Jokerman

by Tim Stevens

  On the corner of a quiet-looking junction, beside some kind of walled park, Purkiss indicated and pulled on to the kerb.

  He climbed out of the Audi, not looking directly back but noticing the Lexus draw to a halt fifty yards down the street. Purkiss popped the bonnet, propped it open using the thin stick hinged to the body, and peered underneath.

  Beyond the bonnet, he saw a man approaching. He shifted position and noted a second man advancing from the other side.

  Purkiss drew out the dipstick, examined the end. He touched the radiator cap, winced.

  ‘Got a problem?’ said a man’s voice, in English.

  Purkiss glanced up. The man who’d approached from the left side of the car was Arabic, in his late twenties, sleekly dressed in a business suit. He was the one who’d spoken, in slightly accented American English. On the other side, the second man was similarly attired. He was European, British-looking. Older, in his late thirties, maybe, shaven-headed and brutal featured.

  ‘Something’s not right here,’ Purkiss muttered, as though exasperated.

  As he spoke, he saw the Arabic man’s hand move inside his jacket.

  Purkiss grabbed the bar that was propping the bonnet up and twisted it upwards and sideways, yanking it free from the notch in which it was resting and at the same time wrenching it off the hinge at the other end. It was no thicker than his thumb, but rigid. As he swung it lefthanded in a backhand slash the bonnet crashed shut, the sudden noise disorientating.

  The steel bar whipped across the Arabic man’s face and he yelled, spinning away and backwards, his hand emerging from his jacket, a handgun dropping onto the pavement. Purkiss swivelled and brought the bar whipping in a forehand motion across his body. The second man, whose gun was already in his hand, caught the blow across his wrist but managed to hold on to his gun. Purkiss moved in with an elbow strike at the man’s neck, connecting before he could step aside, the tip of his elbow driving into the mastoid process below the man’s ear. He wheezed and sagged, bouncing off the front bumper.

  The first man was already up again and coming back at Purkiss, palms open before him in a fighter’s pose. Purkiss aimed a kick at the man’s torso, which he sidestepped in the direction Purkiss had been expecting. Purkiss smashed a hammer fist down onto the back of the man’s neck and he crashed against the bonnet, managing somehow to keep his feet. Purkiss drove a foot into the backs of the man’s knees. This time he went down, banging his head again against the metalwork at the front of the Audi.

  Purkiss stooped and grabbed the older man, the European-looking one, under the arms, and hauled him to the side of the car. He opened the rear door and dumped the man’s dead weight onto the back seat.

  On the pavement behind the Audi, the Lexus’s tyres squealed, its lights leaping forwards.

  Purkiss thought: Damn. They left the driver in the car.

  He dived into the back seat on top of the man he’d slung there, in case the driver of the Lexus opened fire, and slammed the door shut behind him. Kneeling and crawling across the unconscious body, he clambered through the divide into the driver’s seat. Keeping his head low, he hit the ignition switch.

  In the wing mirror the headlights flamed like twin owl eyes, bearing down.

  Purkiss rammed the gear shift into reverse and trod down hard on the accelerator. Reversing was a counter-intuitive move by which Purkiss intended to wrong-foot the Lexus driver, and it seemed to work. The Audi rocketed backwards along the pavement just as the Lexus drew level. Purkiss saw the pale oval of the driver’s face turned towards him through the window an instant before it disappeared behind a curtain of shattering glass and plastic as the wing mirrors of the two cars collided and exploded. A screech of grinding metal accompanied the scraping of the Lexus’s bumper against the side panel of the Audi before Purkiss was clear and angling the Audi out onto the road, the Lexus’s brake lights flaring redly through his windscreen.

  On the back seat, the man moaned quietly.

  Purkiss jolted the wheel sideways and spun out into the middle lane, a limousine blaring furiously past him. He passed the Lexus even as he saw it vault off the pavement where it had partly mounted. Its lights dropped in behind him, alarmingly close, as it gave chase.

