“When I yell ‘Go,’ don’t argue. Just get out of the car and run like hell for the embassy. With any luck, Mr. Smith will get a call from Abu ben Adam to confirm the assassination,” the Scorpion said, his eyes darting as he calculated the traffic flow. Ahead, near the white-filigreed façade of the Royal Bank of Qatar, a one-way street jammed with traffic fed into the Corniche.

A rear-view mirror check showed the BMW right behind them. One of the Arabs was pulling what looked like an AK-47 out of a gun case. In this traffic, Macready and he were sitting ducks. If only the car in front of them—a rheumatic old Citroen belching black exhaust and driven by an elderly Qatari sitting bolt upright behind the wheel as if he had been nailed there—did not move immediately when the van ahead of him, striped red and green like a candy cane, started up, they might have a chance.

The Scorpion wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his sleeve. Even with good luck, it was going to be close.

He made one last check. The traffic on the Corniche was stop and go. Dodging pedestrians played chicken with honking cars at intersections. The street cafés were beginning to fill and the pavement swarmed with the flotsam of a dozen nations, drawn by the smell of money to Qatar like flies to a corpse. The Scorpion hoped they would all add to the confusion at the right moment.

“Suppose you’re wrong. Suppose it’s me they’re really after?” Macready demanded petulantly.

“Then I’ll apologize—afterwards.”

“By then I’ll be dead. It’ll be too late,” Macready pouted. He really was a little prick, the Scorpion thought.

“Apologies always are,” the Scorpion replied.

Come on, come on, he thought, the wheel slippery in his hands from sweat. Just then the candy-striped van’s brake lights went off. As the van lurched forward with a jerk, the Scorpion made his move.

The Chevy leaped forward in a sideways curve as he slued the wheel to the left while stepping on the accelerator as though he wanted to put it through the floorboard. He sandwiched into a gap in the oncoming lane, then swerved back into line ahead of the Citroen, smashing its wing as he angled across its front. As he had anticipated, the panicked old Qatari driver jammed on the brake and froze, giving him the precious inches he needed to cross the lane. Horn blaring, tires screaming, he swerved broadside to the one-way side street feeding cars into the Corniche traffic. Bracing hard, he deliberately allowed the Chevy to smash sideways into the front of a truck filled with frizzy-haired Baluchi laborers. Metal grating and ripping, the Scorpion then rammed almost head-on into a pink Cadillac filled with Qatari women, their eyes bulging wide behind their veils.