“She’s not on board, I swear it!” protested the harassed captain of the freighter Santa Teresa, seated at his desk in the small cabin aft of the wheelhouse. “Search, if you wish, sig-nore. No one will interfere. We put her ashore three … three and a half hours ago. Madre di Dio! Such madness!”
“How? Where?” demanded Havelock.
“Same as you. A motor launch came out to meet us twelve kilometers south of Arma di Taggia. I swear to you, I knew nothing! I’ll kill that pig in Civitavecchia! Just a political refugee from the Balkans, he said—a woman with a little money and friends in France. There are so many these days. Where is the sin in helping one more?”
Michael leaned over and picked up the outdated diplomatic identification card that gave his status as consular attaché, U.S. Department of State, and said calmly, “No sin at all, if that’s what you believed.”
“It’s true, signore! For nearly thirty years I’ve pushed my old cows through these waters. Soon I leave the sea with a little land, a little money. I grow grapes. Never narcotici! Never contrabbandi! But people—yes. Now and then people, and I am not ashamed. Those who flee places and men you and I know nothing about. I ask you again, where is the sin?”
“In making mistakes.”
“I cannot believe this woman is a criminal.”
“I didn’t say that. I said we had to find her.”
The captain nodded his head in resignation. “Badly enough to report me. I leave the sea for prison. Grazie, gran Signor Americano.”
“I didn’t say that, either,” said Michael quietly.
The captain’s eyes widened as he looked up, his head motionless. “Che cosa?”
“I didn’t expect you to be what you seem to be.”
“Che dice?”
“Never mind. There are times when embarrassment should be avoided. If you cooperate, nothing may have to be said. If you cooperate.”
“In any way you wish! It’s a gift I did not expect.”
“Tell me everything she said to you. And do it quickly.”
“There was much that was meaningless—”
“That’s not what I want to hear.”
“I understand. She was calm, obviously highly intelligent, but, beneath, a very frightened woman. She stayed in this cabin.”
“Oh?”
“Not with me, I can assure you. I have daughters her age, signore. We had three meals together; there was no other place for her, and my crew is not what I would have my daughters eat with. Also, she carried a great deal of lire on her person. She had to; the transportation she purchased did not come cheap.… She looked forward to much trouble. Tonight.”
“What do you mean?”
“She asked me if I had ever been to the Village of Col des Moulinets in the Ligurian mountains.”
“She told you about Col des Moulinets?”
“I think she assumed I knew, that I was merely one part of her journey, aware of the other parts. As it happened, I have been to Moulinets several times. The ships they give me are often in need of repairs, here in San Remo, or Savona, or Marseilles, which, incidentally, is my farthest port of call. I am not what is known as a capitano superiore—”
“Please. Go on.”
“We have been dry-docked here in San Remo a few times and I have gone up to the mountains, to Col des Moulinets. It’s across the French border west of Monesi, a lovely town filled with mountain streams and—How do you say it? Ruote a pale?”
“Paddle wheels. Moulinets can also mean paddle wheels in French.”
“Si. It’s a minor pass in the lower Alps, not used very much. It’s difficult to reach, the facilities poor, the transportation poorer. And the border guards are the most lax in the Ligurians and the Maritimes; they barely have time to take the Gauloises out of their mouths to glance at papers. I tried to assure my frightened refugee that she would have no trouble.”
“You think she’ll try to go through a checkpoint?”
“There’s only one, a short bridge across a mountain river. Why not? I doubt it would be necessary even to bribe a guard; if she was one woman among a group of well-dressed people at night, no doubt evidencing fine vino. What concern is it of theirs?”
“Men like me.”
The captain paused; he leaned back in his chair appraising the American official, as if in a somewhat different light. “Then you would have to answer that yourself, signore. Who else knows?” Both men looked at each other, neither speaking. The captain nodded and continued. “But I tell you this, if she doesn’t use the bridge, she will have to make her way through very dense forest with much steep rock, and don’t forget the river.”
