The Take(113)

He kept his eyes on the asphalt rushing toward him. Somewhere out there, barreling at him, was a ten-ton fist of reinforced, impregnable steel. He didn’t see the vehicle. He saw only the man inside. And that man was weak.

Playing chicken was not Simon’s first idea. He had the AK-47 in the back seat and three clips of ammunition. He’d considered trying to stop Coluzzi with concentrated bursts of fire. The problem was that it wouldn’t work. The truck’s engine was protected by a steel cowling. The windows were bulletproof. And the tires were run flat. Armored cars were designed to withstand precisely that kind of attack. The machine gun was out.

A second option was to follow Coluzzi from the airport to his destination. Sooner or later he would have to stop, and when he did, Simon would be there. If he wanted to use the machine gun at that point, he could have at it. Unlike the armored car, Coluzzi was not designed to withstand concentrated bursts of automatic weapons fire. This option was more feasible but equally unsatisfactory. Too much could happen once they left the aerodrome. A look at the fuel gauge put an end to the discussion. Simon was running on fumes.

Or he could simply let Coluzzi go and track him down another day. That was the simplest option and the safest for all concerned. If Simon could find him once, he could find him again. But in that time Coluzzi would have taken the money—however many million euros Borodin had paid him—and socked it away somewhere safe. The idea alone rankled him. Besides, who knew where he might get to?

This last option, he decided, was the dumbest of all. Not because it had the best chance of success—because it did—but because the mere thought of it made him ill. The bad guys did not get away with it. Not even for a day. And certainly not if their name was Coluzzi. Full stop.

Which brought Simon back to the present and the mass of gray steel filling up more and more of his windshield.

This was happening here. And it was happening now.

Simon’s fingers tightened on the wheel. He noted that his palms were as dry as dirt. By all rights his heart should be jumping out of his chest. Instead, it was beating quickly but rhythmically and, he was certain, half as fast as Tino Coluzzi’s was at this instant.

Simon lifted his eyes from the asphalt to the armored truck driving straight for him. If either of them was going to swerve, this was the moment. Twenty meters separated them. His arms tightened, his wrist locked into position. Somewhere he heard a horn blaring, growing louder, louder even than the bloody thoughts that had knocked all the others from his mind. The halogens flashed repeatedly.

Simon raised his gaze to Coluzzi, and for a moment the two looked at each other. In the eye. Man to man.

The next, Coluzzi threw the wheel to one side and steered the truck off the landing strip and into the grassy median.

The truck bounced over the tall grass, drifted into a shallow dip, then bounded up the other side, listing dangerously to one side. The wheels lifted off the ground, and for a few seconds the truck continued on two wheels, balancing precariously as if on a high wire. Then gravity asserted its domain and the armored truck fell onto its side and skidded to a long, slow halt.

Simon saw none of this.

The moment Coluzzi had veered off the runway, something else had demanded his attention. Not a truck, but a plane. His eyes were focused once again directly in front of him, where Vassily Borodin’s jet was advancing toward him like an arrow to its target. Simon braked and made a controlled one hundred eighty degree turn, leaving half his tires on the road. As he came to a halt, he felt the jet pass overhead, its weight pressing down upon him, its shadow blocking out the setting sun. He looked up. The plane was so close he could see the tires spinning, the grease slathered on the metal struts holding the landing gear, so close he could lift his hand and scratch the underbelly.

And then, as the sun came back into view and the plane rose into the air and he finally saw the truck lying on its side, Simon knew that he was going to die.

The thrust of the Gulfstream’s engines struck exactly two seconds later. The Dino was not a heavy car. Its weight with Simon, the machine gun, and the quarter gallon of gasoline remaining in the tank came to less than three thousand pounds. Each of the jet’s two Rolls-Royce turbine engines was capable of producing a maximum of fourteen thousand pounds of thrust. At the moment of takeoff, when the engines were tasked with lifting a forty-thousand-pound object off the earth and propelling it high into the sky, each was working at eighty percent of capacity, creating a combined thrust of nearly twenty-five thousand pounds per square inch. It was this miracle of engineering that picked up the Ferrari and flung it bodily into the air, spinning it head over tail, side over side, like a toy in a dryer.

Simon wrapped his hands around the steering wheel and braced both feet against the floorboard. It was no use. Everything was moving too rapidly, too wildly. He saw the earth and the sky and the earth and the sky. At some point he lost hold of the wheel. There was a terrific collision. Something knocked the wind out of him. He struck his head.

Then he saw nothing at all.





Chapter 68



Barnaby Neill steered his car along the auxiliary road that ringed the aerodrome. He kept one hand on the wheel while the other massaged his aching shoulder. Years had passed since he’d fired a rifle, and he’d failed to hold it as tightly as needed. Still, he was pleased with his aim. He’d needed one shot to neutralize Ren. Makepeace could not have done any better, rest his soul.