Hard Knocks (13 page)

“Gregor Venko again?”

“Hmm, possibly,” Sean said, but there was a hint of doubt in his tone. “I’ve been reading his profile and if it
is
Venko who’s behind these kidnappings then it’s not his usual style. He’s always been ruthless, but this is beyond that. It’s nasty. Vicious.”

I realised I was still turning the round over and over in my fingers like a worry bead. I slipped it back into my pocket.

“D’you think there’s any connection with what happened to Kirk and these kidnappings?” I wondered aloud. “Do we know what kind of weapons the kidnappers were using?”

“Machine pistols,” Sean said, “But that doesn’t prove much. The close protection team were using something very similar.”

“The same type of weapon used to kill Kirk.” A cold little ghost scuffed its feet all the way down my spine. “Are you sure he might not have been involved in some way?”

“Salter was many things Charlie, but I don’t think he’d quite lowered himself to criminal status,” Sean shot back. “Besides, just about every thug in eastern Europe can pick up a machine pistol and a box of Hydra-Shoks these days. It’s common. I wouldn’t read too much into it if I were you.”

“Nevertheless, we know that there
is
some connection between the Manor and Kirk’s death, and whatever’s going on here they might be prepared to kill to keep it covered. Bearing that in mind,” I went on with a studied mildness, “you might want to get Madeleine onto another little research topic before you finally send her home for the night.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, if this all goes pear-shaped,” I said, my voice calm and even, “how do you propose to get me out of here?”

Gilby didn’t show.

After I’d finished talking to Sean I waited for another forty minutes before the cold finally got the better of me and I sloped back into the Manor.

I ran into Jan in the hallway. She had her cigarette packet and lighter in her hand, and had obviously just been out onto the terrace for a crafty smoke. We compared our reddened noses and whitened fingers.

“I keep threatening to give up the soddin’ cancer sticks and if this doesn’t make me, nothing’s going to,” she muttered. She checked her watch. “I’ve got my name down for the pool table in five minutes. D’you fancy a quick game?”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll just dump my jacket and I’ll see you down in the mess hall.”

The mess hall had once been another of the Manor’s elegant drawing rooms, now stripped bare except for a tatty selection of easy chairs and a ripped and faded snooker table with a downward slope towards the bottom left-hand corner pocket.

On the far side of the room was a darts board of similar vintage. The wall around it was pockmarked like a woodworm-infested beam as a testament to people’s general inability to throw a straight arrow. Looking at just how far away some of the holes were from the board itself, it was quite scary to realise that the same people were also given guns and expected to shoot straight.

Jan was setting up the pool balls in their plastic triangle by the time I arrived. She’d helped herself to coffee from the hulking vending machine that lurked in one corner and she offered me a cup.

I shook my head. I’d made the mistake of trying the coffee it dispensed early on. It turned out to be tasteless thin grey sludge with peculiar thermal properties which meant it was either so hot it burned your tongue or stone cold, without seeming to pass through any other temperature on the way.

Jan broke the pack with an aggressive thwack of the cue, scattering the balls in all directions, but not managing to pocket any. She reached for the crumbling cube of blue chalk as she stepped back.

I walked round the table with my eyes on the lie of the balls. There was an easy stripe near the middle pocket, but the others were in difficult positions. I chose a more difficult spot instead, lurking close to the bottom cushion. I was lucky, and I nudged it just far enough to topple into the pocket, wiping its feet on the way in.

“Nice shot,” Jan said.

“Luck rather than judgement, I’m afraid,” I said, bending to see if I could just squeeze the cue ball past the black without a foul.

“So, I hear you work in a gym,” she said as I tried it. The white cleared the black by a fraction and a second spot dropped in.

“Yeah,” I said as I straightened up. “Personal training, stuff like that.”

“Not aerobics, then?” Jan said, and there was just a trace of a sneer in her voice.

It made me unwilling to admit to having taken such classes in the past. Besides, the gym where I’d been working during much of the previous year had not been the kind of place you’d imagine anyone skipping around in shocking pink lycra.

The lads who went there were all seriously into training hard with the biggest weights they could lift without rupturing themselves. Getting them to do proper warm-up stretches was as close as I ever came to introducing any form of aerobic exercise.

“No,” I said, flicking her a quick smile. “I just sort out people’s weight programmes and keep my eye on their technique.” I failed to give my next shot enough pace and the slant of the table had it rolling way wide of the mark.

“So they listen to you OK, do they?” Jan asked, her tone dubious. “They don’t give you any shit because you’re a woman?” She was a canny enough player to leave the easy stripe over the pocket it was covering and pot another instead, putting plenty of backspin on the cue ball to bring it back up to the top of the table for her next shot.

“Not really, no,” I said. Maybe it was because my boss was built like Schwarzenegger and always backed me up, right or wrong. Or maybe it was because all the regulars had seen the scar round my neck at one point or another, and between themselves had exaggerated the rumours about how it got there. Either way, I didn’t get many clients who were prepared to argue with me.

“You’re lucky.” Jan put another two stripe balls away with gutsy determination. “I qualified as an engineer. Got a fucking good degree, too. Better than half the guys I was working with, but you try telling that to most of the macho numskulls and they just pat you on the backside and send you off to make the tea.” As she spoke she let her eyes slide across to where the blokes were playing darts with much loud laughter and matey camaraderie.

I wondered how much of the attitude Jan had experienced was down to her combative stance. You have to show people you know what you’re talking about, not just tell them. Besides, she was too touchy, too perfect a target for winding up. I could understand why they hadn’t been able to resist the temptation.

