'You don't seem very happy, old boy.'

Screw Steadman too.

'If London wants this character, I'll bring him in.'

Soon after Aix-en-Provence I began hitting the Mistral, touching the wheel to correct the steering as the gusts came broadside-on. The Mistral is a strong and steady wind, blowing down the Rhone Valley and bending the cypresses and unnerving the people in its path; it blows for three, six or nine days and by Napoleonic law if it blows for longer than that, murder is not a capital charge.

I didn't know how long it had been blowing this time. If it hadn't dropped by dawn, Zarkovic would have to make a half circuit to bring his plane up-wind because a belly flop would be tricky enough without dead-air conditions. The Mistral turns eastward when it reaches the coast, and that would be Zarkovic's approach direction.

By midnight I was in St-Martin-de-Crau and drove straight through and pulled the Lancia into cover alongside a vineyard, dousing the lights and sleeping on and off for the next five hours. The last time I woke up I was aware of the silence: the Mistral had died and the pre-dawn air was still.

By 05:15 I was positioned to receive the contact, halfway along a narrow road that led south to the coast. The wind had got up again and I stopped trying to work out which way he'd be coming in. There wasn't a lot of room between the railway to the east and the Rhone Basin to the west, but if he managed to come down precisely into the wind he'd be sliding towards me at this point and finish up within a hundred metres of the car.

There are never clouds when the Mistral blows, and I could make out the tower at Istres, black against the pale dawn sky. Within minutes the reeds at the edge of the marshland were turning from blood red to silver as the sun lifted from the low horizons, and the wind tugged at them, curving them into scimitars. Gusts hit the side of the Lancia, shifting it on its springs; I leaned away from it and settled the binoculars on the skyline in the east.