The Lost Testament

99

Bronson transferred his foot from the brake to the accelerator pedal, slammed the gear lever into third, and continued to drive the car as fast as he possibly could. He’d seen their possible salvation.

‘I thought you needed to brake and weave,’ Angela asked, a tremor in her voice. ‘Why are you going so fast?’

Bronson kept both hands on the steering wheel, and gestured with his chin.

‘To get alongside them,’ he replied, ‘as quickly as possible. He won’t be able to shoot through them.’

Angela stared through the windscreen as realization dawned.

‘And I never even saw them coming,’ she said.

Miguel recoiled involuntarily from the rifle. Something totally unexpected had just happened. He’d been expecting to see the impact of the bullet on the driver’s door — he had no doubt that that last shot would end the matter — but instead his sight picture had suddenly filled with a flat white object moving across his field of vision with a blur of speed.

He looked up, away from the telescopic sight and realized in that instant precisely why the driver of the car had been travelling so fast and with minimal evasion. Heading south, down the western side of the autovia, was a long line of articulated lorries, a rolling bulletproof shield that would protect the target vehicle until it was almost certainly out of range. With the trucks doing perhaps seventy to eighty kilometres an hour downhill and heading south, and with the car on the other side of the autovia heading north at — probably — by now well over 120 kilometres an hour, Miguel knew he had no chance of hitting it in the split second gaps when the car might be fleetingly visible to him.

For a moment, he wondered where his last bullet had hit, but in a few moments it became perfectly obvious. The driver of the leading truck switched on his hazard warning lights and began braking the vehicle to a halt on the hard shoulder just off the carriageway. Miguel swung his rifle around so that he could take a look at it through the telescopic sight, and the hole in the right-hand side of the truck’s engine compartment was immediately obvious. His shot had been good, he knew that, but in that fraction of a second before it should have hit the Renault saloon, the lorry had simply driven into the bullet’s path.

Miguel didn’t hesitate. As soon as the driver of the truck saw the bullet hole, he would know exactly what had happened and would immediately call the police. It would take them time to get there, but he needed to be long gone from the hillside before that happened. The car was by now out of range and invulnerable. Cursing, he unloaded the rifle and slipped it into the carrying case, picked up the ammunition and all of the spent cartridges that had been ejected from the weapon, and made his way as quickly as he could off the hill.

He’d have to make the call straight away. Now it would all depend on what forces they would have time to mobilize against this man and woman in France. But that wasn’t his problem.