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Albrecht did as he was told. He moved the dial until they heard voices.
    â€œWhat are they saying?”
    â€œThey’re trying to corner us and set up a road block. My god.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThey’ve blocked the border.”
    â€œI guessed they’d do that.” Jake turned down a narrow street and hoped like hell it wasn’t a dead end. Cars were parked on both sides, so Jake guessed it was a downtown residential area. Looking back, he saw just one car. Damn it. One must have turned down the parallel street, he thought.
    Jake cranked the wheel hard at a cross street and accelerated. “Hold on to your balls.”
    The lights from the other cop car appeared to Jake’s right just as their car reached the crossroad, giving him a micro-second to hit his brakes and timing the collision so his left front bumper clipped the other cop car in the left rear, sending the car careening into parked cars. But Jake was able to shove his stick into second, crank the wheel to the left and miss all of the parked cars.
    â€œOne down,” Jake said, his eyes in the rearview mirror for a second to see the other car was nearly a block behind them.
    More desperate words on the radio.
    â€œYou know this city?” Jake asked Albrecht.
    The man thought and then said, “Not well.”
    Jake checked the road signs and saw directions to the autobahn and Brno, the Czech Republic. He switched off the lights and siren and turned onto a main street, going in that direction. Seconds later he got onto the main autobahn that lead from Bratislava to Prague. The early morning rush hour was starting to show, but most of the cars were coming from the other direction. Thinking quickly, or maybe not thinking at all, Jake crossed the center median heading directly into oncoming traffic, cars screeching to a halt as their cop car cut a path between a big truck and an Audi sedan.
    â€œWhat the hell are you doing?” Albrecht yelled, his grip tighter. “You’ll get us killed.”
    Looking behind him, the chase car followed them across into traffic. As rush hour cars slammed into each other, Jake cut back across the median in front of a line of cars and blended in, with a truck behind him and another on his left. Hidden like that, Jake cruised forward on the autobahn. Just out of town, he turned off the autobahn at the first exit, making sure to slow with the engine so his brake lights wouldn’t give them away, and then he saw the cop car pass on the road above.
    Jake backtracked down a narrow road toward the Danube River, picked up a frontage road, and turned west in the direction of the Austrian border.
    A sign said there was a small town a few kilometers up the road. Jake had a feeling there might be a bridge there—a minor crossing into Austria. But before they reached the town, Jake found a small road that entered a forest to the right. He pulled into the road, drove for a short distance, and parked the police car, shutting down the ticking, tired engine. Then he had Albrecht wipe his prints from the handle and anything else he had touched. The cops he had embarrassed back there would have a description of the two of them, but that’s it. And Jake guessed the two would have them both at close to six-feet five and three hundred pounds to diffuse the pain of their failure.
    Now they needed to get the hell out of the Slovak Republic. That could be tricky.

4
    Magdeburg, Germany
    The former Prussian city of Magdeburg was now the capital of the Sachsen-Anhalt province, and was situated to the west of Brandenburg and Berlin in what had been Soviet occupied East Germany until reunification more than a decade past. The province had seen the rise of Martin Luther, where he had preached at the altar of some of Europe’s greatest cathedrals. But Magdeburg had also seen the destruction of religious division during the Thirty Years War, where more than 30,000 of its citizens were killed.
    The