The Via dei Condotti is Rome’s most exclusive shopping street: straight, narrow and clogged with pedestrians at this hour. A pregnant mother in a puffer jacket shrieked at Jake as he jinked through. “Bastaaa!”
The yell distracted him and when he looked up there was a middle-aged woman wearing Jackie O sunglasses directly in his path, shopping bags fanned out over her left arm. Jake snatched at the brakes and the machine squealed back to stationary with centimetres to spare.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Designer shopping bags quivered in the rubber smoke.
“Scusate signora,” he tried.
But the woman wasn’t looking at him any more. She was looking beyond him. Jake turned to see Davis bearing down at speed, shoppers scattering before the stolen scooter. The journalist accelerated off. One by one the labels flashed past: Prada, Dior, Gucci, Bulgari. The motorbike was twice as powerful as Davis’s scooter, but in the crowds any advantage was lost. The Suzuki cornered heavily at slow speeds, threatening to tumble over. And the scooter was in its element, threading a path through the shoppers, sailing over the feet of an elderly Roma gypsy who was begging in the road. This was another advantage the assassin held: he just didn’t care who got hurt. They burst free of the crowds, like jet planes clearing thick stratocumulus, the odd straggler darting to safety. In Jake’s wing mirror he saw the vibrating image of Davis, levelling his pistol, horribly close now, preparing to fire. There was an alleyway coming up and Jake wrenched the handlebars to the right, sending the bike into a sideways skid that sucked the blood to one side of his body. He came to a halt facing up the passage – a manoeuvre only terror could produce. The alleyway was devoid of people; he hit sixty in two seconds. Davis had become a distant figure in Jake’s mirrors by the time he emerged into the passage behind him. The journalist pulled a left, to be rewarded with another empty alleyway. This was better. The cityscape was playing to his motorbike’s strengths now. And he was mastering the bike, learning to lean with it as he cornered. Davis appeared behind him again as he reached the end of the second alleyway; the gap had expanded to fifty metres. One more stretch like that and he would have lost him, he’d round the corner before Davis came into sight. There was another turning coming up. Jake took this one at speed.
He had the momentary impression of stalls rushing towards him.
The motorbike went straight into a postcard stand, which flipped up into the sky like a juggler’s club. Jake’s face was smarting, but somehow he kept the bike on its wheels, a confetti of cards fluttering down onto the cobbles in his wake. The street market sold books and art and Jake was forced to slow as he wound through the punters. Now Davis was in the alleyway too; instead of slowing down he sped up. The market became a blizzard of paper as the killer bulldozed his way along. An artist was painting a caricature of two Danish girls and Davis tore through the easel, shearing the canvas in half. Ahead of Jake stood the Church of San Carlo Corso, a pedestrian walkway leading past the chapel. He tore along the pavement; bounced down some steps; rounded a corner; ran straight into a film crew. A model dived out of Jake’s way, stumbling into a camera which crashed to the ground. A lighting rig came down after it; bulbs shattered in a blinding flash. Jake weaved around the lunge of a corpulent director and raced away once more. In his rear-view mirror he could make out the paint splattered across Davis’s face as his scooter emerged into the walkway. The director rushed into the path of the oncoming vehicle, hopping from one foot to the other in paroxysms of rage. Davis went right through him, like a prince dispatching riffraff at a medieval joust.
Jake emerged into a park dominated by a windowless cylinder of brickwork, three storeys high and two hundred feet wide. The monument was topped by a conical hillock, cypress trees dotted about the summit. Jake accelerated across the grass towards it.
Two men holding hands wandered into his path.
For the second time in that deranged chase he was forced to ditch the bike. He felt no pain as he slammed sideways into the earth, grazing his cheek and expelling the air from his lungs. He manhandled the Suzuki onto two wheels, swung his leg over the machine, fired it up again. A policeman appeared in front of Jake then, yelling and drawing his gun; behind him Davis’s moped buzzed into the park. The only option was to race down a shallow set of steps and into the ditch that circled the monument.
Davis pursued him, and for a mad few seconds they chased each other around the cylinder of masonry, doing laps of the ditch. But Jake’s tyres were better suited to the terrain and he pulled away, the brickwork sliding across his rear-view mirrors until the assassin could no longer be seen. Seconds later Davis appeared in front of him. The spy was hunched forward on his moped as the grass sprayed up from its rear wheel, unaware he was about to be lapped. Jake swerved out of the ditch before Davis could spot him. The steps acted as a ramp, launching the Suzuki through the air in front of the astonished policeman.
By the time Davis worked out what had happened, Jake was out of the park. Neither man ever knew that they had been doing laps of the Mausoleum of Augustus. Jake came out by the Tiber: here at last was a stretch of open road, and he put a kilometre behind him in thirty seconds. There was still no sign of Davis, and Jake punched the air. It had been easily the most exhilarating two minutes of his life.