She felt a jolt, and suddenly he held himself tighter against her body, and she saw that his hands were gripping the underneath of the seats, pulling himself harder against her, the weight crushing, suffocating her. She screamed again, looked imploringly, but his own eyes were elsewhere, lost in the monumental effort of keeping her pinned down.
Another jolt, this one shuddering through her, and instantly the man was gone, his weight lifting so abruptly that for a moment she felt she, too, was flying, but she was still almost where he had thrown her. She felt the cold air, and turning, saw that the emergency door at the back of the bus had opened, and without knowing it, she scrambled up, to her knees, to her feet, leaping out onto the road and running maybe a dozen steps before the swiftness of her own escape finally caught up with her and she stumbled to the ground.
One of her earphones fell out, and hearing the world, the desperate braking of a vehicle on the road, the blare of a horn, she yanked the other one free and turned to look behind her. Only now did she understand what had just happened, but it was almost impossible to believe it could have happened.
She was sitting in the middle of the road, looking at the wreckage of the bus she’d been traveling on and the timber truck with which it had collided. Cut trees were strewn along the Tarmac, and both vehicles were so mangled it was hard to see where one began and the other ended.
She heard someone running towards her, the driver of the vehicle she’d heard braking hard. He stopped, crouched down, put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t look at him but she could see in her peripheral vision that he was wearing a check shirt, work clothes.
“My God, are you okay?”
His voice was full of incredulity and horror. She nodded.
“There are other people.”
He’d taken out his phone and held it to his ear, but said to her, “I don’t think so. Stay here.”
He got up and walked tentatively toward the wreckage, speaking into his phone, the words not quite audible though she guessed it was the police. And it wasn’t the sight of the crushed and twisted metal that convinced her the man was right, but the disturbing stillness. No one else could have survived that accident.
She should not have survived it herself, and felt strangely light-headed with the realization that she was unharmed, that she was sitting here alive in the middle of the road, and a man she had seen every day, but with whom she had never exchanged a single word, had undoubtedly saved her life.
Chapter One
Ramon Martinez had been living under an alias in this prosperous Madrid suburb for nearly two years now, and had probably reached the point of believing he’d never be found. Maybe it had gone beyond that, and he’d fooled himself into thinking they weren’t even looking for him anymore.
But they were still looking for him, and after eighteen months of drawing a blank, they’d finally employed Dan Hendricks. In the end, that’s how simple it had been—Ramon Martinez didn’t know it, but his time was almost up.
Dan had spent the last two days watching him from the building across the street. He’d had a grandstand view into the Martinez family apartment, observing the man’s day-to-day life with his wife, his young son and baby girl, the maid and the live-in nanny.
This morning, confident of their routine, Dan went one better and walked out of his own building just as Martinez set off to walk the boy the short distance to kindergarten. Dan fell in behind them as they strolled without haste in the autumnal sunshine.
The boy was maybe five or six, wearing a little rucksack, and he talked animatedly to his father as they walked along, his voice carrying on the still morning air. Martinez responded now and then in good humor, even showing contrition when his son chastised him for laughing at something that wasn’t meant to be funny.
They turned right into a long quiet street and Dan dropped back a little, though he needn’t have worried. Martinez was oblivious, as if the matters being explained by his son were the only things of importance in his world.
Briefly, longingly, Dan thought of his own son, but he packed the memory away quickly, determined not to let his concentration slip, determined not to see parallels or even similarities. Nothing was the same, and in truth, he could hardly compare his own life to that of Ramon Martinez.
But it seemed Martinez had found a real happiness here and Dan couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, a little advance regret for what he was about to do to him and his family. And with that thought he stopped and turned, walking back again and waiting in the window until Martinez returned on his own twenty minutes later.