I Am Pilgrim (67 page)

I needed no more incentive than that. I got up, crouched low and ran fast for the edge of the house.

Between one heartbeat and the next my feet lost contact with the tiles and I was swimming in clean air, willing myself forward, stretching with my arms and chest, trying to reach out and grab the guttering on the side of the warehouse. I was falling and for a terrible moment I didn’t think I had a chance, then my left hand touched the metal and slipped but my right hand caught and held. I swung like a bad trapeze artist and reached up and grabbed on with my failed left hand and hauled myself up on to the roof of the warehouse …

Unfortunately, the night wasn’t dark enough.

I heard voices yelling, the sharp crack of a gunshot and I knew at least one of the cops near the garage had seen me. The bullet must have gone wide, and I was confident that nobody had any chance

of recognizing me in the gloom. The problem was going to be escaping off the roof.

Already I could hear orders being yelled, the sound of mobile radios being activated, and I didn’t

need it to be translated to know that men were being told to seal off the warehouse. I had to find the maintenance stairs down from the roof, get into the building and run for the loading bays at the rear.

Outside was the Vespa.

It was going to be a race and it got off to a bad start – one of the cops had called in a chopper.

The pilot had its searchlight on and I saw the bright finger of light approaching as I sprinted across the reinforced steel and climbed a ladder to an even higher section of the roof. I was heading for a pair of large cooling towers, figuring that Mr Gul and his Sons would make sure the water system got regular maintenance, and I wasn’t disappointed. A locked doorway next to them probably gave access to a flight of stairs. I levelled the Walther at the lock and blew it apart.

I kicked the door open and half jumped, half ran down the first flight of steps. There was barely any light but I saw that I was in the boat-repair building – a cavernous, eerie place. Between towering walls lay a group of dry docks and several dozen luxury cruisers hanging from huge claws above.

The motorized claws were attached to steel rails bolted to the rafters, allowing the large boats to be moved hydraulically from one work area to another without ever going near the ground. Some facility.

As the hanging boats creaked and groaned in the high wind, I headed down the next flight of stairs.

Four overhead lights – the big vapour variety – exploded to life.

Allowing the cops to see my face would be as bad as being caught, so I dropped to one knee and

took aim. Unlike the long jump, I had always been pretty good on the firing range. I hammered out

four shots in rapid succession and took out each of the lights in an impressive blast of gas and falling glass.

In the gloom I heard Turkish voices cursing, more men arriving and the sound of large roller doors being raised. I knew that very soon they would have enough boots on the ground to search line

abreast until they had me cornered. I ran back up the flight of stairs, climbed on to a steel gantry just below the grid of steel rails and sprinted for a control box. I could see cops spilling into the facility

below and I just hoped that none of them would look into the rafters and see me silhouetted against the ceiling.

I reached the control box and thanked a God I wasn’t even sure existed: six identical handheld devices were in chargers attached to the wall. I grabbed the first of them, switched it on and saw a numeric keypad and a display screen spring to life. I sprawled on the floor to conceal myself and, with no real idea what I was doing, working more by intuition than anything else, I aimed the device into the darkness and pushed its attached joystick.

The motorized claws holding a huge cruiser started to move, propelling the boat along the overhead grid. A group of four cops on the ground, all in uniforms with a lot of braid, looked up and saw the white and gold cruiser gather speed above them. The most senior of the cops, florid and overweight, his buttons straining against his belly – the Bodrum police chief, I figured – either took an educated guess or saw the glow of the handheld device and pointed at the gantry, yelling orders to his men.

Cops ran for access ladders on the walls and started climbing towards me. They were mostly young, hollering to each other, and I realized that a vacation atmosphere was creeping in – they knew a single man didn’t have a chance against so many and they were sure going to make him pay for violating the property of one of their own. I had the feeling an accidental ‘fall’ wasn’t out of the question.

Frantically, I experimented with the remote device. Each of the boats had a four-digit identification number hanging from its side and I realized that if I entered it on the keypad I could use the joystick to send each boat back or forward, left or right. As more cops arrived to help in the hunt, I lay out of sight, getting as many boats as possible in motion, hoping to create maximum confusion for when I

made my run.

The only part of the device I wasn’t sure about was a yellow button at the bottom – I had my suspicions, but I didn’t want to fool with it. Instead, I ramped the white-and-gold cruiser up faster, turned it on to a track to converge with a forty-foot sloop and flattened myself.

One of the cops climbing the wall saw what was about to happen and screamed a warning.

Everybody below ran fast – standing under two boats when they collided was no place to be.

The moment they hit, debris flew everywhere. The sloop parted from its claw, fell fifty feet to the

floor below and exploded into kindling.

In the chaos and fear I scrambled to my feet. A forty-foot black Cigarette boat with twin gas turbines and a huge wing at the back – every drug smuggler ’s dream boat – was coming towards me.

As it sped past, I leapt, grabbing a chrome stanchion on the boat’s side, and hauled myself aboard.

Chapter Fifty-six

BEING HIDDEN ON board a speeding cigarette boat meant that my situation had improved – but it was also true that the starboard side of the
Titanic
initially held up a bit better than the port side. I was still stuck inside a warehouse with several dozen Turkish cops ready to rumble.

I rolled across the deck of the speedboat and for once managed to time things exactly – a beautifully restored Riva from the 1960s was gliding past in the other direction. I dived off the side of the Cigarette and landed on its teak stern. I sprawled across it, barely hanging on, and it carried me towards the loading docks at the rear.

Somewhere behind me there was a deafening crash – I guessed that another two big cruisers had

collided – but I had no time to turn and look. A catamaran I had unleashed appeared at right angles out of the gloom, coming straight at me.

