.

He smiled. “No one knows me.”

He walked around the car and stared at Rachel’s body from the other side. “No need to worry about her anymore. Which is good. She could have been a threat.”

Then suddenly he straightened up. Isabel heard the sirens. A flash of blue passed across his legs, making him reel a couple of steps backward.

And then her eyes closed.