The Last Witness (63 page)

She closed her eyes, feigning sleep. The darkness felt welcoming, her tiredness threatening to suck her under. Maybe she should just sleep through it all, wake up when it was over. If he came in and started counting down, just let herself sink under. Let it all stay in the darkness and shadows, like every other night. Where it belonged! She just didn’t think she could bare being awake for a second while his hands moved over her body.

Her breath froze, suspended, as the footsteps reached the top of the stairs; then released again as she heard them start moving away towards his bedroom. But after a few paces they paused, turned, and started heading towards her.

Derek Bell watched the blue-grey images on a monitor less than a mile from the Ryall’s.

  He adjusted the dials for a second. With the directional mike, he had to work hard to cut down the background hiss. Finally it was clear: the fall of Lorena’s breathing, the faint rustle of bedsheets.

  Rush job, but that was often how he liked them. More of a challenge. He’d only had forty minutes turn-around to get everything planted and the bear sewn back up again. The lens was in the cap band, the mike in the belt.

  He noticed Lorena look over directly for a moment, and silently prompted
: Get used to not looking. Act as if I’m not here.

  Her eyes shifted towards the door after a second, then finally flickered shut. Faint sound of footsteps from the corridor. They receded for a moment before turning and becoming more prominent again. Bell watched Lorena’s eyes flicker open again fleetingly, then shut again.

  The footsteps were now in the room, moving closer, closer… and Bell clearly saw Ryall – his back at first, then more of his profile. Bell adjusted the focus slightly, his hand staying expectantly by the dials.

  Ryall leant over and touched Lorena’s hair, starting to lightly stroke. Bell’s pulse was suddenly in his throat. He thought he’d been in for a long few nights, but now he began to wonder.

  ‘You poor girl,’ Ryall mumbled under his breath. ‘You’ve been through so much.’

  Bell tweaked the volume up a bit.

  ‘…So much. Such an ordeal.’ The hand continued stroking, now gently tracing across Lorena’s brow as Ryall sat on the side of the bed.

  Lorena’s eyes stayed closed, though Bell knew that she was feigning sleep. Only as Ryall’s hands traced down and started gently stroking one cheek and her neck, did she finally flicker her eyes slowly open, probably sensing that it was too much for her to sleep through.

 
Good girl, good girl,
Bell thought. Keep this up and we’ll get the bastard. Bell was leant forward, intently following each small movement, beads of sweat shiny on his forehead in the glow from the screen.

  But as Lorena’s eyes looked up, Ryall’s hand suddenly paused, hovering an inch above her cheek. Had he sensed something was wrong, seen something in her eyes to alert him? Or was he just deciding: count her down into a deep sleep so that his hand could continue its journey, or return another night?

The heavy rotor blades cut through the night sky.

  Michel felt its rhythm driving him on, pumping his adrenalin. The energy of the motion and the five men sat expectantly with him, rifles and automatics at the ready, was the only thing to make him feel positive.

  He found it hard to escape the feeling that they were heading there after the event, it would all be for nothing. The cavalry turning up after the last Indian arrow had hit Custer. They must be at least an hour behind Roman and his men. Roman might spend some time checking the lay of the land and finalising a plan, but an hour?

  Michel slowly closed his eyes, the dull thud of the rotor pumping almost in time with his pulse. And there was no doubt now that Roman was on his way. He’d had Maury on the radio-phone only minutes ago: phone bugs at both the Donatiens’ and at a switching box outside the
Montclaire
. Roman knew every last detail!

  ‘Ontario border ten miles ahead!’ the pilot announced.

  ‘Okay.’ Michel opened his eyes, nodding. He’d purposely asked for the alert: they’d hit sector 14 only twenty-five minutes after the border. And if there was still nothing still from Mundy, they’d have to start circling. More time lost to Roman.

  Michel asked to be patched through again to Melanie Fuller – he’d already spoken to her twice in the last eighty minutes they’d been airborne.

No, she confirmed, she still hadn’t heard anything from Mundy. ‘…We just missed him at a restaurant by minutes, but he didn’t head home – so now it’s down to bars and clubs. But it’s more difficult: no check-in reservations. We’ve either got to eyeball him or find his car. So there’s a team out there checking every possible dive, and every patrol car’s alerted.’

  ‘We’ll be crossing the border any minute, so time’s tight now.’ Michel had to raise his voice to be heard above the rotor.

  ‘I know. I know. Don’t worry, the second I’ve located Mundy, I’ll be back to you.’

  Michel’s gloom, his sense of despondency, settled like a fast descending cloak in the silence following.

  ‘Four miles now to the border,’ the pilot announced. ‘We’ll be crossing any second.’

  But the cloak was heavy, difficult to shake off this time. Six men on a hell-bent mission
– to nowhere
. Probably he’d known all along they’d be too late, but he needed all of this activity so that he could reassure himself later that he’d done everything he could. Because unlike the men with him, he knew that he was mostly to blame. The set-up so that he could push Donatiens into the Witness Protection programme. Making sure that Donatiens’ birth mother could see him and take a message to Simone to keep him there.
If you tell a lie…

At every stage he’d pushed the envelope, and now this was the payback! They’d get there and there’d be nothing left to do but pick through the bodies, see first hand the result of–

 
Michel visibly jolted as the radio-phone went again, thinking it was news on Mundy – but it was Phil Reeves at Dorchester Boulevard.

  ‘Strangest call just come in, Michel.’

  ‘Why? What is it?’

  ‘Jean-Paul Lacaille has just phoned. He’s on the other line right now – wants to speak to you.’

  Michel was stunned into silence, and after a second Reeves prompted: ‘Do you want me to tell him you’re too busy to talk right now.’

  Michel snapped himself back. ‘No, no, it’s okay. I’ll take it.’

