Running in the woods in the dark was too dangerous; they risked turned ankles at least, and possibly broken bones, so they picked their way through the trees and underbrush, pausing every so often to listen for pursuit. They could hear traffic on the road, growing more and more distant as they angled away from it. They couldn't hope that Ronsard's men would be stymied for much longer, though.
They came out of the woods onto a secondary road. "We'll follow this for a while," he said. "It's easier traveling, and while it's dark we can see them a lot sooner than they can see us."
"Are we going anywhere in particular, or just running?"
"Nice."
"Why Nice? Why not Lyon? It's closer."
"Ronsard will be watching the airport in Lyon, and all the car rentals. He'll expect us to go there."
"Then how about Marseilles?"
"Our yacht is in Nice."
"Really. I didn't know we had a yacht."
"The Company has a yacht, and the yacht has a computer with a satellite up-link. I'll be able to get this information to Langley and let them start work on it immediately."
"Nice it is, then."
He took a knife from his pocket and knelt at her feet. Grasping a fistful of fabric in his hand, he inserted the knife about level with her knee and slit her gown sideways, cutting off the bottom half of the skirt. "You have more things in the pockets of that tuxedo than Snoopy has in his dog house," she commented. "I don't see how it fits as well as it does."
"I have a very good tailor."
Now that they were out from under the trees, she could see that his head was still bleeding. He cut a narrow strip off the swath he had just removed from her gown and tied it over the cut. His tuxedo was torn and dirty, and when she looked down she saw that what remained of her gorgeous Dior gown was in the same condition. The remnant of the fabric he draped around his neck.
They began running in an easy jog, because they weren't wearing running shoes and the impact of the hard asphalt through the thin soles of their evening shoes jarred every bone and muscle as it was.
"Are we going to run all the way to Nice?" she asked after about a mile.
"No, we're going to steal a car."
"When?"
"As soon as we find one."
She tried to find a stride that was easier on her feet and legs, and tried to keep her mind focused on the present. While they were being shot at she hadn't had any trouble focusing, but now there was nothing but the rhythmic slap of their shoes on the asphalt, the easy sound of their breathing, and the night sounds surrounding them. With nothing posing an immediate threat, her thoughts zeroed in on what had happened in Ronsard's office.
She didn't want to think about it, but couldn't stop. Maybe it had been inevitable, given the tug of sexual attraction she felt for him, had felt from the moment she set eyes on him in Frank Vinay's office. He struck sparks off her, made her feel so alive she sometimes thought her skin couldn't contain her. Those kisses they had shared-maybe the setup had been pretense, but her response hadn't. With every touch, every dance, every kiss her anticipation had built until it was a wonder she hadn't climaxed as soon as he licked her.
If only it hadn't happened that way. If only he had been making love to her, instead of setting a scene for their cover story. For her, their coming together had been a cataclysmic event. For him, it had been a job.
Maybe that was what hurt so much. She wanted to mean something to him other than just another job, another means to an end. She was afraid . .. dear God, she was afraid she loved him.
She would have to be a Grade A fool to love John Medina.
Loving a man who traveled was one thing; thousands of women did. Loving a man who drew in danger with every breath was something else thousands of women did. Cops, firemen, high-iron men, oil-well riggers-they all had dangerous jobs and they were gone for long stretches of time. But at least they lived in the sunlight. At least their lives were real. John was always setting a scene, doing a job, working an angle. He was almost always someone else. She would never know if he was dead or alive, or if he was coming back even if he was alive.
She couldn't love like that. She couldn't live like that.
"Car," he said, breaking the agonized chain of her thoughts, gripping her arm and urging her off the road. "Get down." Headlights speared toward them through the darkness, the car moving fast.
She lay flat on her face in the weeds, with the evening wrap draped over her arms and shoulders and the remnants of her skirt covering her bare legs. John lay beside her, between her and the road. The car zoomed past.
Slowly they sat up. Until they stopped running, she hadn't been aware of how her feet and legs were aching. She rubbed her hands up and down her shins. "Maybe barefoot would be better than these shoes."
"On the ground, yes, but not on asphalt."
The thin straps were rubbing blisters on her feet. She eased the straps to a different position. "I'm developing a problem here."
He squatted beside her. "Blisters?"
"Not yet, but getting there."
"Okay, running is out. We need to get transportation tonight, though, because we'll be a lot easier to spot on foot during the day. I wanted to get farther away before I liberated a car, but that can't be helped."
