The Lost Testament

103

François was beside his desk in his house in Saint-Cyrl’École, just west of Versailles, looking down at a map of northern France. As he stood there trying to anticipate every possible move his targets might make, he received a telephone call that was entirely unexpected.

‘It’s me,’ the voice said, and François immediately recognized the man as a contact he had in the banking system.

‘You have something for me?’

‘I thought you might like to know that a short time ago a person named C. Bronson bought a ticket on the 19.55 Calais-to-Dover ferry using a credit card in that name. I checked the transaction, and the booking was made by phone, from a British-registered mobile. The registered address of the cardholder is in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, and that ties in with the information you gave me earlier. It’s almost certainly him.’

François was surprised by the news, to say the least.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Let me know if you hear anything else.’

He put the mobile down on his desk and stared again at the map. The more he thought about the information he’d just been given, the more suspicious he was about what it meant. As far as he could tell, there was no good reason why the fugitives would need to pre-book a ferry ticket.

He shook his head. The only reason why the man he was looking for should have purchased a ticket in advance was because he had devised some other means of crossing the Channel, and the one place he wouldn’t be was at the Calais ferry port at five minutes to eight that evening.

He would have to look very carefully at all the other possible routes over to England. The Eurostar terminal in Paris was covered by his men. His eyes roamed down the ports, all of which he knew were already under surveillance. Another possibility, he supposed, was that they might try going to a fishing port or marina and hire a boat and captain to take them across the Channel. But that seemed unlikely, unless they offered a huge sum for such an illegal smuggling operation, or were really persuasive, the kind of persuasion, in short, likely to be backed up by a couple of firearms. That was just about possible, perhaps, but the Channel had blanket radar coverage, and he was quite sure that if any unauthorized vessel made the journey between the French and the British coastlines it would probably be intercepted long before it reached port on the English side.

The more he looked, the more certain François became that the purchase of the ferry ticket was simply a ruse, something to distract him and his men from working out what was actually going on. He ran his eyes down the almost straight coastline shown on the map from Outreau down to Le Crotoy, where the coast of the country bent gently around to the west. And as he scanned the names and symbols on the map, one tiny mark almost leapt out at him, and he suddenly realized what he’d been missing. He’d covered the ports, and the railway stations and the airports, but there was another way that the two fugitives could leave France that had not until that moment occurred to him.

Immediately, he snatched up his mobile phone and dialled a number from memory. The moment the call was answered, he issued his instructions.