Moscow Sting by Alex Dryden

Cévennes, randomly dotted the open space.
    Logan parked behind a stone barn, which housed the office and weighbridge used for the grape harvest. It was after three o’clock in the afternoon, and there was a sleepiness about the village that perhaps, he thought, never left it.
    He walked back up into the square. He caught the sound of splashing and noticed the unnatural blue of a swimming pool behind the hedge of the bed-and-breakfast manor house. He would ask there.
    There were two men sunbathing beside the pool, and the door to the house was wide open. He walked up the path between shocking pink bougainvilleas and called down a dark, flagstoned corridor until a man wearing an unconvincing wig appeared.
    He was a visitor, Logan explained, come to see the new resident in the village, the foreign lady.
    “Avec l’enfant?” the man enquired.
    Yes, the one with a child, he agreed, though Plismy hadn’t mentioned that.
    The man with the wig gestured generally up a small lane and mentioned a house with a palm tree in the garden, before dismissing Logan by turning his back and walking away. He was busy with something. That was good. It might mean he would forget their encounter.
    Logan didn’t walk straight up the lane, however, but took a more circuitous route, through a horse’s meadow and past a tumbledown wood barn with a portable sawmill outside. The palm tree was visible, higher than the surrounding houses.
    He crossed the lane. Heavy iron gates barred the entrance to the house—electrically operated, he noticed. That kind of security was nowhere else to be seen in the village. Through a crack in the join of the gates, he saw a light blue Mercedes parked in a dusty yard. That was what he needed.
    Turning swiftly away, he walked round the other end of the village, away from the horse’s field and away from the bed and breakfast where the man had given him the directions. Behind the barn the red van was cooking in the sun where he had left it.
    Now was the time to wait. He turned the van around, still concealed behind the barn, and pointed it towards the route down the winding hill to Uzès.
    At six thirty, after nearly three hours in the sweltering car, with brief walks down into the vineyards to cool himself a little, he saw the blue Mercedes begin its descent to the flatter ground below the plateau and onto the straight road with the plane trees. Switching on the engine of the van, he began to follow it from a distance of about half a mile.
    It was twenty-four hours since he’d met Plismy in Paris, and he felt the eagerness of the chase, the excitement of new momentum.
    When they reached Uzès, he drove slowly around the road that circled and concealed the square behind old, high stone buildings. He finally caught sight of the blue Mercedes, parked at the side of the street. Its two occupants, he now saw, were a woman in a baseball cap and a small boy. They were going through the process of preparing to get out, the boy strapped in, the woman forgetting it, then the boy urgently needing some small toy from the floor of the car.
    When they finally climbed out, the woman pressed the key fob for the car alarm as Logan passed without looking at them. He glimpsed through the corner of his eye the woman taking the boy’s hand on the pavement.
    Logan kept going in the direction the two were walking until he was out of sight. He pulled the van into a parking space on the same side of the road, jumped out, and made for a café whose pavement tables led into a darker interior. He hoped they wouldn’t turn off before the café. They didn’t.
    A few minutes later, he watched from the interior of the café as they drew level. The boy had stopped and was tugging the woman’s arm. He had dropped his plastic toy, and she turned back to pick it up. Logan saw them illuminated in the sunlight from the darkness of the bar.
    She was in her mid- to late thirties, he guessed, and wore tight jeans and a green T-shirt. Her hair, which