Page 8 of Denied Access (Mitch Rapp #24)

B ARCELONA , S PAIN

T HE motor scooter careened around the blind corner doing almost forty.

For a second time, Rapp thought he was about to become a victim of vehicular homicide.

Fortunately, the rider handled his scooter with a deftness that, while not excusing his excessive speed, helped atone for it.

Downshifting, the man braked while simultaneously piloting the scooter to the left, passing within inches of Rapp’s torso.

The scooter fishtailed as the rider stopped, nearly tipping over.

Turning, the rider flipped up his helmet’s shaded visor to reveal an irate visage.

His flashing brown eyes centered on Rapp.

“Eres estúpido?”

Even for a non-Spanish speaker, the meaning wasn’t hard to intuit.

Are you an idiot?

“ Lo siento ,” Rapp said.

The man could be forgiven for assuming Rapp was apologizing for standing in the middle of the road.

He was not.

Snapping his arm in a tight circle, Rapp buried his elbow into the side of the rider’s helmet.

The man’s head drooped, and he slid from the motor scooter.

Rapp caught him beneath the armpits and eased him to the ground.

Other than showing the bad sense to drive too fast on Barcelona’s notoriously crowded narrow streets, the rider hadn’t done anything wrong.

Hopefully his motorcycle helmet meant the man would wake with nothing more than a bad headache.

A bad headache and one less motor scooter.

Climbing aboard the scooter, Rapp gunned the throttle and tore off down the street.

The winding passage, while large enough to fit a car, definitely favored the smaller scooters and motorcycles that were ubiquitous on Barcelona’s streets.

Unfortunately, Rapp’s scooter was not what anyone would call a sport bike.

The 50cc engine was designed for fuel economy rather than raw acceleration.

Snarls from the Citroen’s racing motor still reverberated from the side streets’ narrow confines, but the sound was already growing fainter.

If Rapp didn’t do something to change the equation, he would lose Greta.

Rounding a corner, Rapp caught a flash of the sedan’s taillights as it slowed for an intersection.

Then the car nosed into an adjacent street heading west. Braking, Rapp put his left foot onto the ground, added throttle, and spun the scooter in a tight left turn before rocketing down an alley that paralleled the sedan’s route.

The alley east-west-running side streets emptied into the larger north–south Ronda de Sant Antoni, but all paths were not created equal.

Most of the side streets doglegged through additional intersections, while one or two flowed straight west. Rapp believed the alley he was following fell into the latter category, but he wasn’t certain.

Only one way to find out.

The pedestrian traffic during this time of the day was thick, but most people stuck to the meager sidewalks.

Most. A few braved the motorists by brazenly walking down the center of the street.

Thankfully these daredevils were the exception.

Between Rapp’s liberal use of the motor scooter’s anemic horn and his unwillingness to yield ground, the majority of the Spaniards he encountered gave way.

After nearly clipping a man who’d clearly paired his afternoon vermouth with breakfast, Rapp felt the bike sliding from beneath him.

With a display of agility worthy of a former collegiate lacrosse player, he steered into the wobble, touched the ground with his right foot, redlined the engine, and shot back down the alley.

A string of angry Spanish phrases chased him, but Rapp was already focused on what lay ahead—a pair of plastic garbage bins marking the junction with the busier Ronda de Sant Antoni thoroughfare.

While he didn’t pretend to understand the intricacies of Spanish vehicular courtesies, he had learned something of Barcelona’s rules of the road during his forays with Greta.

Driving through some of the narrower alleys was frowned upon, and to discourage collisions between man and machine, refuse containers were strategically placed to block the entrance and exits to the tighter side streets.

Side streets like the one Rapp was currently hurtling down.

Gritting his teeth, Rapp edged the motor scooter onto the curb and drew both feet as close to the center of the scooter as possible.

To dissuade motorists of the two-wheel variety, the city planners had lined the sidewalks with anti-traffic barriers resembling slender fire hydrants.

Rapp estimated six inches of clearance between the concrete barriers and his scooter.

Forcing himself to ignore the bone-crunching cement, he concentrated on the narrow, pedestrian-sized gap between the refuse bins.

With a final burst of speed, Rapp bounced from the sidewalk back to the street.

He cannonballed between the bins and arrived on the far side mostly intact.

A wrenching of the scooter’s steering mechanism accompanied by a shriek of rending metal suggested that the bike that shot from the bins was not an exact replica of the one that had entered.

A quick glance away from the road confirmed his thesis.

His left mirror was gone and the right hung by a collection of wires. Still, he’d made it.

That was the good news.

The great news was that the Citroen’s red two-toned bumper poked from a second side street to Rapp’s right. The sedan was waiting at a traffic light.

A traffic light that had just turned green.