The Babylon Idol

Chapter 36

Ben had a start on their pursuers, but it was only a tenuous one and he intended to widen the gap as fast as he could. The worsening weather conditions weren’t going to make that easy. It was turning into a blizzard out there and the driving snow was splatting the windscreen faster than the wipers could bat it away. What little he could see of the road as he sped down the street was a blanket of virgin white, drifting up against the edges of the kerbs and mounding on the roofs of parked cars.

The street on which Ercan Kavur lived was long and narrow, lined with a clutter of dilapidated houses and apartment buildings. By the time Ben reached the end of the street, he was going over eighty kilometres an hour. Much too fast for the conditions but the glare of the Volvo’s headlights filling the cabin of the Audi pushed him on faster. The SUV should have been crippled by its punctured tyre but its driver was coming after them like a madman, wallowing and skidding all over the road in their wake. If Ben slowed down, it would be right on their tail.

Shots cracked out. The Volvo’s passengers were hanging out of its open windows, firing at the speeding Audi. Their aim was wild but they could get lucky. The Audi’s rear window blew out and a bullet punched through the back of the passenger seat. Now that they had Ercan Kavur, maybe they were no longer as concerned about keeping Anna Manzini alive as Ben had thought.

‘Stay down,’ he yelled at her over the roar of the engine. She was bundled up in the passenger footwell, getting thrown about with the motion of the car.

Ben had no idea where he was going, but as he reached the bottom of the street and there were suddenly no more buildings he could tell they must be on the extreme eastern edge of the city, on the cusp between the last suburban developments and the start of open countryside. The Audi’s wheels hammered over a road surface that was pocked and rough under the snow, hardly more than a track with snow-clumped scrubby grass and tangled bushes marking its edges. The Audi shot by a broken-down house with junked snow-covered cars in its front yard. Then a sharp right bend flashed up without warning, and Ben piled the car into it too fast and felt the wheels losing traction and going into a slide.

A dilapidated fence rushed towards them in the headlights. With his heart in his mouth he swerved to avoid it, felt the tyres bite again and accelerated harder up the track. Trees and bushes tore past. If it had been a clear night, he might have been able to see the sprawling craggy hills stretching away from the city dotted with scrub vegetation and snow-laden conifers, the lights of Ankara clustered and twinkling to his left in the distance, maybe a pylon or a mobile phone mast here and there on the high ground, some of the outlying pockets of residential areas where the spreading city had engulfed surrounding villages, and the mountains in the distance. But all he could see was a steady stream of snowflakes rushing at him like twin arcs of tracer fire in his headlights, and behind it the flat greyness of the blizzard blanketing the night.

The Volvo kept on coming. This guy just wouldn’t give up. In Florence, Ben had been the hunter. Now he was beginning to feel decidedly like the hunted. The shooters kept up their crackling fire, missing more than they were hitting, but still hitting plenty. Lots of damage. The Audi’s perforated bodywork was soaking up pounds of lead. Warning displays were burning like Christmas tree lights all over the instrument panel. Superior German engineering or not, there was only so much punishment the car could take.

The rear window on Ben’s side disintegrated in a shower of glass. Another bullet smacked through the headrest of his seat and he felt it part the hair above his ear before it bit a chunk out of the steering wheel an inch from his fingers and buried itself in the dashboard. That was about as close a call as he wanted. But the car’s core vitals were seemingly still untouched and it kept going, tearing along the rough road that was now so bumpy and potholed that the suspension was hammering against the stops and the revs were screaming up and down as the wheels constantly struggled for grip on the treacherous surface.

The Volvo was still right there behind them, its lights burning into the windowless back of the Audi, muzzle flash popping from its flanks. Its driver was demented, reckless, suicidal. He was pushing them all to the brink. As if survival instinct meant nothing to him. Only the chase, and the kill at the end of it.

This couldn’t go on. Ben knew he had to do something, or any second now this journey would come to a swift and sudden halt. From a bullet or a crash — either way it wouldn’t matter once they were both smashed to a pulp.

‘Hang on tight,’ he yelled. Anna had nothing to hang on to, but she wedged herself tighter into the passenger footwell as he sawed at the wheel and left the road, belting down an even narrower track that veered off to the right through a sudden gap in the bushes.

An instant later he knew it was a bad turning. The track disappeared and he found himself hammering over rough grassland covered in two feet of snow, lurching up and down hillocks, the bottom of the car grinding and scraping over hidden boulders and rocks. Behind them, the Volvo’s headlamps were bucking and bouncing like the lights of a ship on a stormy ocean. Ben gritted his teeth and pressed on through it for several hundred yards until the grinding and banging stopped and the Audi cleared a grassy knoll to come bouncing onto an actual road. It had eighteen inches of snow over it, but under the snow was smooth solid tarmac and now Ben could take advantage of the Audi’s speed and four intact tyres. He pressed his right foot down all the way. The engine note soared. The Volvo’s lights, which had reached the road in his wake, now began to recede in the mirror. The gunfire had stopped.

The road seemed to be leading back towards the edge of the city. Walls and railings and gateways flashed by, too fast to see anything except the speeding tunnel ahead, Ben wrestling the wheel to keep it between the hedges as he ripped a racing line through one twisting bend after another. The Volvo kept falling back, shrinking away in the rear-view mirror. Ben felt a smile spread over his face. Bye-bye, you bastards. They wouldn’t catch him now.

That was when a new warning light in the instrument cluster began flashing urgently at him to catch his attention, and he tore his eyes away momentarily from the road to glance at it. What he saw there clenched at his guts like an icy fist.

A bullet must have clipped the Audi’s fuel line or holed the tank. The gauge was almost at zero. The car was running on fumes and very soon it was going to run out altogether.