  On the dashboard, the satnav peeped and bleated, confused by the erratic moves he was making. He ignored it; it was no use to him now. He was aware he was driving blind, in an utterly unfamiliar city enclosed by desert. And he was aware that any moves in the direction of the Scipio Rand headquarters would draw him closer to the centre of the spider’s web, something he needed to avoid.

  The boulevard ahead furrowed into two parallel prongs with a tree-lined barrier between them. Purkiss chose the left-hand one, for no especial reason. The Lexus hung close behind, cutting across a mini-convoy of sports cars, and as if spurred on by the cavalcade of angry horns closed in on Purkiss.

  He needed to get away. There was no longer any need for deception, for maintaining the fiction that he hadn’t noticed the tag on his tail. Purkiss had one of their men captive - he’d chosen the European because he was older, and therefore more likely to be senior, and in a position to divulge more information - so his goal was to lose the Lexus, avoid whatever reinforcements might be on their way, and escape the bounds of the city.

  But the driver of the Lexus was tenacious.

  Purkiss considered a sudden braking manoeuvre, to force the Lexus to stop and thereby stall its engine, or even to ram into the rear of the Audi; but his instinct told him the driver was a seasoned professional and would be expecting that, and would simply slow down, thereby gaining precious distance. Instead, Purkiss glanced to his right, at the divide between the two sides of the road, lined as it was by manicured palm trees.

  He chose a gap between the trees that looked wider than most, and with a spin of the wheel rammed the Audi through it.

  The car howled up the kerb and across the grassy divide, its sides striking the trunks of adjacent trees with a twin thock sound and a crump of bending metal. But it made it through, and crashed across onto the road on the opposite side, traffic there screaming sideways to avoid collision. Momentarily disorientated, Purkiss looked around, and spotted the Lexus running parallel on the other side of the divide. The trees appeared closer together here, and Purkiss didn’t think the driver would have a chance to aim between them.

  Ahead, a set of traffic lights turned amber, then red. A heavy stream of vehicles began to cross perpendicularly.

  Purkiss weighed the odds. If he continued as he was, straight through the lights, and at his current speed - ninety-five kilometres per hour - he’d almost certainly hit at least one of the cars in the cross-traffic. On the other hand, if he stopped for the lights, the Lexus would in all likelihood reach the lights on its side of the road, which were currently green, hook round, and end up facing Purkiss, ready to ram him where he sat.

  He could have snatched up one of the dropped guns back there where he’d taken down the two men, he reflected. But a running gun battle through the night streets of Riyadh wasn’t his idea of a clean solution to the problem at hand.

  Somewhere, from off to the right and behind, Purkiss heard a police car’s call. The European-style twin note, not the rise and fall of the British or American siren.

  Purkiss hit the accelerator hard, grinding it so that his heel was pressing it down. The speedometer jerked upwards as the Audi gathered momentum, the red-lit junction ahead looming large. Over to the left, the Lexus was temporarily left behind.

  At the last moment before he reached the junction, Purkiss spun the wheel, executing a lurching J-turn that took the Audi in a finely judged arc past the impossibly large and gaping Os of a couple’s mouths through the windscreen of a four-wheel drive in the next lane and right across to the side of the road bound in the opposite direction. Once facing away from the junction, Purkiss rode the accelerator and clutch carefully, holding back from stalling the car, and once he was sure it was steady, headed back the way he’
d come, at a measured pace, neither fast nor suspiciously slow.

  The police cars, two of them, squealed past him towards the junction.

  Through the trees lining the central barrier on Purkiss’s right, he could see lights swaying chaotically, and he understood that the driver of the Lexus was making a U-turn himself. As the road was one-way only on that side of the barrier, it meant the driver was intending to head back the wrong way, in the face of oncoming traffic.

  Purkiss picked up speed. In his mirror, behind and to his right, he watched the Lexus veer crazily between panic-stricken cars as it wove back down the road. Directly behind Purkiss the police cars had screeched round the junction and were beginning to turn down the road on the other side of the barrier, in pursuit of the Lexus.