She miscued her next shot completely and nearly snookered me. I was just about to try and play a tricky bounce off the far cushion when Major Gilby walked in.

The Einsbaden staff had their own mess hall in a different part of the building. Separate and segregated. For any of them to venture into the students’ area was unusual enough to cast the conversation adrift and bring all play to a standstill.

Gilby looked round at the silenced faces. He was frowning, as though in disapproval of the fact that he’d caught us relaxed and relaxing. His gaze seemed to linger in my direction. For a moment I wondered if he’d spotted me waiting for him out there in the tree-line and had changed his plans accordingly. If that was so, evidently it hadn’t pleased him much.

In his hand was a piece of paper. He glanced down at it.

“We’ve had an alteration to tomorrow’s schedule,” he said, his voice deceptively mild. The kind of tone that doctors use when they say, “This won’t hurt.” It provoked an instant ripple of distrust and uneasiness.

“Directly after phys you’ll all be taking part in a simulated casualty exercise,” Gilby went on. “A test of your first-aid knowledge.”

He turned to leave, skimming that steely gaze over us again. “You might find,” he said, quiet yet somewhat ominous, “that your time this evening would be better spent on revision. Good night.”

***

They started in on us after breakfast the next morning. Figgis was showing us how to check cars over for booby traps when the Major appeared with a clipboard and took Hofmann away.

Ten minutes later he was back for McKenna, then Craddock, and Declan, all at ten-minute intervals. None of them returned to the group. My nerves screeched under the tension. By the time my name was called, I was so nervous that I had no brain capacity spare to concentrate on Figgis’s warnings of foreign objects shoved up exhaust pipes, or trip wires in the engine bay.

The Major led me into the hallway and motioned me to remain by the foot of the stairs. He disappeared through a side door and for a few moments all I could do was wait apprehensively for something to happen. I had the underlying fear that I was being manipulated, that events were moving beyond my control.

Still, at least I didn’t have to wait long.

A door burst open and Rebanks came charging out, shouting like someone possessed. He practically scooped me up as he ran past and hustled me down a corridor so fast that he pushed me out of my stride.

We rounded a corner at the far end, with Rebanks still bellowing in my ear. Blakemore was standing by a doorway a few metres away, beckoning frantically. He was yelling, too. I skidded to a stop alongside him and looked in, heart thudding from adrenaline as much as exertion.

The clock stopped. I tuned out the shouting around me, had time to take in the whole scene. The room was a study, darkly decorated and dimly lit. The heavily curtained window was opposite the doorway, fronted by a sombre desk. The usual desk furniture was arranged across its surface – in and out trays, an old-fashioned black telephone, a leather-cornered blotter, and a hooded lamp. The lamp was the only thing that offered illumination, casting eerie shadows into the recesses of the room.

In the gloom I could make out the body of a man lying on his back in the middle of the carpet. He was wearing half a dinner suit, dark trousers with a satin inset along the seam, a bow tie and a formal white shirt. He would have looked smart if it hadn’t been for the twisted mass of intestine spilled across his stomach. The front of the shirt was stained a livid scarlet. My heart kicked up another gear.

“Go on! Go on, that’s your principal in there!” Blakemore’s voice was almost a howl. I took a step forwards, innately following his command, then froze. Something was way wrong here, I could feel it.

He urged me on, his hysteria rippling the hairs on the back of my neck. I glanced sideways at him and found eyes wild with blood lust. I stepped back again, and thought he was going to burst a vein.

“It’s not safe,” I said, shaking my head.

“You coward, you fucking coward!” he screamed. “This isn’t about your own safety. That’s your principal in there. He’s down and he’s injured. You get in there and do your fucking job, you bitch!”

I staked him with a short, vicious glare, but stepped across the threshold, staying close to the wall. Everything smelt of a trap, I just knew it. I waited half a beat, straining to hear anything over the breathing of the men behind me.
Oh shit . . .

I moved towards the man on the floor, squatted beside him. Through all the gore I recognised Ronnie, one of the cooks, and hoped that it wasn’t part of our lunch he was wearing. I’d got as far as pulling back his shirt cuff to check for a pulse when I sensed movement in the shadows, closing fast.

I barely had time to glance up, to take in a big man dressed in black, saw him moving out from behind the open door. There was a balaclava concealing his face, leaving only his eyes exposed, but the jolt it sent through me was like an electric shock.

His hands were clasped together, stretched out in front of him. The silenced automatic let out a sharp, distinctive flup of sound that sent my reactions screaming.

The fear came down like a falling blade, slashing into me. My choices came down to fight or flight. I went for the latter.

By the time the second round was fired I’d hurled myself sideways. I rolled over the top of the desk, scattering half the contents, and dived under the lee of the big mahogany structure.

My breath was coming in gasps, horribly loud to my own ears. In the light from the doorway I could see his shadow moving silently round towards the side of the desk. He knew he had me pinned down, knew I didn’t have a weapon. He knew he could take his time to finish me off.

I had nowhere to run and my hiding place was about to become useless. My options were running down like a tape machine with dying batteries.

They like to play mind games with you. Like to see how you react . . .

I shut my eyes for a moment, forced my breathing back into a regular rhythm.

This isn’t real.

I almost had to whisper the words out loud in order to believe them. Whatever test of our reactions Gilby and his men hoped to achieve from this exercise, it would not involve any real danger. I had to cling to that thought.

The barrel of the gun, extended by its silencer, edged into view at eye level round the corner of the desk, followed by the man who was holding it. Without speaking, he flicked his head to indicate that I should rise, and he stepped back while I did so.