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.