They missed an Anadol at the next intersection, marked as a taxi by its band of black and yellow checkerboard, because its driver had braked hard to watch the Chevy disintegrate. The Mercedes’ left front brushed the little Ford just hard enough to give Gisela control again. She could not have managed the obtuse angle required to turn left onto Bayildim Street, but there was a cobblestone alley directly across the intersection. The Mercedes dropped into it like a bullet through the muzzle of a smoothbore.
The alley ran between the dun-stuccoed courtyard walls of multistory apartment blocks. The coupe’s single remaining headlight filled the passageway, save for the black fingers of shadow flung ahead of the car by projections from the walls. Gisela’s eyes and mouth were both wide open in an expression more masklike than fearful. The engine stuttered and boomed as she downshifted, but she did not lose the car’s minimal traction except for the instant a driving wheel slipped on garbage and the coupe’s right side streaked the plaster silver.
Kelly’s left hand massaged his thigh where the hammer of the P-38 had bitten him while the car spun. His thumb touched the safety lever. Christ, it was on safe! The woman knew a lot more about cars than she did double-action pistols. When he had clicked the safety up to fire position, he also checked the little pin which projected above the hammer to show that a round was chambered.
Kelly didn’t expect to need the gun now, given the likelihood that the collision would have screened their escape and possibly even blocked pursuit. The Chevy had not exploded as it well might have done – and he was glad it had not. Kelly lacked the willingness to ignore side effects displayed by certain of his superiors who would cheerfully have incinerated scores of Turkish civilians in a gasoline fire if it suited their purposes. The victims would be nonwhites, after all, wogs; and certainly non-Christians.
Still, Kelly was not writing the Audis out; he unrolled his window as an unlighted lamp bracket beside a courtyard gate clacked against his door handle and Gisela braked hard. Only when she was sure of her clearance did she spin the wheel and the Mercedes hard right, up a slightly-wider alley leading back toward the Catholic church adjoining the grounds of the Technical School.
There was an echoing cry of metal behind them. The car plunging down the alley they were leaving had scraped twenty feet of stucco from the same wall the coupe had touched. The dazzle of headlights made the vehicle itself invisible, but the only reasonable question about its identity was which of the three Audis this one was.
“Pull right at the next street,” Kelly ordered loudly in a voice as emotionless as the echoing exhaust of the twin pipes. “Drop me half a block down, and go like hell till I take care of the problem.”
The woman glanced at her passenger. Kelly had reached across his body left-handed to unlatch his door and hold it ajar. He held the P-38 vertical beside his head, so that the muzzle was clear of his skull no matter what shocks the weapon received in the next moments.
“All right,” she said, and the agent realized from her tone that she knew how sure she had better be that it was all right.
The Mercedes fishtailed onto Macka Street, losing just enough momentum in a downshift as it burst from the alley that it thrust a Fiat taxi out of the way, by presence rather than by collision, horns on both cars blaring. The taxi cut left, threatening oncoming traffic for a moment but giving the coupe what amounted to a third lane along the curb. Pedestrians and the shills in front of the few shops still open shouted more in enthusiasm than fear.
Gisela braked hard and the Mercedes slewed again, scraping the curb with the edge and sidewall of the front tire as the Fiat that had continued to race them for the slot in traffic shot ahead in a Dopplered howl of alarm. Three more subcompact sedans swerved outward from the coupe’s blazing brake lights, honking and cursing but without real animus. Gisela’s present maneuvering was not greatly out of the ordinary for the streets of the densely-built old city.