He spoke loud enough in his helmet for Ding to receive his transmission. “We’re off the highway, heading north through the Old Town. Don’t know if he has a destination or if he’s just trying to shake me.”
Chavez came over the net an instant later. “I’m hauling ass your way. If you can vector me in front of them I can try to pick up the tail.”
Dom said, “Dude, you’re the guy with the GPS, I’m the guy on the bike trying to read eight-syllable road signs at forty miles an hour.”
Chavez said, “Point taken, Dom. Just give me north, south, east, or west, and let me know what you see. I’ll try to figure it out from my map.”
Dom followed the BMW north through the Old Town. It had slowed to the speed limit but was clearly still trying to find a way out of the area, because it made a series of conflicting turns that led in various directions. Dom called them out to Ding one at a time, and Ding was even able to pan the map on his Land Cruiser’s display over to the neighborhood and reroute Dom so he could give the occupants of the SUV the impression they had lost him.
Dom followed along with Ding’s instructions, taking a parallel alley to the road the X3 was on, but when he came out on the other side, the black SUV wasn’t there.
“Shit!” shouted Dom. “I’ve lost him.”
Ding was using his map to help Dom while he drove closer to the area. “It’s okay, there’s only one way he could have left that road. Turn around, make a left on Subačiaus, and then another immediate left on Kazimiero.”
Dom did as instructed, only to find himself in a perfectly dark, winding cobblestone passage. “He’s not here.”
Ding said, “Stay on that road, he’s got to be in front of you.”
Dom opened up the throttle, raced forward along the cobblestones at breakneck speed. He shot under a pair of passageways where the buildings that ran right up to the side of the pavement connected above the narrow road.
After thirty seconds of racing through the dark, he looked to his right and saw the reflection of the BMW’s taillights parked in the courtyard of a building. He started to slow to turn around, but he’d barely begun to do so when the BMW shot back out in the street, heading the other way. As it made the turn, just seventy-five feet behind Caruso, a single shot cracked in the narrow passageway. Feet above Dom’s head, two-hundred-year-old masonry exploded from the wall of a building.
Dom took off after them, going back the way they had come. Another burst of gunfire kicked up sparks on the cobblestones in front of the motorcycle. Dom slowed and then turned hard through a covered archway that ran under a building, then shot out on the other side. Here there was a staircase that ran down in the direction the BMW had been traveling, so Dom began bouncing down it on his bike. “They are shooting at me. You see any other parallel routes where I can stay out of their line of fire?”
Ding vectored him off the stairs and back toward a road that headed to the south. Just as Dom raced onto the road, he saw the BMW in front of him, not fifty yards ahead on a one-lane cobblestone path with ancient walls tight on both sides. “Got them! South on Dvasios, they’re hauling ass!”
“South on Dvasios?” Ding asked. “You sure?”
“Yeah, why?”
“’Cause I’m heading north on Dvasios, and I’m hauling ass, too!”
“I don’t know how long this road is, but you’d better plan on—”
Dom stopped speaking when he looked beyond the BMW in front of him and saw a big SUV race around the bend with its lights off. Both vehicles were doing fifty, and they were too close to avoid each other.
Ding Chavez had driven all over the Old Town in the past five minutes trying to put himself in front of Caruso and the vehicle he was tailing. And now he had finally done it, but he wasn’t sure of his plan. When he was only twenty-five yards away from impact he let go of the wheel, dropped sideways across the center console of the Land Cruiser, and tucked his head down into the passenger seat. At the same time, he hit the brakes, but did not slam on them. He only wanted to slow down the impact to a survivable speed.
The crash with the big BMW SUV was violent. Chavez’s body was wrenched sideways; glass shattered and metal tore like paper. The airbags in the Toyota had deployed, but they did so over Chavez, who was lying sideways with his head in the passenger seat. They deflated instantly by design, so Chavez sat up quickly with the MP5 in his hands. He leveled it over the dashboard, trained it on the vehicle in front of him.
The radiator of the big Land Cruiser was torn apart and hot steam erupted into the air, fogging the view between Chavez and any potential targets, but after a few seconds to take in the scene, he saw the driver of the BMW, just eight feet or so in front of him, fighting to get his deflated airbag out of his face, and his pistol up and out the shattered windshield.
Chavez flipped off the safety of his submachine gun and opened fire, raking the man in the head with nine-millimeter full-metal-jacketed rounds.
The front passenger got a shot off at Chavez but missed. Chavez used the muzzle flash to find his target through the heavy steam and smoke, and he fired several times, then he ducked down to avoid any return fire.
He unbuckled his seat belt, opened his driver’s-side door, and bailed out, dropping all the way to the ground. Once he hit the hard cobblestones, with the smell of radiator fluid and engine oil prevalent in the cold night air, he swung his MP5 around and toward the BMW.
A man in blue jeans and a heavy coat had bailed from the back of the BMW, and was just now climbing off the ground, pulling a pistol from inside his jacket. Chavez leveled his weapon at the man. “Don’t move!”
The man moved and Ding shot him in the forehead, sending him falling back onto the cobblestones.
“Shit!” Ding said. He needed at least one of these men alive.
He clambered up to his feet now, thankful that his body was cooperating and he’d not been injured in the crash, then he carefully moved around the wreckage of the BMW, spinning around the back, low with his weapon up.
A man had been crawling from the crash on his hands and knees, and he was now in the middle of the one-lane road, thirty feet away.
Dom Caruso knelt over the injured man, his knee in the man’s back, his Beretta pistol pressed against his skull. He looked up to Ding. “Hey, look what I found.”
The last five minutes had been a logistical nightmare, but Chavez and Caruso had the wounded gunman alone, just the way they wanted him.
The only operable vehicle was the Honda motorcycle, so Dom climbed back on and drove over to the man lying in the street. The man had a broken ankle — somehow he’d injured it in the backseat of the BMW in the crash — and he was unable to walk or even stand, so once they searched him for weapons Ding secured his hands with tape, blindfolded him, and then put him on the back of Dom’s motorcycle. Dom drove off to the south, with instructions from Ding to find a place for an in extremis interrogation.
Just on the other side of Daukšos, a main east-west artery a block away from the crash site, Dom motored up a private drive of a section of beat-up-looking old apartment buildings. Here, behind a parking lot and a row of garbage cans, he found a freestanding building the size of a one-car garage. It didn’t look like it had been used in decades — it was surrounded by overgrown weeds and the window glass was broken out — but when he kicked in the loose wooden door and looked over the space with his flashlight, he saw the room would do for a short conversation.