The dancer’s two attendants had carried pocket pistols, .32’s by the sound of them: the highly-portable European answer to situations in which Americans tended to carry small revolvers. Both choices were guns you carried when you wanted to be armed but didn’t expect to have to use your hardware. The pistol Kelly hauled from Gisela’s coat was something else again: a Walther P-38, old enough to have a steel frame and grooved wooden grips. It fired full-house 9mm Parabellum ammunition through a five-inch barrel, which, with the projecting hammer, safety, and front sight, made the weapon as bad a choice for pocket carry as could be imagined.
On the plus side, Kelly couldn’t have asked for a better weapon to use if he had to be limited to pistols.
Behind them, the lights of a car bounced wildly as it plunged into Mete Street in pursuit. The Audi which had shot at them waited for its companion to clear the driveway before pulling a U-turn to follow. Kelly couldn’t be sure through the rear window whether or not the third sedan was following also; but two, crewed by men with submachineguns, were certainly enough.
“Goddam,” he muttered, then raised his voice enough to add, “See if you can lose ’em. They may not want us dead.”
Men with submachineguns, and possibly a woman.
The Taksim District with its broad streets and low-density development – public buildings and luxury hotels landscaped like no other area of the city – was as good a place to drive fast as anywhere in Istanbul. That made it the least suitable place for them to lose pursuers in cars which, for all the coupe’s sporting appearance, had the legs of them. Metallurgy and the technology of internal combustion engines had not stood still during” the past fifteen years.
Gisela sent the Mercedes snarling past the Sport Palace – the enclosed soccer stadium – without shifting up from third gear, and entered what was supposed to be a controlled intersection at speed. As it chanced, the light was in their favor – but a ’56 Chevy, for Chrissake, being driven with almost as much abandon as the coupe, was running it from Kadergalar, the merging street.
Kelly’s feet were planted against the firewall and his shoulders compressed the springs of the seatback, anchoring him despite the violent accelerations of the car. Gisela yanked her wheel left, trusting the gap in oncoming traffic, as the driver of the Chevy slammed on brakes which grabbed on the right front and started his car spinning just before the moment of contact.
The result was something closer to elastic rebound than auto bodies collapsing within one another, though eight tires simultaneously losing their grip on the pavement sounded like a chorus of the damned.
The coupe’s right headlight nacelle touched the left bumper of the taller American design, spraying glass and a cloud of tungsten which had sublimed in a green arc. The front ends counterrotated and the rear quarter-panel of the Chevy patted the Mercedes’ back bumper with the control of a handball player’s glove. Gisela, bracing herself on the wheel rim as her passenger did on the carpeted firewall, did not attempt input through the brakes or steering wheel until the tires regained enough traction to accept it.
The Chevy, its back end drifting to the right in response to the second impact, broadsided the end of the iron-tube barrier intended to separate cars and pedestrians at the intersection. The scattering of individuals waiting to cross the street at this hour leaped into recessed shop fronts or tried to climb the grated window of a branch bank as the car sawed itself in half with trunk and rear wheels on the sidewalk and the remainder sliding in the street.
Gisela’s 280 SL swapped ends twice in a hundred yards of skidding while its tires shrieked without fatal overtones of metal dragging as well. The coupe’s short wheelbase and tight suspension made the uncontrolled spin less physically punishing than it might have been in another vehicle, but the Chevy beside them separating in sparks both from friction and the sheared powerline feeding the traffic signal was a sight with heart-freezing elements of prophecy.