The English Girl: A Novel

per line, two strides per gap. Gabriel used the lines to keep his motion rhythmic and even. Two strides per line, two strides per gap. Fifteen minutes to cover three kilometers.
    “Or what?”
    “You’re wasting time.”
    After five minutes his calves felt like granite and he was sweating beneath the weight of his leather jacket. He tried to shed the coat while running but couldn’t, so he paused long enough to remove it and hurl it into a farmer’s field. When he started running again, he saw a faint dome of yellow light on the horizon. Then two lamps, the parking lamps of a vehicle, peaked over the crest of a small rise and headed toward him at high speed. The vehicle was a small paneled van, pale gray in color, well worn. As it shot past in a blur, Gabriel noticed that the driver and his passenger were both wearing balaclava masks. The bagmen, he thought, coming to collect their prize. He didn’t bother turning to watch. Instead, he tried to ignore the burning in his calves and the sting of the rain on his face. Two strides per line, two strides per gap. Fifteen minutes to cover three kilometers.
    When she is dead. Then you will know the truth . . .
    Gabriel cleared the small rise and immediately saw a chain of lights glowing in the distance. They were the lights of Audresselles, he thought, the small coastal village just south of the lighthouse at Cap Gris Nez. He checked the time on the mobile phone. Eight minutes elapsed, seven remaining. His stride was beginning to falter, and the back of his neck felt numb. He lamented the fact he had not taken better care of his body, but mainly his thoughts were of Vienna. Of a car parked at the edge of a snowy square. Of an engine that wouldn’t start right away because of a bomb drawing power from the battery. He looked at the phone. Nine minutes elapsed, six remaining. Two strides per line, two strides per gap.
    He lifted the phone to his mouth. “Did you get the money?”
    The voice responded a few seconds later.
    “We got it. Thank you very much.”
    Thin, lifeless, stressing all the wrong words. Even so, Gabriel swore it was filled with mirth.
    “You have to give me more time,” he shouted.
    “That’s not possible.”
    “I can’t make it.”
    “You have to try harder.”
    He looked at the clock. Ten minutes elapsed, five remaining. Three strides per line, three strides per gap.
    “I’m coming for you, Leah,” he shouted into the wind. “Don’t turn the key again. Don’t turn the key.”
    H e sprinted past a sprawling manor house, new but built to look old, and immediately felt the pull of the sea. The road sank toward it, and the smell of it tasted of fish and salt on Gabriel’s tongue. A sign materialized from the dark indicating there was beach access two hundred meters ahead. And then Gabriel saw the Citroën. It was waiting in a small sandy car park, its headlamps staring him straight in the face, seemingly watching him as he hurtled toward it like a madman. He glanced at the clock on the phone. Thirteen minutes elapsed, two remaining. He would make it with time to spare. Still, he forced himself to see the race to its end, pounding his feet on the asphalt, flailing his arms, until he thought his heart would burst. Starved of oxygen, his brain started to play tricks on him. He saw a Citroën parked by the beach one instant, but the next it was a dark blue Mercedes sedan in a snowy Vienna square. He swore he heard an engine struggling to start, and later he would remember shouting something incoherent before being blinded by the flash of an explosion. The blast wave hit him with the force of a speeding car and blew him off his feet. He lay on the cold asphalt for several minutes, gasping for breath, wondering whether it was real or only a dream.

29
    AUDRESSELLES, PAS-DE-CALAIS
    T he hour was early, the location remote, and therefore the response was slow. Much later, a commission of inquiry would reprimand the chief of the local gendarmerie and issue a lofty set of recommendations that went largely ignored, for in the quaint little fishing village of Audresselles, recriminations were the last thing on anyone’s mind. For many months afterward, its shocked residents would speak of that morning in the most somber of tones. One woman, an octogenarian whose family had lived in the village when it was ruled by an English king, would describe the incident on the beach as the worst thing she had seen since the Nazis hoisted a swastika over the