Its steel bow, reinforced for ocean-going journeys, would slice the Riva in half, but there was nothing I could do except hang on – if I abandoned ship I would end up as a pile of broken bones next to the kindling fifty feet below. I braced myself for the impact, but at the last moment the Riva pulled ahead and I watched as the big cat passed behind, stripping the paint off the hull right next to me.

Light split the darkness and I looked down and saw that the cops had wheeled in banks of work lights from the yard outside. My first inclination was to shoot them out but, on quick reflection, I decided it would almost certainly give away my position. Instead I had to watch as they tilted them up and started searching the grid and the rampaging boats for any sign of me.

Every second, the Riva carried me closer to the loading bays, but the cops on the lights were working methodically, lighting up sectors, and it was only a matter of moments before they would hit on the old boat and see me. I slid over the side, dangled for a moment and scanned the area beneath

me for any cops. I registered it as clear but, in the confusion and urgency, I was wrong – a cop in a sharkskin suit was running in a cable for more work lights.

Hanging over the side of the Riva, clinging by my fingertips, I waited … waited … and let go. I fell twenty feet and almost ripped my arms out of my sockets as I grabbed hold of a horizontal pipe that

fed water to the sprinkler system. I had no time to scream – hand over hand I moved along the pipe

until I could drop down on to the roof of a storeroom. From there I reached the side wall and, while a dozen cops were climbing higher to find me, I scrambled from one handhold to another down the aluminium siding.

Still holding the remote device, I hit the ground while the cops on the work lights swept the rafters and boats above. I sprinted for the rear and rounded a corner – there was the loading dock, thirty feet ahead. Cops entering to search the joint had left one of the roller doors up and I knew that the scooter was only twenty yards away, hidden in the darkness behind the row of garbage skips.

Running fast, I caught a flash of movement to my left. I wheeled, the Walther rising fast to the firing position, but saw that it was only a street dog that had wandered in looking for food.

The dog wasn’t the problem, though – it was the voice that suddenly barked a command from behind me. It was in Turkish, but in some situations all languages are the same.

‘Drop the gun, raise your hands’ was what he was saying – or a pretty fair approximation of it.

I guessed the guy was armed, and that meant he had me square in the back, from what seemed –

according to the position of his voice – to be about ten yards away. Well done, Turkish cop – too far for me to jump you, too close for you to miss. I dropped the Walther but kept the remote.

The cop said something, and I guessed from the tone he was telling me to turn around. I wheeled slowly until I faced him. It was the cop in the sharkskin suit, kneeling down, still crouching to connect a cable to the work lights. He had a nasty little Glock pointed at my chest. But that wasn’t the most surprising thing – that was reserved for his name. It was SpongeBob.

He looked at my face, more surprised than I was. ‘Seni!’ he said, and then repeated it in English.

‘You.’

As the full implication of the deep shit in which I found myself hit him, he curled his lip and smiled with pleasure. I said earlier I had made an enemy for life, and I wasn’t wrong – for him this was payback with a lovely twist.

I saw that, behind him, the Cigarette had reached the end of the grid and was coming back fast towards us. SpongeBob, still triumphant, yelled over his shoulder into the cavernous space to come

quick. Thankfully, I didn’t hear my name mentioned, and I figured that he was keeping that as a big

surprise. The Cigarette came closer, closer …

I heard boots running, approaching fast. The Cigarette loomed directly above SpongeBob and I only had a second to act before everything about the mission fell to ruins. I pressed the yellow button.

SpongeBob heard the rattle of chains and flashed a glance upwards. The claws holding the huge boat released. He was too alarmed even to scream – instead, he tried to run. He was no athlete, though, and the sharkskin suit was cut too tight to let him do much more than a strange sidestep.

The rear of the hull, housing the twin turbines and all the weight, fell first. It plunged down and took him on the skull, compressing his head into his chest, exploding his neck and killing him before he even hit the floor.

As his body found the concrete I was already diving behind a mobile crane. The Cigarette hit the

floor and exploded into fragments of fibreglass and metal. While the steel of the crane protected me from most of the debris, I still felt a stinging pain in my left calf.

I ignored it, got to my feet and ran hard for the little I could see of the roller door through the clouds of dust and swirling debris. I heard the cops yelling, and I guessed they were telling each other to take cover in case more boats started raining down.

I saw the open roller door, made it through and burst out into the night. I sprinted for the garbage skips, saw the Vespa and was thankful I had exercised the foresight to leave the key in the ignition. My hands were shaking so much it probably would have taken me five minutes to fit it in.

The engine burst to life, I roared out from behind the garbage skip, hurtled between a stack of shipping containers and fishtailed down the road and into the night before the first of the cops had made their way out of the warehouse.

My only concern was the chopper, but I saw no sign of it and guessed that, once the police chief thought I was cornered, he had dismissed it. Whatever the reason, driving more soberly once I hit the busier streets, I reached the hotel without trouble and slid the scooter into the small garage reserved for the manager ’s old Mercedes.

I didn’t even notice that I was wounded.

Chapter Fifty-seven

THE MANAGER DID. He was alone in the foyer, sitting behind a desk on one side of the reception area, when he looked up and saw me enter. As usual – hand extended, his face alight with his signature smile – he came forward to greet me.

‘Ah, Mr Brodie David Wilson – you have been on the relax with a dinner of the fine quality, I hope.’

Before I could answer, I saw his expression change: a shadow of concern and perplexity crossed

his face.

‘But you are wearing an injury of seriousness,’ he said, pointing across his always impeccably clean tile floor to where smears of blood marked my path.