Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (60 page)

The sedan’s bright headlights reflected explosively from the metallic side of the Mercedes squirming past it, accelerating. The Mercedes was too solidly built for competitive racing, but the little engine had enough torque to shoot them through a gap which neither Kelly nor the Audi’s driver thought was present.

“Not yours?” Kelly shouted over the exhaust note reflected from the sides of parked cars. Lights scissored across the sky behind them as both sedans maneuvered in the parking lot.

“I don’t know whose,” Gisela shouted back, shifting into third up the short ramp to Mete Street. The headlights of a car parked illegally on the street flashed on. “What are you
doing
?” Her gearshift hand batted down at Kelly.

The car on Mete Street was a third Audi.

“You drive,” said Kelly as he worked the gun from the woman’s coat pocket. “I’ll worry about the rest.”

Gisela’s hand touched the control standard on the left side of the steering column, throwing her headlights on and bright. That might have spooked the passenger in the third sedan into putting his burst of shots into the dirt and driveway curb instead of through the Mercedes’ windshield. Alternatively, he might have been trying merely to disable the coupe by shooting out the left-side tires. Either way, the muzzle blasts and the ringing crash of a ricochet into one of the Mercedes’ rocker panels confirmed a decision Kelly had more or less made already. The guy who shot at them had just clarified the rules.

Gisela had flinched as the bullet hit the car, but her hands were rock-steady now at the ten and two o’clock positions on the steering wheel. She crossed them right and straightened expertly to give the coupe room at the head of the drive if this Audi too attempted to drive across their path. The Mercedes lurched, brushing but not rebounding from the right-hand radius of the curb cut. Then they were in Mete Street, using the full considerable width of the pavement to hang a left turn while continuing to accelerate. There was more firing distantly behind them, but nothing passed close to the 280 SL.

The dancer’s two attendants had carried pocket pistols, .32s by the sound of them: the highly-portable European answer to situations in which Americans tended to carry small revolvers. Both choices were guns you carried when you wanted to be armed but didn’t expect to have to use your hardware.

The pistol Kelly hauled from Gisela’s coat was something else again: a Walther P-38, old enough to have a steel frame and grooved wooden grips. It fired full-house 9mm Parabellum ammunition through a five-inch barrel, which, with the projecting hammer, safety, and front sight, made the weapon as bad a choice for pocket carry as could be imagined.

On the plus side, Kelly couldn’t have asked for a better weapon to
use
if he had to be limited to pistols.

Behind them, the lights of a car bounced wildly as it plunged into Mete Street in pursuit. The Audi which had shot at them waited for its companion to clear the driveway before pulling a U-turn to follow. Kelly couldn’t be sure through the rear window whether or not the third sedan was following also; but two, crewed by men with submachine guns, were certainly enough.

“Goddam
,” he muttered, then raised his voice enough to add, “See if you can lose ‘em. They may not want us dead.”

Men with submachineguns, and possibly a woman.

The Taksim District with its broad streets and low-density development—public buildings and luxury hotels landscaped like no other area of the city—was as good a place to drive fast as anywhere in Istanbul. That made it the least suitable place for them to lose pursuers in cars which, for all the coupe’s sporting appearance, had the legs of them. Metallurgy and the technology of internal combustion engines had not stood still during the past fifteen years.

Gisela sent the Mercedes snarling past the Sport Palace—the enclosed soccer stadium—without shifting up from third gear, and entered what was supposed to be a controlled intersection at speed. As it chanced, the light was in their favor—but a ‘56 Chevy, for
Chrissake
, being driven with almost as much abandon as the coupe, was running it from Kadergalar, the merging street.

Kelly’s feet were planted against the firewall and his shoulders compressed the springs of the seatback, anchoring him despite the violent accelerations of the car. Gisela yanked her wheel left, trusting the gap in oncoming traffic, as the driver of the Chevy slammed on brakes which grabbed on the right front and started his car spinning just before the moment of contact.

The result was something closer to elastic rebound than auto bodies collapsing within one another, though eight tires simultaneously losing their grip on the pavement sounded like a chorus of the damned.