“Thanks. That’s the kind of information I need. Did she say why she was getting out this way?”
“The usual. The airports were watched; the train stations also, as well as the major roads that cross into France.”
“Watched by whom?”
“Men like you, signore?”
“Is that what she said?”
“She did not have to say anything more than she did, and I did not inquire. That is the truth.”
“I believe you.”
“will you answer the question, then? Do others know?”
“I’m not sure,” said Michael. “The truth.”
“Because if they do, I am arrested. I leave the sea for prison.”
“Would that mean it’s public information?”
“Most certainly. Charges would be brought before la commissione”
“Then I don’t think they’ll touch you. I have an idea that this incident is the last thing on earth the men I’m involved with want known. If they haven’t reached you by now—by radio, or a fast boat, or by helicopter—they either don’t know about you, or they don’t want to touch you.”
Again the captain paused, looking carefully at Havelock. “Men you are involved with, signore?” he said, the words suspended.
“I don’t understand.”
“Involved with, but not of, is that correct?”
“It’s not important.”
“You wish to help this woman, do you not? You are not after her to … penalize her.”
“The answer to the first is yes. The second, no.”
“Then I will tell you. She asked me if I knew the airfield near Col des Moulinets, I did not. I never heard of it.”
“An airfield?” Michael understood. It was added information he would not have been given ten seconds ago. “A bridge over a mountain river, and an airfield. Tonight.”
“That is all I can tell you.”
The mountain road leading out of Monesi toward the French border was wide enough, but the profusion of rock and boulder and bordering overgrowth made it appear narrow, more suited to heavy-wheeled trucks and rugged jeeps than to any normal automobile. It was the excuse that Michael used to travel the last half-mile on foot, to the relief of the taxi driver from Monesi.
He had learned there was a country inn just before the bridge, a watering spot for the Italian and French patrols, where both languages were sufficiently understood by the small garrisons on either side, as well as by the few nationals and fewer tourists who occasionally passed back and forth. From what little Havelock had seen and had been told, the captain of the Santa Teresa was right. The border checkpoint of Col des Moulinets was at a minor pass in the lower Alps, not easily accessible and poorly staffed, manned no doubt because it was there—had been for decades—and no bureaucratic legislation had bothered to remove it. The general flow of traffic between the two countries used either the wide coast roads of the Mediterranean fifteen miles south or the larger, more accommodating passes in the north, such as Col de Larche or Col de la Madeleine, west of Turin.
The late-afternoon sun was now a fan-shaped arc of deep orange and yellows, spraying up from behind the higher mountains, filling the sky above the Maritimes with receding echoes of light. The shadows on the primitive road were growing longer, sharper; in minutes their outlines would fade and they would become obscure shapes, indistinguishable in the gray darkness of early evening. Michael walked along the edge of the woods, prepared to spring into the underbrush at the first sounds not part of the forest. He knew that every move he made had to be prejudged on the assumption that Rome had learned about Col des Moulinets. He had not lied to the captain of the Santa Teresa; there could be any number of reasons why those working for the embassy would stay away from a ship in international waters. The slow freighter could be tracked and watched—very likely had been—but it was another matter to board her in a legitimate official capacity. It was a high-risk tactic; inquiries too easily could be raised with a commissione.
Had Rome found the man in Civitavecchia? He could only presume that others could do what he had done; no one was that exceptional or that lucky. He had in his anger—no, his outrage—shouted the name of the port city into the phone and Baylor had repeated it. If the wounded intelligence officer was capable of functioning after the Palatine, he would order his people to prowl the Civitavecchia waterfront and find a broker of illegal passage.
