He was edging up to 100 on the speedometer, but it wasn’t doing much good. The Mercedes was faster and heavier and all they had to do was bump him anywhere off-center to send him careening out of control. If the road wasn’t a straightaway, driving skill could come into play, but it was straight and he was running out of time. He memorized the road ahead and flicked off his lights, making it a little harder for them to aim and follow him. A single bullet in his gas tank or one of the tires would finish it right then and there.

There was a loud cracking sound, like a frozen river breaking up in spring, and the rear window disappeared. A roar of rushing air blasted through the Mustang as it surged forward, the air resistance suddenly reduced. Now he could see the headlights of the Mercedes instead of a white film in the rear-view mirror. It was a wonderful break, except that the Mercedes was only inches from his rear bumper. He flicked on the headlights and watched the front end of the Mercedes swerve and recede as the driver braked to avoid what he had assumed from the rear lights to be the Mustang’s sudden braking. The driver should have realized that braking, given the Mercedes’ heavier mass, would have been suicidal, the Scorpion thought. But it hadn’t bought him much. Even worse, the Mercedes was coming up again on his left side and it wasn’t a trick you could use twice.

The two cars sped like bullets through the night. Ahead, he spotted a fork, one road curving off to the right to Zallaq, the left twisting into Sakhir all the way down towards Ras al-Barr at the southern tip of the island. Left, he decided, perhaps because it was a longer road. He needed every edge he could get. His Walther was virtually useless against the AK-47 in the Mercedes and it was all wrong, anyway. Something kept nagging at him and then he had it. They’d used his cover name! They’d known all along.

The glare from the Mercedes’ headlights filled the rear-view mirror and he felt the bump on the left side, like a gentle push from behind, and he lost control. The headlights raked across the side of the road as the Mustang slid on to the dirt shoulder. He turned the wheel to the right, fighting the skid, and the front of the car rocked forward and back like a metronome. A palm tree loomed on his right, seeming as wide an obstacle as a mountain and then he was flying off the road on to the mushy sand surface of the desert, just barely grazing the tree. If he stuck in the sand, he was a dead man.