‘Return fire at your discretion. We’re coming up on your six now,’ Birendra said.
She heard a siren, and searched fruitlessly for any sign of the police until she realised the warbling klaxon was coming from somewhere just outside. The driver had fired up his own siren. Seeing her confusion, Shah smiled. He appeared serene in the midst of all this chaos.
‘Do you forget, Ms Julianne, that I am an FPDA-approved security contractor. Licensed and bonded to the development authority, and subcontracted to the city to maintain order during emergencies. I think there has been enough gunfire and bloodshed this morning to constitute an emergency. And two vehicles are currently fleeing the scene of that gunfire at high speed, endangering law-abiding motorists and pedestrians and threatening the dignity and repose of the city at large. It is our duty to pursue them. And so we shall. You are still armed?’
She shifted in her seat and retrieved the SIG Sauer. Her neck muscles and most of those in her upper back seized up as she did so; she ignored the discomfort. The weapon felt heavy in her hand. It felt like something that could open up all sorts of possibilities.
‘How is Granger?’ she asked.
Shah turned off his smile while he answered. ‘Mr Cooley acquitted himself admirably,’ he said. ‘He detected the ambush as the attacking vehicle sped through the red light and he accelerated his own vehicle early enough to avoid being rammed amidships, so to speak. The impact was still significant, but it spun you around, rather than smashing and flipping your vehicle into the deep ditch by the side of the road, as was intended, I believe.’
The driver, a man Jules did not recognise, whipped the steering wheel back and forth as he weaved through the traffic at more than a hundred klicks an hour. They passed a pair of police cruisers going in the opposite direction. The cops showed no signs of providing back-up today.
‘But is Granger okay, Shah? He looked terrible after the crash.’
The old Gurkha nodded. ‘He has sustained injury. But he shall live and probably recuperate. Mr Cooley is one of my best men. Even shocked and disoriented by the collision, he managed to hold off your attackers while our support vehicles closed in. He killed one of them, in fact, as the man was leaning into the car to shoot you both.’ This seemed to amuse Shah greatly, and his face lit up again, smiling with Taoist contentment.
‘Oh … I guess I didn’t notice,’ said Jules, not really believing the words as they came out of her mouth.
Had Granger blown some bugger’s head off right next to her? She shook her own head in wonder, aggravating the strained muscles in her neck again.
‘How many of them are there?’ she asked.
Birendra drew out his seatbelt so he could turn around to answer. ‘There were about thirty of them, Miss Julianne. Many more than we expected.’
‘I am certain we will find that Mr Cesky’s agents have secured support from one of my rivals,’ said Shah. ‘I recognised two of the men back at the intersection. Freelancers. And not in the way Mr Pappas is a freelancer. These men are scavengers. Not skilled or reliable enough to secure permanent employment with any reputable contractor, they sell their services on the grey market, doing work like this, one or two steps away from the agency holding the original commission.’
The driver swung hard left, taking them off the main drag past the airport and away from the thickening chaos of the traffic banked up there. Jules was not familiar enough with the city’s layout to know where they were headed, but down in her gut she suspected the destination was New Town. Shah leaned forward to mutter instructions to the driver, who sped up to the point where every course correction, every small turn of the wheel to whip them around a slower car, threw the Volvo’s occupants back and forth across the cabin.
Ahead of them, Julianne could just make out the rear of two late-model cars. Streamlined and low to the ground, they wove through the stop-start traffic like barracudas streaking through schools of slow-moving guppies. Flickers of flash suppressors could be seen as tracer rounds zipped towards them. One of the shooters emptied a clip into a passing civilian vehicle, causing it to slam into oncoming traffic.
‘Evasive,’ the radio crackled.
‘Oh shit,’ said Jules.
The driver cranked the wheel, taking their car across two lanes. He ran up the shoulder until he was clear of the collision site, before whipping back into the proper lane. The scenery outside changed in brief strobes of blurred imagery. The Volvo screamed through the wide, dusty streets of a factory and warehouse district before bursting out onto a wide four-lane arterial road that swept alongside the upper reaches of the harbour.
‘Speed increasing,’ the radio said. The pursuit vehicles were zeroing in on the fleeing hit squad. ’Closing. Fifty metres. I’m going to try and ram him …’
A black pepper cloud suddenly enveloped one of Shah’s Landcruisers, shredding the passenger compartment into disassociated bits of glass, flesh, metal and bone. Bursts of flame brewed up around the undercarriage as the vehicle turned over on its side. The other pursuit SUV whipped around their fallen comrades before ramming the offending vehicle off the road.
‘Stay with that one,’ Birendra ordered. ‘We’ll take the last one.’
‘Grenade launcher,’ Shah remarked, as they passed the burning ruins of his men. ‘This is most unfortunate.’
There, up ahead on the left, Jules could see the marina where the Rhino had moored his boat. Police tape still fluttered across the entrance near the manager’s hut. She then caught a sunburst flaring off the tinted rear windows of the car in front as it screeched through a hard right turn and disappeared into the diabolical labyrinth of the city’s red-light district.
‘Oh God, we’ll lose them,’ she said, despair in her voice.
‘They cannot move at speed now,’ Shah assured her.
Yeah Shah, but neither can we, she thought to herself.
Within moments they had reached the same corner where their quarry had just entered New Town. The driver yanked the wheel once more and took them into the congested chaos, blowing through a pile of garbage as he did so. The stench of rotten eggs, meat and vegetable matter saturated the inside of the Volvo. Jules resisted the urge to gag.
She craned around awkwardly to see how much back-up Shah had. She could see one other SUV, an older Toyota of some sort. Red and blue flashers turned inside its grille work, adding their own urgency to the bubble the driver had placed on the roof. She might have shaken her head had it not been so painful to move. The longer she was in this city, the less she understood it.
‘Where are the police?’ she asked.
‘They will be back at the crash site,’ said Shah. ‘But Northern Territory and city law prohibits them from exceeding the speed limit by more than twenty kilometres an hour, even while in hot pursuit. There have been incidents. Pedestrian fatalities.’
As if to underscore that point, they passed a trio of bodies, lying face down in the bone-dry dust, their blood spilling into the earth. Crowds had gathered, but kept their distance, as if the corpses might somehow transmit the violence of their ending through simple proximity.
‘But we -‘
‘We do not answer to the city or Territory,’ he explained patiently. ‘We are licensed by the development authority.’
Birendra spoke up again from the front seat, where he was loading shells into a military-style shotgun. ‘They would not follow us into New Town anyway, Miss Julianne.’
‘Turning right,’ their driver said, giving another brutal hoist on the steering wheel. The Volvo scraped past a pair of pedestrians, the vortex of the vehicle’s passing yanking their hats off into the rubbish.