Tim Stevens - Jokerman

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.

Purkiss ground the accelerator down, surging forward into the path of the truck, its bulk towering down in a blare of horn that sounded like a train’s warning. The Audi cleared the front of the truck by such a narrow margin Purkiss thought he could feel the car’s rear rocked by the slipstream. Then he was through and across on the other side.

He slowed but kept driving, eyes locked on the mirror. Behind, the truck too had cleared the junction. On the other side of it the Lexus arced sideways as the driver tried to brake and control it at the same time. The momentum took the car through three hundred and sixty, then five hundred and forty degrees, across the middle of the junction, other vehicles skidding and screeching aside to avoid it. With a punch almost as loud as the earlier gunshots the Lexus smashed side-on into a car parked on the side of the street and rocked to a standstill.

Purkiss sped on, watching the carnage recede in his mirror.

His vision was suddenly blocked by the silhouette of a man’s head, rearing behind him like a final twist in a cheap horror film. Purkiss felt the hand clutch at his shoulder, saw the vague, dazed look in the man’s brutal features.

Holding the wheel with his left hand, Purkiss lashed backwards with his right, his fist connecting with the man’s nose. The head jerked back and the man folded heavily onto the seat once more.

Purkiss cruised, taking turn-offs on instinct, heading to what he sensed was the perimeter of the city, and the desert beyond.

The lizard watched, unblinking, an occasional lightning-fast flick of its tongue the only movement it betrayed. Its skin was the precise colour of the sand, so that it appeared transparent.

Purkiss found the lizard helpful. Its utter refusal to rush about, to do anything except bask in the early morning heat, forced him to try to match it. To slow his thoughts, his movements, even his breathing.

It was the only way to make the waiting bearable.

The man sat on the sand in his boxer shorts. His wrists were secured behind his back with strips torn from his discarded shirt. They weren’t the strongest bonds, and given enough time on his own, he’d manage to work his hands free. But he wasn’t on his own, and if Purkiss thought he was making even a surreptitious effort to free himself, he’d simply pull the strips tighter.

Purkiss sat in the driver’s seat of the Audi, his legs out the open door, his feet on the sand. The dunes, which had changed from orange through yellow to ivory as the sun had crept above the horizon and risen to its current position halfway up the sky, rolled and tumbled in all directions, as far as the eye could make out. The horizon was a shimmering blur.

Apart from Purkiss, the only living creatures visible for miles around were the lizard on the slope of a dune to the left, and the man sitting directly in front of Purkiss several yards away.

Purkiss had found an all-night petrol station soon after fleeing the scene of the Lexus’s crash. If a description of the Audi was going to be circulated by the police, then Purkiss wanted to make the purchases he needed before word got round. At the station he’d filled the tank, then bought two ten-litre cans inside the shop and filled those as well. He’d also bought three five-litre bottles of spring water. All the time, he’d kept an eye on the Audi outside, where the man lay unconscious on the back seat.

Afterwards Purkiss had driven east, leaving the city’s environs and heading out into the desert. He’d kept to the main highway for fifty miles or so, then turned off down a single-lane road in a poor state of repair, following this through small settlements shrouded in darkness. All the while he kept an eye on the Audi’s fuel gauge.

When there was a little over half a tank left, he turned down a still rougher road, barely a strip of gravel through the dunes. This he followed for a further ten miles. He checked the display on the satnav from time to time, to ensure it was still showing a reading. Purkiss didn’t know where he was going, but he wanted to be able to find his way back later.