Calvary stumbled to his feet and peered about for Gaines, seeing him scrambling away.
He yelled, ‘Gaines, over here,’ and raised the Makarov. Blažek leaned out the window of the Hummer and fired. Calvary leaped and rolled, hearing the rapid fire raking off the tarmac, waiting for the bullets to rip across his back. He took cover beside the wrecked pickup, risked a glance round.
Saw Blažek hauling Gaines into the Hummer one handed, the rifle pointed now back towards the VW where Jakub was trying to get a shot in.
Gunfire was coming from somewhere else now, the Russians on the other side of the Hummer, but all of a sudden there wasn’t a Hummer there because Blažek had taken off. Calvary stood and saw the big vehicle rocketing away in the direction of the castle. He waved, frantic, to Nikola behind the wheel of the VW, saw the rear door flapping open even as the car swung close to him, and dived in beside Max.
*
‘Darya Yaroslavovna. Can you hear me?’
Usually the city’s lights, especially around the castle, made it hard to see the stars, but Krupina had a perfect view of them now. Something quick and sudden had happened and the darkness that veiled her eyes had vanished. There’d been some sort of impact, and the car was no longer over her.
There was no pain, at last. Just an overwhelming coldness.
Arkady’s face loomed pale and close. He was crouching over her, blood on his hands. She tried to ask him if he was all right. Then she angled her eyes down, saw that the blood was hers. Noticed something odd about her hips, the whole lower half of her body, in fact: it was twisted at right angles to the upper half.
‘Arkasha…’ She couldn’t remember his patronymic. Careless of her, and rude.
‘I have to get you away.’
From nearby came the singing of urban angels: the sirens of emergency vehicles.
It was too late. Arkady knew it; she could read it in his gaze.
Her boys. Arkady and Gleb. Her only constants in a treacherous world.
She gripped his hand in both of hers. Whispered, ‘Did you get him? The Englishman, Gaines?’
His eyes burned into hers.
‘Yes, Darya Yaroslavovna. We got him.’ A beat, then: ‘You’ve won.’
She closed her eyes.
A life well lived.
TWENTY-NINE
The giddiness Bartos had felt as he lurched out of the car and grabbed the skinny old guy was wiped away by the cold air blasting through the gap where the windscreen had been. The bonnet of the Hummer was stove in, one corner lifting like an old piece of lino, but the machine was still going, its rumble harshened to a roar.
I need to get myself one of these, he thought.
First things first. The old guy had tried to grab at the door handle and although Bartos had locked it centrally, he didn’t like this display of defiance and busted the man in the chops. He remembered to pull his blow – the guy looked seventy or more – but even so there was blood, and when the man slumped sideways Bartos worried for a moment that he was dead. He seized the man’s meagre hair and bellowed at him, shaking his head back and forth. The Brit stirred, mumbling. Bartos cuffed his face once more.
‘Pull that shit again and I will let you out. Straight into the river.’
In the mirror Calvary and his loser buddies were picking up speed. Their car wasn’t worth shit compared to the Hummer, but they had the advantage of a vehicle that hadn’t been in two collisions.
He was heading south west, towards Mala Strana, the Lesser Town. A big, fast car wasn’t much use there among all the cobbled streets. Plus, the sirens were all around. The cops would be looking for a car of the Hummer’s description; it was one that would have stuck in witnesses’ minds. Best to ditch it.
Bartos yanked the wheel to the left, took a steep winding street at almost one hundred kilometres an hour, doing some serious damage to the side panels against the narrow stone walls. He banked right again, saw a dead end ahead with a railing and a drop beyond it, slammed on the brakes and killed the engine.
He jumped down, came round to the passenger side and dragged Gaines out, the pistol pressed against his head. Bartos reached back into the car for the rifle, which he hoisted awkwardly over his shoulder. Clamping his hand over the old man’s mouth, he marched him back up to the end of the side street. The mouth of a tiny alley, so narrow it could barely fit them both, loomed blackly.
*
Calvary hated sitting in the back seat of anything: a taxi, a car like this one, with an amateur gunman of only modest ability riding shotgun in the passenger seat up front. He glanced back. Through the still-flaming wreckage of the car that Blažek had blown up with the grenade, he saw no headlights flashing in pursuit. The Russians were out of the game, for now at least.
He craned to look at the surface of the road behind them.
‘Are we leaking oil?’
Nikola said, ‘No.’
‘Then the Hummer is. He hasn’t got much time left.’
In front of him, Jakub cocked his gun ostentatiously. Calvary said, ‘When we find him, keep back. For God’s sake. You’ve done enough. You came at just the right time. You need to leave this to me now.’
Jakub made a sound like a snort.
It wasn’t the time for small talk but Calvary couldn’t help it. ‘Nikola, are you all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘You got away.’
‘Only just. I reached the car, came looking for you. I drove around the hospital many times. I thought they had you.’
‘They did.’
In the mirror she touched her forehead. ‘What did they –?’
‘It’s nothing. I’ll tell you later.’
Behind them the first flashing blue and red lights crested the road. Calvary said, ‘Slow down.’
‘He is turning.’
‘All right. Follow him, but be discreet.’
They dipped alarmingly, the streets losing their broad functionality and becoming medieval. Ahead the Hummer had disappeared. Nikola took the VW judderingly down the cobbles, peering left and right. Max pointed: ‘There.’
Nikola pulled in. The side road ended in a railed balcony. Thirty yards ahead, parked sideways alongside the balcony, was the Hummer. The light from the city beyond showed no human silhouettes in the windows.
Calvary said, ‘Stay here.’
He climbed out, keeping low, the Makarov in a two-handed grip.
Blažek was either in the car, out of sight with Gaines, or he’d ducked behind it. Calvary flattened himself against the cobblestones, peering into the blackness beneath the bulk of the vehicle, looking for telltale glints of metal or teeth. Nothing.
He duckwalked to the car, rose up and dropped just as quickly. The snapshot he’d glimpsed of the interior of the car had confirmed that nobody of Bartos’s bulk was inside.
Nikola’s shout made him whirl, on his knees, the gun extended.
From the obscure mouth of an alleyway Blažek had emerged and got his forearm across the throat of Jakub, who’d been standing by the open passenger door of the VW. The big man’s other hand was jamming a pistol against the side of Jakub’s head.
Blažek roared something in Czech. Calvary stood and advanced. Blažek switched to Russian: ‘Step back or I kill him.’
‘Give it up, Blažek.’
Jakub had the Browning in his raised hand. Blažek snarled something at him and increased the pressure across his throat. With a hiss, Jakub dropped the gun on to the cobblestones.
Into the car Blažek yelled, ‘Get out, now.’
Behind the wheel, Nikola stared at him. Calvary took a step forward. Gaines cowered in the mouth of the alley, looking dazed.
Blažek lowered the pistol for a moment, pointing it straight down, and shot Jakub in the foot. Jakub howled, twisting in the bigger man’s grasp, his bloodied leg flailing. Once more Blažek pushed the muzzle agains the side of his head.