56
The life-transforming idea came to Macron about six minutes into his journey. It seemed so simple – and so logical – that he was sorely tempted to pull the car over on to the hard shoulder to afford himself a little extra elbow room to consider it.
Why not think outside the loop for a change? Use his initiative? Why not take advantage of the eye-man’s ignorance about the secret connection between Sabir and the police? It was the single edge they had on him. He would be expecting only Sabir and the gypsy to come riding to the girl’s rescue. Why not make use of that very fact to pull off an ambush?
Macron had been present at only one single police siege during the course of his career. He had just turned twenty and had passed his police primaries six days before. Neighbours had reported seeing a man threatening his wife with a gun. A building in the 13th arrondissement had been sealed off. Macron had been all but forgotten about. His police mentor at the time had been a trained negotiator and had been called in at the very last moment to defuse the situation. Macron had asked if he might come along as an observer. The man had said yes. Just so long as he kept out of the way. Far out of the way.
Five minutes into the siege the negotiations had broken down. The wife had made a comment to her husband which had driven him over the brink. He had killed her, killed the negotiator and then killed himself.
It was the very first time that Macron had seen and understood the innate fallibility of the police machine. Which was only as good as the cogs that made it up. If one of the cogs skipped a ratchet, the whole machine could go kaput. Faster than the Titanic.
He had liked that mentor. Macron had counted on the man to monitor and encourage his career. Shepherd him through his rookie-ship.
After the siege he had been forgotten about a second time. As good as abandoned. No more mentors. No more helping hands up the greasy pole. And now it was all happening again. The Marseillais detectives would come in and take over his case. Cosy up to Calque. Shunt Macron to the sidelines. Take all the credit that was his by right.
The eye-man had hurt him. Once, personally, out in the field and once, professionally, on the road to Millau. And now the man was sitting, like a staked-out pigeon, in a partially lit room, expecting to dominate proceedings for the third time.
But Macron would be the spoke in his machine. He had a gun. He had the crucial element of surprise. The eye-man had made himself a sitting duck. Who would know, in the chaos of a shootout, what had really gone down?
If he killed the eye-man, his career would be made. He would forever remain the man who had cracked the twin fatalities of the Paris gypsy case. The gypsy didn’t matter, of course. But security guards were honorary police – at least when it came to being murdered. Macron could already imagine the envy of his peers; the admiration of his fiancee; the grudging respect from his normally detached father; the triumphant revenge of his downtrodden mother who had fought long and hard for his right to leave the bakery and attend police college.
Yes. This was it. This would be Paul Eric Macron’s moment of truth.
57
Sabir was standing by the side of the road, just as arranged. Macron recognised him immediately from the image he kept on his cellphone. Sabir had lost weight in the intervening period and his expression lacked some of the bumptious self-confidence he exuded in the publicity photograph they had downloaded from his agency website. Now his face looked washed out in the artificial light from the stationary Simca’s headlights – an airport face – the face of a man in endless transit.
The idiot was even stripped to the waist. Why had the other motorist stopped? If Macron, as a civilian, had happened upon a half naked-man, in the middle of a lonely road, at dusk, he would have hurried on past and left him to the next fool down the line. Or called the police. Not risked a mugging or a car-napping by stopping to pick him up. People were strange, sometimes.
Macron drew up beside the Simca, his eyes scanning the road for traps. At this stage he wouldn’t put anything past the eye-man. Even setting up an ambush, with Sabir as the bait, in order to procure himself a police hostage. ‘Are you alone? Is it just you two here? Where’s the other gypsy?’
‘You mean Alexi? Alexi Dufontaine? He’s injured. I’ve left him with the horse.’
‘The horse?’
‘We rode in. At least Alexi did.’
Macron sifted a little air through his front teeth. ‘And you, Monsieur. You decided to lend this man your phone?’
The farmer ducked his head. ‘Yes. Yes. He was standing in the road with his hands held up. I nearly struck him with my car. He said he had to call the police. Are you the police? What is going on here?’
