The Babylon Idol

by Scott Mariani

  Answers might come later, or they might not. Either way, the trap was sprung.

  And Ben and Anna were caught right in it like a couple of rats.

  Chapter 34

  Trapped inside a strange house, on unfamiliar ground with little sense of the lie of the land, unarmed except for a kitchen knife, with four heavily tooled-up professional thugs about to attack at any moment and a matter of seconds in which to figure out a contingency plan. Ben had been in similar scrapes before now, and survived. But it wasn’t something to make a habit of.

  Then again, Ercan Kavur’s home was not the typical middle-class suburban residence.

  Ben jumped over to the desk and turned off the lamp, plunging the study into darkness. Too late. The attackers already knew which room their targets were in. Through the window he saw the lithe figure of the team leader signal to the one with the grenade launcher, who planted himself on the patch of lawn in front of the house, braced himself and fired straight at the study window with a loud report that Kavur’s thick security glass muffled to a WHOOMPH.

  Ben instinctively dived away from the window, grabbing Anna and yanking her down to the floor. If the grenade was high explosive, they were both dead anyway; but if his guess was right and the assault team were using tear gas, he’d have to try to get to the study door in time to escape the worst of it.

  The juddering impact seemed to shake the whole house as the grenade whacked into the glass. A normal window would have shattered into a million fragments that would have covered Ben and Anna’s prone bodies like an ice storm, but Ercan Kavur’s home improvements paid off. Instead of smashing through the window the missile just bounced off.

  Once, while training on a pistol shooting range, Ben had been hit square in the chest by a forty-calibre slug that had bounced straight back at him from a steel plate target and left him shaken and bruised. These things happened, time to time. Up on his feet instantly, still clutching Anna’s arm, Ben saw the grenade rebound towards the shooter who had launched it, catch him right in the face and knock him off his feet with his visor cracked. The grenade dropped to the ground next to him, blowing out a pressurised stream of CS gas that billowed and dispersed into the night air. The team leader quickly kicked the grenade away and it rolled harmlessly into the bushes. The fallen guy jumped back up, ripped off his damaged mask and threw it away in disgust.

  The assault hadn’t started well, but the team now wasted no time to move on with the next phase of the attack, to get inside. That was when the fun would begin.

  ‘Time to leave,’ Ben said. He snatched up his bag and slung it over his shoulder, reached down and pulled Anna sharply to her feet.

  ‘The papers—’ she began.

  ‘Leave them.’ He hauled her towards the study door. There was no time to grab her coat or handbag, either. The electrified perimeter might deter a casual burglar but it wasn’t going to be an obstacle to these guys. As Ben wrenched open the door he heard the explosive BLAM of the breaching shotgun taking out the lock on the front entrance.

  Then they were in.

  At the instant that Ben emerged from the study and bounded into the corridor, knife in one hand and Anna’s arm clutched in the other, the front door crashed open. Through the reinforced glass of the security door separating them he saw the four men burst into the hallway. Their boots were rimed with snow. Weapons pointing. The leader was first in, carbine at the hip, finger on trigger, eyes glinting behind his visor, moving with a fluid violence that looked as if he lived for these moments.

  Next, three things happened. First, the alarm system activated a whooping, shrilling siren that filled the house. Second, as the invaders charged into the breached hallway, they were met with streams of vapour that shot like smoke from the wall vents either side of them, instantly engulfing them in thick fog. Third, the overhead nozzles built into the light fittings went into action, scooshing jets of red fluid downwards into the impenetrable mist. It looked like blood, or brake fluid, but it was neither.

  With gas masks on, the three men still wearing them were protected from the pepper blasters that would have reduced any normal intruders into an incapacitated jelly, and they pushed on blindly through the fog to make it to the first glass door a few paces in front of them. The guy who had torn off his damaged mask didn’t fare as well. From the muffled scream that Ben heard through the security glass, it was obvious that Ercan Kavur’s pepper spray must be the proper undiluted tactical capsaicin agent that would put the most determined attacker out of action for a good half-hour, and not the attenuated dilution for sale to civilians in those few countries where governments still trusted citizens to defend life and property. The guy wouldn’t be much of a threat for a while.