Yet there were always gaps, spaces that could not be filled. Would the man in Civitavecchia name the specific ship, knowing that if he did so, he’d never again be trusted on the waterfront? Trusted, hell; he could be killed in any one of a dozen mist-filled back streets. Or might he plead ignorance to that phase of the escape—sold by others unknown to him—but reveal Col des Moulinets so as to curry favor with powerful Americans in Rome, who everyone knew were inordinately generous with those they favored … “One more refugee from the Balkans, where was the sin, signori?”
So many gaps, so little that was concrete … so little time to think, so many inconsistencies. Who would have thought there’d be a tired, aging captain opposed to trafficking in the profitable world of narcotics and contraband but perfectly willing to smuggle refugees out of Italy—no less a risk, no less a cause for imprisonment?
Or blunt Red Ogilvie, a violent man who never stopped trying to justify violence. There was ambivalence in that strange justification. What had driven John Philip Ogilvie? Why does a man strain all his life to break out of self-imposed chains? Who really was the Apache? The Gunslinger? Whoever and whatever, he had died violently at the very moment he had understood a violent truth. The liars were in control in Washington.
Above all, Jenna. His love who had not betrayed that love but, instead, had been betrayed. How could she have believed the liars? What could they have said to her, what irrefutable proof could they have presented that she would accept? Most important of all, who were the liars? What were their names and where had they come from?
He was so close now that he could sense it, feel it with every step he took on the darkening mountain road. Before the disappearing sun came up on the other side of the world, he would have the answers, have his love back. If his enemies had come from Rome, they were not a match for him; he knew that. His belief in himself swelled within him; it was unjustified all too often, but it was necessary. One did not come out of the early days, the terrible days, and survive without it. Each step and he was nearer.
And when he had the answers, and his love, the call would be made to a cabin in another range of mountains thousands of miles away. To the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah, U.S.A. His mentor, his přítel, Anton Matthias, would be presented with a conspiracy that reached into the bowels of clandestine operations, its existence incontrovertible, its purpose unknown.
Suddenly he saw a small circle of light up ahead, shining through the foliage on the left-hand side of the road. He crouched and studied it, trying to define it. It did not move; it was merely there, where no light had been before. He crept forward, mesmerized, frightened; what was it?
Then he stood up, relieved, breathing again. There was a bend in the road, and in its cradle were the outlines of a building; it was the country inn. Someone had just turned on an outside post lamp; other lights would follow shortly. The darkness had come abruptly, as if the sun had dropped into a chasm; the tall pines and the massive boulders blocked the shafts of orange and yellow that could still be seen in the sky. Light now appeared in windows, three on the nearest side, more in front—how many he could not tell, but at least six, judging from the spill that washed over the grass and graveled entrance of the building.
Michael stepped into the woods to check the underbrush and foliage. Both were manageable, so he made his way toward the three lighted windows. There was no point in staying on the road any longer; if there were surprises in store, he did not care to be on the receiving end.
He reached the border of the woods, where the thick trunk of a pine tree stood between him and a deeply rutted driveway of hard mud. The drive extended along the side of the inn and curved behind it into some kind of parking area next to what appeared to be a delivery entrance. The distance to the window directly across was about twenty-five feet; he stepped out from behind the tree.
Instantly he was blinded by headlights. The truck thundered out of the primitive road thirty yards to his right, careening into the narrow driveway of ridged mud. Havelock spun back into the foliage, behind the trunk of the pine tree, and reached for the Spanish automatic strapped to his chest. The truck bounced past, pitching and rolling over the hardened ruts of the drive like a small barge in choppy water. From inside the van could be heard the angry shouts of men objecting to the discomfort of their ride.
Havelock could not tell whether he had been seen or not; again he crouched for protective cover and watched. The truck lurched to a stop at the entrance of the wide, flat parking area; the driver opened his door and jumped to the ground. Prepared to race into the woods, Michael crept back several feet. It was not necessary; the driver stretched while swearing in Italian, his figure suddenly caught in the spill of a floodlight someone had switched on from inside the building. What the light revealed was bewildering: the driver was in the uniform of the Italian army, the insignia that of a border guard. He walked to the back of the truck and opened the large double doors.
