Night Racing in Istanbul
Screeeeeech—!
The car packed with his men slid coming out of the corner, and the stink of scorched rubber rose off the asphalt. The crew chief felt the curses climb his throat of their own accord.
"Those bastards! I'll catch every last one of them and kill them! Every single one!"
He was running, and it burned him alive all the same. It wasn't enough that they'd been played. He'd lost even the men he'd kept hidden, and now he was the one in flight. Worse, he'd had to abandon not only the drugs but the four million euros he'd sweated to scrape together. If the boss of the organization ever learned the truth, the man might well have him killed.
Still. Get clear first. Survive this, then come back with a crowd of soldiers, stamp the bastards into the ground, and take the money and the product both.
"Fucking animals. I catch you, I'll pull your guts out while you're still breathing. Next time we meet..."
He was grinding the words between his teeth when the man at the wheel blurted, voice tight.
"B-Boss. Behind us. Somebody's coming."
"What?"
"I think... I think it's them."
"Shit!"
The crew chief twisted to look back. Behind the sedan carrying the rest of his men, a pair of headlights was eating the road at a furious clip. All that talk of showing them what he was made of the next time they met had already burned clean out of his head.
"Damn it! Floor it! Floor it, now!"
VROOOOOOM—!
A G-Wagen AMG. Six hundred horsepower of V8, a monster that shrugged off three tons of its own bulk and ran the other cars down anyway. Every time his foot buried the accelerator, that four-second zero-to-sixty hauled the truck forward without mercy.
Vroom—! VROOOOM—!
Before long he had their tail. The two crew cars dove for a corner, and in the instant they shed speed he was on the rearmost of them, brakes, then the wheel, following them in.
Screeeeeeeech—!
The truck slid and laid a sheet of smoke across the pavement. Coming out of the bend they tried to claw their speed back. He put his foot down again without hesitation. The engine screamed. Torque that had gone slack came roaring up, and the G-Wagen's mass drove straight into the sedan's rear bumper.
Crash!
The impact lifted the sedan clean off the road for a heartbeat and dropped it on its nose. It yawed, wallowing, and he charged the twitching tail a second time.
VROOOM—!
Crash!
The second hit stole the last of its balance. The car broke into a sideways slide. He lined the nose up on that exposed flank and floored it again. The headlights washed the doors in a hard white glare, and the men inside started screaming.
"No!"
"Look out!"
Crunch—crash, crash—!
The G-Wagen took the sedan in the side the way an axe takes a log and swatted it off the road, then it was running again. The front bumper was half torn away. It didn't matter. The thing still drove. Hands on the wheel, he stared down the road ahead.
"Where'd the next one get to?"
Far off, a pair of red taillights fled, dragging a streak of light behind them.
"Get over here, you little shit."
The crew chief had seen what happened behind them, and he howled.
"Sons of bitches! Hey! Drive! Faster, damn it!!"
"Y-yes, Boss!"
The man at the wheel drove harder than he had in his life. Luck was with them, for the moment. While the cars behind tangled, the gap had opened nicely, and the dwindling headlights in the mirror let him breathe again.
Back in the G-Wagen, the distance had grown stubborn. The fleeing car would not come in. He needed them while the road was still empty of witnesses, but the truck had its limits. He should have brought something nastier. Lighter. Quicker.
Then a thought cut through. Same engine. If the weight came off...
One of the magic rings crowded onto his fingers rose in his mind, and he spoke the word that woke it.
Levitation
Gravity was weight. Ease the gravity, and the weight went with it. In an instant the spell took the G-Wagen, and its mass fell by half. Three tons became a ton and a half.
VROOOOM—!
"Ungh—!"
Six hundred horsepower grabbed the lightened truck and all but threw it down the road. The speedometer pegged at its stop and shivered there. The gap died. A Mercedes sedan was suddenly right in front of him, its tail rushing up to fill the glass.
The crew chief saw the charge coming, hauled out a gun, and sprayed it wildly at the dark behind them.
"Just fuck off!!"
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Inside the G-Wagen he snapped a warning at the slaves and buried the pedal deeper.
"Down."
VROOOOOOM—!
The windshield starred. Sparks skipped across the hood. Bullets couldn't hurt him anyway, so he drove straight through the fire with his foot on the floor, and a heartbeat before the hit he killed the spell.
Three tons came back all at once and piled into the Mercedes' tail.
Crash!
He felt the car ahead break loose and skate across the asphalt. Its rear end was caved in, the trunk lid flapping. He climbed, pulled out to the side, and drew level.
VROOOOOOM—!
