During the agent’s death throes the protagonists had been powerless to look away. But when that red dot appeared on her forehead like a magical bhindi everything changed. Her accomplice reacted first, diving left as another bullet sliced through the night. There was no gunshot – merely a crack as the projectile broke the speed of sound right by them. Even in the chaos of the moment Jake realized the assassin must have a silencer. The bullet missed the plunging figure and a cobble erupted in a puff of shards. The stranger hit the ground in a roll, but he was instantly on his feet, running fast and low, jinking as bullets whizzed through space on either side of him. Three times the assailant fired his sniper rifle. Twice his aim was foiled by the turns. But the third bullet caught the gunman as he rounded the corner; Jake heard the crunch of lead into bone and sinew and the man’s shoulder turned inside out like a juiced grapefruit. Somehow he stayed on his feet until he disappeared around the shoulder of the building.
Rain lashed against Jake’s face as he ran. He gritted his teeth against the deluge, Florence’s grip bony on his wrist. Behind them Medcalf’s body was inert: black became sepia as her lifeblood was washed beneath the streets of Istanbul. A Mercedes M Class roared into view and slowed, sniffing at the corpse, a man with a gun in the passenger seat. To the journalist’s right a narrow set of steps wound its way between two nineteenth-century apartment blocks. He pulled Florence into the defile.
“The train station’s this way,” he said. “If we make it we can lose them in the crowds.”
They rushed through the alleyway. Cracked plaster and graffiti; empty cooking-oil drums; a white cat fleeing before their onrush with its ears flat. The four-by-four slowed, hovering at the top of the steps, and for a moment Jake and the front seat passenger looked into each other’s eyes: he was ginger-haired and square-jawed, with hulking shoulders. An understanding passed between the pair and then the car tore away, the sound of its engine growing quieter – only to grow in volume again. That was when Jake realized.
The lane doubles back below us.
The Mercedes rounded the hairpin bend to their left as they made it out of the defile. On the far side of the street another stairway beckoned. It was a race. Already the car was a blur – gaining speed, hunched forward on its wheels. If they didn’t reach the next alleyway they would be run down like dogs. And it was going to the wire.
He wasn’t going to get there. He wasn’t going to get there.
He wasn’t –
The car missed Jake by a hand’s width. Displaced air buffeted him and he stumbled down the steps. The engine note fell away as it raced for the next bend, looking to intercept them below for a second time. Jake clambered to his feet. They had thirty seconds to clear this alleyway and burst across the main road for the safety of the train station. But Florence hauled him back out of the alleyway and pointed up the hill. “That way,” she shouted.
The walls of the Topkapi Palace formed a black hulk against a sky that still flickered with lightning.
“It’ll be closed for sure,” Jake gasped.
Tyres screeched as the Mercedes reached the end of the alleyway they had been about to run down. A block away they heard car doors slam, a frantic three-point turn. Gunmen were coming up the stairway and the Mercedes would be back. There was no time to argue. Two pale arcs illuminated the street as the car rounded the corner. The driver gunned his engine, a bull stamping before the charge. Then the Mercedes shot from the starting blocks, hitting thirty, forty, fifty miles an hour. Jake’s feet crashed through the puddles and his shadow was thrown up in duplicate on the road, a pair of fleeing figures that converged as the vehicle neared. The hill was steep and his breath was ragged. He felt himself surrender.
He had never known love.
Energy flooded back into Jake’s bloodstream, his adrenal glands spurred into overdrive. Only this time the surge of hormones didn’t diminish him. His strides became powerful and he pulled ahead of Florence, dragging her along. Now their shadows flickered on the ramparts. He saw a gate; it stood open. It was man against machine, muscle and sinew versus metal and precision engineering. The hunger for survival beside the instinct to kill.
The engine note rose to a scream.