The Nemesis Program (Ben Hope) (21 page)

A motorcyclist locked up his front wheel, and parted company with his machine, both sliding across the tarmac. Ben had to swerve violently to avoid running over him; the Mercedes veered towards the kerb and almost ploughed into a line of parked cars. Ben steered to the right of them, just clipping the wing mirror of the nearest before mounting the high kerb with a sound that made him worry deeply about the front suspension. But so far, German engineering seemed to be holding up to the job. The Mercedes went racing through the narrow gap between the shop fronts and buildings and the row of trees that lined the pavement. Shoppers scattered like pigeons.

Ben saw an opening in the line of parked cars and sent the Mercedes hurtling back out onto the road, the squeal of his tyres drowned out by the blare of horns from motorists skidding out of his path.

Both Audis were still in chase. Ben threw the car round a right turn, pushing it to the limits of traction and almost going up on two wheels. The first Audi followed his line around the bend. The second went wide and hit the opposite kerb, heading straight for the terrace of a corner café.

The breakfast crowd fled in panic at the car’s approach. Plastic chairs and tables and people’s morning coffee and croissants sailed up over its bonnet and into the air. The Audi ground to a halt and was quickly surrounded by a screaming mob, all beating on its windows.

Ben lost sight of the stalled Audi as he flew around another bend. The Mercedes blasted down the street with the other still right behind. A direction sign for the Périphérique shot past. Ben brutally hammered his way through the lines of slow-moving cars and followed it. The Audi came roaring after them.

The chopper was still directly overhead.

Tearing through the streets at such high speed, it was only a few moments before they were weaving through the flow of traffic on the Paris ring road heading west. The Mercedes was going as fast as Ben dared let it, overtaking everything in sight and swinging all over the road like a pendulum. The chasing Audi collided from behind with a small hatchback that got in its way, and sent it spinning mercilessly into the roadside verge as it powered on by.

Ben couldn’t see any sign of the second Q7, until Roberta’s hoarse cry of ‘There he is!’ alerted him that it was back, certainly guided via radio communication from the chopper, and rapidly regaining ground on them. Whoever these people were, they were determined, and they took advanced pursuit courses.

The entrance to one of the shorter tunnels came flashing up. Moments later they were speeding though the underpass, concrete pillars zipping past, swerving from side to side to get around the slower traffic. The Audis were back in formation now, hunting constantly for an opening to draw level with the taxi.

‘Ben, look out!’ Roberta yelled as one of them suddenly charged up and began to creep up alongside to their left. The dark-tinted glass on the passenger side wound down and Ben was able to steal a glance at the men inside. The hard-faced, heavily-built driver was in his thirties or forties but had the silvery-white hair of a much older man.

The face of the front seat passenger wasn’t something Ben gave much thought to. He was much more concerned about the pistol in his hand that was about to be aimed at the Mercedes.

Ben instinctively twisted the steering wheel and slammed the taxi sideways into the Audi, forcing it to the left. The Audi’s left flank scraped the concrete centre embankment in a storm of sparks. Another pillar was coming up fast and Ben meant to keep his pursuers pinned against the side and guide them right into it. At the last possible moment, he swerved violently away to the right so as not to get caught up in the devastating impact he expected to happen half a second later – but the Audi’s driver reacted just in time, expertly managing only to shear off his left wing mirror and wheel arches with a screech of rending steel. The heavy vehicle slewed into a weave and the second Audi had to brake hard to avoid ramming it from behind.

The Mercedes exited the tunnel and burst back out into the bright sunlight at over 120 kilometres per hour. The two Audis had fallen back a good distance and now Ben saw his first real chance of losing them.

He sliced past a dawdling Vauxhall Corsa and then swore under his breath as he saw the two big trucks that filled the lanes ahead, blocking his way and moving at about half his speed. There was no way round or between them.

In short seconds, he’d lost his advantage and the Audis were coming up fast again. The passenger appeared at the window of the lead vehicle and aimed his pistol. The shot was no more than a muted pop over the roar of the engines. The taxi’s rear window shattered, showering Roberta with glass.

