The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [82]
The muffled sound of a wireless beeping caught my attention. I cocked my head and tried to figure out where it was coming from.
“I can hear a wireless beeping,” I said into my walkie-talkie.
“It’s not one of ours,” responded Schitt from the control base in a deserted farmhouse a quarter of a mile away. “I suggest you find it.”
The wireless was wrapped in plastic and stashed in the branches of a tree on the other side of the road. It was Hades and it was a bad line—it sounded as though he was in a car somewhere.
“Thursday?”
“Here.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“How are you? I’m sorry I had to do what I did but you know how desperate we psychopaths get.”
“Is my uncle okay?”
“In the pink, dear girl. Enjoying himself tremendously; such an intellect, you know, but so very vague. With his mind and my drive I could rule the globe instead of resorting to all this banal extortion.”
“You can finish it now,” I told him. Hades ignored me and carried on:
“Don’t try anything heroic, Thursday. As you must have guessed, I have the Chuzzlewit manuscript and I’m not afraid to disrupt it.”
“Where are you?”
“Tut, tut, Thursday, who do you think you’re talking to? We’ll discuss terms for your uncle’s release just as soon as I have my money. You’ll see on the parapet a karabiner attached to a length of wire. Place the money and the Gainsborough on the parapet and clip them on. Once that’s done I’ll come and pick them up. Until we meet again, Miss Thursday Next!”
I repeated to the others what he had said. They told me to do as I was told.
I placed the Gladstone with the money on the parapet and attached it to the Gainsborough. I walked back to the car, sat on the bonnet and watched Hades’ booty intently. Ten minutes went by, then half an hour. I asked Victor for advice but he just told me to stay where I was.
The sun became hotter and the flies buzzed merrily around the hedgerows. I could smell the faint odor of freshly turned hay and hear far off the gentle thrum of traffic. It looked as though Hades was just testing us, a not unusual occurrence in the delicate task of paying ransoms. When the poet writer general was kidnapped five years previously it had taken nine attempts before the ransom was successfully delivered. In the event the PWG was returned unharmed; it turned out that he had engineered the whole thing himself to boost flagging sales of his decidedly lame autobiography.
I got bored and walked up to the parapet again, ignoring Schitt’s request to back off. I toyed with the karabiner and absently followed the thin high-tensile cable that had been hidden in the brickwork. I traced its course to the loose soil at the base of the parapet, where it led off the bridge. I pulled it up slowly and found it attached to a bungee cord, coiled like a snake beneath some dried grass. Intrigued, I traced the bungee back to another length of high-tensile braided cable. This was taped carefully to a telegraph pole and then stretched ten feet above my head in a large double loop to another pole at the far end of the bridge. I frowned as the low growl of an engine made me turn. I couldn’t see anything but the engine was definitely coming toward me, and quite quickly. I looked along the gravel bed of the old railway, expecting to see a four-wheel-drive, but there was nothing. The noise of the approaching engine increased dramatically as a light aircraft appeared from behind an embankment, where it had obviously flown in low to avoid detection.
“Plane!” I shouted into my walkie-talkie. “They’ve got a plane!”
Then the firing began. It was impossible to say who started it, or even where it came from, but in an instant the quiet countryside was filled with the sharp, directionless crackle of small-arms fire. I ducked instinctively as several rounds hit the parapet, throwing up a shower of red brick dust. I pulled out my automatic and released the safety as the plane passed overhead. I recognized it as the sort of high-wing observation plane they used in the Crimea for artillery spotting; the side door had