The coupe’s right headlight nacelle touched the left bumper of the taller American design, spraying glass and a cloud of tungsten which had sublimed in a green arc. The front ends counterrotated and the rear quarter-panel of the Chevy patted the Mercedes’ back bumper with the control of a handball player’s glove. Gisela, bracing herself on the wheel rim as her passenger did on the carpeted firewall, did not attempt input through the brakes or steering wheel until the tires regained enough traction to accept it.

The Chevy, its back end drifting to the right in response to the second impact, broadsided the end of the iron-tube barrier intended to separate cars and pedestrians at the intersection. The scattering of individuals waiting to cross the street at this hour leaped into recessed shop fronts or tried to climb the grated window of a branch bank as the car sawed itself in half with trunk and rear wheels on the sidewalk and the remainder sliding in the street.

Gisela’s 280 SL swapped ends twice in a hundred yards of skidding while its tires shrieked without fatal overtones of metal dragging as well. The coupe’s short wheelbase and tight suspension made the uncontrolled spin less physically punishing than it might have been in another vehicle, but the Chevy beside them separating in sparks both from friction and the sheared powerline feeding the traffic signal was a sight with heart-freezing elements of prophecy.

They missed an Anadol at the next intersection, marked as a taxi by its band of black and yellow checkerboard, because its driver had braked hard to watch the Chevy disintegrate. The Mercedes’ left front brushed the little Ford just hard enough to give Gisela control again. She could not have managed the obtuse angle required to turn left onto Bayildim Street, but there was a cobblestone alley directly across the intersection. The Mercedes dropped into it like a bullet through the muzzle of a smoothbore.

The alley ran between the dun-stuccoed courtyard walls of multistory apartment blocks. The coupe’s single remaining headlight filled the passageway, save for the black fingers of shadow flung ahead of the car by projections from the walls. Gisela’s eyes and mouth were both wide open in an expression more masklike than fearful. The engine stuttered and boomed as she downshifted, but she did not lose the car’s minimal traction except for the instant a driving wheel slipped on garbage and the coupe’s right side streaked the plaster silver.

Kelly’s left hand massaged his thigh where the hammer of the P-38 had bitten him while the car spun. His thumb touched the safety lever. Christ, it was on safe! The woman knew a lot more about cars than she did double-action pistols. When he had clicked the safety up to fire position, he also checked the little pin which projected above the hammer to show that a round was chambered.

Kelly didn’t expect to need the gun now, given the likelihood that the collision would have screened their escape and possibly even blocked pursuit. The Chevy had not exploded as it well might have done—and he was glad it had not. Kelly lacked the willingness to ignore side effects displayed by certain of his superiors who would cheerfully have incinerated scores of Turkish civilians in a gasoline fire if it suited their purposes. The victims would be nonwhites, after all, wogs; and
certainly
non-Christians. Still, Kelly was not writing the Audis out; he unrolled his window as an unlighted lamp bracket beside a courtyard gate clacked against his door handle and Gisela braked hard. Only when she was sure of her clearance did she spin the wheel and the Mercedes hard right, up a slightly-wider alley leading back toward the Catholic church adjoining the grounds of the Technical School.

There was an echoing cry of metal behind them. The car plunging down the alley they were leaving had scraped twenty feet of stucco from the same wall the coupe had touched. The dazzle of headlights made the vehicle itself invisible, but the only reasonable question about its identity was
which
of the three Audis this one was.

“Pull right at the next street,” Kelly ordered loudly in a voice as emotionless as the echoing exhaust of the twin pipes. “Drop me half a block down, and go like hell till I take care of the problem.”

The woman glanced at her passenger. Kelly had reached across his body left-handed to unlatch his door and hold it ajar. He held the P-38 vertical beside his head, so that the muzzle was clear of his skull no matter what shocks the weapon received in the next moments.

“All right,” she said, and the agent realized from her tone that she knew how sure she had better be that it
was
all right.