Darkness. Constant, all-enveloping darkness.

  Elena tried to think of it like the solitude she’d sought in the chine, an escape from all the madness outside – God knows she’d seen more than her fair share these past days – and for a while that worked. She could retreat into her own thoughts, continue spinning around what she might say to Georges. But the bumpy flight did little to help her already jaded nerves. And as the darkness continued, the long minutes stretching into hours – the journey seemed to be taking forever – her unease returned. This was different! This was a forced darkness, an imposed solitude. In the chine she was always free to make her way back up to the light.

In that moment it suddenly struck her why Lorena had run in panic from the chine – she’d spent half her life in forced darkness with the sewers and the orphanages, and now Ryall. Eyes clenched tight shut behind the visor, Elena said a silent prayer that it all went well with Crowley. And she was suddenly piqued at her own rising paranoia: all she risked was rejection, non-acceptance if she said the wrong thing. Probably all she deserved having blanked Georges from her mind for a lifetime. It paled in comparison to what Lorena faced.

She should be rejoicing, not chewing her fingernails – she’d finally got what she wanted. Isn’t that what the whole nightmare had been about? Perhaps her anxiety was as much because of that passage than what was to come. A sense of a lifetime’s odyssey coming to a close. She’d get her few hours in the spotlight with Georges to try and make good, and then that was it. And she wasn’t just performing for herself: she couldn’t help sense her father riding along with her. He’d been unable to track Georges down, make amends before he died: now it was down to her to make amends for both of them.

Forced darkness.
But as they hit the last stage of their journey driving from the plane, Michel Chenouda’s chilling account from their last conversation was suddenly back with her: how Georges had been blindfolded in the back of a van and would have been killed if they hadn’t intervened.

  Probably that journey wouldn’t have felt far different from this, Elena thought, settling back for a moment into the darkness and the thrum of the wheels on the road. She shuddered at what that must have been like: going through this same forced solitude thinking that at any second you were about to die?

  But as it struck her that in part she was grappling for an empathy link – a reminder of the chasm she faced with little idea of how to even start crossing it – she pushed the contemplation away.

Brian Cole weaved through the tables of the busy jazz club.

  On the small stage, a trio were running through a passable instrumental rendition of Jobim’s ‘Girl from Ipanema’. He thought for a moment he could see Mundy in the far corner, but as he got closer and could get a clearer view, it wasn’t him.

  Only nine clubs they thought Mundy could get away with visiting at his age, but each one took time to search. They’d split the list between two of them: this was now the third on Cole’s list. Bars and cocktail lounges presented more of a problem: they’d made a list of twenty, but there were probably a dozen more they could have added. The other two in their team were busy working through them: the only advantage was that they could rush in, a quick scan, and rush out again.

  It wasn’t until Cole started down the steps of his next club that his mobile rang. His colleague Tim had found Mundy at
The Glue Pot
.

  ‘…He’s here with me now. I’ll pass you over.’ Tim was almost shouting to be heard above the noise of the club.

Mundy came on with a gruff ‘What is this?’ – clearly irritated at the intrusion – and Cole sneaked a quick glance at his watch as he explained the problem. Almost an hour and a half into their search: he wondered whether they’d still be in time.

‘Come on, come on!’ Roman rubbed his hands together and stomped his feet to fight off the cold.

He wore a lined bomber jacket – it was still bitter at night in Montreal – but where they were now felt a good ten degrees colder. And with the waiting around, it was starting to cut through more to his bones.

Funicelli studied the house through the night-sight binoculars: two lights on that he could see. One at the side upstairs which also shone through at the front onto the veranda – probably the main lounge. And the other downstairs at the back. They hadn’t been able to check the far side of the house; although the lake wrapping around was iced over, they’d have been too visible. But they couldn’t see any reflected glow on the lake surface.

  Thirty-five minutes now they’d been waiting for the two men escorting the English woman to leave – an hour and twenty minutes since Jake Kirkham had followed them there. Maybe Roman was wrong. He thought they’d be heading off to a local hotel or, if it was a brief meeting, heading back with the woman – but maybe they were staying the night. The house looked big, but was it big enough to take them all? These places usually had a tight spec: enough room for the guards and the main subject, with not a lot to spare. And already they might have to make room for the woman.

  Funicelli had placated that maybe it didn’t matter. With the gas he was using, it was going to knock all of them out anyway.

  But it was the panicky few minutes between them cutting the telephone and power lines and putting in the gas that Roman was worried about. With only three or four men, one would see to the generator and they wouldn’t dream of leaving less than two guarding Georges or risk sending someone out alone on reconnaissance. But with another two, they’d have the extra manpower to check for anything suspicious.

  Roman had decided to wait, but now the cold and his impatience were getting the better of him.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Roman muttered under his breath. ‘Maybe we should take all the fuckers out at the same time.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Funicelli nodded mechanically, still checking through the binoculars.

  Massenat was to Roman’s side with Desmarais and Jake Kirkham hanging a couple of yards back, as if they were only peripherally involved with whatever the three decided.

  Roman had quickly set the tone on first greeting when Kirkham glanced at the blood splatters on one shoulder and arm and asked what happened. ‘I cut myself shaving.’ As Kirkham’s eyes shifted to the heavier splatters on Massenat’s collar and chest, Roman added with the same wry smile: ‘He’s got the same razor.’ The message was clear: Don’t pry. We’re here to get a job done, not answer twenty fucking questions.

  Kirkham’s other two goons they’d left over a mile away at the start of the dirt track leading to the lakeside. Funicelli had given them simple instructions on exactly where and how to cut the electricity and telephones to the house: one advantage in the wilds, everything ran overhead. But they looked like two rejects from Wayne’s World; Roman seriously wondered if they could manage even that without frying themselves.