by Tim Stevens
‘Mr Purkiss.’ Abby’s voice cut across his thoughts. ‘She’s stopped moving and there’s something coming through on the audio.’
He pulled over when he spotted a clear stretch of pavement and kept the engine running and listened. The scrabble of material against the bug again and a loud noise – another slammed car door – and then a man’s voice in Russian.
‘They hurt you?’
‘No.’ Even the suboptimal sound failed to disguise the fear in her voice. ‘They knew about Ivan.’
‘Your son is in no danger.’ The voice was raspy, middle-aged. ‘You told them nothing?’
There was a prolonged blast of static that made Purkiss wince, then a muffled rumbling. When it continued beyond ten seconds Purkiss said, ‘Damn.’
Abby: ‘It fell off.’
‘Must have. It sounded like she got in a car. Her seatbelt probably pulled the bug off.’
‘But it’s still in the car. That sound is the rumble of the engine. And the signal’s moving again, more quickly now.’
‘Okay. Guide me again. And if there’s a change in the audio, voices or anything, patch it through to me.’
It was more difficult this time because he was chasing an unseen target moving at a car’s speed, with only Abby’s directions to give him a sense of where to go. Always the other vehicle managed to stay several blocks ahead, so that he couldn’t begin to work out which car it was.
‘Hang on, they’re stopping,’ said Abby. ‘Not a traffic light, I don’t think. Halfway along the road.’
He put his foot down a touch and overshot before she could correct him and went round the block and she murmured, ‘You should be nearing them just about now,’ and then he saw her, Lyuba, standing talking through the open rear window of a black car by the kerb, a Lexus by the look of it. She straightened, nodded and walked away. The car pulled off.
‘Got a visual,’ he said to Abby.
‘Are you going to follow her, or the car?’
‘The car.’
Now it was easier because he could hang back a little, confident that if he lost visual contact Abby was still tracking the car. He couldn’t be sure but it seemed there were two people in the Lexus: the driver, and the man in the back to whom Lyuba had been talking after she’d got out. The Lexus moved smoothly through the streets, heading north through the bustle of early afternoon commerce. Purkiss felt the first salt tang of sea air in his mouth.
The office blocks and arcades thinned out and finally yielded entirely. They were heading along a coast road, the sea shifting and glittering on the left. Ahead the Lexus was slowing and pulling on to the pavement. There wasn’t any apparent reason for Purkiss to stop, so he drove past and turned off into a small parking lot on the edge of the water where people were unloading picnicking materials. He parked so that he could watch the Lexus in the rear-view mirror.
Another vehicle had been waiting where the Lexus had pulled in, a large four by four which looked bulkier than normal as though it had been customised, possibly with armour plating. A man emerged from the rear of the Lexus, large and blocky in build, hair in a military crop, perhaps fifty years old and dressed in a business suit. The distance was too great for any decent pictures but Purkiss lifted his phone to the window. He did what he could with the zoom function and took as many photographs as he could of the man before he climbed into the passenger side of the four by four, which began to turn on to the road back in the direction the Lexus had come. The Lexus pulled off in the opposite direction.
Purkiss considered the options for a second. The man in the four by four appeared to be in charge and was potentially a more valuable target, but the tracking device was in the Lexus. Plus, there was only the driver in the Lexus, which meant better odds in the event of a confrontation. He waited until the black car had passed, then reversed back on to the road and set off after it.
Ahead, inland to the right and set back from the road, Purkiss saw a stone spire which put him in mind of Cleopatra’s Needle on the north bank of the Thames in London. The Soviet War Memorial. He knew this because it had featured heavily on the news in recent months, was the site at which the meeting was to take place between the Russian and Estonian leaders. As he passed it he saw the activity around the cordoned-off base. A couple of news crews were shooting footage and a chanting crowd brandishing placards was being kept back from the cordon by a thin film of uniformed police.
The Lexus turned off the coast road as the city began to coalesce into a discrete whole in the mirrors. Buildings started to become sparse and the aroma of pine began to supplant the sea air. Traffic was thinner here, too. Purkiss touched the brake to pull back.