  Ben had to smile. Round two to Kavur and his home improvements.

  The leader never even glanced back at his fallen man. First to reach the security door, he shouldered and kicked and beat it with his gloved fist, but the alarm system had sent it into lockdown mode. In a fury he motioned to the breacher to take out the lock. The breacher stepped forward, jacked another round into the chamber of his shotgun, jammed the jagged muzzle tight up below the door handle, pulled the trigger, and BOOM, they were through. First came the leader, then the breacher, then the third guy dragging their incapacitated comrade out of the smoke and dumping him on the floor, where he lay writhing and rubbing his eyes as if they were on fire.

  By then, Ben and Anna were already through the second glass door, Anna frantically punching in the four-digit code from memory to override the lockdown mode long enough for them to dart through and slam it shut behind them. The electronic lock reactivated on closing with a solid clunk, audible over the screech of the alarm siren.

  The leader sprinted towards them and slid to a halt as the second door blocked his way. He ripped off his goggles and respirator.

  Ben had been about to hurry on, but he held back. He and the man were just feet apart, almost close enough to reach out and touch if the security glass hadn’t separated them.

  The man’s eyes seemed to bore into Ben’s.

  Ben stared back.

  Chapter 35

  Ben was good with faces. Never forgot one, and certainly wouldn’t have forgotten this one. He was certain he’d never met, or seen, this guy before in his life. Yet, as he lingered for a moment that seemed suspended in time, he experienced the strangest feeling of semi-recognition. It wasn’t the facial features themselves – the shaven head, the solid cheekbones, the square heavy jaw behind the goatee beard.

  No, it was the eyes. They were like the eyes of a shark watching him. Dull, lifeless, yet filled with such an intensity of inhuman hatred that Ben had only ever seen once before on a man’s face.

  That man was dead. Ben had seen him die. And yet—

  Then the moment was over. The man’s lips curled into a kind of snarl and he raised his weapon and loosed a fully automatic burst of gunfire at his side of the security door. He disappeared from sight as the reinforced glass became an opaque web of cracks.

  Ben turned away from the door, took Anna’s hand and they ran away down the corridor.

  ‘That man—’ Anna gasped as they hurried on. It seemed to Ben that she had more to say, but there was no time for conversation. The attackers would be through the second door in moments.

  Ben and Anna sprinted for the kitchen. Her shoes weren’t made for running and she stumbled and almost fell. They burst inside the kitchen, past the table and chair, and to the back door.

  ‘I hope you know this combination too,’ Ben said, pointing at the panel on the wall. ‘Or this is going to be a very short escape.’ She nodded and started tapping in a number with a shaking hand. Just as she finished entering the code there was a muffled blast behind them as the breaching shotgun took out the second security door.

  ‘There,’ she said.

  Ben kicked open the back door and the cold night air rushed in. The temperature outside seemed to have dropped several more degrees. He pushed Anna out
of the door, then followed, slamming the door behind him. There were two steps down to a path that wound back around the side of the house towards the front. The flagstones were covered in two inches of fresh snow over a layer of ice. Anna slipped and went down on her side with a cry. Ben scooped her up and got her back on her feet. Her flimsy blouse was wet and clinging to her skin where she’d fallen. No time to stop and ask her if she was hurt. A security light flashed on as they ran, illuminating them like a floodlamp shining on a pair of escaping prison inmates. Their pursuers would be out of the house in seconds.

  Now Ben and Anna were racing around the corner to the front of the property, down the driveway, towards the gate, slithering on the ice, their breath fogging in huge clouds. Lights were coming on in neighbouring houses as residents became alarmed at the commotion. Faces were peeking through curtains. Nobody would dare venture outside, but someone would be bound to have called the cops. The police might already be on their way, a complication that Ben pushed to the back of his mind as he ran through the gate and into the empty street.

  Slabs of fresh snow had layered the roofs and bonnets and windscreens of the Volvo and the Audi. Ben’s eye landed on the big SUV and he thought, Kavur. It was the kind of car in which a drugged-up kidnap victim could be bundled in the back. He let go of Anna and wrenched open the tailgate, but the cavernous boot was empty.