"What difference does it make?"
"If a car is stolen practically in Ronsard's backyard, do you think he won't hear about it and figure we're the ones who stole it? Then he'll know what kind of car we're in and can have people watching for us."
She sighed. "Then we walk."
His hand dosed gently over her foot. "I don't think that's an option, either. We'll come across a farm soon, or a village, and I'll get whatever's there, even if it's a tow truck."
"Until then," she said as she got to her feet, "we walk."
Chapter Twenty-Four.
Ronsard was more coldly furious than he'd ever been in his life, but more at himself than anyone else. After all, in his business one could expect treachery. What he hadn't expected was that he would have been so completely fooled. Nor had he expected that as many security personnel as were on the estate wouldn't be able to stop one car from leaving. They were supposedly professionals, but they hadn't performed as such.
He had one man dead, and another, Hossam, suffering from a concussion. Hossam had been found lying on the garage floor, only half-dressed and unconscious. Having correctly guessed that Temple would try for one of the estate vehicles, he had evidently been taken from behind. Why Hossam had been wearing only his pants when he was supposed to have been working was a puzzle, until he noticed that Cara was nowhere to be found and sent someone to investigate. She was found tied to her bed, naked and furious. He had been wondering if he would have to kill Hossam for assaulting her until her concern, when she found he had been injured, reassured him that whatever had been going on in her bedroom had been consensual.
Ronsard's guests were shocked and uneasy. The violence of the night's events had forcibly brought home to many of them exactly what sort of world their host lived in. It was all very well to flirt with danger, to boast to their friends that they had been guests at the notorious Louis Ronsard's luxurious estate, to give him information that made them feel wicked and notorious too, but the reality of it was more brutal than they could have guessed.
He imagined none of them had ever seen a man who had been shot in the head. Then all hell had broken loose outside as Temple made his escape, with a hail of automatic fire that sounded as if a small war was being waged on his front lawn, the car crashing through his front gates, his guards scattering as small-arms fire was returned at them. It wasn't just his security that had been breached, but theirs. They no longer had the illusion of safety. Most of them were leaving come the morning.
As a host, his night had been a fiasco. As a businessman, it was worse than that.
Temple and Niema had been in his office. What Niema was doing there, he couldn't imagine. Perhaps she was Temple's partner, perhaps not. Witnesses to the shooting in the hallway had agreed he was manhandling her, shoving her around, dragging her outside. On the other hand, Temple had been driving the car; who other than Niema had been shooting at his guards? It was possible Temple had been both driving and shooting; difficult, but not impossible, and Temple was a trained assassin.
What had they been doing in his office? .
The lock wasn't working. It had been, however, when he left the office the last time, because he automatically, from ingrained habit, tried the handle every time he left.
He stood in his office looking around, trying to see what Temple could have seen. What would he have been interested in? The computers, of course. But there was nothing on Cara's that would have been of interest to him, and the information in Ronsard's computer was password protected.
The password. He walked to his desk and surveyed the items on top of it. Nothing looked disturbed; his copy of A Tale of Two Cities was exactly where he had left it.
And yet- And yet, the instinct for survival that had stood him in such good stead told him that Temple had somehow breached the security in his computer as surely as he had breached the estate's security. Ronsard couldn't afford to assume otherwise. Nor could he afford to underestimate his opponent, a man who evidently appeared and disappeared at will, and who had access to government documents before they were made public. Such a man was a man with power either behind him, or in his own hands.
They had to be found. With one phone call to the authorities in Lyon he had immediately thrown a net over the airport, then, when one of his more observant men saw where a car had been driven off the road and found the Mercedes abandoned, extended that net to the car rental services also.
They were on foot, unless Temple stole another car. Ronsard arranged that he be told immediately if any thefts were reported.
He sat down at his desk, drumming his fingers on the wood. Lyon was the most logical immediate destination-but perhaps Temple would go in the opposite direction, for that reason. Do the unexpected. Keep your opponent off balance, guessing.
This would be like a game of chess, with moves and countermoves. The key to victory was planning ahead, anticipating every move his opponent could make.
Marseilles was to the south-a larger city than Lyon, with a huge, busy port. It was farther away, but once there, the chances of escaping went up dramatically.
The port. That was the key. Temple would escape by water.
