‘I’m still here. But we’re fucked. We’ll never catch them in this shitbox.’

‘Hang in there, Jean-Luc. We’re on our way.’

Ben had a lot of ground to catch up. But that was what the Alpina was made for. He was pointed in the wrong direction. He fired up the engine with a throaty blast, spun the wheels as he pulled a tight U-turn in the road and accelerated away so hard that the car fishtailed and the rev counter needle was swallowed in the red. He said to Roth, ‘You wanted to find out what two hundred miles an hour feels like? Buckle up.’

Chapter 58

This was the one chance they had of ever catching up again with Nazim al-Kassar, and Ben wasn’t about to let it slip between his fingers. He blew through the country lanes at 130 kilometres an hour and jammed it to over 160 as he hit the network of broader, smoother D-roads in pursuit of the target. Roth’s phone hung cradled in the holder on the dashboard and the little red inverted teardrop was still moving steadily southwards ahead of them, moving at a decent pace.

Ben went faster. As they skirted back past Le Havre he wondered if Julien Segal was still with Margot at the guest house, but Segal didn’t remain in his thoughts for long. They hit the D579 and signs flashed by for Lisieux and Le Breuil en Auge. Then onto the D406, speeding towards Hauteville. Thankfully little traffic was travelling on the minor roads that day. What there was, the Alpina slammed past as though it was accelerating backwards. Ben was holding steady at 220 kilometres an hour whenever and wherever he could, burning wild amounts of fuel and triggering speed traps all over the place. All it took was one police car to flag them and take up the chase, and then there’d be a whole world of trouble because Ben would have no intention of slowing down for anyone or anything, short of an anti-tank barrage. But that was a risk he had to take.

Shooting a glance sideways at Roth in the passenger seat he noticed that the American had strapped himself in tight and was gripping the door handle, the muscles in his jaw tight as piano strings. It gave Ben a certain fiendish satisfaction to know that Roth was crapping his pants and doing all he could to hide it. Ben rocketed towards the tail of a lumbering goods truck that filled the lane up ahead and waited until the last millisecond before he swerved around it towards the oncoming traffic, then blasted through the narrow gap with the needle at the 170 mark and hammered it back up past 200 on the straight. Just to scare Roth a bit more. It was either that, or punch him in the head.