  The Lexus leaped the barrier, just as Purkiss had done with the Audi and at the same spot, its bumper gouging out a chunk of one of the palm trees’ boles. With a scrape of loosened metal the Lexus made it on to the road and straightened out so that it was behind Purkiss once more.

  On the other side of the barrier the police cars slowed, thrown by this sudden manoeuvre.

  The first gunshot erupted, the rear window of the Audi bursting inwards in a glittering cascade.

  Purkiss floored the accelerator, crouching low over the steering wheel, swinging it fractionally to present an unsteady target. He was fairly sure he’d seen just one man in the Lexus, which meant the driver himself was doing the shooting and was therefore hampered by his need to control the car. But the second shot came then, the blast alarmingly close behind, and this time the bullet struck the upholstery just above Purkiss’s head.

  Another junction was coming up rapidly, the lights turning amber. Purkiss saw a large refuse truck beginning to ease over the line to the left, in preparation for the green signal.

  He touched the brake to slow himself just enough to get the timing right, gritted his teeth as the Lexus kept on coming behind him, its headlights growing enormous and on full beam. Ahead of him the light was red, and he saw the truck lumber forwards.

  Purkiss ground the accelerator down, surging forward into the path of the truck, its bulk towering down in a blare of horn that sounded like a train’s warning. The Audi cleared the front of the truck by such a narrow margin Purkiss thought he could feel the car’s rear rocked by the slipstream. Then he was through and across on the other side.

  He slowed but kept driving, eyes locked on the mirror. Behind, the truck too had cleared the junction. On the other side of it the Lexus arced sideways as the driver tried to brake and control it at the same time. The momentum took the car through three hundred and sixty, then five hundred and forty degrees, across the middle of the junction, other vehicles skidding and screeching aside to avoid it. With a punch almost as loud as the earlier gunshots the Lexus smashed side-on into a car parked on the side of the street and rocked to a standstill.

  Purkiss sped on, watching the carnage recede in his mirror.

  His vision was suddenly blocked by the silhouette of a man’s head, rearing behind him like a final twist in a cheap horror film. Purkiss felt the hand clutch at his shoulder, saw the vague, dazed look in the man’s brutal features.

  Holding the wheel with his left hand, Purkiss lashed backwards with his right, his fist connecting with the man’s nose. The head jerked back and the man folded heavily onto the seat once more.

  Purkiss cruised, taking turn-offs on instinct, heading to what he sensed was the perimeter of the city, and the desert beyond.

  Forty-one

  The lizard watched, unblinking, an occasional lightning-fast flick of its tongue the only movement it betrayed. Its skin was the precise colour of the sand, so that it appeared transparent.

  Purkiss found the lizard helpful. Its utter refusal to rush about, to do anything except bask in the early morning heat, forced him to try to match it. To slow his thoughts, his movements, even his breathing.

  It was the only way to make the waiting bearable.

  The man sat on the sand in his boxer shorts. His wrists were secured behind his back with strips torn from his discarded shirt. They weren’t the strongest bonds, and given enough time on his own, he’d manage to work his hands free. But he wasn’t on his own, and if Purkiss thought he was making even a surreptitious effort to free himself, he’d simply pull the strips tighter.

  Purkiss sat in the driver’s seat of the Audi, his legs out the open door, his feet on the sand. The dunes, which had changed from orange through yellow to ivory as the sun had crept above the horizon and risen to its current position halfway up the sky, rolled and tumbled in all directions, as far as the eye could make out. The horizon was a shimmering blur.

  Apart from Purkiss, the only living creatures visible for miles around were the lizard on the slope of a dune to the left, and the man sitting directly in front of Purkiss several yards away.

  Purkiss had found an all-night petrol station soon after fleeing the scene of the Lexus’s crash. If a description of the Audi was going to be circulated by the police, then Purkiss wanted to make the purchases he needed before word got round. At the station he’d filled the tank, then bought two ten-litre cans inside the shop and filled those as well. He’d also bought three five-litre bottles of spring water. All the time, he’d kept an eye on the Audi outside, where the man lay unconscious on the back seat.

