The Lost Testament

71

‘Where are you going now?’ Angela asked, as Bronson turned off down the next street on the right.

‘Just watch,’ Bronson said. ‘I’m following a different road sign.’

About fifty yards down the street was a large blue sign with a white letter ‘P’ in it, and without hesitation he swung the car into the wide opening directly below it. He stopped at the barrier at the entrance to the garage, took a ticket from the machine, and then drove inside as soon as the barrier lifted. There were plenty of vacant parking spaces, and he stopped the car on the second floor level.

‘Right,’ Bronson said, switching off the engine. ‘We’ll sit here for a few minutes. Those guys were probably at least one or two minutes behind us, and with any luck we did manage to lose them. But even if we didn’t, and they saw us heading this way, they’ll probably shoot right past here and keep looking for this car out on the streets. What we need to do now is get hold of another vehicle.’

Angela looked around at the dozen or so cars parked on that level of the garage.

‘You mean steal one?’

‘Nothing so dramatic. What I had in mind was just hiring one.’

Angela nodded slowly. ‘And then what? Can we just drive to the airport and get on to a flight to London? What about George?’

‘We daren’t risk trying to fly out of Spain now. We know the kind of connections and reach these people have. If I was trying to find us, about the first thing I’d do would be to organize a watch on all our credit card transactions plus red-flag our passports.’

‘Can they do that?’

Bronson nodded.

‘Probably. The only way they could have got an assassin to the café where you met Anum Husani, at the time the meeting took place, would be if they had hacked into his email. You didn’t arrange the rendezvous on the telephone, and there was no other source for that piece of information. Hacking — or even tracking — emails is legally and technically very difficult. It needs either access to something like the Echelon global surveillance system or the assistance of some pretty senior guy in whichever Internet service provider supplied Husani’s email facilities.’

‘And they must have tracked that assassin’s mobile phone as well,’ Angela reminded him, ‘otherwise they couldn’t have known we were in that hotel.’

‘You’re quite right. And if they can do that kind of thing, it’s not too big a stretch to assume that they will also have people working within the banking system who could put a watch on credit card transactions.’

‘But then the moment you hire a car they’ll know about us as well, won’t they?’ Angela protested.

‘Yes … but all the credit card transaction will show is that we’ve hired a car. It will take quite some time for them to get to the car hire company and find out exactly what vehicle we’ve hired, and by the time they do that we’ll be miles away. With a plane, we’d have to wait until we could get on one, and then go through security, where they could have people working for them. We’re much more likely to get away with it in a hire car.’

‘So where are we going to drive to?’

‘London,’ Bronson said. ‘If we keep clear of the autoroutes and pick places to stay where the car can be parked off the road and out of sight we should be safe. And there’s another reason as well. I think we could do something to help George.’

Angela looked at him, puzzled by his sudden change of heart.

‘But how can you do that?’ she asked.

‘We can play them at their own game. But first we have to find a hotel.’