Guilty Wives (28 page)

BY 2:20 A.M., BOULEZ
was at his wits’ end. He had very clearly told Sabine that he wanted a call to his private cell phone when the task had been completed. What part of that hadn’t she understood?

He nursed his Scotch, his cell phone in his other hand. He sat in his love seat and pondered his future. It would be bright, after this. He’d had all sorts of aspirations of climbing the ladder at the Ministry of Justice and Liberty, but he’d never dreamed of the good fortune that would befall him when Abbie Elliot walked into his life.

But dammit, she’d been difficult. If only she’d confessed, she could have lived. This was, ultimately, her own doing.

He jumped as his phone rang. But not his cell. His landline. His home phone was ringing?

He picked up the phone in the bedroom. “Hello?” he answered cautiously in French. He looked at his reflection in the dresser mirror.

“Sir, this is Aimée, the AC on duty right now.”

The administrative commander. Sure. Sabine must have forgotten to call. But no matter now. They’d found Abbie, obviously. Someone had turned on the security camera and found her swinging from the ceiling by a bed strap. And now they were dutifully calling the warden.

“Yes, Aimée.”

“Sir, I have some bad news.”

And Boulez would be sure to treat it as such. Shock, indignation, the works.

“It’s Abbie Elliot, sir.”

“I see,” he said. “Tell me what’s happened.” How calm and commanding he sounded. A leader in control in a time of crisis. No doubt for this prisoner there would be inquiries tomorrow morning, and he’d accommodate the media by making himself available for them. He’d already picked out the suit he’d wear, a new orange Hermès tie—

As he listened to Aimée, his blood went cold.

He closed his eyes and felt a catch in his throat, tension immediately forming above his eyes.

“Tell me…you’re joking,” he said to his hand.

It was a moment before he realized that he’d dropped the phone.

THE CLERK SLID A
ticket, and Lucy’s credit card, over the counter to me.

“C’est le seul train pendant des heures,”
the clerk said to me.

It’s the only train for hours. Don’t miss it, in other words.

I thanked him and took the ticket. The clock behind him read 2:16 a.m.

I turned and ran through the station. It was open and airy, with ornate carvings on the domed ceiling and stained glass windows that were probably gorgeous in the sunlight. But it wasn’t daytime and I wasn’t sightseeing. I was running for my life across a train terminal.

I made a turn in the largely empty station and picked up my pace. An amorous couple sitting on a bench looked up, startled, and watched as I ran, as if they were wondering where I was headed.

It wasn’t much of a mystery. I was running for the staircase. Which meant I could only be heading for one of two things at this time of night.

One, an exit out of the station.

Or two, the overnight train from London to Toulouse, stopping here in Limoges for a connection at 2:24 a.m.

I took the stairs down and ran onto the platform, almost slamming into one of the yellow pillars. I hopped onto the first car I saw, which I was pretty sure was a first-class car because there was a large
1
on the side.

I hadn’t purchased a first-class ticket.

I found a porter almost instantly and handed him my ticket.
“Bonsoir,”
I said to the man, a chubby fellow with a cherubic face and wiry hair.

It was now 2:18 a.m. Made it with six minutes to spare.

“Bonsoir,”
the man sang. After looking at my ticket, he said,
“Ah, mademoiselle. Vous êtes dans la mauvaise voiture. La couchette est deux voitures en bas.”

He was telling me I had jumped onto the wrong car on the train. The
couchette
—the sleeping car—was two cars down.

He gave me the once-over. I was quite the picture, a sweaty, frazzled, out-of-breath woman in an ill-fitting prison guard’s outfit.

“Ah, trés bien,”
I said. I pointed behind me, to make sure I knew the direction. I asked him if I could just walk through the train cars, rather than hop off and hop back on two cars down.

“Oui, c’est bon,”
he answered.

I turned to walk through the first-class cabin toward the next car over.

“Bon voyage,”
the porter said to me.

“Merci.”
I was certainly hoping that my
voyage
would be
bon.

