The Moses Stone Read Online Free PDF

in silence. She’d not told Ralph what she’d seen near the Chellah that morning, though she had sent her daughter a hasty e-mail about it just before they left the hotel.
    About five miles out of Rabat, the traffic died away almost to nothing, and they had the road virtually to themselves. The only vehicle Ralph could see in his mirrors was a large dark-colored four-by-four jeep some distance behind them. Oncoming traffic grew less frequent as they got further away from the city.
    When they reached a stretch of road fairly near the Atlantic coast, the driver of the jeep accelerated. Ralph O’Connor was a careful driver, and began switching his attention between the road ahead and the jeep, which was gaining on them very rapidly.
    Then he saw an old white Peugeot sedan coming in the opposite direction. He eased his foot slightly off the accelerator to allow the driver of the jeep to overtake before the Peugeot reached them.
    “Why have you slowed down?” Margaret demanded.
    “There’s a jeep coming up on us fast, and a fairly sharp bend in front. I’d rather he overtook us before we reach it.”
    But the jeep showed no signs of overtaking, just closed up to about twenty yards behind the O’Connors’ Renault and matched its speed.
    Then everything happened very quickly. As they approached the left-hand bend in the road, the Peugeot suddenly swerved toward them. Ralph braked hard, and looked to his left. The jeep—a Toyota Land Cruiser with tinted windows and a massive bull bar on the front—was right beside him.
    But the driver of the Toyota still seemed to have no intention of overtaking. He just held the heavy vehicle in position. Ralph slowed down even more. Then the Toyota driver swung the wheel to the right and drove the right-hand side of the bull bar into the Renault. There was a terrifying bang and Ralph felt his car lurch sideways.
    “Christ!” He hit the brakes hard.
    The tires screamed and smoked, leaving parallel skid marks across the road. The Renault was forced to the right, toward the apex of the bend.
    Ralph’s efforts were never going to be enough. The speed of the Renault, and the power of the two-ton Toyota, forced the lighter car inexorably toward the edge of the tarmac.
    “Ralph!” Margaret screamed, as their car slid sideways toward the sheer drop on the right-hand side of the road.
    Then the Toyota hit the Renault again. This time the impact triggered Ralph’s air bag, forcing his hands off the steering wheel. He was now helpless. The Renault smashed into a line of low rocks cemented into the verge at the edge of the road.
    As Margaret screamed in terror, the left-hand side of their car lifted and began to topple sideways. It rolled over the edge and began an uncontrolled tumble down the near-vertical drop to the bottom of a dried-up riverbed some thirty feet below.
    The comforting noise of the engine was instantly replaced by a thunderous crashing, thumping and jolting as the car left the road.
    Margaret screamed again as the world span in front of her eyes, her terror the more acute because she was utterly helpless to do anything about it. Ralph still had his foot hard on the brake pedal, and was again grasping the steering wheel, both instinctive and utterly pointless actions.
    In that moment, their world turned into a maelstrom of noise and violence. Their bodies were flung around in their seats as the window glass shattered and panels buckled with the repeated impacts. The belts held them in their seats, and the remaining air bags deployed, but neither action helped.
    Margaret reached out for Ralph’s hand, but never found it as the crashing and tumbling intensified. She opened her mouth to scream again as the violence suddenly, catastrophically, stopped. She felt an immense blow on the top of her head, a sudden agonizing pain and then the blackness supervened.
     
    On the road above, the Toyota and Peugeot stopped and the drivers climbed out. They walked to the edge of the road