by Stevens, Tim
As if they had heard him there was a brittle crack followed by the thump of the shot. In the mirror Calvary saw the glass of the back window craze and star. Reflexively he pulled his head down on to his neck as the bullet embedded itself in the soft padding of the interior of the cab above their heads with a thwock.
His attention was riveted suddenly, shockingly, to the scene directly ahead as the nose of another car appeared from a sidestreet to the right. When Calvary saw it wasn’t going to stop he ground down on the pedal. The engine roared like a beast, the rev counter going wild, and the front bumper of the pickup clipped the other car at an angle, its headlight exploding in a shower of glass. The impact had done little damage to the other car, a Toyota, and it pulled out in pursuit of them, the Hummer dropping back to let it in.
Up ahead Calvary could see the Hlavka Bridge spreading across the river to the left, lit up in gold against the black haze of the sky. It crossed an island in the middle of the river before reaching the opposite bank. He jerked the wheel to angle them up the approach, avoiding the tunnel that loomed ahead dropping below the bridge, and he gunned the car straight at the traffic lights beyond which a left turn would take him on to the bridge, a right back towards the Old Town. He leaned on the horn so that a pair of cars waiting at the lights peeled aside frantically, and jumped the red light, angling rightwards, the Toyota close behind. Calvary lifted the handbrake as smoothly as he could manage and the back of the pickup slewed round to the right. As it hit ninety degrees Calvary released the handbrake and the pickup shot down the road to the left and across the bridge.
Behind them Calvary saw in the mirror that the Toyota had overshot, taken in by his feint, but the Hummer braked in time and swung round to follow, less elegantly and thereby losing a few seconds. Calvary was able to pick up speed, but there was traffic at the end of the bridge and within moments he was backed up against a slower driver, while cars flashed in quanta of light and metal in the opposite direction so that he was unable to overtake.
The Hummer was gaining. Calvary slipped out the SIG and twisted in the seat, took aim through the shattered rear window and squeezed the trigger twice. The shots were almost intolerably loud in the confined space of the car and he saw Gaines duck his head. Calvary was off-centre and thought he’d hit the frame above the windscreen with one of them because he heard the whine of a ricochet, but the lights dropped back. Just then there was no oncoming traffic, so he went for the gap and overtook the car in front of him and was off again, weaving round a second car and putting space between him and his pursuers.
The bridge became a broad road running straight ahead on the north bank, perpendicular to the river. Again the Hummer was closing on him. Calvary saw a narrower street leading off on the left and did another handbrake turn, timing it less well this time so that the rear end fishtailed. The Hummer was anticipating something like this because he saw in the mirror that it managed not to overshoot and roared round the corner after the pickup. The end of the street was coming up and Calvary was headed for a T-junction. He decided on a left turn again because it would represent a fairly tight doubling-back which might throw the Hummer.
It might have been a mistake because a hundred yards ahead a car came screaming from a side street to the left and swung to face the pickup. Calvary realised it must have crossed at an earlier bridge, anticipating his flight across the river. He was going too fast not to hit it unless he braked, so instead he turned to the left, up the street from which the second car had emerged. It was a short street and ended in another T-junction.
Headlights came fast from behind and the new car came speeding on the wrong side of the road and overtaking him before swerving in ahead and slowing. It was an Audi, one he’d seen before. Calvary tapped the brake. The Hummer came round the corner and shoehorned its way in behind him.
They had him then, boxed and ready for shipping to wherever it was people like Calvary went when they died.
TWENTY-SEVEN
In the mirror Krupina could see Calvary’s silhouette through the windscreen, backlit by the headlights of the Hummer behind him. She couldn’t see Gaines. Calvary had probably shoved him down below the dashboard or in the back seat.
She said to Lev, ‘Slow down. Give us some space in front.’
‘He may choose to ram us.’
‘It gives us more room to manoeuvre if he tries to break out.’
