Laravel 5 remap route

I want to provide a link to a binary file to uses via, say

<a href="/downloads/images.zip">

but on the server the file is physically not to be located under ./public/downloads ("." = Laravel root), but somewhere else.

Is there any way, if a user clicks on the above link, that Laravel delivers a file which is physically located at, say, c:\transfer\data\images.zip?

I suspect that I could maybe do such hacky things in the webserver configuration, but I have three of them (IIS, Apache, PHP built-in), and I don't want a complicated web server installation.

via Chebli Mohamed