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.
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 buckled it. Calvary had time to register that the figure emerging from the passenger side was the woman, Krupina . Twenty yards