Lev did as he was asked. The speedometer dial dropped to sixty kilometres per hour.
*
Behind the Hummer the cars were hanging well back, leaving the convoy of three – Hummer, pickup and Audi – isolated.
For the show of it Calvary tried nosing out to overtake, but immediately the Audi veered to block him. In the orange from the streetlights that strobed past he could see two heads in the Audi, the driver and a passenger. Through the Hummer’s tinted windows he could see nothing.
Calvary estimated he had perhaps ten seconds to decide what to do, because it was about to turn into an execution. He assumed they were going to try to bring the speed down to minimise inconvenience and, sure enough, the brake lights flashed on the rear of the Audi. He nudged the brake pedal of the pickup.
Beside him Gaines was a dark, huddled shape, his eyes glinting in the intermittent light from outside. Calvary said, ‘Brace your feet against the dashboard. Keep yourself doubled over and press yourself back against the seat.’
He twisted and grunted in compliance. They were down to forty. In the Hummer the passenger in front was starting to lean out of the window, something dark in his hand.
Calvary lifted the SIG so that they could see it.
Then he hit the brake, extending his leg fully, grinding the pedal into the floor. The tyres screamed on the road surface and he watched the mirror where the Hummer was growing huge, the driver realising at the last minute and braking himself, but not quickly enough. Just before the impact Calvary twisted and loosed off a shot – again, so loud, even against the cacophony of rubber on tarmac – through the hole where the rear window had been. This time he was more accurate and the windscreen on the driver’s side spackled.
The Hummer rear-ended the pickup at a slight angle because Calvary’s braking had swung the back of the car to the left. He felt himself rammed back against the seat, managed to hold himself there enough that he wasn’t flung forward too far by the recoil. A car’s horn raged past at the same moment and Christ knew how it missed them; it swerved back onto the right side ahead of the Audi, which had shot forward and was only now braking.
The collision left the pickup stalled and at an angle across the road, blocking it in both directions. Beside Calvary, Gaines slumped with his head lolling back, but he rolled his neck to look at Calvary and although there was blood on his face he blinked and nodded. Calvary knew he was all right for the time being.
The temptation was to get out and run, but that was what they would be expecting. Instead Calvary fired the engine again and saw in the mirror that the passenger door of the Hummer had been flung open by the impact. A man was clambering out, his hand coming up with his gun in it. Calvary hit reverse and smashed straight through him as he pulled the trigger, the shot going off into the night. He went down below the field of view afforded by the mirror and Calvary felt the bump and flop of him beneath the wheels and saw him emerge on the road in front of the truck, bent and crushed.
Calvary kept the car in reverse gear, veering past the stalled Hummer. He saw that the road was clear for at least fifty yards behind him, a queue of frightened and bewildered drivers stacked up behind an imaginary barrier. He built up some speed before spinning the wheel and executing a J-turn which took them through 180 degrees. He found second gear and put his foot to the floor again so that he was heading towards the queue. A couple of cars had pulled over into the oncoming lane to see what was going on but they veered to one side when they saw he wasn’t going to stop. Behind him the Audi had turned, more quickly than he was expecting, and was in pursuit.
/> Calvary had to hope the police would take their time getting to the area. There were two reasons why this might be the case. Calvary and his pursuers were on the move constantly so it would be difficult for the police to co-ordinate themselves in the absence of a specific location. Also, they would be stretched thinly because of what had been happening elsewhere in the city. Nevertheless, somewhere, far off, perhaps on the other side of the hill, sirens were slicing the air.
The pickup hadn’t been badly damaged in the collision but there was a noise from the back, the flapping of metal torn loose. Calvary took it up to a hundred and ten kilometres per hour. A judder started up in the pickup’s chassis, not strong, but a warning growl of discontent. He pushed it harder. A hundred and twenty. Headlights stabbed by, seeming to be aiming straight at them before disappearing on the left. The Audi was gaining ground, and wasn’t even up to full speed yet.