‘Abby?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re obviously heading away from the city. What’s ahead?’
‘Google Earth says forest, and plenty of it.’
‘Okay. I’m going to keep well back. I might lose visual contact. Let me know if he turns off or does anything odd.’
The road began to wind and climb upwards. Pine and spruce soared on either side, blanketing the road in shadow, and the temperature was dropping noticeably. Purkiss had lost sight of the Lexus fifteen minutes earlier but took Abby’s silence to mean that he was still keeping pace. They had taken a turnoff some way back when he’d still had the Lexus in view and were now on a single-lane road. Cars passed in the opposite direction at the rate of perhaps one every three minutes.
Abby’s voice startled him. ‘He’s stopped.’
‘All right.’ Purkiss pulled off the road on to a pine-carpeted bank.
‘Hang on. The sound’s different. Listen.’
She patched through the audio feed. There was no longer the rumble of the engine. Instead there was silence, punctured by an intermittent undefinable scratching.
‘He’s killed the engine.’ Purkiss put the car into gear. ‘I’m going to drive past.’
‘Careful, boss.’
The road ahead curved upwards and to the left. On the right the forest sloped downwards, the drop becoming sheerer as the road rose. Purkiss glanced out and down and felt a twinge of vertigo, the darkness of the depths accentuating the drop. Unbidden, the opening chords of Sibelius’s Tapiola echoed in his head. Wrong side of the Gulf, he thought.
The curve was blind and he tensed, prepared to dodge a car speeding down towards him. None came. He kept up a steady speed, sensible but not excessively slow, to avoid giving the impression that he was on the lookout for something. After fifty feet or so the road curved again, this time to the right.
‘Boss. You’re right on top of him.’
The trees were packed tightly enough that there was no room for the Lexus to be hidden among them.
‘You’ve passed him.’
Purkiss understood. The man had found the bug and ditched it.
The realisation caused him to slow a fraction. As he did so he caught sight of the nose of the Lexus around the curve.
The roar of the car’s engine sounded off the forest wall and the shriek of tyres echoed like the cry of some unnatural woodland beast. The Lexus was bearing down on him from ahead, the driver’s arm extended through the open window, his fist gripping something black and metallic.
Fifteen
Years earlier Purkiss had taken an amateur interest in the concept of time and the psychology of time perception. He’d concluded that it was all to do with attention. The more one concentrated on an experience, immersed oneself in it to the exclusion of all distractions, the more slowly time appeared to pass.
There were few experiences more likely to hold the attention than being fired upon by a man advancing in a car at high speed on the edge of a drop.
Purkiss’s first instinct was to brake. Instead he gunned the engine. The Toyota jolted forward and at the same time he dipped his head. The first of the shots smashed a star into the windscreen and the bullet hit the headrest of the seat. His front nearside bumper caromed off the rear door of the Lexus on the driver’s side, but the m
an kept control of the Lexus so that it didn’t spin. Purkiss was past him and rounding the curve, but already the man was turning using the handbrake. He had the benefit of the more powerful engine and already he was gaining.
With the heel of his hand Purkiss did what he could to clear a hole in the sagging mesh of the windscreen. The cold air hit him hard and clear. In the side mirror he saw the man taking aim again. At the last minute Purkiss swerved into the oncoming lane, just for an instant to put the man off, and it worked because the bullet sang wild but here was an oncoming car. Purkiss jerked the wheel back just in time as the car blared past. The bumper of the Lexus grazed the back of the Toyota and then jarred it harder. Purkiss thought about slamming on the brakes, which would certainly stop the Lexus but would also send the Toyota over the side.