‘Fuck it,’ Ben said. He twisted the wheel hard to the left and sent the Mercedes bucking and crashing over the central reservation into the opposite two lanes.

Suddenly they were in a sea of oncoming traffic hurtling towards them at combined speeds of over two hundred kilometres an hour. Roberta’s shout of ‘
Are you nuts?
’ dissolved into a scream as an oncoming Range Rover swerved out of their path and they only very narrowly missed a head-on collision that would have fused the two cars into one and annihilated everyone inside.

Ben was far too busy weaving his way at high speed through the mayhem to answer her. He needed every ounce of his concentration, as focused as a fighter pilot as he fought to keep them alive. Blaring horns wailed past on both sides and his vision was filled with headlights flashing furiously at him from everywhere.

But if he was nuts, the Audi drivers were too, because they were now carving their way rapidly upstream on the wrong side of the road in the Mercedes’ wake. It seemed like nothing short of suicide was going to shake these guys off.

Nor the chopper. Ben could no longer see it, but he could feel the deep thump of the rotors in his guts and knew it was directly over them, keeping pace and flying low. This wasn’t getting any better.

Suddenly, it got worse. Warning signs shot past announcing that a construction zone was up ahead. Beyond the sweeping curve of the next two hundred metres Ben could see the cranes and road works for the new overpass near the Porte de Sèvres, and the long elevated section of the Périphérique carrying traffic over the exit routes to and from the city. In the distance, traffic was down to a single lane in each direction and moving slow.

Just as Ben thought his options were dramatically falling away, he saw them drop to zero when he spotted the third Audi up ahead on the overpass. It had come round to head them off in the opposite direction and was storming through the oncoming traffic a hundred and fifty yards away and closing fast.

Whatever these guys were planning, they were betting on getting it done quickly. The trap was closing in and the endgame was just seconds away. Ben could visualise the passengers of the three Audis cocking an arsenal of small arms in preparation of hosing the taxi full of bullets and then beating a rapid getaway before the police came roaring down on the scene.

The Mercedes sped up the slope onto the overpass. The side barriers streaked past like ribbons. Streets and rooftops twenty feet below. The chopper hovering right above, its swaying belly visible through the sunroof. The two Audis closing in from behind. The third looming larger in front of them every second. Eighty yards; sixty. A game of chicken, with nowhere to go.

But Ben wasn’t going to stop, even though there was no sane alternative. He pressed harder on the pedal. ‘Wrap the seatbelt tight around you and stay low!’ he yelled at Roberta over his shoulder.

Fifty yards. Thirty.

No sane alternative.

But sometimes there was no room for sanity.

Ben twisted the wheel. One quarter turn, hard right. Before Roberta had time to cry out, the Mercedes veered crazily off course, hit the side and burst through with a massive rending crash of metal on metal, ripping a whole section of barrier from its mountings.

The car flew over the edge of the overpass and into empty space.

Chapter Thirty

For just a second or two, it was like floating. Ben experienced a strange sensation of weightlessness that was somehow liberating and not unpleasant. The howl of the soaring engine and Roberta’s cry from the back seat seemed muffled and far away.

Then reality cut back in with terrifying speed as the Mercedes dropped like a missile towards the road below and the traffic lumbering in and out of the Porte de Sèvres. Ben caught a glimpse of a huge articulated truck coming the other way and he was utterly convinced they were going to plummet right into its path and be smashed and rolled and twisted into tiny pieces all across the tarmac.

But then the bone-jolting impact as the taxi’s spinning wheels touched down on the truck’s roof told him that death wasn’t going to be quite so instant. The Mercedes tore across the top of the truck with a shearing crunch that felt as if it had ripped the whole underside away, bounced, twisted in mid-air and nose-dived sideways towards the construction works at the side of the road. An inch difference in its trajectory and the car and its occupants would have been mangled against a steel rubbish skip. The car overflew it and landed on its left side in a ten-ton pile of sand that exploded outwards as if a bomb had burst against it

The driver’s airbag punched Ben in the face as he was hurled forwards to meet it. He was stunned, but only for a moment: his first thought as his mind snapped back into focus was of Roberta. He wrestled the collapsed airbag out of the way, twisted himself around to see into the back of the mangled, overturned taxi and called her name.