There was a flash above and to the side of its headlights, the crash of the shot before glass splashed up from the rear of the pickup. Calvary swerved instinctively. They had hit one of the rear lights.
The pickup crested a hill and shot down a steep drop towards a built-up area, the wheels leaving the road surface for a second before crashing back down and jarring the entire body of the car. Calvary had to dab the brake because he wasn’t going to be able to sustain this speed and keep control of the car in terrain like this. The road curved to the right and he was thankful because it would make them a marginally more difficult target. The Audi was almost on them now, ten yards back. A surge in its acceleration would slam it into the back of the pickup.
Another shot sang past Calvary’s head, coming straight through the empty rear window and hitting the windscreen, cracking it into a ragged many-armed star. Because of the angle, the damage was on the passenger side and he could still see through, but visibility on the right was badly impaired. There was a sharp turn ahead to the right which Calvary spotted only because of the apparent end of the road in front of him. He craned his neck to see round the damaged windscreen, then slowed as little as he dared before taking the corner, not judging it as well as he was hoping and hitting a wooden front gate with the left rear end of the car, sending the gate shearing into the front garden beyond.
The Audi took the corner more carefully but at the expense of speed, so Calvary was a few seconds ahead when he straightened out again. Some sort of complicated junction was coming up ahead with lots of exits. Calvary did the counter-instinctual thing and chose one that bent off to the left and backwards like a hairpin. He hit the horn to keep the traffic off the junction before spinning the wheel and sending the rear of the car scudding across the tarmac so that the front was pointing about a hundred and thirty-five degrees left of where it had started. He took off down the new road. It put further distance between him and the Audi, and for the first time he thought he might lose them.
*
Bartos took his chance just as the pickup ploughed through the guy who’d got out the passenger side of the Hummer. Voronin, the bastard who’d been in charge of his interrogation.
Seconds earlier the driver’s head had rocked back in a dark crimson spray and the bullet had sung past Bartos’s head and embedded itself in the seat beside him. An instant after that, the Hummer had slammed into the rear of the pickup truck. The men on either side of Bartos in the back seat had been jolted by the impact, as he had, but they kept their grips on the guns jammed into his flanks.
Voronin rolled out of the passenger door and through the remains of the windscreen Bartos saw him aim his gun before the reversing pickup smashed into him. The man on Bartos’s left gave a yell and for the first time he felt the pressure of the barrel ease against his side as the man lifted it away and began to bring it up to face the front.
Bartos grabbed the raised arm and brought it across his body, using the heel of his left hand to bend it against the elbow so that the bone cracked. Reflexively the man pulled the trigger. By this time the gun was pointing directly at the man on Bartos’s right. The shot caught him in the temple, snapping his head to bounce off the window. Bartos hauled on the other man’s arm, drawing his head down towards him, and got his arm around the man’s neck. He clasped his hands together and tightened his forearm across the throat. The man’s arms flailed but he was trapped. Bartos was a big man. He was the Kodiak. The Russian gave a last choking hiss and was silent.
Bartos shook his head, trying to clear the ringing from the close-quarters gunfire. He peered through the wrecked windscreen. The pickup was gone. Inside the Hummer were three dead men, with another on the road outside.
But he, Bartos, was alive.
He began to laugh.
He opened the rear doors on either side and shoved the bodies out on to the road. Then he clambered through to the front. The driver’s seat was a mess, gore splashed across the upholstery and the dashboard. He kicked the corpse on to the tarmac, tried the engine. It fired up.
He remembered something. When they’d first loaded him into the Hummer outside the park, before the interrogation, they’d blindfolded him, but not before he’d noticed them loading something into the boot.
He pulled to a halt down a side street, went round to the back. Lifted the false bottom away from the base of the boot. Saw the hardware clamped into place.
Beautiful.
*
‘Talk to me, talk to me.’ Her yell faded to a croak on the last word. Beside her Lev’s head was hunched forward as though he could increase their speed that way.
