‘Way ahead of you,’ said Marc, grabbing a handful of the dust sheath over the nearest car. There were a half-dozen other vehicles up on racks or parked in the corners of the garage, but they didn’t have the time to window shop or compare marques. He dragged the cover off a metallic blue Audi S5 and slid into the driver’s seat, fishing his grimy sunglasses from a pocket. Lucy grabbed the keys from a rack on the wall and tossed them into his lap as she vaulted into the passenger seat.
‘Go!’ she snapped, and he put the car into gear, launching it out of the garage in a wheel-spin skirl of noise. The Audi responded easily, and Marc threaded around the fountain and powered down the distance toward the front entrance. The gates were hanging open as they bounced onto the road, and Lucy jabbed a finger toward a retreating blur up ahead. ‘There’s the Beemer . . .’
‘I see it,’ said Marc, narrowing his focus to the road as he applied pressure to the accelerator.
‘Get up there.’ Lucy dropped the window and the hot wind whipped through the S5’s interior. ‘I need to be closer. We are going to fuck up his shit.’
Marc pushed the Audi up through the gear changes and slipped across the three-lane highway. Low concrete walls flashed by as they turned into First Al Khail Street and continued to accelerate, speeding past signs for an expensive residential district called the Lakes. The name appeared odd to Marc’s eyes, conjuring up visions of pastoral English countryside rather than a transplanted greensward on the edge of the desert. Less secluded than Sood’s isolated estate, the houses were still in the top tier of private villas in the city, and the high walls surrounding the buildings echoed with the roar of engines as the cars shot past.
Ahead, he glimpsed the red BMW weaving between a pair of white people carriers and scanned the road beyond it, trying to spot the silver supercar.
‘Those losers in the other car are not the priority,’ said Lucy, following the same train of thought. ‘We gotta get on that Merc’s tail and stick to it.’
‘Easy ask,’ Marc replied. ‘Not so much in the execution, though. That SLR’s got six hundred-odd horses under the hood. If we get to a straightaway, he’s gone.’
‘Then pour it on,’ she retorted.
‘Copy that.’ He passed one of the people carriers on the inside and there was a brief flash of bright crimson as the BMW blinked past and fell behind, disappearing into the Audi’s slipstream. The driver hadn’t seen them coming and he reacted way too slow to run any interference for Ramaas.
As the road curved to the right, Marc leaned into the turn and continued to put his foot down. The BMW would be racing to catch up to them, which only gave Marc and Lucy a small window of opportunity to get in range of the SLR before they would have trouble coming at them from in front and behind.
The road passed the sculpted lawns of a golf course on the right, and to the left dozens of marble towers rose out of the near horizon, catching the rays of the morning sun. The light blinked off something else; a low-slung silver arrowhead just ahead, two lanes over and moving swiftly into the feeder lane of a motorway interchange.
Marc yanked the steering wheel and the Audi screeched across the road, cutting over the paths of other drivers who hit their horns in a blaring chorus of disapproval. He ignored them and slipped into a trailing position a few vehicle’s lengths behind the SLR. The other car was losing speed as it approached the complex cloverleaf junction, but Marc didn’t follow suit, betting on the Audi’s traction control to keep them from losing it on the turn.
They followed an overpass across the sixteen lanes of the Sheikh Zayed highway that bifurcated downtown Dubai, and the road branched just as Ramaas woke up to the fact that he had a tailgater. The SLR descended the exit ramp and started to gain speed.
‘Get me close!’ Lucy shouted again, propping up the gold pistol on the door frame. But Marc was already committing himself to a different approach. ‘Hold on!’ he called, and aimed the Audi’s prow right at the rear quarter of the supercar.
The two vehicles met in a heavy crunch of fracturing plastic, with enough force to dent the panels on the SLR’s side frame. Shards of tail lights scattered like shrapnel. The silver car skidded and recovered, before lurching across the Audi’s path and into another feeder lane that would take it onto the wide highway they had just crossed.