  Afterwards Purkiss had driven east, leaving the city’s environs and heading out into the desert. He’d kept to the main highway for fifty miles or so, then turned off down a single-lane road in a poor state of repair, following this through small settlements shrouded in darkness. All the while he kept an eye on the Audi’s fuel gauge.

  When there was a little over half a tank left, he turned down a still rougher road, barely a strip of gravel through the dunes. This he followed for a further ten miles. He checked the display on the satnav from time to time, to ensure it was still showing a reading. Purkiss didn’t know where he was going, but he wanted to be able to find his way back later.

  At last, with no sign of human habitation anywhere in the vicinity, he pulled in at the side of the road and got out, stretching his legs and neck, limbering up. He took a long pull from one of the water bottles, before opening the back door and hauling the man out.

  The man struggled vaguely while Purkiss was stripping him, and needed a gentle fist across the head to discourage him. Purkiss trussed his wrists, not bothering with his legs, and propped him in a sitting position on the ground.

  Then he sat down to wait.

  The sky began to lighten imperceptibly, as though the half-moon’s luminescence was seeping into it. At some point, the man on the sand came round. Purkiss saw the glint of his open eye, even though his head remained bowed.

  For ninety minutes, two hours, they sat like that. Purkiss in the open door of the car, taking occasional sips from the water bottle, and the man below him on the sand.

  Sunrise came at five thirty-three by Purkiss’s watch, a spectacular burnt-orange glow that spilled and bled over the lip of the horizon. With it came new heat, flooding across the expanse of the dunes.

  At six o’clock Purkiss said: ‘Hey.’

  It was the first word either man had said since they had arrived, hours earlier.

  The man’s head lifted a fraction. His back was to the dawn and his face was still in shadow.

  Purkiss reached into the back of the car and lifted out the remaining two water bottles. He held them up.

  ‘Fifteen litres in total,’ he said.

  Purkiss lowered them into the back of the car once more.

  ‘It’s likely to top forty degrees by early afternoon,’ he said. ‘Any idea how much water a man needs in forty-degree heat?’

  The man said nothing.

  ‘Well,’ Purkiss continued, ‘at rest, and in the shade – as I am – a man needs around ten litres of water per day. Do you understand what I’m getting at?’

  Still no reply.

  ‘I’m saying I’m prepared t
o wait here all day, if necessary,’ said Purkiss. ‘I’ll be quite comfortable. Plenty to drink.’

  Silence.

  Purkiss shrugged, took a draught of water, put the cap back on.

  The lizard made its appearance. Purkiss studied it for what seemed like an hour, and probably was.

  He shifted his gaze to the man. The sweat stood out in stark beads on his denuded scalp. His eyes were lowered, fixed on the sand in front of him.

  Purkiss thought he’d chosen the man well. He was holding out. If he’d been a minion, mere hired muscle, he’d have said something by now.

  It suggested he had information of value.

  The sun soared, losing its orange and red hues and taking on the brilliant white of burning phosphorus.

  Purkiss was no torturer. He’d used the threat of physical harm, even death, to loosen his enemies’ tongues on more than one occasion. He’d administered sharp physical shocks as incentives. But he’d never employed the sustained infliction of physical pain. He was averse to it, and he didn’t think he’d be particularly effective at it.

  He’d never before had occasion to use the elements – the sun’s heat – or physiological processes such as thirst, to gather intelligence.

  At eight o’clock he began the questions. Since he had a lot of time available, he started with the basics.

  ‘Who do you work for?’

  The man said nothing.

  ‘Who sent you to follow me?’

  Still nothing.

  ‘How did you know I was coming?’

  Nothing.

  The man’s scalp, his bare torso, his limbs, were slowly, steadily turning the colour of ochre. The sweat was stinging his eyes now, matting his chest hair.

  Purkiss was beginning to feel mildly uncomfortable himself, his left arm aching where it had been bitten, and he stood up to pace about, swinging his arms to create a faint breeze. He was reluctant to turn on the car engine to run the air conditioning because he didn’t want to waste fuel. Besides, there would be little point, given the broken rear window where the bullet had struck it.