“WE’VE INITIATED PROTOCOL,”
said LaFave, the captain of the prison’s elite Unité d’Intervention Tactique—the Tactical Response Unit—on the phone with Boulez as Boulez traveled back to the prison.

“The prison is locked down?” Boulez said. “The bloodhounds are out?”

“Yes, sir. But as I said, I don’t think she’s in the prison, and I don’t think she’s on foot.”

“You think she drove Lucy’s car right out.”

“Affirmative, sir.” It had taken everyone a few minutes, unfortunately, to sort through the confusion. When Luisa first discovered that bed 1 in the infirmary’s secured area contained not the prisoner but a drugged prison guard—Lucy—the initial reaction was that Abbie Elliot was somewhere still within the walls of the prison, carrying a Glock handgun. Lockdown procedures had been put in place and a search initiated. It took a few minutes before they realized the second, crucial piece of information—that while Lucy was lying in bed 1 in a drug-induced slumber, her car had been driven out of the prison, through the main gate, at 2:06 a.m.

They had lost precious minutes. Luisa called for the lockdown at 2:12, and they didn’t realize that the prisoner had breached the perimeter until a minute ago—at 2:20 a.m.

LaFave grudgingly smiled. Had to admire her brass. Abbie Elliot had driven right out of the damn prison.

He looked at his watch, which was synced up to the official prison clock. It was 2:21. “So she’s had basically a fifteen-minute head start,” he said.

“How far can she get in fifteen minutes?”

Obviously, that answer varied. In LaFave’s experience, a desperate inmate will ride whatever has worked for her so far—in this case, Lucy’s car. Basic human nature says to keep running, as fast as you can; distance is the most important goal. Get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible.

“Her options include the following, as I see it,” LaFave said. “She could get rid of the car and try to hide out in the countryside. There’s plenty of terrain around here. She could take the bus. She could take the train. Or she could just drive.”

“Drive where?”

LaFave sighed. “Anywhere, sir. The airport wouldn’t make sense, because she has no passport. But there are plenty of roads she could travel in all directions, sir, and then she could access our highways.”

“Can we block the roads?”

“Block the roads?” LaFave shook his head, even though he was talking on the phone. “It isn’t feasible. By the time we got up the manpower to do it, she’d have had an opportunity to go almost anywhere. The perimeter we’d have to draw would be—it would just be unworkable.”

Boulez let out a string of expletives. LaFave held the phone away from his ear.

“Sir,” he said, “in the time we’ve been on the phone, we’ve flashed her photo everywhere. The police have it. The toll collectors have it. And the police are being dispatched right now to the bus and train stations. That’s a good start. Understand, Elliot was hoping that her ruse would last a long time. She hoped that Luisa would never walk up to that secured room, that she’d be content to watch things on that monitor from the hallway. She figured Luisa wouldn’t be able to see Sabine, who was directly under the camera, and she wouldn’t realize that the person lying in bed 1 was Lucy. And Abbie put enough drugs in those women to keep them quiet for several hours.”

“And why are you telling me this, LaFave?”

“I’m saying,” he replied, “that Abbie probably thinks we don’t know she’s gone yet.”

“Ah. Maybe so.”

“She thinks she has a little breathing room, sir. She thinks she has the flexibility to make some decisions. Like getting rid of a car that, very soon, is going to be hot. I mean, she’s pretty smart, right? She seems to be.”

Another set of expletives came over the phone line. Boulez wasn’t feeling complimentary toward Abbie Elliot at the moment.

Boulez sighed through the phone. “She’s very smart,” he conceded. “So what’s this smart lady who thinks she has some time on her hands going to do, LaFave?”

LaFave nodded to himself. “My bet?” he said. “If there’s a train any time soon, she takes it.”

THOUGH THEY CAME
from different directions, the three police cars descended on the Gare de Limoges-Bénédictins, the train station, almost simultaneously, pulling up abruptly at varying angles in the area typically reserved for taxis. The six officers drew their weapons and fanned out, four of them heading inside the station and two staying outside.

