The Evolution of Fear (Claymore Straker #2) - Paul E. Hardisty Page 0,36
Suez Canal was within a couple of day’s sailing. He would find Rania, wherever she was, and they’d sail south, to Africa like they’d planned. Through the canal, down the Red Sea, past Yemen, down the east coast, maybe stop for a while in Zanzibar. He’d always wanted to see the Spice Islands.
His nerves tingled at the thought of her, a deep biological faint that seemed to bloom from within the fibre of him, the sinew grafted to his bones, the cartilage of his joints. She knew he was coming. A matter of hours, now. He reached for his soda water, took a long drink, wished it was whisky, let the ice cubes rattle his teeth.
After a while he fell into a stuttering sleep, edging in and out of consciousness, still urging himself to stay lucid, clawing at the fuzzy threshold of what was real, the need to keep Flame on course, guide her safely over the surging waves. The plane hit the runway and jerked Clay awake. He opened his eyes, looked out at the rain, the low grey cloud. Geneva.
After clearing customs he found a phone box, called the chalet again and listened to the same mechanical female voice. An hour and a half later he was in a new rented Renault Laguna, hurtling along the E62, Lake Geneva spreading grey and unsettled on his right. He checked the rear-view mirror. The same black Mercedes had been with him since before Lausanne, almost forty minutes now, two cars back, steady like a star turning in the sky. At Vevey, where the autoroute bifurcated, the black Merc stayed with him towards Montreux. He hadn’t seen anyone following him in the airport, but if Medved or Crowbar had access to flight passenger records or even customs clearance data, they would know that he had surfaced. The message sent to the bank had been designed to rattle him, push him towards Rania, flush him out. They needn’t have bothered.
Just outside Villeneuve, the Merc steady two back, Clay braked hard and swerved from the outer passing lane across three lanes of traffic, rumbling across the hatched warning median onto the exit sliproad for the Shell Villeneuve services. The black Merc flashed past, unable to follow. Clay watched it pass, two kids in the backseat, mum checking her makeup in the vanity mirror. Jesus Christ.
After a plastic sandwich and a cup of coffee, Clay was back on the road. He rejoined the autoroute at Lavey-Les-Bains, took the Colombey exit and started the climb towards Champéry, the countryside familiar now but changed from when he was here with Rania in the last bloom of summer, the frosted anticline of Pointe-de-Bellevue looming now through the clouds, the forests thick-covered in fresh white, the roads high-banked with graded snow.
Traffic slowed to a walk behind heavy trucks panting up switchbacks thick with slush. He willed them forward, his impatience for her burning a ragged hole in his chest. By the time he reached the outskirts of Champéry, the air was thick with big, spinning flakes and the cloud hung low in the valley. At the téléphérique, Clay left the main road and started up, past the old hotel, its window-boxes piled with snow, icicles hanging like rows of silver teeth from the eaves, then over the one-lane bridge, the road climbing through dark forest, snow thickening under the Renault’s tyres.
In his mind he could see the chalet, the pitch of the roof, snow corniced along the eaves, smoke wisping from the chimney, light glowing through frosted windows. And she would be inside, expecting him perhaps, sitting by the fire, her hair down, and if not there, then somewhere just like it, solitary and safe.
Emerging from dense woodland, Clay peered out through cloud and driving snow into the swirling beams of the headlights. He had walked this road so many times during that short time that he and Rania had spent together here, after Yemen – she still weak and recovering from the gunshot wound, he struggling with the loss of his hand – that despite the snow he could feel himself anticipating every curve and rise as he contoured the mountainside. Rania’s chalet stood alone looking out over the valley, set into the slope just below the road. He stopped the car and stared out through the windscreen and the flapping wipers at this place that he did not now recognize. At first he wasn’t sure. The snowburst and the cloud and the throw of the headlights