She put a hand to her shoulder, gripped hard, and felt tomorrow’s bruise taking shape. But only a bruise. Nothing serious.
What mattered more was—shit—something was missing.
She’d dropped her mobile.
“She’s stopped moving,” Roddy said.
The pulse on his screen was stationary, as if Louisa had come to a halt out there in the dark.
They’d made a U-turn after spotting Lech, and were heading that same direction now, up the main road. To their left, hiding behind a screen of trees, lay the common. The thought of it had Shirley wriggling in her seat, as if, deep in its shadows, lay something to satisfy the restless cravings which were creeping up on her again. Which were always creeping up on her.
“How close is she?” she said.
“Dunno. But we’re nearly parallel.”
They reached a junction and turned, heading towards the roadworks, and keeping the common to their left. Its bordering trees thinned out, offering glimpses into the darkness: she peered, but couldn’t make out anything much. Roddy followed her gaze, and unlike Shirley could make out shifting shapes in the dark—the Rodster’s night vision was up there with your average cat. There were people; there was action. The scenario unfolded before him like a one-take movie: Louisa, lured onto the common by a former KGB Colonel, taking revenge for ancient defeats. There were black prisons in remote corners of the former Soviet states; Roddy knew about them—everyone did. British spies, long written off as missing in action, were among the captives; locked up with no hope of release, and treated with inhuman cruelty. It was all starting to happen right now, not far from here, in the dark. Under the pitiless eyes of ex-Colonel Alexa Chaikovskaya, Louisa was being bundled into a sack, thrown into the boot of a car, dispatched from a private airfield, and the next time she’d see daylight, it would be falling on stone-cold snow and rock. An orange jumpsuit and a bucket in the corner . . . Yeah, right. Not on Roddy’s watch. His upper lip twitched, the only outer sign to betray his mental preparation for action, and something inside him hardened at the thought of the battle to come; the split-second reflexes he’d rely on— “Red light.”
“。 . . Wha’？”
“Red light!”
Roddy braked, and screeched to a halt in the path of the tourist coach coming the opposite way.
The noise of the coach’s brakes—like a pair of pigs being sheared—startled Lech, who was close at hand, having pulled over on the far side of the roadworks, where the road became two lanes again. He was standing by the car, mobile in hand, peering into the darkness beyond the trees, and hearing nothing from Louisa’s end. He’d said her name twice before the noise of the near-collision nearly made him drop his phone, though that same sound, transmitted through the ether, reached Louisa, the squawk erupting just yards from where she stood, and more audible than Lech’s voice had been. She scooped her mobile up gratefully, and turned back to where the men had waylaid de Greer, if that’s what they were doing. If that’s who she was. She switched her headtorch back on and ran to within yards of where the trio had clustered. “Still here,” she said into the phone. Then called to the group in front of her: “Hey!”
The woman had seen her approaching. The men hadn’t, and didn’t look welcoming.
“Hey,” Louisa said again. “Are you okay?”
The one with the shirt reading Number Eleven said, “You talkin’ to me?”
“I was talking to her,” Louisa said.
The blonde woman pushed her goggles onto her forehead. It was de Greer, Louisa noted with relief. One possible way of the evening ending up a fiasco was off the table. Others remained.
“Are you okay?” Louisa repeated. “Do you need help?”
It seemed to her that the woman smiled.
Green Trainers said to Louisa, “We’re all friends here. We’re just having a chat.”
“Yeah, no, it just seems an odd place to be doing that? So I wondered.”
“No need.”
The accent, she thought, was Italian. The looks matched: dark features, generous stubble, probably black hair—hard to tell in this light—but product definitely involved. The guy had been running for ten minutes, and his mop looked like he’d just stepped out of a wardrobe.
Ignoring him, she spoke to de Greer. “That’s right? They’re friends of yours?”
De Greer said, “I’ve never seen them before in my life.”
“She’s joking,” said Green Trainers.