The Lost Relic

the road, its nearside wing badly crumpled and a smashed mirror dangling like a half-severed ear.

Two figures got out of the car, moving towards Ben’s Renault. As his senses cleared, he realised they were wearing uniforms – and that their car was a dark blue Citroen C4 with a light bar on the roof and POLICIA written across its side.

One of the cops was an older man, mid-fifties. There was a smear of blood on his mouth where the airbag had punched his lip into a tooth. The other was maybe late twenties, already on his radio reporting the accident. Ben tried to open his car door, but it was jammed. He turned sideways in the driver’s seat and kicked out with both feet together. The door burst open with a grinding of buckled metal. As he clambered out, the two cops met him with humble and apologetic looks, and the older one launched into an explanation in rapid Spanish.

Then stopped. He frowned at Ben, peering at him closely under the streetlights. He turned to his colleague, who was staring too. A rapid nod, a heartbeat’s silence, and both cops went for their pistols.

The younger cop’s SIG was the first to clear its holster, but it never made it to aiming position. Ben was on him in one step and about half a second. He slapped the pistol downwards and twisted it out of the guy’s hand, throwing a solid elbow in his face. At the same time his left foot lashed out in a straight low kick that connected with the older cop’s knee and sent him tumbling on his back. Before the younger cop had hit the ground, Ben had stepped over to his colleague and knocked him out with a kick to the head.

Neither of them would have any permanent damage. Ben shoved the younger cop’s SIG in his waistband, scooped up his partner’s weapon and ejected the mag and pocketed it. The pistol was quick and easy to dismantle. With the slide off the frame rails, the barrel fell out and Ben dropped it through the slots of a nearby iron drain cover. He tossed the other useless pieces into the shadows, then picked up the cops’ radios and smashed them on the road.

The Renault was undriveable, but the police Citroen still had the keys in it. As he took off, Ben knew that it was tactically a bad move and that he’d have to ditch the car within the short time it would take for the alarm to be raised.

Only a few seconds passed before he knew it was already too late. As he rounded a bend, there were suddenly two more police C4s right behind him. They weren’t after him – not yet. He could either stay with them and gamble on their not spotting him behind the wheel, or he could take evasive action before fifty more of them joined the party, together with air support and the whole of Spain’s rapid response firearms units combined. That was a little more trouble than he needed right now.

It wasn’t a difficult decision to make. He floored the gas and threw the Citroen into a screeching hard left turn. The two following cars seemed to hesitate, then turned in after him. His in-car radio began to shout at him. He ignored it. No point pretending any more. He hammered the car up onto the kerb and the revs soared as he sent it over the top of a flight of concrete steps that descended steeply down to a pedestrianised street below. The Citroen bucked and juddered down the steps. There was a loud whang and a shower of sparks as he hit the bottom. As Ben took off again he glanced in the mirror and saw that his pursuers hadn’t dared risk the steps. Four cops were out of their vehicles. He heard a ragged series of popping pistol shots. His rear window shattered. There was a junction twenty metres ahead. Ben threw the Citroen into a skidding right-hander out of pistol range and then redlined it. He was heading away from the old city, into the modern urban sprawl that had grown up around its edges.

He was scanning left and right for a good spot to pull over and ditch the police car when he heard the thud of the chopper overhead. An instant later, he was caught in the strong circle of white light it was throwing down over the street. He pressed harder on the gas, leaving the chopper behind momentarily as the speedometer climbed past a hundred and twenty and buildings and parked vehicles zipped past on both sides in a blur. Pedal to the floor, his stomach rose into his ribcage as the road dropped down through a flyover tunnel. The chopper banked steeply to clear the bridge, then it was on him again as he zipped by signs for an industrial estate. Tall warehouse buildings loomed against the night sky. The chopper dropped down low, keeping pace just thirty metres to his left. Its side hatch slid open and a police shooter in a black tactical vest hung out with one foot on the skid and a large shotgun in his gloved hands. He was aiming for the front of the car.