“Get out, you bastards!” he shouted in Italian. “You’ve got about an hour to fill your kidneys before you go on duty. I’ll walk up to the bridge and tell the others we’re here.”
“The way you drive, Sergeant,” said a soldier, grimacing as he stepped out, “they heard you halfway back to Monesi.”
“Up yours!”
Three other men got out, stamping their feet and stretching; all were guards.
The sergeant continued, “Paolo, you take the new man. Teach him the rules.” As the noncommissioned officer lumbered up the driveway past Havelock, he scratched his groin and pulled down the underwear beneath his trousers—signs of a long, uncomfortable trip.
“You, Ricci!” shouted a soldier at the rear of the truck, looking up into the van. “Your name’s Ricci, right?”
“Yes,” said the voice from inside, and a fifth figure emerged from the shadows.
“You’ve got the best duty you’ll find in the army, paesano! The quarters are up at the bridge, but we have an arrangement: we damn near live here. We don’t go up there until we go on. Once you walk in, you sign in, understand?”
“I understand,” said the soldier named Ricci.
But his name was not Ricci, thought Michael, staring at the blond man slapping his barracks hat against his left hand. Havelock’s mind raced back over a dozen photographs; his mind’s eye selected one. The man was not a soldier in the Italian army—certainly no border guard. He was a Corsican, a very proficient drone with a rifle or a handgun, a string of wire or a knife. His real name was irrelevant; he used too many to count. He was a “specialist” used only in “extreme prejudice” situations, a reliable executioner who knew his way around the western Mediterranean better than most such men, as much at home in the Balearic Islands as he was in the forests of Sicily. His photograph and a file of his known accomplishments had been provided Michael several years ago by a CIA agent in a sealed-off room at Palombara. Havelock had tracked a Brigate Rosse unit and was moving in for a nonattributable kill; he had rejected the blond man now standing thirty feet away from him in the floodlit driveway. He had not cared to trust him then, but Rome did now.
Rome did know. The embassy had found a man in Civitavecchia, and Rome had sent an executioner—for a nonattributable kill. Something or someone had convinced the liars in Washington that a former field officer was now a threat only if he lived, so they had put out the word that he was “beyond salvage,” his immediate dispatch the highest priority. Nonattributable, of course.
The liars could not let him reach Jenna Karas, for she was part of their lie, her mock death on the Spanish coast intrinsic to it. Yet Jenna was running too; somehow, some way after Costa Brava she had escaped. Was she now included in the execution order? It was inevitable; the bait could not be permitted to live, and therefore the blond assassin was not the only killer on the bridge at Col des Moulinets. On, or near it.
The four soldiers and the new recruit started toward the rear entrance of the country inn. The door beneath the floodlight was opened, and a heavyset man spoke in a loud voice. “If you pigs spent all your money in Monesi, stay the hell out of here!”
“Ah, Gianni, then we’d have to close you up for selling French girls higher than ours!”
“You pay!”
“Ricci,” one of the soldiers said, “this is Gianni the thief. He owns this dung heap. Be careful what you eat.”
“I have to use the bathroom,” said the new recruit. He had just looked at his watch; it was an odd thing to do.
“Who doesn’t?” shouted another soldier as all five went inside.
The instant the door closed, Havelock ran across the drive to the first window. It looked in on a dining room. The tables were covered with red-checked cloths, with cheap silver and glassware in place, but there were no diners; either it was too early for the kitchen or there were no takers that afternoon. Beyond, separated only by a wide archway that extended the length of the wall, was the larger central barroom. From what he could see, there were a number of people seated at small round tables—between ten and fifteen would be his estimate, nearly all men. The two women in his sight lines were in their sixties, one fat, one gaunt, sitting at adjacent tables with mustachioed men; they were both talking and drinking beer. Teatime in the Ligurian Alps. He wondered if there were any other women in that room; he wondered—his chest aching—if Jenna was huddled at a corner table he could not see. If that was the case, he had to be able to watch a door from the rear quarters—from the kitchen, perhaps—from which the five soldiers had to emerge into the barroom. He had to be able to see. The next few minutes could tell him what he needed to know: who among the clientele in that barroom would the blond killer recognize, if only with a glance, a twitch of his lips, or an almost imperceptible nod?