‘I’m okay,’ came a muffled gasp from inside the flattened space between the rear seats and the roof. ‘I’m fine, I’m okay. What about you?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said. He was blind in his left eye for some reason, and he could taste blood – but that didn’t matter to him. He struggled to free himself of the seatbelt, only very dimly aware of the carnage that was happening just a few yards away on the overpass.

As the Mercedes had gone flying off the edge, the three Audi Q7s had hammered on their brakes to avoid a three-way collision, skidding all over the road. The one that had been approaching from the opposite direction had lost control, rolled spectacularly and gone spinning through the yawning gap that the Mercedes had left in the barrier. It tumbled in mid-air as it dropped like a stone, and landed on its roof.

At the same time, the articulated truck whose cab roof had been half torn away by the flying Mercedes had gone into a violent skid, its trailer slewing around and broadsiding one of the tall steel power masts that flanked the overpass bridge.

The helicopter pilot had brought his aircraft about and was hovering, uncertain as to what to do next, close to the side of the overpass as the destruction unfolded all around. The crippled power mast began to topple, dragged down by the weight of the cables. Before the pilot could react, the collapsing thick steel wires became entangled in the tail rotor and instantly shattered the blades in an explosion of sparks.

The aircraft’s rear plunged downwards and it spun out of control, smashed into the side of the overpass and exploded in a bright little supernova of combusting avgas that rained fiery fragments all over the road below, instantly setting fire to the fallen Audi before any of its occupants, if they were still conscious, were able to escape. The truck driver leaped from his ruptured cab and ran for his life as burning debris blasted in all directions. The wave of fire that washed across the overpass engulfed another of the black Audi Q7s before anyone had time to get out. Thick smoke billowed skywards.

In seconds, the scene had become a battlefield.

Fully alert now, Ben kicked through what was left of the wrecked Mercedes’ windscreen and clambered through the sand that came pouring inside the cab. He could smell petrol and spilled fluids and hear the ticking of hot metal. Still unable to see out of his left eye, he staggered around the mangled underside of the car, managed to haul himself on top of its scarred flank and with all his strength hauled open the rear passenger door.

He reached a hand inside for Roberta. She grabbed it and climbed out, and they slid down off the wrecked Mercedes into the soft sand. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ he asked insistently. ‘You’re not hurt?’

‘No, no. Just a little banged up, that’s all. But you’re covered in blood.’

He touched his fingers to his left temple and they came away thickly coated in red. Only then did he realise that blood was streaming down his face, filling his eye. He wiped it with the back of his sleeve, blinked and could suddenly see again. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Just a scalp wound.’

‘Look,’ Roberta said, standing up. Ben turned and looked back at the overpass. Flames leapt high from the burning Audi. The blazing wreck of the helicopter was still clinging by its mangled skids to the side of the overpass like some grotesque giant insect on fire. The enormous column of black smoke rising up from the carnage blotted out the sunlight. Meanwhile there was bedlam as panicking drivers who had managed to stop short of the devastation now tried to U-turn back the way they’d come, creating a massive snarl-up extending hundreds of yards back from either side of the scene. A cacophony of blaring horns filled the air.

As Ben and Roberta watched, a secondary blast tore the chopper completely apart. Its blazing shell fell away from the overpass and crashed down into the still-burning wreckage of the Audi that had plunged to the road.

A sudden breeze tore a hole in the pall of smoke and Ben saw that just one of the three Audis had escaped unscathed. It had skidded a full hundred and eighty degrees round on itself as it came to a halt: he could tell from the damage to its left side that it was the car he’d rammed into the side of the tunnel during the chase. Its four occupants had jumped out, the vehicle so hopelessly boxed in by the log-jam of stationary traffic that they had no option but to quickly conceal their weapons and beat their retreat on foot.

One of the men paused to stare from the overpass barrier. Even from a distance, his eyes seemed to meet Ben’s. Ben recognised the hard, lean features and distinctive prematurely-silver hair of the driver. He was a big, powerful-looking man, six-two or three and broad across the shoulders. Their eye contact lasted only a moment before the man disappeared into the chaos and the smoke.