Purkiss stooped and grabbed the older man, the European-looking one, under the arms, and hauled him to the side of the car. He opened the rear door and dumped the man’s dead weight onto the back seat.
On the pavement behind the Audi, the Lexus’s tyres squealed, its lights leaping forwards.
Purkiss thought: Damn. They left the driver in the car.
He dived into the back seat on top of the man he’d slung there, in case the driver of the Lexus opened fire, and slammed the door shut behind him. Kneeling and crawling across the unconscious body, he clambered through the divide into the driver’s seat. Keeping his head low, he hit the ignition switch.
In the wing mirror the headlights flamed like twin owl eyes, bearing down.
Purkiss rammed the gear shift into reverse and trod down hard on the accelerator. Reversing was a counter-intuitive move by which Purkiss intended to wrong-foot the Lexus driver, and it seemed to work. The Audi rocketed backwards along the pavement just as the Lexus drew level. Purkiss saw the pale oval of the driver’s face turned towards him through the window an instant before it disappeared behind a curtain of shattering glass and plastic as the wing mirrors of the two cars collided and exploded. A screech of grinding metal accompanied the scraping of the Lexus’s bumper against the side panel of the Audi before Purkiss was clear and angling the Audi out onto the road, the Lexus’s brake lights flaring redly through his windscreen.
On the back seat, the man moaned quietly.
Purkiss jolted the wheel sideways and spun out into the middle lane, a limousine blaring furiously past him. He passed the Lexus even as he saw it vault off the pavement where it had partly mounted. Its lights dropped in behind him, alarmingly close, as it gave chase.
On the dashboard, the satnav peeped and bleated, confused by the erratic moves he was making. He ignored it; it was no use to him now. He was aware he was driving blind, in an utterly unfamiliar city enclosed by desert. And he was aware that any moves in the direction of the Scipio Rand headquarters would draw him closer to the centre of the spider’s web, something he needed to avoid.
The boulevard ahead furrowed into two parallel prongs with a tree-lined barrier between them. Purkiss chose the left-hand one, for no especial reason. The Lexus hung close behind, cutting across a mini-convoy of sports cars, and as if spurred on by the cavalcade of angry horns closed in on Purkiss.
He needed to get away. There was no longer any need for deception, for maintaining the fiction that he hadn’t noticed the tag on his tail. Purkiss had one of their men captive — he’d chosen the European because he was older, and therefore more likely to be senior, and in a position to divulge more information — so his goal was to lose the Lexus, avoid whatever reinforcements might be on their way, and escape the bounds of the city.
But the driver of the Lexus was tenacious.
Purkiss considered a sudden braking manoeuvre, to force the Lexus to stop and thereby stall its engine, or even to ram into the rear of the Audi; but his instinct told him the driver was a seasoned professional and would be expecting that, and would simply slow down, thereby gaining precious distance. Instead, Purkiss glanced to his right, at the divide between the two sides of the road, lined as it was by manicured palm trees.
He chose a gap between the trees that looked wider than most, and with a spin of the wheel rammed the Audi through it.
The car howled up the kerb and across the grassy divide, its sides striking the trunks of adjacent trees with a twin thock sound and a crump of bending metal. But it made it through, and crashed across onto the road on the opposite side, traffic there screaming sideways to avoid collision. Momentarily disorientated, Purkiss looked around, and spotted the Lexus running parallel on the other side of the divide. The trees appeared closer together here, and Purkiss didn’t think the driver would have a chance to aim between them.
Ahead, a set of traffic lights turned amber, then red. A heavy stream of vehicles began to cross perpendicularly.
Purkiss weighed the odds. If he continued as he was, straight through the lights, and at his current speed — ninety-five kilometres per hour — he’d almost certainly hit at least one of the cars in the cross-traffic. On the other hand, if he stopped for the lights, the Lexus would in all likelihood reach the lights on its side of the road, which were currently green, hook round, and end up facing Purkiss, ready to ram him where he sat.
He could have snatched up one of the dropped guns back there where he’d taken down the two men, he reflected. But a running gun battle through the night streets of Riyadh wasn’t his idea of a clean solution to the problem at hand.
Somewhere, from off to the right and behind, Purkiss heard a police car’s call. The European-style twin note, not the rise and fall of the British or American siren.
Purkiss hit the accelerator hard, grinding it so that his heel was pressing it down. The speedometer jerked upwards as the Audi gathered momentum, the red-lit junction ahead looming large. Over to the left, the Lexus was temporarily left behind.
At the last moment before he reached the junction, Purkiss spun the wheel, executing a lurching J-turn that took the Audi in a finely judged arc past the impossibly large and gaping Os of a couple’s mouths through the windscreen of a four-wheel drive in the next lane and right across to the side of the road bound in the opposite direction. Once facing away from the junction, Purkiss rode the accelerator and clutch carefully, holding back from stalling the car, and once he was sure it was steady, headed back the way he’d come, at a measured pace, neither fast nor suspiciously slow.
The police cars, two of them, squealed past him towards the junction.
Through the trees lining the central barrier on Purkiss’s right, he could see lights swaying chaotically, and he understood that the driver of the Lexus was making a U-turn himself. As the road was one-way only on that side of the barrier, it meant the driver was intending to head back the wrong way, in the face of oncoming traffic.
Purkiss picked up speed. In his mirror, behind and to his right, he watched the Lexus veer crazily between panic-stricken cars as it wove back down the road. Directly behind Purkiss the police cars had screeched round the junction and were beginning to turn down the road on the other side of the barrier, in pursuit of the Lexus.
The Lexus leaped the barrier, just as Purkiss had done with the Audi and at the same spot, its bumper gouging out a chunk of one of the palm trees’ boles. With a scrape of loosened metal the Lexus made it on to the road and straightened out so that it was behind Purkiss once more.
On the other side of the barrier the police cars slowed, thrown by this sudden manoeuvre.
The first gunshot erupted, the rear window of the Audi bursting inwards in a glittering cascade.
Purkiss floored the accelerator, crouching low over the steering wheel, swinging it fractionally to present an unsteady target. He was fairly sure he’d seen just one man in the Lexus, which meant the driver himself was doing the shooting and was therefore hampered by his need to control the car. But the second shot came then, the blast alarmingly close behind, and this time the bullet struck the upholstery just above Purkiss’s head.
Another junction was coming up rapidly, the lights turning amber. Purkiss saw a large refuse truck beginning to ease over the line to the left, in preparation for the green signal.
He touched the brake to slow himself just enough to get the timing right, gritted his teeth as the Lexus kept on coming behind him, its headlights growing enormous and on full beam. Ahead of him the light was red, and he saw the truck lumber forwards.