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.His left hand was stuffed in the pocket of the hooded sweatshirt he had on.Thirty fast paces and he was at the other side of the square.Two more and he was outside the blue door.The locking unit was loose.Looked like it might topple out at any moment.The young man clenched his hand in his pocket.He muttered a few words of encouragement to himself.Then he jabbed the door with the heel of his palm and tried to ignore the watery sensation in his stomach as he took the hardest, heaviest step of his life.Chapter Forty-twoThere was a drainage trough on the other side of the road.Trent stumbled down it, then stepped over a low log barrier and set off across the dusty scrubland that lay ahead.There was no defined path.He would come to one eventually – could see it running diagonally up towards the far ridge like a scar in the chalky white rock – but for now he had to walk through untamed land.The ground fell away at an acute angle, forming a giant, shallow depression that jacked up towards the ridge.The going was rough and uneven.There was a lot of sandy earth and loose rock underfoot.It would be easy to turn an ankle.Low bushes and parched Mediterranean brush snagged the cuffs of his jeans and tangled with his boot-laces.He stomped through rosemary, thyme and myrtle.He trampled wild flowers, laurel and juniper.He moved on relentlessly, his skin crawling with the sensation of being watched.He pounded the ground and swung his arms, and all the while the droning traffic faded gradually from behind until the low hum started to blend with the throb of the blood in his ears.There was no shade.The tallest trees came only as high as his shoulders.He passed contorted pines and miniature green oaks, a weedy ash or two, and olive trees with knotted trunks.He squinted hard against the blinding light coming up off the baked white rock.He searched for movement.For the glint of a rifle scope.His eyes streamed in the glare.Not even mid-morning and his brow and neck and back were filmed with sweat.He clasped a palm to his skull and felt a warmth like he’d picked up a noontime boulder.The brush was dry as tinder.This time of summer, the Calanques were closed to the public because of the risk of wild fires.There’d be warning signs up on the official trails.There’d be red metal chains slung across them to deter hikers from coming through.So it was easy enough to believe he was alone out here.Just him and the hostile men who were watching.And as he got further away, beyond the ridge, he’d be out of sight of the road.He’d be even more vulnerable.Strange to think that he’d often been here before, and how different the barren environment had felt then.There’d been times when he’d set out on his own for a challenging hike to cleanse his mind of a tortuous negotiation.And there’d been other times, too.Occasions when he’d strolled along these trails with Aimée.When they’d marvelled at the stark beauty of this place, squeezing one another’s hands, the straps of a rucksack loaded with picnic things biting into Trent’s shoulders.Times when they’d spent whole days on the lonely beaches of Port Pin or Sormiou or, yes, En Vau.Afternoons when they’d lounged in the sun and bathed in the cooling green waters and he’d talked about one day teaching her to sail.Like the day she’d told him she was expecting his baby.He’d hired a small yacht and they’d sailed into the Calanque de Sugiton, laying anchor a short distance from the beach.They’d lazed in the sun.Swum just a little, canoodling in the tides.Then Trent had returned to the boat for his mask and snorkel and underwater camera, and Aimée had stumbled out of the shallows in her black bikini onto the scalding hot sand.She’d wrung the sea from her hair.Waved to him and settled cross-legged on the beach.And that was when he’d surged up from the cool waters, planted his feet in the clinging, liquid seabed, and taken her picture.The one he kept in his wallet.The only shot he had of the woman he loved carrying his unborn child.Trent growled and shook his head.He was getting distracted.Losing focus.Right now, the terrain ahead of him looked like something out of the Wild West.A lone bird circled the sky way above, its wingspan huge, feathers splayed like probing fingers.It wouldn’t be hard to picture a cowboy on a horse traversing the hard rocky slope up ahead.And many hundreds of metres away, in a wide compression near another sheltered parking spot, he saw an old swaybacked pine cabin that might have been a frontier shack or a drinking saloon.Water would have been good.He should have brought the bottle from the car.He’d have liked nothing more than to pour it over his head.To feel it drain down through his hair, dousing his sizzling scalp.He checked his watch.He’d been going for just over ten minutes.A long time, considering how exposed he was.He wondered if the hold-all had already been claimed.He wondered what Girard might have seen.He wondered what lay in wait for him beyond the abrupt stone ridge, its jagged summit looming as sharp and unyielding as a blade.* * *The young man hadn’t known what to expect.But whatever he’d anticipated, it wasn’t this.The hallway was long and narrow and featureless, like a corridor from an anxious dream, but it led him to a compact living area that was flooded with light.The walls were pale, the furniture modern.There was a kitchen area on his right.A telephone on the counter.Some kind of answering machine wired up to it.There was no sign of the guy in the grey jacket.The temperature was neither cool nor hot.The air smelled of nothing perceptible.The only noise was the low murmur of a fridge.He could close his eyes and be anywhere.Nowhere.He could pretend he was in a space entirely his own.He edged his way to a bathroom.It was basic and clean and tidy.There was a deep tub with a shower curtain drawn across it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]