Tim Stevens - Jokerman

One car, then. Not so much a welcoming committee as a scout party, there to make sure he did indeed head to the Scipio Rand headquarters rather than going off and doing his own thing.

It left Purkiss with a dilemma. He was now in no doubt that if he ventured near the Scipio Rand building he’d be walking into a trap, one from which he was unlikely to escape given all the advantages the enemy had, knowledge of the terrain being one of them. On the other hand, if he very obviously avoided heading there, the person or people in the Lexus would become suspicious, and might surmise that he was on to them. They might call for backup, which would further tip the odds against Purkiss.

He needed to isolate the Lexus, somehow. Draw it away and create a scenario in which he could interrogate its occupants.

The commercial centre of the city was beckoning brightly ahead, most of the lighting from the windows and awnings of shops that wouldn’t open for many hours yet. Light traffic continued to pass Purkiss, a scattering of pedestrians, exclusively male, here and there on the pavements: workmen, mostly, maintaining the city’s infrastructure. Once, a police patrol car eased past him in the opposite direction, two faces turning to watch him as they passed.

On the corner of a quiet-looking junction, beside some kind of walled park, Purkiss indicated and pulled on to the kerb.

He climbed out of the Audi, not looking directly back but noticing the Lexus draw to a halt fifty yards down the street. Purkiss popped the bonnet, propped it open using the thin stick hinged to the body, and peered underneath.

Beyond the bonnet, he saw a man approaching. He shifted position and noted a second man advancing from the other side.

Purkiss drew out the dipstick, examined the end. He touched the radiator cap, winced.

‘Got a problem?’ said a man’s voice, in English.

Purkiss glanced up. The man who’d approached from the left side of the car was Arabic, in his late twenties, sleekly dressed in a business suit. He was the one who’d spoken, in slightly accented American English. On the other side, the second man was similarly attired. He was European, British-looking. Older, in his late thirties, maybe, shaven-headed and brutal featured.

‘Something’s not right here,’ Purkiss muttered, as though exasperated.

As he spoke, he saw the Arabic man’s hand move inside his jacket.

Purkiss grabbed the bar that was propping the bonnet up and twisted it upwards and sideways, yanking it free from the notch in which it was resting and at the same time wrenching it off the hinge at the other end. It was no thicker than his thumb, but rigid. As he swung it lefthanded in a backhand slash the bonnet crashed shut, the sudden noise disorientating.

The steel bar whipped across the Arabic man’s face and he yelled, spinning away and backwards, his hand emerging from his jacket, a handgun dropping onto the pavement. Purkiss swivelled and brought the bar whipping in a forehand motion across his body. The second man, whose gun was already in his hand, caught the blow across his wrist but managed to hold on to his gun. Purkiss moved in with an elbow strike at the man’s neck, connecting before he could step aside, the tip of his elbow driving into the mastoid process below the man’s ear. He wheezed and sagged, bouncing off the front bumper.

The first man was already up again and coming back at Purkiss, palms open before him in a fighter’s pose. Purkiss aimed a kick at the man’s torso, which he sidestepped in the direction Purkiss had been expecting. Purkiss smashed a hammer fist down onto the back of the man’s neck and he crashed against the bonnet, managing somehow to keep his feet. Purkiss drove a foot into the backs of the man’s knees. This time he went down, banging his head again against the metalwork at the front of the Audi.

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.