Marc stamped on the accelerator and rear-ended the SLR again, this time shunting the supercar into another skid that didn’t allow Ramaas to make a clean recovery. The car snaked across into another lane and side-swiped a green SUV, sending the 4x4 off on its own uncontrolled slide. As the SLR slewed back, Lucy fired off a shot that blew out the passenger-side window in a shower of glass.
Marc hunched forward in his seat, as if that would give him a fraction more speed, and went for it again. Part of the Audi’s front bumper and a section of the grille were already dislocated from the frame and trailing against the asphalt as he slammed the cars together for the third time. The busted grille splintered and tumbled away, but the impact took part of the SLR’s rear bumper with it, and popped the lock on the supercar’s boot hatch.
As the car passed in front of them, the hatch yawned open and revealed the contents of the trunk. ‘Oh, shit,’ cried Lucy. ‘Are they –?’
‘Yeah.’ Inside, lined up in a row, were five identical steel-shell suitcases. Each was a perfect duplicate of the Exile unit that Marc had last seen in the hands of Neven Kurjak.
‘Which one?’ The inevitable question was forming on Lucy’s lips, but she never got to voice it. The SLR’s swerve sent one wheel over the rumble strip on the edge of the highway before Ramaas managed to regain control of it, but not before the shuddering and rolling of the car’s motion bounced one of the cases clear out of the trunk and into the path of the oncoming traffic.
Marc swore and stamped on the brakes, desperately veering to avoid the steel case as it landed flat-side down and spun wildly across the asphalt, like a stone skipping over a lake.
*
Lucy’s head snapped around to follow the path of the spinning case, unable to take her eyes off it. She felt a sudden fist of panic in her gut as the case ricocheted off a guide rail and directly into the path of a cargo truck speeding up along the outside lane.
She wanted to close her eyes, momentarily terrified that a world’s-end whiteout flash would be the next thing she would see, but then the truck rode right over the case and flattened it, scattering smashed pieces across the roadway.
‘So not that one,’ managed Marc, answering her unfinished question. ‘Bloody hell . . .’
‘Remind me to get some clean underwear after this,’ she shot back. Ahead of them, the silver roadster was drifting across the lanes again, in the direction of the elevated metro line that parallelled the road. The highway was a canyon boxed in by an orchard of shining towers, all blue glass and pale sand-coloured stone, and it extended off toward the horizon in a ribbon of black. If Marc was right – and he usually had a handle on the numbers – the fancy Merc would soon leave them eating dust.
She weighed the pistol on her hand. Three rounds left. She would have to make every one count. ‘Get us alongside!’
Marc nodded and changed gear, aiming them into the supercar’s slipstream. Lucy kept expecting Ramaas’s vehicle to light the afterburners and blaze away, but he didn’t. Then she saw why.
The thug they had glimpsed in Sood’s garage, the man with the shotgun, emerged from the broken passenger-side window. He clung to the car’s hardtop, reaching backward, and Lucy realised that he was trying to slam shut the yawning trunk hatch.
As their car came closer, the hatch went down and locked, and the baby-faced thug looked back toward Lucy. His hand dropped to grab at his belt and she knew he was going for a gun.
For the second time that day, the action came to her without hesitation, powered by a cold kind of combat logic that was born out of hard training and harder experience. Lucy leaned out of the window and into the hurricane of air blasting down the road. T
wo moving vehicles, close range, dry air, a 9mm bullet. All the variables threaded through her mind in a fraction of a second, as easy to her as breathing. The Sig bucked in her hand, the sound of the discharge swallowed by the wind. The thug grew a rosette of red on his chest and sagged against the side of the car. One arm flopped away and his hand ground against the speeding road surface.
Lucy turned her head to suck in a breath of air and as she turned back, the shadow in the silver car’s driving seat was in motion, pushing at the body of the gun-thug. The injured man was still trying to claw back inside when Ramaas forced him the rest of the way out and let the slipstream rip him away.
‘Bollocks!’ Marc mashed the brakes again and the car lurched aside, narrowly avoiding the thug’s body as it wheeled past them and into the path of the traffic behind.
Ramaas used the moment to pour on the coals. The Merc roadster began to pull away from them as they passed the marina and the towers around them started to thin out. Lucy shot a glance at the Audi’s speedometer. The needle was already at ninety and still climbing, but the Merc kept adding distance.
