The Martyr's Curse by Scott Mariani

Author:Scott Mariani [Mariani, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avon
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Five

The first act of the newly formed alliance was to leave the routier café in search of somewhere to hole up and rest a while. ‘I can sleep fine in the car,’ Ben kept insisting as they headed down the road. Silvie drove, with her Glock back in her pocket.

‘Don’t tell me – you’ve slept in a lot worse places. You Special Forces characters seem to take some weird pride in subjecting yourselves to shitty conditions. What’s wrong with us getting a room, with a proper bed in it?’

‘Partly that I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea about me,’ he admitted.

She laughed. ‘A gentleman to the last.’

The gentleman sat and kept a lookout for police, until his eyes wouldn’t stay open any longer and he fell into a doze. Just seconds seemed to pass before he sensed the pickup had stopped, and opened them again to see that Silvie had pulled up in front of a roadside motel. ‘This place looks like it might do us,’ she said, getting out.

Within five minutes, they were unlocking the door to room twenty, which was situated at the far end of a block around the back of the motel, with a designated parking slot just a few steps away. Silvie grabbed the weapons holdall from the Toyota while Ben wearily brought in his green bag. She was strong and handled the heavy weight easily.

The room wasn’t big, and it offered nothing more than the barest essentials. A pair of worn single beds, a wardrobe, a utilitarian bathroom, a lopsided standard lamp in one corner, a flimsy table in the other with a phone, cheaply framed bad art on the walls.

‘Is this place scummy enough to satisfy your delicate sensibilities?’ she said, smiling.

‘Perfect,’ he replied. He locked the door, walked straight back to the left-hand bed, nearest the window, and collapsed face down on it without taking his shoes off. The hard, lumpy mattress felt like feathers to him. He shut his eyes, breathed once, breathed twice, and then was spinning downwards into a dark deep pool where there were no thoughts or dreams and nothing really mattered.

More than five hundred kilometres to the north, Luc Simon hustled off the Learjet at Le Bourget airport, dived into the waiting black Citroën sedan and let himself be driven into the heaving traffic of Paris. He was restless and irritable. Irritated that he’d had to abandon his frenetic command post in Lyon just to report to a bunch of government suits. Irritated that he hadn’t had a decent cup of coffee for the last several hours. Most of all, he was irritated that the high-powered and very secret meeting he was about to attend couldn’t have been held in a simple boardroom. Trust these damn politicians to piss around at the Georges V when there was so much at stake and so little time.

When he walked inside the grand hotel’s ridiculously opulent lobby and was ushered up to the Presidential Suite on the

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