Macron showed the man his warrant card. ‘I’m going to record your name and address on my cellphone and take a picture of you. With your permission, of course. Then you may go. We will contact you later if we need to.’
‘What’s happening here?’
‘Your name, Sir?’
Once the formalities were over, Sabir and Macron watched the Simca disappear into the darkness.
Sabir turned towards the policeman. ‘When is Captain Calque coming?’
‘Captain Calque is not coming. He is coordinating the operation from the gendarmerie in Les Saintes-Maries. The paramilitaries will be here in two hours.’
‘The Hell you say? You told me fi fty minutes. You people must be crazy. The eye-man has had Yola standing on a stool for God knows how long, with a noose around her neck and a sack covering her head. She must be scared witless. She’ll fall. We need an ambulance on standby. Paramedics. A fucking helicopter.’
‘Calm yourself, Sabir. There’s an ongoing crisis in Marseille. The detachment of CRS we would normally be counting on for operations of this nature are fully occupied with other matters. We have had to address ourselves to Montpellier instead. Permissions have had to be given. Identities checked. That all adds to the time frame.’ Macron was astonished at how easily the lies tripped off his tongue.
‘What are we going to do then? Just wait? She’ll never hold out that long. And neither will Alexi. He’ll crack and go powering in. And so will I. If he goes, I go.’
‘No you won’t.’ Macron tapped the waist of his blouson, just above the hip. ‘I have a pistol. If necessary, I will handcuff both of you to my car and leave you for my colleagues to find. You, Sabir, are still wanted for murder. And I have reason to suspect that your companions – Dufontaine and the girl – have been using this house illegally. Have you any idea who it actually belongs to? Or have you just been house-sitting on spec?’
Sabir ignored him. He pointed up the track leading towards the house. ‘When’s your local back-up coming? You need to cut through all this bullshit, surround the place and make immediate contact with the eye-man. The sooner you start putting pressure on him, the better. Make it clear that he will gain nothing by harming Yola. That was the deal we had. The deal I made with your boss.’
‘My local back-up will be here in fifteen minutes. Twenty at the outside. They know exactly where to go and what to do. Show me the situation, Sabir. Explain to me exactly what trouble you have all managed to get yourselves into. And then we will see what we can do to get you out of it.’
58
Macron had settled on his plan. It was absurdly simple. He had reconnoitred the house and understood the layout perfectly. A wide-open window led to the back of the Maset. He would wait for Sabir and Alexi to show themselves and then he would pass through it, counting on their voices – and the eye-man’s concentration on them – to mask the sound of his movements. The minute he had a clear sight of the eye-man he would take him out – a shot to the right shoulder ought to do it.
For Macron wanted his day in court. It wouldn’t be enough just to kill the eye-man – he wanted the bastard to suffer. Just as he had suffered with his feet. And his back. And his neck. And the muscle at the top of his buttock that had been crushed by the car seat and which ticked incessantly since the accident – particularly when he was attempting to drift off to sleep.
He wanted the eye-man to suffer all the tiny humiliations of bureaucratic procedure that he, Macron, had to suffer in his position as a junior police officer. All the stone walls and the Chinese whispers and the unintentionally intentional mortifications. He wanted the eye-man to rot for thirty years in a ten foot by six foot jail cell and to come out an old man, with no friends, no future and with his health in tatters.
Sabir had been telling the truth after all. This was a crisis. The girl was obviously on her last legs. She was swinging around like a rag doll on a light bracket. She couldn’t possibly hold out for the twenty-five minutes necessary for the CRS to land a helicopter the full kilometre and a half away from the Maset needed for effective sound containment – and then to hurry into position.
This had become his call. He was the man the service had in place. Any hesitation would only lead to tragedy.
Macron squatted down beside Sabir and Alexi. He checked the loads in his pistol, enjoying the feeling of power it gave him over the other two men. ‘Give me three minutes to get round to the back of the house and then show yourselves. But don’t come within the eye-man’s range. Stay near the trees and tantalise him. Draw him out. I want him framed against the front door.’