Arkady’s voice came through, raised but calm. ‘We’re on the Letna side, between the river and the southern edge of the Gardens.’
‘Heading which way?’
‘West, towards the castle.’
‘Keep going. We’re behind him on Milady Herakove, same direction.’
‘You operational, boss?’
‘Yes. The Hummer’s out of action.’
And Voronin was dead. She’d seen him go down under Calvary’s truck..
The pain in her abdomen was like a spear impaling her to her seat. Coughing made it worse, so she stifled it, spluttering. Lev didn’t waste time asking her how she was.
‘Where’s the other car?’ She meant the one carrying the remaining two Voronin men.
Arkady was quiet for a moment, consulting. Then: ‘Approaching from the castle side.’
The end game.
*
Calvary used the roads creatively, choosing a direction at the last minute, swinging left and right and right and left in what was probably some sort of pattern if one were to study it closely but seemed random enough to suit my purposes. Some kind of park was to his left. Ahead he recognised the sign for the Metro system. In the near distance was the Gothic grandeur of the castle.
The pickup was shaking violently as if in the grip of some ague and the speedometer showed one hundred and forty kph. Still the Audi kept at its back, matching the lane switches and the feints.
Then the shots came, a volley of three, two so close together as to be virtually simultaneous with the third lagging by a fraction of a second. There was no impact, no crash of projectile striking metal. Instead there was an explosion, briefer and sharper than the shots that had preceded it, followed by the high-pitched screech of a naked wheel rim scouring across tarmac.
Calvary risked a glance up at the mirror and saw the Audi slewing to the side, the driver spinning the wheel, his mouth stretched wide as he fought for control over the vehicle. I braked, quickly but steadily, and swung the Passat Mercedes round. The Audi’s front passenger wheel bounced up on to the pavement and the bumper hit a concrete bollard with enough force that it crumpled like crepe paper. The car came to a halt, its rear tyre on the driver’s side hanging off the wheel in a ragged ribbon, steam coming up in clouds from beneath the sharply arched bonnet.
There was no time to reflect on what had happened because the front doors of the car were already opening, the one on the passenger side with difficulty because the impact had b
uckled it. Calvary had time to register that the figure emerging from the passenger side was the woman, Krupina . Twenty yards , behind, Calvary saw the lights of another car, a VW – the rental from earlier – and through the windscreen Nikola at the wheel and Jakub beside her.
He used the brake firmly but not sharply, taking the pickup round in a fast but steady arc and gunning back the way he had come. Be side him Gaines peered about , confused. Ahead the man who had been driving the Audi was now crouching and using one of the doors as cover , and peering back towards the VW. Jakub had opened the passenger door of the VW and was sighting along the top of the door, a gun – Calvary assumed the Browning or the Glock – in his hand. Calvary understood. Jakub had shot out the Audi’s tyre.
Calvary braked to a stop fifty yards away. as He kicked out the windscreen of the pickup where the glass was starred. F rom behind the shield of the dashboard he fired off three shots in rapid order, catching the driver with two of them so that he slammed back off the Audi and hit the ground.
The woman cowered behind the cover of her own door. There didn’t seem to be any others in the Audi. Calvary was about to call across to Jakub when Nikola put her head through the driver’s window and screamed, ‘Martin. Behind you.’
Calvary looked over his shoulder, saw the lights coming fast from the direction of the castle, two sets of them.
And the roar of a bigger beast caused his head to snap back round. Beyond the crashed Audi, beyond the VW, its half-severed bumper sparking off the tarmac, the Hummer was advancing.
*
The trail was like that of an explorer hacked through the jungle. Cars were pulled over to the side, their shaken drivers jabbering into phones, and pedestrians milled about staring off into the direction the pickup and the Audi had passed. Bartos followed with ease, feeling a thrill at the throbbing power of the vehicle even in its battered state.