Another curve to the left, and when Purkiss saw the other lane was clear and the Lexus was a few feet back, readying itself for another shunt, he hauled on the handbrake and began the turn just as the Lexus surged forward again. Its bumper got the rear of the Toyota on the left in a spray of shattering rear- and brake lights. The impact helped Purkiss complete the spin through a little under one hundred and eighty degrees. He was facing in the opposite direction but the man was fast and as Purkiss passed him, his face close, he raised the gun and fired. Purkiss jerked his head back in time to feel the slipstream flick the pinna of his ear before the shot smashed out the passenger window.
The wrecked windscreen blasted his face with a funnel of cold air and petrol fumes and burnt rubber. He sucked it in, the smell of life in all its rawness. In the mirror the Lexus had turned again, of course, and was after him once more. A remote place in his consciousness registered the earpiece which had dropped out on to the seat, Abby’s tiny voice piping from it.
He put his foot down, the speedometer barely visible under the coat of glass fragments. Eighty, eighty-five kilometres per hour. Instinct told him the next shot was coming and he ducked, hearing the ricochet sing off the tarmac. He understood the man was doing what Purkiss would have done from the start. He was aiming for the tyres.
Purkiss began to swerve like a slaloming skier, doing his best to stay within the lane because another car had shot past up the slope, the driver’s face a confused smudge. Another shot flicked up from the road surface and this time clanged off the chassis somewhere. Purkiss checked the petrol gauge and the rest of the dials. Nothing crucial had been hit yet. He hadn’t been counting the shots, but in any case the man might have another magazine, so it made no difference.
He realised suddenly that he needed to take the opposite tack to the one he’d tried previously. Instead of trying to outrun the Lexus, something he was never going to manage, he had to keep it close enough behind him that the man would struggle to hit his tyres. He jabbed the brake, too hard, don’t stall the damned thing, and the Lexus bore down, but the man saw what he was doing and slowed himself. He hung well back so that the space between them grew, and in the mirror came the flash of the muzzle. With a sound that to Purkiss could have been a Zeppelin springing a leak the rear passenger tyre exploded. The Toyota slewed round so that Purkiss was presented side-on to the man. He braced himself for the next shot. It didn’t come, because the Lexus was advancing again at speed. The man was going to ram him.
Purkiss spun the wheel into the direction in which the car was swerving, aware that he was straddling the road and an oncoming car wouldn’t have time to brake. The front of the Toyota was close to the bank beyond which was the drop down into the forest, the darkness below looming like a living presence. The Lexus rammed him just behind the driver’s door, the side of the Toyota buckling and compressing him and the impact shunting the Toyota so that its passenger side hung poised over the edge. The man’s face was close again, separated from Purkiss’s by the narrow gap between the opposite-facing cars. Teeth clenched, eyes narrowed, he raised the gun. Purkiss ducked but the shot didn’t come. Instead he felt the Toyota rock as the Lexus disengaged. He knew the man was reversing, getting ready to ram him a final time and send him over the edge.
One chance.
He felt the revving of the Lexus’s engine transmitted through the road and the chassis of his own car. When he judged it was almost on him he grabbed one of the phones from the passenger seat and straightened, took a split second to aim, and hurled it through the open window at the driver, a good solid shot that caught the man in one eye. Because the missile was coming in at an angle from the left the man flung up his left hand, which meant that his right hand dragged downward on the steering wheel, causing the Lexus to veer to the right. At the same time Purkiss floored the accelerator of the Toyota to try and pull it out of the path of the oncoming Lexus. With two wheels over the edge of the drop, all the Toyota could manage was a couple of inches forward. The Lexus slammed into the Toyota behind the rear door, and in a grinding of chassis against rock the back of the car heaved over the edge.
