Ratcatcher

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 man 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 buthere 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