‘We’re never gonna catch him in this thing,’ muttered the Brit.
‘I’m open to any suggestions,’ she began.
Suddenly, Marc’s head snapped around as he saw something in the Audi’s wing mirror. Lucy looked in the same direction and saw the red BMW convertible coming up fast on the outside, headlights on full beam and blazing. The bald guy with the Uzi was in the passenger seat, and he was taking his time with his aim as the Z3 matched pace.
‘Marc . . .’ Lucy warned. He didn’t seem to hear her. ‘Marc?’ She shouted at him. ‘Dane!’
He pumped the brakes as the thug with the Uzi fired off a burst, and the positions between the two cars reversed. The bullets missed the passenger compartment, but Lucy saw the blue metal of the Audi’s hood grow a bunch of silver impact craters as the rounds hit the front of the car.
Marc worked the steering left-right, left-right in an experimental motion. ‘I think he might’ve hit something important,’ he called out over the roar of the wind. ‘Feels mushy . . .’
Ahead, they were catching up with a group of slow-moving trucks spread out over the middle lanes. Marc found a way to thread the needle between two of them as the BMW tried to drop back and parallel them again. The bald guy fired off another burst, but they were already behind the truck and the rounds went harmlessly into the back of the wagon.
‘I can’t get a bead on that asshole while he’s on the wrong side of us,’ Lucy complained.
Marc’s eyes were fixed on the horizon. ‘We’re losing Ramaas,’ he grated. ‘We don’t have time to screw around!’
*
‘Faster, faster!’ Bidar shouted eagerly at Guhaad as he ejected a spent magazine from the submachine gun and rammed a fresh one into its place. ‘Faster would be better!’
Guhaad scowled. When this was over, he was going to punish Bidar and remind him which of them was in charge. He took in the road around them, alert for the blue car to re-emerge from behind one of the slower-moving trucks. They were passing out of the city now, the landscape around them flattening as the expensive, lavish towers gave way to construction sites and cranes. Signs in English and Arabic suspended over the highway told him they were going in the right direction; the Jebel Ali Free Zone industrial area was a few miles ahead, and within its boundaries there was a sprawl of unmarked roads and unmapped buildings. Once they were inside, they were as good as ghosts.
He chanced a look over his shoulder, searching for the signs of the police, but saw nothing. If the Dubai cops had been alerted to the chase, they were still rushing to reach it.
‘Come on, come on!’ shouted Bidar, brandishing the Uzi. ‘Where is the white rat?’
Out of nowhere, the digital satellite phone stuffed into Guhaad’s pocket buzzed angrily and he pressed it to his ear. ‘Yes, boss?’
‘Where are you?’ demanded Ramaas.
‘Chasing the policeman. The one who came after you.’
‘Don’t take too much time with him,’ came the reply. ‘Deal with it quickly. They know we are here, we can’t wait for you. They must not follow us!’ The line cut and Guhaad’s scowl deepened.
‘There! I see it!’ Bidar pointed and bellowed out the words. Guhaad remembered him doing the same, long ago in the gunwale of a skiff as they sighted an overladen freighter in the Gulf of Aden.
This is no different, Guhaad told himself. We killed the foreigners there. We’ll kill them here . . .
As they passed through the pack of cargo trucks, Guhaad looked ahead and saw another, larger vehicle snaking along the highway. He reached across and yanked on Bidar’s belt. ‘Hold your fire. I have an idea.’
*
The desert gusts whipped around the Audi’s interior, dragging sand in with them and stealing away all the moisture in Marc’s mouth. He blinked behind his aviator sunglasses and squared his shoulders, wishing that the Audi had a nitro button he could mash to gain a burst of much-needed velocity.
‘There he is!’ said Lucy. She aimed the pistol in the direction of the BMW as the red car suddenly vaulted forward and cut left across the lanes. Marc accelerated again to match him, but the convertible had already vanished behind the rear of a dust-caked eighteen-wheeler carrying a load of wide-gauge water pipes. He glimpsed flashes of red as the BMW passed up the length of the truck on the far side, moving to overtake it.