  Big it might be, and built like a Sherman tank, but the Volvo was the slower car compared to the Audi, and speed was what Ben wanted. He ran to the saloon. The driver’s door was open. No key dangling from the ignition. His guts gave a twist of panic, but then he noticed the keyless start button and the fob lying in a moulded recess in the centre console. He shoved a foot inside the footwell, pressed the brake and touched the button and the engine instantly powered into life. He hurled his bag onto the back seats. Flicked on the lights and wipers. The frozen blades juddered, then sprang free and sliced away the brittle layer of snow on the glass.

  Anna hovered uncertainly nearby, as if paralysed by the bitter cold. Ben pointed at the passenger side and ordered her to get in, and his sharp command spurred her back into life. As she scurried to the passenger side, she was looking fearfully at him as if to say, What are you doing?

  Ben leaped back towards the Volvo. The dirty tyre tracks in the snow were already beginning to freeze over into hard ruts. He knelt behind the big boxy rear of the car. Clumps of snow were clinging to its wheels. He planted the tip of the carving knife horizontally against the sidewall of a rear tyre, and used the heel of his left hand on the handle to punch the blade through the rubber. When they did it in the movies, the tyre burst in a spectacular explosion. In real life it just gasped a loud hiss of bad-smelling air and the Volvo sank down at one corner.

  Ben was about to do the same with the other rear wheel when he heard Anna’s panicked voice from the Audi, screaming his name. He looked up and saw the three armed men charging around the corner, sprinting across the garden for the gate. The leader was in front, his boots pounding the frozen ground as he ran like a madman, his gun raised to the shoulder, eyes darting from side to side, hunting for his escaping targets.

  Ben leaped to his feet. Head low, he covered the few steps to the Audi in two leaps. The leader saw him and opened fire. The sharp rat-a-rat-tat cut through the silence of the empty street. Bullets chittered off the Audi’s bodywork. Ben reached the driver’s door, ripped it open and threw himself inside. Anna was saying something, but her words were coming out in a terrified gargle.

  The men were racing closer. More gunshots raked across the Audi’s windscreen. The left side-door mirror burst apart as a bullet smashed into it. Anna screamed. Ben pressed a hand against her shoulder and forced her roughly down into the passenger footwell. He rammed the stick into drive and stamped down hard on the gas, and the Audi’s wheels spun with a tortured scream as it leaped forwards.

  Steering with one hand and pressing Anna down with the other he aimed the nose of the car at the oncoming attackers and hammered the wheels up onto the snowy kerb straight at them. The Audi absorbed a dozen more snapping gunshots before the three men scattered out of his path. One slipped on the ice and went down in his haste to avoid being run over. Ben swerved away from the gateway and accelerated along the pavement, scraping past the parked Volvo. Swerved again, bumping down off the kerb and onto the road and booting as much power as he could force from the Audi’s screaming engine as the wheels bit down on the slippery surface and he sped fishtailing away from the scene. A glance in his remaining mirror told him the three men were piling into the Volvo. The leader was getting behind the wheel. Its headlights flared into life and it took off in pursuit.

  The chase had only just begun.

  Chapter 36

  Ben had a start on their pursuers, but it was only a tenuous one and he intended to widen the gap as fast as he could. The worsening weather conditions weren’t going to make that easy. It was turning into a blizzard out there and the driving snow was splatting the windscreen faster than the wipers could bat it away. What little he could see of the road as he sped down the street was a blanket of virgin white, drifting up against the edges of the kerbs and mounding on the roofs of parked cars.

  The street on which Ercan Kavur lived was long and narrow, lined with a clutter of dilapidated houses and apartment buildings. By the time Ben reached the end of the street, he was going over eighty kilometres an hour. Much too fast for the conditions but the glare of the Volvo’s headlights filling the cabin of the Audi pushed him on faster. The SUV should have been crippled by its punctured tyre but its driver was coming after them like a madman, wallowing and skidding all over the road in their wake. If Ben slowed down, it would be right on their tail.