The lead patrol officer, a man named Darrow, walked so briskly it was almost a jog, his gun down at his side, his other hand clutching his cell phone, which displayed a photograph of Abbie Elliot that the prison had just flashed over. Darrow watched as a handful of bleary-eyed passengers walked in his direction, toward the main exit. They were carrying overnight bags or pulling suitcases behind them.

They’d just arrived.

Right. The overnight train. These people had come from London, or Paris, and disembarked at Limoges.

“Come on,” he shouted to his partner. They raced toward the train tracks. A few people were strolling in front of them but they quickly parted as they heard the urgent footsteps of the officers running.

“Darrow,” his radio blared from his belt. It was one of the officers who had stayed outside, calling out to him in French. “The car is parked right outside. AA-243-AA.”

“She’s on that train,” Darrow mumbled as he reached the staircase.

Just as he heard the train pulling away.

He took the stairs two at a time, hit the bottom, and, from the platform, watched the rear of the train as it rolled down the tracks.

THE TRAIN HAD COME
from London via Paris’s Gare d’Austerlitz, traveling at a speed of 125 miles per hour, with scheduled stops at Limoges, Brive-la-Gaillarde, Cahors, and, ultimately, Toulouse, at 6:44 a.m. The stop at Limoges had taken place at 2:24 a.m.

The train rolled into the station at its next stop, Brive-la-Gaillarde, on schedule, sixty-four minutes later, at 3:28 a.m. The train passed under the bridge connecting the train terminal to the passenger platform. The platform was empty. A few minutes ago, there had been two people who were planning on getting on this train. Those people had been politely encouraged to leave.

The train stopped next to a platform covered by a pitched roof. The doors to the train opened with a hiss. Only three passengers disembarked. A black male, a white, gray-haired female, and a white male, who appeared to be in his twenties.

No big surprise that the number was small. Brive-la-Gaillarde was not full of tourist sites. The people disembarking were most likely residents. No, most people on this train were going all the way to the end, to Toulouse.

The police hadn’t expected Abbie Elliot to disembark here. The smart money said she hoped to get to Toulouse, and from there to Barcelona, Spain. Getting out of the country would probably seem optimal to her, and besides, she spoke fluent Spanish.

But they couldn’t count on that, obviously. They had to intercept her at the first stop after she got on at Limoges.

“Approach,” said the operations commander from his perch, lying flat on top of the bridge under which the train had passed. Members of the RAID assault team, dressed in black, jumped down from their nearby posts and crept toward the train, holding their Beretta pistols out in front of them. Spotters at various points, using night-vision binoculars, monitored the inside of the train cars. No sign of Abbie Elliot in any of the passenger cars. No evidence that she had moved out of her sleeping car.

Using a stolen Visa card, Abbie Elliot had purchased a ticket in the
couchette
that was fourth from the end. A porter had confirmed that a woman matching Abbie’s description, wearing a JRF guard’s uniform, had embarked at Limoges-Bénédictins.

Three members of the assault team entered the
couchette
for which Abbie Elliot had purchased her ticket. Others entered the adjoining cars on either side, in the event the target tried to flee.

The commandant waited, drumming his fingers on the bridge. They had no eyes in the
couchette
. All he could do was wait for word.

It came surprisingly quickly.

“She’s not in there,” came a voice through his earpiece.

The commandant didn’t hesitate. “Take the train,” he said. “All forces, take the train.”

In the blink of an eye, powerful lights splashed over the train, like something on a Hollywood movie set. A helicopter appeared from the south and hovered overhead. Twenty local police officers joined with the elite ten-man RAID unit as they invaded all cars of the train at once, armed with Berettas or HK MP5 submachine guns.

They checked every seat. They checked baggage compartments. They checked bathrooms. They checked every sleeping car. They called out various status updates through their mikes and into the operation commander’s earpiece.

When it was all done, twenty-three minutes had passed.

And Abbie Elliot was nowhere to be found.