Calvary darted sideways, to his left, launching himself into the traffic almost without casting a glance at it. The cacophony was shocking, a disharmony of yells and horns and tyres on rubber. A saloon grew in his left visual field and instinctively he knew it wasn’t going to brake in time so he jumped, not forwards but straight up. As if detached, he observed his feet clear the bumper and felt his legs crash down on the bonnet. Felt the cold smooth slope of the windscreen against his shoulder, the side of his face. Saw another face, chalky, mouth distorted into a terrified O, through the glass. Then the roll carried him off the windscreen to the side and he was back on the road and lurching on, the far pavement within sight.
All he’d done was clear the way, slow the traffic so that the two pursuers could follow him; and the new car, the BMW would be turning, heading back across the road. He tripped at the kerb, absorbed the fall through his hands, stumbled upright. He felt the nearness of the car as it pulled up directly behind him, almost catching his heel. Hands grabbed at him, at his arms and his trouser cuffs, and he shook them off, the movement dropping him to one knee again.
Then, cutting through the noise and the surging in his ears, a woman’s voice, low and urgent. First in Czech.
Then: ‘Get in. We’re on your side.’
He turned, then, instead of running as he should have, because it was so unexpected. Not just the fact that it was a woman, nor even the oddness of the comment. What was most jarring of all was that she’d spoken in English.
It wasn’t a BMW or Lexus or Mercedes, but a beaten-up camper van. Two faces peered at him through the driver’s window. The sliding door in the side of the van was drawn open. Calvary made a snap decision, dived in.
The door slammed shut under its own weight as a man’s voice from the front said, ‘Go,’ and the van took off.
*
‘Jesus, damn it.’
Bartos drove his fist into the dashboard, once, twice, popping the glove compartment open, not caring if he triggered the airbag. He reeled forward in his seat as the driver hit reverse. This time the front bumper clipped another car, glass from a shattered headlight arcing across the bonnet. Sirens were sounding somewhere not far away. Bartos didn’t think they belonged to ambulances.
The idiots, Janos and his crony, were trying to cross the road after the umbrella guy but were too scared of getting run over to do it properly. Bartos’s driver showed some guts, barrelling into the traffic, the rear of the BMW caroming off a sports car’s panelwork.
There was the guy, half kneeling by the kerb, pedestrians describing a wide arc around him as though he was radioactive.
Bartos had the gun out from under the dash, a stubby Ruger P95. Good American hardware, punchy and reliable. He held it low in a gloved hand in the footwell between his knees. Would ditch it out the window the moment the cops got near. His driver was braking already, drawing up to the guy on the pavement.
The van cut in so suddenly that for a second it looked inevitable that they’d tailend it. Bartos’s driver braked and banked hard to the right and the BMW’s front passenger wheel hit the kerb, jarring the car to a stop. The impact flung the gun from Bartos’s hand into the footwell. He ducked to retrieve it and when he lifted his head the van was leaping away, its door rolling shut. The guy was gone from the pavement.
The BMW’s engine had stalled. His driver’s mouth was set in a curve of fury as he fired it up again. He spun the wheel and the first few metres were half on the pavement, sending people scattering. The BMW cleared the three cars that had pulled into line behind the van and was once more behind it.
Bartos said, ‘Ram it if you have to.’
The van’s rear window was blacked out. The bodywork was covered with rust. Piece of shit hippymobile. Looked as old as the 1970s, too.
The driver muttered, ‘Brace yourself, boss,’ and put his foot down.
*
The rear seat was torn and bursting like a collapsed loaf. Calvary rocked and bounced off it as the van swerved.
He craned back. Through the rear window the BMW curved in off the pavement and was behind them once more. Two men, the driver and another. The passenger was big, wearing sunglasses.
Calvary said, ‘Got weapons?’
‘What?’ The woman. She was driving.
‘Guns.’
‘Not here. Back at base.’
Not much bloody use then, are they? he wanted to snarl. He cast about among the junk at his feet. Newspapers, soft drink cans, stinking polystyrene fast food containers.
The man up front – young, his English American accented – peered round. ‘What’re you doing?’
‘Looking for something to stop them. You’ll never outrun them, not in this wreck.’
‘They’ll leave us alone when they see the cops.’
‘You willing to wait for that?’ Calvary snapped his fingers. ‘Come on. Something heavy. Anything.’
The impact threw him forward against the back of the driver’s seat, and the woman let out a cry. The collision shunted the van forwards and slightly sideways. Calvary crawled back on to the seat and looked back. The BMW had dropped away, its front bumper at an angle, its bonnet creased. But it was coming on.
‘They’re going to do it again,’ he said.
The woman had kept the engine running and she swung them back onto the lane. All around cars were veering away or simply stopping, allowing the madness to pass by. The young man was scrabbling in the glovebox, spilling detritus: road maps, tickets of various kinds.
‘Got this,’ he said, handing it back.
It was a torch, a chunky one. Metal with a rubber grip. Calvary hefted it.
The BMW rammed them again, then, and this time there was a bang and the van sagged and listed to the right. Its end fishtailed and the woman pulled at the wheel frantically. The stink of burning rubber added to the assortment of smells inside.
‘I can’t hold it,’ she yelled.
‘You’ll have to.’ In the swinging view through the rear window Calvary saw the BMW drop back again and then resume its pursuit. It too had taken some damage, the bumper skittering away across the road as he watched, one of the headlights completely stove in.
Calvary turned so that one leg was above the back of the seat, braced his hands.
He waited until the BMW had closed the distance to perhaps five yards. Then he pistoned his leg out and felt his boot strike the glass of the window. It cracked and splintered as glass used to in car windows, back when he was a very small boy. Two more kicks and the shards sprayed out into the wind, the air rushing in.
He knelt on the back seat, hefted the torch once more.
Below, the big man in the passenger seat stuck an extended arm out his window. Aimed a handgun at the remaining rear tyre.
Calvary hurled the torch at the middle of the BMW’s windscreen.
The gun went off at the precise moment the torch struck. The noise from the blast was ripped away in the wind. The shot sang clear. A nebula of cracks burst across the windscreen. Beautifully symmetrical.
The arm with the gun was withdrawn and Calvary could hear the shouting. The BMW swerved and shook. They were on a single-lane road now and the BMW was perilously close to the kerb. The crazed windscreen looked opaque. Visibility through it must be zero.
Two things happened then. The van’s rear tyre, the one that had burst in the second ramming, peeled free and flapped away like a crippled scavenging bird, the bare rim of the wheel screeching against the tarmac. And the BMW’s mangled front slammed into the base of a lamppost, the rear wheels lifting off the ground before the car dropped, dead.