Michael crouched and ran to the second window along the drive; the angle of vision was still too restricting. He raced to the third, appraised the view and rejected it, then rounded the corner of the building to the first window in front. He could see the door now—CUCINA, the lettering said; the five soldiers would walk out of that door any second, but he could not see all the tables. There were two windows remaining that faced the stone path leading to the entrance. The second window was too close to the door for reasonable cover, but he held his breath and crawled swiftly to it, then stood up in the shadow of a spreading pine. He inched his face to the glass, and what he saw allowed him to let out the breath he had held. Jenna karas was not an ambushed target sitting in a corner. The window was beyond the inside archway; he could see not only the kitchen entrance but every table, every person in the room. Jenna was not there. And then his eyes strayed to the far-right wall; there was another door, a narrow door with two separate lines of letters. Uomini and Hommes, the men’s room.
The door labeled CUCINA swung open and the five soldiers straggled in; Gianni the thief had his hand on the shoulder of the blond man whose name was not Ricci. Havelock stared at the killer, stared at the eyes with all his concentration. The owner of the inn gestured to his left—Michael’s right—and the assassin started across the room toward the men’s room. The eyes. Watch the eyes!
It came! Barely a flicker of the lids, but it was there, the glance was there. Recognition. Havelock followed the blond man’s line of sight Confirmed. Two men were at a table in the center of the room; one had lowered his eyes to his drink while talking, the other—bad form—had actually shifted his legs so as to turn his head away from the path of the killer’s movement. Two more members of the unit—but only one of them was active. The other was an observer. The man who had shifted his legs was the agent of record who would confirm the dispatch but in no way participate. He was an American; his mistakes bore it out. His jacket was an expensive Swiss windbreaker, wrong for the scene and out of season; his shoes were soft black leather, and he wore a shiny digital chronometer on his wrist—all so impressive, so irresistible to a swollen paycheck overseas, so in contrast to the shabby mountain garments of his companion. So American. The agent of record-but it was a file no more than six men alive would ever see.
Something else was inconsistent; it was in the numbers. A unit of three with only two active weapons was understaffed, considering the priority of the kill and the background of the foreign service officer who was the primary target. Michael began studying every face in the room, isolating each, watching eyes, seeing if any strayed to the oddly matched pair at the center table. After the faces came the clothes, especially those belonging to the few faces angled away from him. Shoes, trousers and belts where they could be seen; shirts, jackets, hats and whatever jewelry was visible. He kept trying to spot another chronometer or an Alpine wind-breaker or soft leather shoes. Inconsistencies. If they were there, he could not find them. With the exception of the two men at the center table, the drinkers at the inn were a ramshackle collection of mountain people. Farmers, guides, storekeepers—apparently French from across the bridge—and, of course, the border guards.
“Ehi! Che avete?” The words were hurled at him, a soldier’s challenge. The sergeant from the truck stood, with his hand on his holster, in the semidarkness of the path that led to the entrance of the inn.
“Mia sposa,” said Havelock quickly, his voice low, urgent, properly respectful. “Noi siamo molto disturbati, Signor Maggiore. lo vado ad aiutare una ragazza francese. Là mia sposa mi seguirà”
The soldier grinned and removed his hand from the gun case. He admonished Havelock in barracks Italian: “So the men of Monesi still go across the border for French ass, eh? If your wife’s not in there, she’s probably back in your own bedroom being pumped by a Frenchman! Did you ever think of that?”