  Shots cracked out. The Volvo’s passengers were hanging out of its open windows, firing at the speeding Audi. Their aim was wild but they could get lucky. The Audi’s rear window blew out and a bullet punched through the back of the passenger seat. Now that they had Ercan Kavur, maybe they were no longer as concerned about keeping Anna Manzini alive as Ben had thought.

  ‘Stay down,’ he yelled at her over the roar of the engine. She was bundled up in the passenger footwell, getting thrown about with the motion of the car.

  Ben had no idea where he was going, but as he reached the bottom of the street and there were suddenly no more buildings he could tell they must be on the extreme eastern edge of the city, on the cusp between the last suburban developments and the start of open countryside. The Audi’s wheels hammered over a road surface that was pocked and rough under the snow, hardly more than a track with snow-clumped scrubby grass and tangled bushes marking its edges. The Audi shot by a broken-down house with junked snow-covered cars in its front yard. Then a sharp right bend flashed up without warning, and Ben piled the car into it too fast and felt the wheels losing traction and going into a slide.

  A dilapidated fence rushed towards them in the headlights. With his heart in his mouth he swerved to avoid it, felt the tyres bite again and accelerated harder up the track. Trees and bushes tore past. If it had been a clear night, he might have been able to see the sprawling craggy hills stretching away from the city dotted with scrub vegetation and snow-laden conifers, the lights of Ankara clustered and twinkling to his left in the distance, maybe a pylon or a mobile phone mast here and there on the high ground, some of the outlying pockets of residential areas where the spreading city had engulfed surrounding villages, and the mountains in the distance. But all he could see was a steady stream of snowflakes rushing at him like twin arcs of tracer fire in his headlights, and behind it the flat greyness of the blizzard blanketing the night.

  The Volvo kept on coming. This guy just wouldn’t give up. In Florence, Ben had been the hunter. Now he was beginning to feel decidedly like the hunted. The shooters kept up their crackling fire, missing more than they were hitting, but still hitting plenty. Lots of damage. The Audi’s perforated bodywork was soaking up pounds of lead. Warning displays were burning like Christmas
tree lights all over the instrument panel. Superior German engineering or not, there was only so much punishment the car could take.

  The rear window on Ben’s side disintegrated in a shower of glass. Another bullet smacked through the headrest of his seat and he felt it part the hair above his ear before it bit a chunk out of the steering wheel an inch from his fingers and buried itself in the dashboard. That was about as close a call as he wanted. But the car’s core vitals were seemingly still untouched and it kept going, tearing along the rough road that was now so bumpy and potholed that the suspension was hammering against the stops and the revs were screaming up and down as the wheels constantly struggled for grip on the treacherous surface.

  The Volvo was still right there behind them, its lights burning into the windowless back of the Audi, muzzle flash popping from its flanks. Its driver was demented, reckless, suicidal. He was pushing them all to the brink. As if survival instinct meant nothing to him. Only the chase, and the kill at the end of it.

  This couldn’t go on. Ben knew he had to do something, or any second now this journey would come to a swift and sudden halt. From a bullet or a crash – either way it wouldn’t matter once they were both smashed to a pulp.

  ‘Hang on tight,’ he yelled. Anna had nothing to hang on to, but she wedged herself tighter into the passenger footwell as he sawed at the wheel and left the road, belting down an even narrower track that veered off to the right through a sudden gap in the bushes.

  An instant later he knew it was a bad turning. The track disappeared and he found himself hammering over rough grassland covered in two feet of snow, lurching up and down hillocks, the bottom of the car grinding and scraping over hidden boulders and rocks. Behind them, the Volvo’s headlamps were bucking and bouncing like the lights of a ship on a stormy ocean. Ben gritted his teeth and pressed on through it for several hundred yards until the grinding and banging stopped and the Audi cleared a grassy knoll to come bouncing onto an actual road. It had eighteen inches of snow over it, but under the snow was smooth solid tarmac and now Ben could take advantage of the Audi’s speed and four intact tyres. He pressed his right foot down all the way. The engine note soared. The Volvo’s lights, which had reached the road in his wake, now began to recede in the mirror. The gunfire had stopped.