The Nostradamus prophecies

60

Achor Bale fell to his knees behind a rock. Something was moving in front of him. He squinted through the dusk but was unable to make out sufficient detail to satisfy himself. Easing the Redhawk into his hand, he began to inch his way further down the hillside. Whatever was moving was making a meal of it. Small stones clattered down ahead of him and there was even a grunt as whatever it was encountered an unexpected obstacle. Not a wild goat, then, but a man. The smell of sweat and stale cigarette smoke wafted towards him on the lightly heated breeze.

Bale was just ten yards away from Macron when he finally caught sight of movement. Macron was using the night glasses to follow his superior’s tortured attempts at a soundless progress down the hillside. Bale levelled the silenced pistol on the back of Macron’s head. Then, dissatisfied with his view of the front sight, he felt around in his pocket for a small piece of white paper. He balled up the paper in his mouth, covered it in saliva, then wadded it, papier-mache like, over the red-tipped aiming nipple, so that it stood just proud of the silencer. He lined the sight up once again with Macron’s head, then let out a long, disappointed sigh. It was quite simply too dark for accuracy.

He sheathed the Redhawk, and felt around for his leather sap. With this in hand, he began to belly his way over the rocks towards Macron, using the distant clatter Calque was still making as cover.

At the last possible moment Macron sensed something, and reared up from his position, but Bale’s first blow caught him fl at on the side of the head. Macron scythed to the ground, his arms pressed tightly against his flanks. Bale crept forward and squinted into Macron’s face. So. It wasn’t Sabir. And it wasn’t the gypsy. Lucky, now, that he hadn’t used the pistol.

Grinning, Bale felt around in Macron’s pockets until he found his cellphone. He lit up the screen and checked for messages. Then, with an angry grunt, he ground the phone into the earth with his foot. Only a policeman would encrypt his text messages and, once encrypted, make them accessible only with a password – it was like wearing a belt and braces.

He dug around further in Macron’s pockets. Money. Identity papers. A picture of a coloured girl in a white dress sporting an overbite that her parents were obviously either too tight or too poor to have rectified. Lieutenant Paul Macron. An address in Creteil. Bale pocketed the wad of material.

Reaching down, he took off Macron’s shoes and tossed them behind him into the brush. Then, taking first one foot in his hand and then the other, like a mother cat scruffing her kittens, he struck Macron a further sharp blow with the sap against each instep.

Satisfied with his work, he picked up the night glasses and monitored the surrounding hillside. He was just in time to catch sight of Calque’s spectrally pale head disappearing behind a bluff six hundred metres below him.

So what was happening? How much did the police already know about him? He had obviously underestimated them as well, for they too must have had access to the message hidden on the Virgin’s base, thanks to Sabir’s quick thinking in not making off with her when he had the chance.

Bale rather regretted knocking out Macron now. A missed opportunity. To question a man in absolute silence and on a staked-out hillside – that would have been a definite first in his experience. How could he have achieved it? Only one way to find out.

Bale eased himself out of the hide and set off towards the bluff. It was obvious that these idiotic policemen were only looking for him down in the valley – it would have taken far too much imagination for them to imagine him traversing a barren and, to all intents and purposes, impassable mountainside. This meant that he would come up with them conveniently from behind.

Every fifty metres or so he stopped and listened with his mouth open and both hands cupped behind his ears. When he was about two hundred metres from the bluff he hesitated. More cigarette smoke. Was it the same man coming back? Or was one of the paramilitaries sneaking a quick drag?

He eased himself away from the bluff and down towards the final escarpment overlooking the Sanctuary square. Yes. He could make out a man’s head highlighted against the almost luminous backdrop of the stone cladding.

Bale snaked his way down towards the man’s hideout. He had had an idea. A good idea. And he intended to test it out.