Assets and Liabilities (Alex Mason Book 4) by Blake Banner & David Archer

Author:Blake Banner & David Archer [Banner, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Right House
Published: 2022-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

It was a six-and-a-half-hour drive that took us south as far as Logroño and Zaragoza, and then up through Lleida, back into the Pyrenees. It was a long way around, but it was quicker than driving through the mountains. It rained all the way, so all the way we were driving through a mist of spray. But the worst part was the final stretch through the mountains. It was a slow crawl among hairpin bends, through fog that was sometimes so dense you could barely see twelve feet in front of the hood. At other times it was like a huge cave made of cobwebs that hung in misty strands among the branches of the pine trees.

Darkness came on quickly, and after we had passed the small airport of Seu d’Urgell on our left, some ten miles from Andorra, we began to see scattered snowdrifts among the fog in the fields, among the trees and piled along the roadsides. It looked eerie, shrouded in the trailing billows of mist.

Our six-and-a-half-hour drive wound up being more like eight hours by the time we finally crossed the border at Sant Juliá de Llória. By then we had risen above the fog, but the snowdrifts had grown larger and deeper under the ice-cold, dark blue sky, in which the stars were encrusted like small slivers of ice.

The border cops pretty much ignored us and waved us through, which bode well for my disguise. Then it was a twenty-minute drive into the nocturnal hills. Here the peaks were covered in thick, white mantles which reflected not just the dark blue of the sky, but the starlight and the yellow light of the rising moon. It was a beautiful and haunting sight which prompted Gallin twice to stop and climb out and gaze at the landscape. The second time I got out with her and we stood in silence, companionably breathing clouds of condensation. All she said was, “We will only live this once,” and she stared up into my face. “It will never be like this again.”

I didn’t argue. I knew what she meant.

We finally arrived at the Sport Hotel Hermitage, in the village of Soldeu, at ten PM. The hotel was nestled in a narrow valley, and as I climbed from behind the wheel I looked up at the huge, dark mass of the mountainside across the river to the south of us. At the very top you could see the winking lights of the Grand Continental five-star hotel. It may have been my imagination, but I thought there was something sinister about it. It looked too aloof, to private, too privileged.

I grabbed our cases from the trunk and followed Gallin through the big glass doors into the polished pine reception. We checked in and were shown to our room by a bellboy who extorted twenty euros from me for opening the curtains and showing us where the bathroom was.

When he was gone Gallin opened the suitcases and threw an evening suit at me, complete with wing collar and dickey-bow tie.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.