‘Nice night,’ he said calmly, standing and walking between parked cars into the empty street.
The woman turned and froze, like a deer caught in the full beams.
‘It’s okay,’ said Mac, still approaching but holding his hands open. ‘But next time you want to ask me for a drink, there might be an easier way.’
Mid to late thirties, Javanese, her hair was pulled up in a chignon.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, genuinely embarrassed. ‘I’ve never done this before.’
‘It’s okay,’ said Mac. ‘It’s just that I prefer to meet people face to face rather than trying to speak through the back of my head.’
Now she laughed, and Mac could see a smart, beautiful, well-educated woman.
‘So, what’s up?’ asked Mac, looking to make sure there was no backup, no unmarked vans with mobile dental surgeries in the back.
‘My name is Chloe,’ she said. ‘I need to speak to you.’
‘Yes?’ said Mac, starting slightly as an engine revved down the road.
‘I work for the President, and -’
The revving engine screamed to a climax and Mac swivelled around to see a red Toyota Camry charging at forty-five degrees across the street.
As he dragged the woman to the ground behind a parked car, there was a loud screeching of metal as the car stopped twenty metres away. Mac peeked over the parked car and saw two men emerge from the Corolla with small machine-guns.
‘What’s happening?’ screamed Chloe, as Mac dragged her away by the hand. The sound of windows shattering and car alarms going off was punctuated by the hammering of two machine pistols blasting at full auto, as they sprinted.
Feeling a sharp knock in his left bicep, Mac increased their speed along the pavement as bullets ripped into cars, lamp-posts, trees and storefronts. About forty metres in front of them, Mac could see a side alley at ninety degrees to the street.
‘Let’s make it to the alley, okay, Chloe?’ he yelled over the gunfire.
Chloe whimpered as they turned into the alley and were plunged into the darkness of a no-nonsense Denpasar laneway. Stopping for a second, Mac tried to get his bearings. Then a bullet took a brick edge beside his shoulder and Mac raced forward, pulling the woman along through stinking puddles, slimy muck and boxes of garbage.
‘Shit,’ said Mac, drawing to a halt where the alley ended at a brick wall.
They ducked behind a garbage bin as a powerful torch beam reached out from the other end of the alley and filled the confined space with light. Whatever their pursuers had was not a torch in the hardware-store sense of the word, but a SWAT-team halogen system found in helicopters for search-and-rescue work.
‘Over there,’ whispered Chloe, squinting at the reflected light. ‘There’s a door.’
Following Chloe’s lead, Mac found the wooden doors behind a large garbage box. The doors stood at hip-height, with a padlock in the middle of them. After backing up two paces, Mac lunged forward and kicked at the middle with all his weight.
The doors didn’t budge.
CHAPTER 59
‘Here,’ hissed Chloe, picking up a steel bar.
Grabbing it, Mac levered it under the padlock, opening the doors in one attempt. Chloe gasped as the searchlight beam swept closer and several rounds of gunfire whacked into the wall above them.
There was a brief lull in gunfire as the male voices chattered at each other. The light was aimed over Mac and Chloe’s heads as they crawled from the alley through the open doors. As Mac went to stand, he found himself falling down a chute, landing in a stinking puddle of slime at the bottom. Chloe joined him half a second later, and as they searched for an escape route in the inky darkness, a volley of machine-gun fire ricocheted into the delivery chute.
Walking along the cellar floor, hands stretched out in front of him, Mac tripped in the blackness, falling forward and hitting his head on concrete steps.
‘Are you okay?’ whispered Chloe, voice panicked.
‘Good as gold,’ said Mac, pushing himself onto his knees then leading Chloe up the steps.
They emerged in the ground floor of what looked like an old warehouse space. Moving to the most obvious exit, Mac cursed as he found it bolted. Creeping along the wall with Chloe in front of him, they slipped behind a pile of wooden crates.
Mac pulled out his Nokia as they heard their pursuers sliding down the delivery chute.
‘Bongo, I need a hand, mate,’ rasped Mac. Describing their location as clearly as he could, Mac asked him to hurry.
‘There yesterday, brother,’ said Bongo, whose apartment was two blocks away.
The rays of searchlight beams winked from the cellar entry. Mac considered ambushing the shooters as they came up the stairs, but decided against it. Clearly pros, they’d stagger the ascent of those stairs, precisely to catch an ambusher in the support fire. Besides, he couldn’t leave Chloe, who was shaking like a leaf and looked as if she might collapse at any moment.
Moving further around the wall, Mac found a place where he could see the top of the cellar stairs. Torches now off, the first shooter emerged and cased the warehouse in distinct quartiles: east-west, high-low.
The second shooter joined him and they split, the taller of the two moving towards the crate they were hiding behind.
‘Okay,’ whispered Mac. ‘We’re going to move along this wall, see if we can stay one step ahead, okay?’
There was no reply and then Mac felt her slump against him.
‘You okay?’ asked Mac.
Looking down he saw her back was a shiny black mess of blood – she’d taken a bullet on the street.
‘Fuck!’ said Mac.
Looking up Mac saw a mezzanine about ten metres above the floor. Doorways and skylights led out of the area and he realised that this was their best escape route. As he plotted his course to get up to the mezzanine, he saw the short gunman racing at the stairs and charge up them three at a time. Reaching the mezzanine level, the shooter hit the power on his halogen searchlight and strobed the ground-floor area with the intense illumination.
‘Hang in there,’ said Mac as Chloe clung to him. ‘I’m going to get us out of here.’
Up ahead was a partially unloaded crate with a panel missing. Steering Chloe into it, Mac whispered for her to stay put until he gave the okay. Though scared and injured, she looked him in the eye and nodded.
Moving back along the wall, Mac saw a pile of sacks on a filing cabinet. Picking one up, he undid his boat shoes, put them in a sack and waited for the tall shooter to come down the corridor of crates. Mac ducked back from the sweeping glare of the halogen and waited for ten seconds. The tall shooter turned right, and waved a hand over his head, his searchlight exposing a scuttling rat. Mac pulled back behind the crate as the shooter kept coming.
Taking two steps to his right, away from the corridor, Mac swung the sack into the darkness. The tall shooter swivelled around to face the sound and Mac lunged at him, kicking the shooter’s groin, whipping a right elbow across his nose, and ripping the A4 counter clockwise from the shooter’s right hand, breaking the fingers so that the machine pistol dropped into Mac’s hand.
Getting his finger on the trigger, Mac swung the gun at the shooter who was lying in the foetal position, clutching at his wrist. Suddenly Mac was bathed in light as he squinted into the harshness of another searchlight, virtually paralysing in its intensity.
‘Drop the weapon,’ came the mechanical English of an Indonesian. ‘You’re in my sights.’
Heaving for breath and blinded, Mac felt the beam of light move off him. Then there were two shots and a weight hit Mac from the side.
Turning, he found Chloe sagged against his leg.
‘Ask for George,’ she whispered. ‘In Singapore, okay?’
‘What?’ asked Mac, barely able to see.
‘George – find the traitor,’ said Chloe, then the air was torn with the hellish racket of gunfire. Mac fell and scrambled back to his hide between the crates.