reaction. He stared for a second, because he realised he had seen Victor before. He stared for another second, because he didn’t know where. He stared for a third second, because he was assessing the chances that a lone Caucasian male he had seen before and who had just been directly behind him was simply a tourist too.
And he ran.
TWO
Victor grabbed the watch seller by both of his scrawny shoulders and threw him out of the way. The young guy was light and Victor was strong, and he crashed to the ground, one arm of watches impacting first, the women’s watch he had taken off to give to Victor scattering between sandals and disappearing into the tangle of legs and feet.
Kooi’s route was clearer, but he had first to turn back around and lost a little of his lead. He used his height and body mass to shove his way past the smaller Algerians in his path. They shouted abuse and waved their fists. Victor dashed through the gap in the crowd Kooi created, dodging his way around locals as the gap closed up again and shouldering past those he couldn’t weave by. He received his own share of jeers.
His target had a fifteen-metre lead, but he was easy enough to keep track of as he stood several inches taller than those around him. But he was fast and determined and running for his life.
Stalls flashed by in Victor’s peripheral vision. A woman screamed up ahead and he ran past where she sat sobbing on the ground, an ornate earthenware jar smashed nearby, the cinnamon it had held colouring the paving stones orange and drifting away in the breeze.
Victor tripped over a foot and stumbled, but thanks to his agility and the mass of bodies in close proximity he avoided falling.
He glimpsed Kooi veering out of the market square and down a side street shaded from the sun by tall buildings. The back and the right arm of his short-sleeved shirt were orange with smeared cinnamon. Victor entered the side street a few seconds after his target and caught sight of him as he turned a corner up ahead. Beggars sat with their backs against one wall, their legs crossed before them and wooden bowls near their feet, paying no attention to the men who ran by. Victor avoided crashing into a pair of men who entered the alley ahead of him, slipping side-on between them and round the corner Kooi had taken.
The street that Victor found himself on was long and straight and he powered along the centre of it after Kooi, who rounded pedestrians and leapt over a bench to avoid a crowd that would have slowed him down. Victor did the same, and someone applauded the show of athletics.
Kooi took another corner and when Victor reached it he saw a short walkway that crossed another. At the intersection he couldn’t see Kooi either to the left or right, but he saw to the right a number of locals with expressions of bemusement or curiosity.
Victor headed that way, then turned into an alleyway where he saw boxes had been knocked over. He exited it and heard a horn blare, dashed across the road and cut through another alley, moving towards the sound, coming out on a tree-lined boulevard flanked by nineteenth-century French colonial buildings, grand but dilapidated. He caught sight of Kooi as he hurried through a restaurant’s entrance.
More horns sounded as Victor cut across the traffic. Insults were cast in his direction. He pushed open the restaurant door and dodged around the tables and waiters before shoving open the only door Kooi could have taken, entering the kitchen and bundling staff out of his way to follow Kooi through a back door.
He emerged onto another winding market alleyway, lined on both sides by ramshackle stalls. Victor headed left, because a stall had been upturned that way and traders were yelling and throwing things. He jumped up and scrambled over the stall, inflicting further damage and shrugging off the angry locals’ attempts to grab him.
Kooi’s lead was short, but the streets of the old town were a maze-like collection of narrow cobbled walkways that wound and twisted between whitewashed buildings in no discernible pattern. He disappeared around corners and took intersections before Victor could see which way he went. Victor fell further and further behind as he struggled to deduce the correct turnings to take, looking all ways to identify Kooi’s path or listening to ascertain in which