it to Hart. He replied a few seconds later. Francesca stared, understanding.
‘You’re crazy. You’ll never get them out of there. This can’t possibly work.’ She shook her head, breathing heavily. ‘If you’re not Felix Kooi, who are you?’
‘That’s not important, Francesca. What’s important is that you tell me where in the mill Lucille and Peter are being held.’
‘I… I can’t do that. Whoever you are, you must understand that. What do you think you’re going to do? You can’t get them out of there. Drive back to the embassy. There’s still enough time. I’ll tell them you panicked but you’re going to go through with it. That’s the only way you can save them.’
‘Tell me, where are they?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Then I’ll have to hurt you. I have very little time left, Francesca, so I’ll do whatever I need to so that you tell me what I need to know. You need to decide right now how this is going to work.’
She stared across at him. She was breathing heavily. She was scared because in Budapest he’d given her a first-hand demonstration of his ability to inflict pain. But a lot had happened since then and the fear slipped away from her face. ‘No, you won’t. You’re not going to hurt me, Felix – or whatever your name is. Ever since the first time we met you’ve been trying to convince me to walk away from this. Why is that?’ He didn’t answer. ‘You like me. I know you do. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? You care about me. You wanted to save me from this life, remember? You didn’t want me to get hurt. So you’re not going to hurt me now, are you?’
Victor stared straight ahead, through his reflection on the windscreen glass. ‘Last chance, Francesca.’
She smiled at him, softly, sympathetically. ‘You don’t really believe you can get them out of there before Hart finds out you’re not at the embassy. They could already be dead. But if they’re not your family why do you even care? Let me out of the car and drive away. By the time I tell Robert what’s happened, you’ll be long gone.’ She touched him on the shoulder, lightly. ‘Or we could go together. Just the two of us. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
He punched her in the face.
Not hard, because he didn’t want to knock her out, but hard enough to burst her bottom lip wide open. She reeled away, blood smeared across her chin and cheek, face screwed up from the pain and shock, eyes wide with fear, the bloodshot whites showing all around the irises.
‘Where are they?’
She didn’t hesitate. ‘Beneath the older building. There’s an underground mill. From Roman times. They’re in there.’ She touched her lip and examined the blood on her fingers. ‘Why did you do that? You didn’t need to do that, you piece of shit.’
Victor pictured the terror in Lucille’s eyes and the searching gaze of Peter as he stared at the man he believed was his father. Victor pictured what might happen to them because of Francesca’s complicity.
He turned in his seat, reached across to where she sat, and broke her neck.
SIXTY-TWO
Security at the used car dealership was poor. There was a nominal barrier that would stop a car being driven off the forecourt but it took less than a second for Victor to climb over it. He carried the vest slung over one shoulder and the seventeen-shot handgun in his waistband. He kept low as he hurried between the lines of cars until he came to the chain-link fence that surrounded the mill complex. It was four metres in height and topped by a tube of metal from which triangular spikes protruded in spiralling rows. An insurmountable obstacle. At least for the kind of intruders that kept olive mill owners awake at night. Whoever commissioned the fence had never imagined it would need to keep out someone like Victor. And it wasn’t going to.
He waited in the dark, watching and listening until he was sure no one was nearby in the compound. The modern mill building stood three metres away on the other side of the fence, creating a near-perfect barrier to block line of sight from anyone in the old building or in the corridor of space between the two. He stepped back and threw the vest. It arced over the spikes and dropped down between the fence and the building. It made a distinctive thud and Victor drew the handgun in