BOOM. Ben felt the heavy buckshot load punch into the front wing, sending the car skittering to one side. The shooter was going for the tyres. At this speed, a blowout could send him into a spin, flip and roll that would turn him into corned beef. He hit the brakes and skidded around another bend. He was heading deeper into the industrial estate.

A scream of sirens tore his eyes from the road to the mirror. Police cars were joining the chase from all directions, converging into a fleet that filled the road in an ocean of swirling blue lights.

Not good. But the chopper worried him more. It was swinging back parallel to him, closer now, and the shooter was lining up for another shot. Ben could see the guy’s black-gloved hand tighten on the weapon’s pistol grip. Quarter of a second before he heard the shot, he stabbed the brakes and the blast of pellets passed in front of the Citroen’s nose.

But braking meant he’d lost precious speed, and now the pursuing cars were coming up fast behind him. More shots rang out. Ben felt the impact as bullets punched into the bodywork of the car.

The shotgunner fired again from the chopper. This time he scored. The front corner of the C4 dipped hard as the tyre exploded into flying ribbons of rubber. Ben sawed at the wheel and just about managed to control the skid that sent him screaming into a narrow alley between warehouse buildings. The helicopter pilot pulled up into a violent climb.

Ben’s car was lurching and bumping wildly as he gunned it down the alley as fast as it could go. There were extensive building works going on up ahead – a yellow JCB, a concrete mixer and a giant dumper truck with its flatbed elevated to tip a load of gravel by the roadside. The chopper’s lights were reflected in the windows of another tall warehouse directly opposite the exit of the alley.

Another police C4 was right on Ben’s tail. As he wrestled with the erratic steering, it nipped past his right flank and overtook him, trying to block his path. The alley was narrowing for the building works. As the car in front braked heavily, Ben realised with a shock that he was running out of road.

With half the Spanish police behind him, there was no way he was about to slow down. He flattened the pedal to the floor and aimed the speeding car at the heap of gravel behind the dumper truck.

If this didn’t kill him, it might even work.

Fuck it. Ben braced himself for the impact.

As the car raced towards the gravel pile at almost a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour, more shots rang out over the scream of the engine and his windscreen suddenly turned into an opaque web of cracks. Something thumped his upper left arm hard, but his senses barely had time to register it before the car crashed into the gravel pile with massive force and the airbag exploded in his face. He felt the crunching shock through the steering wheel as most of the front suspension and the underside of the Citroen’s chassis were sheared away. The car’s nose jerked brutally skywards as it hit the uptilted flatbed of the dumper truck and sailed up it, tearing through the wire mesh barrier at its end and flying upwards through the air like an F-16 fighter launched from the deck of an aircraft carrier.

For a snatched moment in time that seemed to linger for an eternity, everything was almost peaceful. Ben thought of summer breezes and wildflower meadows. He thought about Brooke. Heard her laughter echo in his mind.

Then he was engulfed in a maelstrom of deafening noise and pain and chaos and bone-crunching destructive forces as the airborne car hit the building opposite. A dozen metres above the street, the Citroen went smashing through the plate-glass warehouse windows. It careened into the building in a storm of flying glass and spinning masonry and timber. There was a massive shower of sparks as it ploughed across the concrete floor. Stacks of wooden pallets and crates cannoned off the shattered windscreen. The car spun across the warehouse and buried itself in one of the brick pillars holding up the roof.

Suddenly, all was still and quiet again, just the ticking of hot metal from the wrecked car. The police sirens sounded muffled and a long way away.

Ben groaned, stirred and painfully released his seatbelt. There was no need to open the driver’s door, because it wasn’t there any more. He stumbled out of the Citroen and stared at the devastation around him illuminated by the flashing blue lights from down below. A moment earlier, the place had obviously been some kind of furniture warehouse. Now it looked like the ruins of Dresden, February 1945.

It was only then that Ben felt the burning agony in his upper left arm and remembered the impact he’d felt.