The G-Wagen took the flank. For a moment the two machines ran abreast, and the crew chief, just dragging his wits back out of the impact, lifted the pistol again.
"Goddamn it..."
He never got the trigger pulled. The wheel turned first. The G-Wagen's body hammered the Mercedes in the side.
Whump!
The Benz was kicked across the road, slammed the far guardrail, lost what balance it had left, slid sideways, flipped, and went tumbling down the pavement.
Crash, crash, crash—! Crash, crash, crash, crash—!
It rolled and rolled, and at last lay belly-up, scraping to a stop. In the back seat the crew chief clawed his way up through a spinning haze. Blood from a split scalp ran into his eyes. One arm still worked. He lifted it and smeared the blood away.
What the cleared eye found was a pair of headlights, coming on fast.
"Oh, fuck..."
The lights filled his vision.
CRASH—!
What was left of his mind blew apart and scattered.
A nightclub in central Istanbul. Alone in a room on the second floor, a middle-aged man watched the dancers move on the floor below and lifted his glass. Expensive whiskey went down scalding. He was savoring the heat, and the women, when someone opened the door and stepped in.
"Boss. We found them."
"Yeah. How'd it go?"
"All of them. Dead."
"So that's how it went. The money? They at least find the drugs?"
"Nothing. No money, no drugs."
"Hmph. IS. I knew they ran wild. I didn't know they were this far gone."
"We're going through what the police have locked down."
Karaman, boss of the Karaman crew, Istanbul's own mafia, had sent ten of his men out the night before to make a drug buy. Then the contact died. When he checked, the police had already found wrecked cars and corpses along an outer highway, and the dead were his.
More than mourning the men, more than the vanished drugs or the four million euros in cash, what mattered to him was simpler than either. Someone had laid a hand on his pride. That someone was going to be found, and he was going to have his revenge.
"Yes, Boss."
The United States Embassy in Istanbul. The office of Jackson, serving there as a CIA counselor.
Knock, knock, knock.
"Come in."
The staffer who opened the door sounded almost pleased.
"Jackson. Those guys made another mess."
Jackson had been hunting the IS cell that had lately gone to ground, and he understood at once.
"What? What kind of mess?"
"Last night, eastern outskirts of Istanbul. A shooting and a rollover got called in. Ten dead so far, confirmed. And guess what turned up at the scene of the shooting."
"All right. What'd they find?"
"Captagon."
Captagon was what IS cooked and moved when it needed cash. People had another name for it. The jihadi drug.
"Captagon? Then it's them. The bodies?"
"So far, every one of them is a member of a mafia crew working Istanbul."
"Mafia? What the hell are those IS bastards doing? They don't shoot the people who buy their product."
"Maybe they do, if they're desperate enough that they have to. Or there's some other reason."
"First thing, get on the police and have them hand over the file. And where is this place?"
"An abandoned factory, a little over fifty kilometers east of Istanbul. The rollover was on the road leading in, about twenty kilometers this side of it. Both spots are pretty well out of the way. Doesn't look like they've found a witness yet."
"Doesn't matter. I'll go myself. You call the satellite team. See if anything was passing overhead at the time."
"Yes."
"This time we pin a real tail on them. Before they disappear again."
The villa in Istanbul.
Every mafioso who had chased the cars was dead. He had made sure of them, one by one. After that he ran the empty roads, slipped the G-Wagen back into the magic pouch, and changed buses and cars enough times that the trail went cold before he came home.
Beside the villa stood a warehouse he'd had built new. He drew the truck out into it: front bumper and hood smashed, bullet holes punched through the body here and there.
"Engine looks sound. Fix the bodywork and she'll drive again, won't she?"
The performance had surprised him. The pull was good. And the fact that magic would take on a machine like this had his curiosity up. He could rebuild the thing into something properly mean.
First he took the money and the drugs out of the trunk. Then the truck went back into the pouch.
He went online and bought a plane ticket, the earliest departure he could find. Buying this close to the flight was usually hopeless, but business class still had seats to spare. This was why he flew business. It cost, and he could spend that kind of money without blinking.
He still had the two million euros from the earlier deals sitting untouched, and now another four million on top of that. In won, call it 8.4 billion. If that wasn't enough to fund his work on Earth, nothing was.
And this wasn't the end of it.
He opened a text that had landed on the burner he'd set up in Cairo.
Giovanni, with the Italian mafia. The one he'd opened with on the last deal.
The holes money could pour through just kept appearing. The caravan he'd sent by ship ought to be reaching its destination right about now, too. One way or another, it was time to go.
He gathered his bags and the goods he'd hauled over from Korea, got into the Lincoln SUV, and headed for the airport.