I could smell oranges and lemons in the air. My senses were sharp. Fear can do that.
I was losing the Mercedes, though, so I made the only move I could. Instead of slowing around the next curve, I accelerated.
Chapter 111
I BEGAN TO GAIN on the Mercedes and I kept my foot pressed to the floor. Are you suicidal? I wondered about myself.
Suddenly the Mercedes skidded all the way across the opposite lane. It struck the side of the mountain, a glancing blow, but very damaging to the car at that speed. Then it swerved back and forth on the road, across both lanes. It caromed off the rocks again. The blue sedan suddenly took off into the sky.
It was airborne, falling toward the sea.
I braked to the side of the road and jumped from my car. I saw the Mercedes hit the side of the cliff twice, then roll onto the lower highway far below. I couldn’t get down there from where I was. Couldn’t climb down, anyway.
I didn’t see any movement from the wreck. Whoever was inside the Mercedes had to be dead. But who is it?
I got back in the police car I had commandeered at the estate. It took me close to ten minutes to make my way to the lower highway and the scene of the wreck. French police and an ambulance had already arrived and so had many early-morning onlookers.
As I climbed from my car, I could see that the body hadn’t been removed from the wreckage. Medical workers were leaning inside the car and seemed to be working frantically. They were talking to whoever had been driving. Who was it?
One of them shouted, “He’s still alive. One male! He’s alive in here!”
I started to run toward the wreckage to get a look at the driver. Who? Could he talk to me? I glanced back up at the Moyenne and wondered how the driver could have survived the long fall and crash. The Wolf was supposed to be a tough guy. This tough?
I flashed my creds, and the police surrounding the wreck let me move on.
Then I could see. I knew who it was trapped in the wreck. I couldn’t believe it, though. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing with my own eyes.
My heart was thumping loudly, racing out of control. So was my mind, what was left of it. I came up to the smoldering, overturned car. I knelt on the rocky ground and leaned forward.
“It’s Alex,” I said.
The car’s driver looked at me and tried to focus. His body was trapped inside the crumpled Mercedes. He’d been crushed by metal everywhere below the shoulders. Just awful to see.
But Martin Lodge was alive, and he was hanging on. He seemed to want to say something, and I moved closer. “It’s Alex,” I said again. I turned my head so that my ear was near his mouth.
I needed to know the identity of the Wolf. I had so many questions.
Martin whispered, “It’s all for nothing. Your manhunt is useless. I’m not the Wolf. I never even saw him.”
Then he died on me, and everyone else who was waiting for an answer.
Chapter 112
THE LODGE FAMILY had been taken into protective custody back in England. We all felt that if the Wolf suspected that the wife or any of the children had been told anything incriminating, they would be targets. Maybe he’d kill them just to be safe, or because he felt like killing somebody that day.
The next morning I flew to London and met with the
police at Scotland Yard, specifically Lodge’s superior, a man named John Mortenson. First, he reported that none of the survivors at Cap-Ferrat seemed to know anything about the Wolf, or even who Martin Lodge had been.
“There is a new development, a little wrinkle,” he told me then.
I leaned back in a leather lounger with a view of Buckingham Palace. “At this point, I’m not surprised about anything, John. Tell me what’s going on. This is about the Lodge family?”
He nodded, sighed, and then began. “It starts with Klára Lodge. Klára Cernohosska, actually. Let me begin with her. It turns out Martin was on the team that brought a defector named Edward Morozov out of Russia back in ’ninety-three. Martin worked with the American CIA, with Cahill and Hancock, and also Thomas Weir. Only there was no Edward Morozov. He was an unidentified KGB defector whose name we don’t know. We think that it was the Wolf.”
“You started by saying something about Martin’s wife, Klára. What about her?”
“For one thing, she’s not Czech. She came out of Russia with the man called Morozov. She was an assistant to a KGB chief, and also our main source of information in Moscow. She and Lodge apparently got cozy during the transfer, and then she was relocated to England. He had her identity changed, got rid of the records. Then he married her. How about that?”