‘Where’s he going?’ said Lucy.
Marc shook his head, dropping back. ‘No idea. I’m gonna go around, try to get behind him . . .’
To the right, he saw a clump of buildings settled in the middle of the sands – a giant shopping mall clustered at the foot of a hotel complex in the shape of a giant’s gateway – and for a second he thought that the BMW was going to head for the off-ramp. But then Marc saw the bald man stand up in the footwell as the car passed the truck’s cab, and aim the submachine gun at the big rig’s driver.
A pennant of flame spat from the Uzi’s muzzle and a full-auto discharge shredded the windscreen of the truck and the luckless man driving it. At high speed and instantly out of control, the rig swerved wildly and the oscillation translated down the length of the trailer, rocking it hard enough to pull the rear wheels away from the asphalt.
Marc saw it coming and stomped the Audi’s brake pedal into the floor.
The truck cab swung as the BMW sped on and away. The rig jackknifed and the transfer of momentum was so brutal that it flipped the entire vehicle onto its side and back down across four lanes of the highway. The cables holding the water pipes snapped and the truck shed its load directly into the path of the Audi and the traffic behind.
Lucy reflexively grabbed the ‘oh-shit’ handle over the door as Marc wrenched the steering wheel from side to side, desperately trying to find a path through the bouncing, rolling pipes that came tumbling toward them. The Audi pitched hard on its shocks, but in a fraction of a second they ran out of room. The yawning end of a pipe section struck the back end of the car with enough force to break something in the drive train and the Audi lurched into an unrecoverable skid. They hit the safety barrier on the right side of the highway with a flat crunch of rending metal, and the airbags deployed to smother the impact.
Marc lolled back in his seat, choking on dust, and tore the airbag away from his face. Across the road, cars were swerving into one another and juddering to a halt as they came upon the obstacles strewn over the highway.
His shoulder and his neck ached as though he had been kicked by a horse. Lucy squirmed across the ruined interior toward him and coughed. ‘Get out.’
‘Yeah.’ Marc kicked open the driver-side door and they got clear of the broken Audi. Oil was already pooling beneath it, and white vapour coiled from the bonnet. ‘Lost our wheels,’ he said thickly.
‘Maybe not . . .’ said Lucy.
A few metres away, a glassy footbridge crossed over the road, connecting to the shopping mall and
a metro station that resembled the cocoon of a huge moth coated in bronze. It was incongruous out here, with little else around, but the complex was simply waiting for the dead desert around it to sprout more homes, more towers, and more money.
An athletic young man in the tan uniform of the Dubai police force came sprinting over to them, his face a mask of worry. ‘Are you all right?’ Marc gave him a weary nod and he shot a look at the disorder of the pile-up forming on the road before him. ‘Oh, no. I have to call this in.’ The young cop started back toward the footbridge.
In the shadow of it were a cluster of vehicles. A handful of the ubiquitous bone-white SUVs that swarmed the city’s backroads were grouped next to a svelte, airstream shape that shimmered in the heat. People who had been gathering around it were now gawping at the road accident.
But the car . . . The car was low and swift even standing still, and Marc blinked at it in amazement. ‘Bloody hell, is that a . . . ?’
‘For cryin’ out loud.’ Lucy glared back at him as she brushed dust off her face and chest. ‘Close your mouth. It’s just a goddamn machine.’
The goddamn machine was a Bugatti Veyron in a green-and-white livery, and it looked as if it was designed to go into orbit and back rather than hug the blacktop. Marc had heard that Dubai’s police department had a stock of expensive supercars in their patrol fleet, but he’d only ever half-believed it.
‘Hey!’ His thoughts caught up with him and he reached out to grab the cop’s shoulder. Like his car, the young man was well sculpted and perfectly manicured. ‘There was a silver SLR McLaren, you must have seen it burning rubber up here a moment ago . . . And a red BMW drop-top . . .’
The police officer nodded. ‘I was reporting it. There have been calls about a shooting near the marina . . .’ He looked back at the mess on the highway. ‘But this . . . We have to get help here!’
Exile Page 28
