‘They’re on the move,’ Luca Rossi said when Ferrara answered his mobile.
‘I know. I saw it on my phone as well. I’m just leaving the hotel; I’ll see you somewhere on the road.’
‘Don’t crowd them. On the way to Auch, none of us got closer than about one or two kilometres and that worked really well.’
‘I know my business,’ Ferrara said, somewhat sharply. ‘I’ve done this kind of thing more times than I can remember.’
In the hotel car park, he put his overnight bag in the boot, then attached a mobile phone mount to the inside of the windscreen, clipped his smartphone into it and ran the charging lead from the phone to a socket on the dashboard. He checked that in his normal driving position he could see the screen clearly, which meant he would have no difficulty in following the target vehicle.
He studied the map display on his mobile. The tracker was moving down the link road that joined the N21 and the A64 autoroute, so the targets were going either west or east. It all depended on which way they turned when they got to the junction. If they went west, Ferrara knew he’d have to get out of the city centre pretty smartish to avoid being left too far behind, but until he knew whether to turn left or right, he couldn’t leave the hotel car park.
Moments later, he had the answer. The steadily pulsing light on the display that represented the tracker had gone straight on at the intersection to the south side of the autoroute. That meant they were going east, because the road went nowhere else.
The N21 acted as a kind of a ring road around the east and south of Tarbes, and Ferrara checked his satnav again before deciding which route to take. There was a junction, a complex of two roundabouts and autoroute access, just south-east of the built-up area. That was about the only place where the targets could change direction to head north and seemed like the obvious place for him to go. If they did turn north, he could simply go round one of the roundabouts to follow them, and if they continued to the east, he would join the autoroute and slot in behind them.
Ten minutes later, he was driving south-east down the D817 towards the roundabout complex, keeping one eye on the screen of his smartphone, where the tracker symbol was approaching the same feature from the west.
Ferrara had always believed in getting eyes on his targets as soon as he could, and as he looked at the converging symbol, he realised that if he slowed up slightly, he would actually be able to see the target car. He eased the pressure on the accelerator, slowing down by perhaps ten kilometres an hour as he neared the autoroute. As he passed over the eastbound lane, he glanced right and saw a light grey Peugeot drive underneath the overpass. A quick look at his smartphone confirmed it was the target vehicle.
Rossi had told him the make and model of car the targets were driving, and his eyes-on check confirmed the description. It also showed that the targets hadn’t found either of the trackers and stuck them on an entirely different car.
Ferrara turned the MiTo right at both the roundabouts and entered the slip road for the A64 autoroute, taking a ticket at the toll booth. According to his smartphone, he was three or four kilometres behind the Peugeot, and he knew he could quickly close that distance to about one kilometre, close enough to take any action necessary but far enough away that his car wouldn’t be spotted.
Like all French autoroutes, the A64 was mainly straight and fast with a good surface, and was a very efficient way of covering long distances quickly. Unfortunately, what it didn’t do was go where Bronson and Angela wanted, because it ended up in Toulouse.
Just beyond Lestelle-de-Saint-Martory, they turned off onto the D117, a narrower, twisting road that first took them south-west before turning south and then east to head through the Parc Naturel Régional des Pyrénées Ariégeoises, a very pretty area dotted with small villages. Bronson had been checking his mirrors ever since he’d left the autoroute but had seen no sign of any pursuing vehicles. He pulled off the road in Saint-Girons, where the road went around the village in a large loop to the south and over the river, and they stopped there for a few minutes. They ordered coffee in a cafe near the river, sitting outside in the sun at a round metal table shaded by an umbrella, watching village life, while Bronson tried to check that nobody was showing any particular interest in them.
One of the defining characteristics of the French is that they are very patriotic. In any group of French-owned cars, an observer can be reasonably certain that eight or nine out of every ten will be manufactured by Citroën, Peugeot or Renault, unlike the situation in Britain, where patriotism is often seen as a dirty word and the vehicles of choice for most people tend to be manufactured in Germany. Or Japan. Or Italy or France or any nation, basically, apart from Britain.
That simple fact, he hoped, gave him a slight edge. He knew two things about the people who were watching them. First, they were Italian, and second, they were armed. That more or less guaranteed they must have arrived in France by car, and so he could ignore the French-registered Euro-boxes.
From their vantage point he could see their parked hire car, but every car that passed or stopped had French plates. It looked to Bronson as if they had successfully shaken off the surveillance team, but he would keep one eye on his rear-view mirrors, just in case.
Just over quarter of an hour later, they got back on the road. At Foix they would turn south on the N20 towards Andorra and then head east, back on the D117 towards Lavelanet and Puivert. When they reached Couiza, they would turn south towards Rennes-le-Château.
In fact, one of the vehicles Bronson had seen had been occupied by two of Rossi’s men. He had ordered them to drive through the village when the tracker had stopped moving to assess the situation. They’d spotted both the parked hire car and the two targets sitting outside the cafe, and the passenger had reported back to Rossi. The driver had then stopped out of sight in a quiet road at the other end of the village.
Rossi and Ferrara had both stopped their cars to the west of Saint-Girons when they’d seen the tracker come to a halt, and Rossi had ordered the last of his three men to do the same, keeping in touch with each other using their mobiles. They would simply stay where they were until the tracker started moving again, when the pursuit would continue.
Twenty minutes later, they were back on the road, Ferrara’s Alfa Romeo leading the four vehicles shadowing the English couple, who still appeared completely unaware that they were the focus of so much covert attention.
Which was exactly the way Marco Ferrara wanted it.