The Mercedes fishtailed onto Macka Street, losing just enough momentum in a downshift as it burst from the alley that it thrust a Fiat taxi out of the way, by presence rather than by collision, horns on both cars blaring. The taxi cut left, threatening oncoming traffic for a moment but giving the coupe what amounted to a third lane along the curb. Pedestrians and the shills in front of the few shops still open shouted more in enthusiasm than fear.

Gisela braked hard and the Mercedes slewed again, scraping the curb with the edge and sidewall of the front tire as the Fiat that had continued to race them for the slot in traffic shot ahead in a Dopplered howl of alarm. Three more subcompact sedans swerved outward from the coupe’s blazing brake lights, honking and cursing but without real animus. Gisela’s present maneuvering was not greatly out of the ordinary for the streets of the densely-built old city.

Kelly let the inertia of the door swing it open against the coupe’s breaking effort, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He immediately tumbled, balling his head and limbs against his torso to save himself serious injury from the unintended somersaults. Only to the agent’s speeded-up senses had the car stopped. It and he were still moving at about ten miles an hour when his foot hit the concrete, and the small contact patch provided by his right heel could not possibly bring to a halt his hundred-and-eighty-pound mass as he intended.

The 280 SL accelerated away, surely enough to save the door’s hinges though not to latch it firmly again. Kelly skidded to a stop on his back, the suit coat bunched beneath his shoulders. He rolled to his feet and stood, looking back toward the alley they had left.

Men in sweaters or baggy suits who had run to help him up scattered when they saw the big pistol in Kelly’s hand. There was holster wear at the muzzle and the squared-off edges of the slide, and the external bar that was part of the trigger mechanism had polished a patch of bluing from the frame. That only meant that the P-38 had been used, however, and guns were meant to be used.

Horns and tires competed in cacophony behind Kelly, with the insistent note of rubber skidding on concrete probably the winner of the contest. He spun, bracing his left palm against the blistered paint of a light pole. He had expected the Audi which was their immediate pursuit to exit the alley momentarily; headlights already blazed from its mouth across the intersecting street.

But another of the German sedans had expertly circled the whole warren of alleys on Sport Street—named because of the stadium—and had been speeding north on Macka Street past the Technical School when the driver caught sight of Gisela heading in the other direction.

The way the Audi changed front and scrubbed off velocity in an all-wheel drift was testimony both to the driver’s skill and the fact that the sedan had four-wheel drive. Otherwise, the weight shift during braking would have unloaded the rear wheels and thrown the vehicle into an uncontrollable spin as the driver tried to change direction.

Gisela had made room for herself in the southbound lane by bluff and audacity. The Audi sedan was a 5000, heavy and as close to a full-sized car as anything made in Europe save for six-door limousines. It simply brushed aside a Skoda pickup which crashed to a halt against the barred front of an apothecary’s shop twenty feet south of the agent.

A man Kelly did not recognize from behind was hanging out of the passenger-side window as the Audi regained forward momentum in its new direction. The P-38’s thin front sightblade and its U-notch rear were almost useless in the bad lighting, but the Walther pointed like his own finger as Kelly squeezed the trigger through its first long double-action pull. The muzzle blast of the 9-mm, even from a relatively long barrel, was a deafening crash more painful than that of larger and more powerful cartridges operating at lower levels of pressure.

Handgun recoil was always more a matter of perception than physical punishment, and the P-38’s was mild by reasonable standards in any case. The barrel had a right-hand twist, giving the gun a torque opposite to what a shooter expected as it recoiled and returned to battery, but neither that nor the lift of the light barrel kept Kelly from putting out a second aimed shot within a fraction of a second of the first. Ears ringing and his retinas flooded by purple afterimages of the huge flashes from the muzzle of his weapon, Kelly rotated back to the Audi which he had intended for his initial target when he jumped from the coupe.

Kelly had aimed not at the passenger, though the man presumably had a submachine gun, but rather at the side window behind him. Reflection from the smooth glass made the empty rectangle a good aiming point, and Kelly’s quartering angle on the sedan meant that the bullets would snap across the tonneau and the space most likely to be occupied by the driver’s head.