Purkiss felt the jar of the seat against his back as he was flung against it and the world tilted crazily, the sky far above the treetops suddenly and incongruously in front of him through the mangled windscreen. The weight of the car bore down behind him. Helplessly he began to be dragged down with it. He turned his head to the left and saw the front of the Lexus tipping downwards, the chassis pivoting on a point just behind its centre. The phone he’d thrown had put the driver off his aim so that he’d rammed the Toyota just obliquely enough not to lose his own momentum, and he’d been unable to stop the Lexus’s front wheels from crossing the edge of the drop. Purkiss groped with his left hand for the release button of the seatbelt and found it crushed by the impact, the clasp jamming the belt in place. Reaching across with his other hand he picked up the other phone from where it lay against the back of the passenger seat. The car continued its relentless grind backwards, and he transferred the phone across to his left hand and began to bash at the seatbelt clasp, feeling plastic splinter. Across from him through the open window of the driver’s door he saw the face of the driver, florid and contorted, as he leaned forward against his own seatbelt. As Purkiss watched the man freed himself, the seatbelt rolling up with a snap. The man toppled forwards against his windscreen, and the movement was enough to push the Lexus the final few inches. With a groan it passed the point of no return and plunged out of sight, the man’s scream drowned in the noise of smashing wood and rending foliage.
Something gave in the seatbelt clasp. With both hands Purkiss pulled the belt free and disentangled himself and jackknifed his body so that he was reaching up through the remains of the windscreen. He fell back, and the impact of doing so jarred the car so that it slipped down. He twisted his head round and, through the gap where the rear window had been, he saw that the back of the car was propped against the base of a pine trunk which protruded at an angle from the slope. It was a youngish tree, and even as he watched it was shifting, its movement accompanied by the graveyard sound of roots tearing through soil.
He faced the front again, drew breath, and expelled it as he jackknifed again, abdominal muscles on fire. This time he caught hold of an exposed root. He got his other hand round it and hauled, but it was giving way and so was the trunk behind and beneath the car. He got his feet against the back of the seat and pistoned his legs just as the loop of root broke free at one end and the car dropped away from him. For a moment he was hanging in mid-air from one end of the root, before he got a purchase on the slope with his other hand and pulled himself up. Behind him was the awful screech of metal against rock and ancient wood and a final plummeting grind punctuated by the smashing of glass.
Then, nothing but the hammering in his head and his chest.
Sixteen
He hung clutching at the slope for what seemed like an hour but was probably a minute. Then he clambered up over the edge. Crouching on the bank, he turned to look down the drop.
Far below, the only sign of it a hint of its buckled white door panels among the foliage, was the Toyota. It had turned sideways during its d
escent and had left a wake of smashed branches and fragments of glass. Closer by, ten feet below Purkiss, the Lexus was wedged nose-down in a fork created by the trunks of two huge trees. One of its rear wheels was twisted sideways, almost wrenched off the axle. From its engine came an occasional desultory tick. The smell of petrol swamped the pine scent.
Purkiss had had the presence of mind to turn off the ignition after the back of the Toyota had gone over the edge. He didn’t know if the other man had done the same with the Lexus. Of the man there was no sign, and Purkiss wondered whether he’d fallen through the windscreen and dropped down into the forest, or whether he was still inside the car.
A car was approaching along the road. Purkiss debated for a moment but decided against flagging it down and crawled swiftly over the edge and squatted out of sight on the slope until it had passed. He moved, crabwalking, looking for the least treacherous way down, and began to make his way towards the Lexus, sliding on his bottom and gripping the roots and rock protrusions for support. Just above the car the slope dropped away, sheer. Vertigo made him reel and press himself against the slope. When it felt safe to look down again he peered straight through the rear window space of the car. He could see the dark shape of the man inside, folded against the windscreen, which hadn’t entirely given way. There was no movement.
Purkiss turned onto his belly and sidled down the slope using his elbows until he felt his feet touch one of the trunks between which the car was jammed. He tested the strength of the trunk by stamping a little – it seemed solid enough – and reached out and took hold of the rear bumper of the car. He gave it an experimental shake. The metal protested against the trunk, and he felt the minutest shift. So it wasn’t securely wedged; any significant weight would drive it through the other side and send it plummeting.
He knelt on the trunk and leaned over as far as he dared. Again dizziness took hold of him. The front end of the car hung below the trunks over a sheer drop of perhaps a hundred feet, a great cleft in the earth coated with trees. Secure though the trunk was, his movement on it produced further creaking from the car.