The village was a small one, no more than fifteen houses loosely grouped on each side of the road. John selected an older model Renault that was parked in front of a cottage, as the older cars were easier to hotwire. Niema stood watch while he eased the car door open and felt under the dash for the wiring harness. The interior light was burning, but he didn't have a flashlight and had to take the chance of someone seeing the light. With his knife, he stripped the wires of their plastic sheath.
Three cottages away, a dog roused from its doggy dreams and barked once, then fell silent. No light came on in any of the cottage's windows.
"Get in," John whispered, moving aside so she could crawl in from that side and not make more noise by having to open and close the passenger door, too. She wasn't a four-year-old, and the Renault was small; she banged her knee on the gear shift, her head on the interior light, and her elbow on the steering wheel. Swearing under her breath, she finally maneuvered herself into the passenger seat.
John wasn't laughing, but his mouth wore a curve that said he wanted to. The small interior light gave her the first dear look at him since they left the estate, and her heart skipped a beat. The right side of his face was streaked with dried blood, despite his efforts to wipe it off. His once-snowy shirt was rusty with dirt and blood, his hair was tousled, and beard stubble darkened his jaw. With the black strip of silk tied around his head, he looked like a disreputable, Armani-dad pirate.
If anyone saw them the way they looked now, they were busted.
He twisted the wires together, and the engine began trying to crank. It coughed, the fan turning, and he slid into the seat and gently pressed the gas pedal. With a high-pitched hum like a sewing machine, the car started. Without closing the door, he put in the clutch and shifted into low gear; the car began rolling as he let out the clutch. Fifty yards down the road, he closed the door.
"What time is it?" she asked, slumping in the seat. Her feet were throbbing. She eased them out of the sandals, knowing she might not be able to get her shoes back on and not caring. Sitting down was such a relief she almost groaned.
He glanced at his wristwatch. "A little after three. With luck, we have two or three hours before anyone notices the car is missing. Why don't you try to get some sleep?"
"I'm not sleepy." She wasn't. She was exhausted but not sleepy. She was both hungry and thirsty, and really, really needed to soak her aching feet in cold water.
"You will be. When your adrenaline drops, you'll crash."
"What about you? Don't you have adrenaline?" she snapped, though she didn't know why she was suddenly crabby.
"I'm used to it. I've learned how to work through the crash."
"I'm okay."
She wasn't, though. She glanced at him. His strong hands were steady on the wheel, his expression as calm as if he were out for a Sunday drive. Maybe she looked that calm, too, but inside she was shredded.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"No," she said, appalled. There was no need to ask what "it" was. She didn't want him to be reasonable and logical and tell her to just look at what they'd done as part of the job. All she wanted was to get this over with and leave with some semblance of dignity still intact.
"We have to at some point."
"No, we don't. I just want to forget it."
He paused, and his jaw tightened. "Are you mad because you came, or because I did?"
She felt like screaming. God, why wouldn't he just leave it alone? "Neither. Both."
"That's certainly a definitive answer."
"If you want definitive answers, get a dictionary."
Another pause, as if he measured her resistance. "All right, I'll drop it for now, but we will talk."
She didn't reply. Didn't he understand? Talking about what happened was like touching a wound, keeping it fresh and bleeding. But, no, how could he understand, when it wasn't like that for him?
"How far is it to Nice?"
"A couple of hundred miles if we use the expressway, less if we go over the mountains. The direct route probably won't be the fastest, though, at least not in this car. It doesn't have the horses to climb the mountains at much more than a crawl."
"The expressway should get us there by six-thirty or seven, though."
"In the neighborhood. We have to stop and steal another car."
"Another one?"
"We're too close to Ronsard's estate. He'll hear about this as soon as it's reported. We need to ditch this one."
"Where?"
"Valence, I think. I'll look for something there."
They were serial car thieves, she mused. Well, she had wanted excitement. John Medina certainly filled the bill; there were no dull stretches while in his company. But home was looking better and better, as a refuge in which she could deal with the idiocy of having fallen in love with him. She thought of her peaceful house, with everything specifically arranged to her liking-except for the double hook-and-eye latches on every door and window.
"If I can get a flight out, I'll be home by this time tomorrow," she said, then remembered her passport. "No, scratch that. No passport. How am I going to get back into the States?"
"We'll probably take military transport home."
We? He intended to travel with her? That was news. "You're going back to Washington, too?"
"For the time being."
He didn't expand on that, and she didn't ask.
Instead she leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Even if she couldn't sleep, she could rest.