“The way of the world, Major,” replied Michael obsequiously, shrugging, and wishing to Christ the loudmouthed dolt would go inside and leave him alone. He had to get back to the window!
“You’re not from Monesi,” said the sergeant, suddenly alarmed. “You don’t talk like a man from Monesi.”
“The Swiss border, Major. I come from Lugano. I moved here two years ago.”
The soldier was silent for a moment, his eyes squinting. Havelock slowly moved his hand in the shadows toward his waist, where, secured uncomfortably under his belt, was the heavy magnum with the silencer attached. There could be no sounds of gunfire, if it came to that.
Finally the sergeant threw up his hands, shaking his head in disgust. “Swiss! Italian-Swiss, but more Swiss than Italian! All of you! Sneaky bastards. I won’t serve in a battalion north of Milan, I swear it. I’ll get out of the army first. Go back to your sneaking, Swiss!” He turned and stalked into the inn.
Inside, another door—the narrow door to the men’s room—was opened. A man walked out, and Michael not only knew he had found a third weapon in the unit from Rome, but realized there had to be a fourth. The man was part of a team-two demolition experts who worked together—veteran mercenaries who had spent several years in Africa blowing up everything from dams and airports to grand villas suddenly occupied by inept despots in Graustarkian regalia. The CIA had found them in Angola, on the wrong side, but the American dollar was healthier then, and persuasive. The two experts had been placed in a single black-bordered file deep in the cabinets of clandestine operations.
And their being at the brídge of Col des Moulinets gave Havelock a vital piece of information: a vehicle or vehicles were anticipated. Either one of these two demolition specialists could pause for ten seconds by an automobile, and ten minutes later it would explode, killing everyone in the immediate vicinity. Jenna Karas was expected to cross the border by car; minutes later she would be dead, a successful, nonattributable kill.
The airfield. Rome had learned about the airfield from the man in Civitavecchia. Somewhere on the road out of Col des Moulinets, whatever conveyance she was in would be blown into the night sky.
Michael dropped to the ground behind the pine tree. Through the window he could see the explosives expert walking directly to the front door of the inn; the man glanced at his watch, as the blond killer had done minutes ago. A schedule was in progress, but what schedule?
The man emerged; his swarthy face looked even darker in the dim light of the post lamp at the end of the path. He began walking faster, but the acceleration was barely perceptible; this was a professional who knew the value of control. Havelock rose cautiously, prepared to follow; he glanced at the window, then looked again, alarmed. Inside, by the bar, the sergeant was talking to the blond recruit he called Ricci, obviously delivering an unwanted order. The killer seemed to be protesting, raising his beer as if it were much needed medicine and thus an excuse for not obeying. Then he grimaced, drank his drink in several swallows, and started for the door.
The schedule was being adhered to. Through prearrangement, someone at the bridge had been instructed to call for the new recruit in advance of the duty hour; he was to be rostered before the shift was over. Procedural methods would be the cover, and no one would argue, but it was not procedure, it was the schedule.
They knew. The unit from Rome knew that Jenna Karas was on her way to the bridge. A motor launch had been picked up in Arma di Taggia, and the party had been followed; the vehicle in which she traveled into the Ligurian mountains was now spotted within minutes of its arrival at the checkpoint of Col des Moulinets. It was logical: what better time to cross a border than at the end of a shift, when the soldiers were tired, weary of the dull monotony, waiting for relief, more careless than usual?
The door opened, and Michael crouched again, peering to his right through the branches of the pine tree at the road beyond the post lamp. The mercenary had crossed diagonally to the shoulder on the other side, bearing left toward the bridge—an ordinary stroller, a Frenchman perhaps, returning to Col des Moulinets. But in moments he would fade into the woods, taking up a predetermined position east of the bridge’s entrance, from which he could crawl to an automobile briefly held up by the guards. The blond killer was now halfway to the post lamp; he paused, lighting a cigarette, an action that gave another reason for his delay. He heard the sound of the door being opened, and was satisfied. The “soldier” continued on his way as the two men from the center table—the American agent of record and his roughly dressed companion, the second weapon in the unit from Rome—came out.
