He stood on the brakes for a two count, then punched the gas again. The SUV skidded, swerved, then slammed into the Lancia’s bumper. Sam had timed it well, accelerating just before the moment of impact. They pulled ahead of the SUV: twenty feet . . . thirty . . . four car lengths.
“Whoa!”
Abruptly, the trees disappeared from either side of them.
Remi popped her head up. “Oh, no!”
The Lancia’s wheels thumped over a berm and they were airborne. Open space loomed in the windshield. The Lancia landed again and bounced, the tires spraying gravel.
“Shoulder!” Remi called.
“I see it,” Sam replied and spun the wheel left. The Lancia went into a tail skid. He eased right, compensating, then straightened out. Out Remi’s window a boulder-strewn embankment dropped several hundred feet into a ravine.
Engine roaring, Kholkov’s SUV sailed over the berm and slammed onto the road.
“He’s not going to make it,” Remi said.
“Let’s hope.”
The SUV went into its own skid, but Kholkov overcompensated. The passenger-side rear tire crunched into the rocks along the shoulder and slipped over the edge. Carried by its own momentum, the rear third of the SUV’s chassis scraped over the dirt, edging inch by inch over the precipice until it stopped, partially suspended in space.
Sam took his foot off the accelerator and let the Lancia coast to a stop. Fifty feet behind them the SUV was seesawing at the road’s edge. Aside from the faint rhythmic groaning of stressed metal, all was quiet.
Remi sat up, looked around.
“Careful,” Sam whispered.
“Are we going to help them?” she asked.
A hand emerged from the darkened interior of the SUV and grasped a windshield wiper. A muzzle flashed from within the cab.
A bullet thunked into the Lancia’s bumper.
“The hell with them,” Sam said and stepped on the accelerator.
“That’s gratitude for you,” Remi said. “We could have bumped them into that ravine.”
“Something tells me we’re going to wish we did.”
CHAPTER 28
GRAND HÔTEL BEAUVAU VIEUX PORT, MARSEILLE, FRANCE
Even as Sam tipped the bellhop and shut the door behind him Remi was dialing the iPhone. Selma answered on the first ring. “Safe and sound, Mrs. Fargo?”
“Safe and sound,” Remi replied as she sat on the bed and kicked off her shoes. “Now will you tell me why we’re in Marseille?”
After leaving Kholkov and his mustachioed partner teetering on the precipice, they’d driven at the Lancia’s best speed to Nisporto. Umberto, his forearm wrapped in his own shirt, used the sat phone to alert his cousin to their arrival.
Nisporto, a village of a few hundred people, sat in the nook of a V-shaped cove ten miles up the coast from Portoferraio. When they arrived, Umberto’s wife, Teresa, and his cousins—all five of them—were waiting at the back door. While Teresa tended to Umberto’s wound, which had missed hitting any bones or arteries, the cousins bundled the now-conscious Bianco into the garage. The mother of the house, Umberto’s aunt Brunela, ushered Sam and Remi into the house and straight to the kitchen table, where she set about feeding them homemade pasta with onions, capers, olives, and red sauce. Thirty minutes later Umberto reappeared, his arm bandaged.
“We’ve put you in some danger,” Sam said.
“Nonsense. You’ve helped me redeem my honor. I think my father would have been proud.”
“I think he would, too,” Remi said, leaning over and kissing him on the cheek. “Thank you.”
Sam asked, “Do we want to know what you’re going to do with Bianco?”