Free Mosaic by Jo Bannister Page B

car’s engine so that he could listen and turned once more down the hill, on foot, scanning the tarmac surface minutely until he found the spoor again.
    He followed the faint trail for perhaps sixty metres and then it ended. On one side were the sheep; on the other the stone wall had lost its crown of barbed wire. With a quiet surge of confidence Vanderbilt vaulted over.
    He landed knee-deep in old bracken. Brakes of the wet brown stuff spread dense fingers across the slope. If Grant had burrowed deeply into that lot it could take hours to find him, and Vanderbilt did not have hours to spare. He had a rendezvous with a helicopter less than an hour from now, and first he had to find a suitable landing spot. If he did not recapture Grant in the next thirty minutes he would have to spend a second night in this country, with the police using every extra hour to intensify their search, tighten their grip on the airports and call in the expert assistance of men who had met the De Witte machine before. Vanderbilt had counted on getting his captive out before that degree of mobilization could be organized. Tomorrow would be twice as hard as today, and the day after might be impossible. If they got close enough that he felt breath on his neck he would kill his man and get out like a criminal, in his own time and by a devious route; but if he did that he doubted if he would work again. At least not for De Witte; maybe as a freelance assassin.
    He looked down the sodden patchwork field towards the rushing little river and contemplated failure. He could not afford to spend time beating the bracken for a skulking boy he should have had the sense to dope before detaching him from the bedstead. At least if he had died it would have been Pretoria’s mistake, not his.
    While he thus ruminated on his predicament another portion of his brain, that area where he was a professional first, last and always, was conceiving of a solution. When he had it a small light kindled in his eye, a small cool smile touched his lip and he climbed back onto the road and fetched the car.
    He considered shouting a warning but decided it would be ignored. He drove the car into the stone wall, accelerating all the way.
    The impact broke the wall into a hundred tumbling rocks that hit the ground, bounced once or twice and hurtled off down the slope, gaining momentum as they went, crashing a broad swathe through the stands of bracken. Vanderbilt hurdled the rubble and set off in pursuit.
    The small avalanche was half-way down the slope and beginning to run out of steam, and Vanderbilt was beginning to worry that his tactic had achieved nothing more than a bit of vandalism—or at the other extreme a silent crush of blood and bones in the flattened bracken. Then, with the noise of the stones like hollow thunder about his ears, Grant’s nerve broke and he struggled up out of the tangle and jerked round to face the danger.
    It was a mistake, but by the time he saw that the nearest of the bounding stones would skip by him harmless metres away Vanderbilt had him marked. The big man slowed almost to a saunter behind the dying avalanche. He knew that, chained, Grant could not run anywhere that he could not be overhauled in a few strides. Grant knew it too. Vanderbilt thought the panic was over. He smiled from under his nosebleed. “There you are.”
    Joel Grant felt a scream building up inside him. It was like in Pretoria, listening to the footsteps stop outside his door; or maybe worse because of the sanity, the normality, the safety all around. Things like this did not happen in England.
    But it was not altogether like Pretoria. In the corridors of small rooms under De Witte’s office there was no freedom, not of body, mind or soul; none of the freedoms that separate life from existence, not even the freedom to die. On this wet northern hillside, though his snatched liberty was restricted in both space and time by the big man bearing down on him, a