‘If you see him, will you take him out? Not hesitate? The man’s a psychopath. He’ll kill Yola without a second thought. God alone knows what he’s put her through already.’
‘I’ll shoot. I’ve done it before. It wouldn’t be the first time. Our part of Paris is no nursery. There are shootings nearly every day.’
Macron’s words didn’t ring true somehow – Sabir couldn’t quite get himself to believe in them. There was something fervid about the man – something just a little fake. As though he were a civilian who had wandered into a police operation and had decided, off the cuff, to act the part of a participating officer simply for the Hell of it. ‘Are you sure Captain Calque’s okayed this?’
‘I’ve just this moment called him. I’ve explained that a further wait might be fatal. My back-up are still a good fifteen minutes away. Anything could happen in that time. Are you with me on this?’
‘I say go in now.’ Alexi pushed himself up on his knees. ‘Look at her. I can’t bear watching this anymore.’
Given the tenor of Alexi’s words and the urgency of the situation confronting them, Sabir decided to ditch his reservations too. ‘All right, then. We’ll do as you say.’
‘Three minutes. Give me three minutes.’ Macron slithered through the undergrowth towards the back of the Maset.
59
The second he heard Sabir’s voice, Bale played the fi re extinguisher over the candles and oil lamps surrounding Yola. He had caught sight of the extinguisher as he was fetching soup from the kitchen and had immediately decided how best to use it. Now he screwed his eyes shut and waited for them to readjust to the darkness.
Yola called out in her terror, ‘What was that? What did you just do? Why did the lights go out?’
‘I’m pleased you’ve finally turned up, Sabir. The girl’s been complaining that her legs are tired. Have you got the prophecies with you? If not, she swings.’
‘Yes. Yes. We’ve got the prophecies. I have them on me.’
‘Bring them over here.’
‘No. Let the girl go first. Then you get them.’
Bale knocked the stool away with a backward flick of his leg. ‘She’s swinging. I warned you of this. You’ve got about thirty seconds before her windpipe crushes. After that you could try an emergency tracheotomy. I’ll even lend you a pencil to stick her with.’
Sabir felt rather than saw Alexi gliding past him. Five seconds earlier the man had been on his knees. Now he was running straight for the entrance to the Maset.
‘Alexi. No. He’ll kill you.’
There was a flash of light from inside the house. Alexi’s running figure was briefly lit up. Then darkness fell again.
Sabir started running. It didn’t matter that he would die. He had to save Yola. Alexi had shamed him by running in first. Now he was probably dead.
As he ran, he dragged the clasp knife from his pocket and locked open the blade. There were more fl ashes of light from inside the Maset. Oh Christ.
***
On the first note of Sabir’s voice, Macron ducked in through the back window of the Maset. He would guide himself by the lights in the front room – that ought to do it. But as he made his way up the hall, the lights were suddenly extinguished.
Bale’s voice was coming from the left of the open door. Now it was moving across the room. Macron could just make out a darker silhouette against the faint light coming in from outside.
He tried for a snap shot. Please God he hadn’t shot the girl. The sudden flash of light was just enough to warn him of the barricade of chairs and tables Bale had set-up across the face of the corridor. Macron tripped over the first chair and began to fall. In desperate slow motion he twisted over on to his back and endeavoured to kick his way out of the mess – but he only managed to sink deeper inside the morass of wooden slats.
He still had his gun in his hand. But by this time he was lying on his back like a stranded cockroach. He shot wildly over his head, hoping, in that way, to keep Bale’s head down until he was able to disentangle himself.
It didn’t work.
The last sensation Macron had on earth was of Bale kneeling on his gun-hand, levering his mouth open and forcing a pistol barrel across the swollen barrier of his tongue.
***
Bale had instantly moved away from the girl after kicking out the stool legs. The Legion had taught him never to stand for too long in one place during a firefight. His drill instructor had drummed into him that you always move about a battlefield in a series of four-second bursts, to the tune of an internal rhythm that you keep on repeating in your head: You Run – They See You – They Lock and Load – You Drop. The old discipline saved his life.