He forced himself to stop. Breathe. Think.
Marielle emerged from a side street, shaking her head before he could ask. “The pharmacy. The wine shop. A woman watering geraniums on her balcony. No one’s seen her.”
They regrouped at the fountain. The teenagers had abandoned their perch, leaving the square empty except for a tortoiseshell cat threading between the café chairs in search of dropped crumbs.
“This isn’t working,” Marielle said, her voice tight with controlled urgency. “We need to think like Hanna. She heard us talking about abandoning her. So she bolted. She’s not gonna stay in town.”
He met her eyes, understanding crystallizing between them. “Marseille is too obvious. Where would she go?”
They said it simultaneously, their voices overlapping, “Nice.”
“Nice is big, lots of places to disappear to,” Omar mused.
“And it has a large North African population. She won’t stand out.”
“I doubt there’s anywhere to rent a car here. Could she have hitched a ride or?—?”
“There’s a train station on the edge of town.” Marielle grabbed his forearm, her grip urgent. “Not the main line through Marseille. She’d avoid that. There’s a local TER station on the outskirts. Trains to Toulon, then connections to Nice.”
They ran. She led the way, and he followed.
The village streets were a blur of honey-colored stone and terracotta roofs. Omar’s lungs burned, his legs drove forward with mechanical efficiency. They cut through an alley barely wider than his shoulders, startling a cat that yowled its indignation, and emerged onto a wider road that curved uphill through scrubland studded with wild fennel and thorny broom.
The run-down station materialized as they crested the hill. It consisted of a single platform, a glass shelter with cracks spider-webbing across one panel, and a ticket booth no bigger than a phone box.
Omar spotted her immediately. She stood at the ticket window, her yellow dress luminous under the harsh fluorescent lights that hummed and flickered overhead. She was fishing through the small leather bag, pulling out crumpled euro notes with trembling fingers.
He cupped his hands around his mouth to shout her name.
Then he saw them.
Two of Idris’s men were positioned near a weathered bench at the platform’s far end out of Hanna’s line of site. Their dark clothes turned them into shadows in the night.
One of them was big. Very big. Shoulders like a linebacker, head shaved to gleaming smoothness.
Bashir.
The second man was smaller, leaner, with the wiry build of someone who relied on speed rather than power.
He wasted a moment wondering how they’d tracked the village down so quickly. Was Hanna carrying a tracker she didn’t know about?
The men were focused on Hanna with the patience of professionals, waiting for her to step away from the relative safety of the ticket window. Waiting for their moment.
Omar caught Marielle’s eye and gestured sharply: You intercept Hanna. I’ll handle the guards.
She gave a crisp nod of understanding and moved, angling toward the ticket booth with quick, purposeful strides.
Omar circled wide, keeping to the shadows at the platform’s periphery where the fluorescent lights lost their battle with darkness. His hand went automatically to his hip before memory caught up: no gun. He’d left his Glock in the dry bag at the inn.
Stupid. Sloppy. Jake would have his head for it.
He’d have to do this the old-fashioned way.
Hanna completed her transaction and turned from the window, ticket clutched in one hand like a passport to safety. Bashir and his companion straightened, muscles coiling.
Marielle sprang out from the side of the booth and intercepted her before she’d taken three steps. She grabbed Hanna’s arm and pulled her close in what might have looked like an affectionate reunion. Hanna’s mouth opened in shock, her eyes going wide with recognition and confusion.
Bashir growled when he spotted Marielle. His companion’s right hand drifted toward hip.