Havelock understood now. The trap had been engineered with precision; in a matter of minutes it would be in place. Two expert marksmen would take out the intruder who tried to interfere with the car carrying Jenna Karas—take him out instantly, the second he came in sight, with a fusillade of bullets; and two demolition specialists would guarantee that the automobile waved through would explode somewhere in the streets of Col des Moulinets, or on a road to an unmarked airfield.
Another assumption could be made beyond the fact that there was a schedule in progress that included a car on its way to the bridge. The unit from Rome knew he was there, knew he would be close enough to the border patrols to observe all those in any vehicle offering passports to the guards. They would examine closely every male figure that came into view, their hands on their weapons as they did so. Their advantage was in their numbers, but he, too, had an advantage and it was considerable: he knew who they were.
The well-dressed American and his employee, the second gun, separated at the road, the agent of record turning right in order to remove himself from the execution ground, the killer going left and to the bridge. Two small trucks clattered up the road from Monesi, one with only a single headlight, the other with both headlights but no windshield. Neither the American nor his hired weapon paid any attention; they knew the vehicle they were waiting for, and it was neither of these.
If you know a strategy, you can counter a strategy—his father’s words so many years ago. He could recall the tall, erudite man patiently explaining to a cell of partisans, calming their fears, channeling their angers. Lidice was their cause, the death of Germans their objective. He remembered it all now as he crept back to the driveway and raced across into the woods.
He got his first glimpse of the bridge from three hundred yards away on the edge of the bend in the road that led to the country inn—the curve he had avoided by heading into the woods. From what he could see, it was narrow and not long, which was a blessing for drivers because two cars crossing at the same time would no doubt graze fenders. A dual string of naked bulbs was now lit; it arced over the central steel span, sagging between the struts; several of the bulbs had burned out, to be replaced when others joined them. The checkpoint itself consisted of two opposing structures that served as gatehouses, the windows high and wide, each with a ceiling light fixture; between the two small, square buildings a hand-winched barrier painted with intense, light-reflecting orange fell across the road. To the right of the winch was a shoulder-high gate that opened onto the pedestrian walk.
Two soldiers in their brown uniforms with the red and green stripes were on either side of the second truck, talking wearily but animatedly with the driver. A third guard was at the rear, his attention not on the truck but on the woods beyond the bridge. He was studying the areas on both sides as a hunter might when stalking a wounded mountain cat; he stood motionless, his eyes roving, his head barely turning. He was the blond assassin. Who would suspect that a lowly soldier at a border checkpoint was a killer with a range of accomplishments that spanned the Mediterranean?
A fourth man had just been passed through the pedestrian gate. He was trudging slowly up the slight incline toward the midpoint of the bridge. But this man had no intention of crossing to the other side, no intention of greeting the French patrols in Ligurian patois, claiming as so many did that the air was different in la belle France and thank God for slender women. No, thought Michael, this crudely dressed peasant of the mountains with the drooping trousers and the large, heavy jacket would remain in the center shadows and, if the light was dim enough, would check his weapon, no doubt a braced, repeating, rapid-fire machine gun, its stock a steel bar clamped to the shoulders, easily concealed beneath garments. He would release the safety and be prepared to race down to the checkpoint at the moment of execution, ready to kill the Italian guards if they interfered, intent on firing into the body of a man coming out of the darkness to reach a woman crossing the border. This man, last seen at a center table in the country inn, was the backup support for the blond-haired killer.
It was a gauntlet, at once simple and well manned, using natural and procedural roadblocks; once the target entered, he was trapped both within and without. Two men waited with explosives and weapons at the mouth of the trap, one at its core, and a fourth at its outer rim. Well conceived, very professional.