Hard Knocks (42 page)

“It’s nice to see someone’s relaxed,” I said quietly to Sean. I jerked my head. “Hofmann’s spark out.”

“You can tell he’s been a soldier,” he said. He smiled. “You might want to grab some kip now yourself. You never know when you’ll get the opportunity again.”

“I’m OK,” I said, “and I’d rather stay awake.”

As I said the words it struck me how frightened I should have been feeling. I did a quick mental search, just in case a huge example of classic denial of the situation was sitting lurking in the back of my mind, but found nothing. I was keyed up, yes. My stomach was clenched tight like I’d done a rake of Todd’s sit-ups, but there was no panic there.

I’d been in action with Sean before, stared death in the face and been terrified. But not for myself, I realised.

For him.

“I’m sorry, Charlie,” Sean said suddenly and for a moment I frowned at him, backtracking to try and work out an immediate reason for him to be apologising to me. It took a moment to register that there wasn’t one. So we were back to that confrontation we’d had outside the Manor. It seemed so long ago I could barely remember what had been said. Maybe that was my denial.

As the Skyline motored on Sean kept his eyes on the road, almost fixed to the vanishing point ahead of him. “I don’t know what I can say or do to change things,” he went on, his voice low and tense. “I wish to God I could!”

“I don’t want you to do or say anything, Sean,” I said, surprised at how calm I sounded, how perfectly reasonable. “I know you weren’t the cause of any of it, but that doesn’t change what happened.”

I paused, tried to put some kind of order to my jumbled thoughts. “When you look at me,” I came out with, “all I want is for you to still see
me
underneath it all. Not some faceless victim. Does that make sense?”

For a few seconds he didn’t answer and the heavy frown was back. “You’re asking me to pretend it never happened,” he said, neutral and cautious. “Is that it?”

I sighed. “No,” I said. I stared out of the darkened glass of the side window, aware only of the flash of the passing road markers like a continuous stream of stars in hyperdrive and the morbid pulse of my thoughts. I turned back to Sean. His face was set.

“I’m just asking you to accept that it did, but underneath, inside, I’m still me,” I said. “A bit ragged at the edges, maybe, but still me.”

There was a long stretch of silent deliberation then he said, at last, “I’ll try and remember that.” He smiled, but it was a sad, tired smile. “There is no instant rewind button in life, is there?”

“No, I guess not,” I said, shrugging, trying to smile myself although there was a sudden taste in the back of my mouth that was hot and bitter, like smoke.

If there was I’d go back and edit out a whole heap of things. But the time I’d spent with Sean, I realised, would not be one of them.

***

We stopped for fuel again just outside Dessau at a little after 2:15 am.

As we slowed for the exit I reached awkwardly behind me to tap Hofmann’s leg to warn him. By chance my hand landed on his solid calf just above the top of his combat boot. My fingers grazed across something, but at that moment he jerked awake, shifted his position.

“What is it?”

“We’re stopping to fill up,” I said over my shoulder. “If you need a break of any description, speak now.”

He nodded. “I will stretch my legs,” he said.

I watched him pace away across the filling station forecourt, rolling his neck and swinging his arms to ease the constrictions out of his considerable muscles. I moved round to stand with Sean, leaning carefully against the dirt-streaked rear wing of the Nissan. Sean had left the engine running, to try and save the turbos from self-destructing. It hummed now under my hip.

“You do realise that Hofmann’s carrying a knife, don’t you?” I murmured, low enough for the German not to overhear.

Sean’s eyes flicked sharply to Hofmann, but he didn’t look surprised. “Where?”

“Top of his right boot.”

Sean nodded. “OK,” he said. “Leave it for the moment, but just be ready for him if he tries anything.”

I shivered, and not just at the wind that whipped between the pumps. “That’s easy for you to say,” I muttered. “You’re not the one who’s got him sitting right behind you.”

I’d faced knives before and had the scars to prove it, but the prospect of taking on someone with the kind of military training Hofmann had been through took it up to another level altogether. He’d been an elite soldier. If he was planning to double-cross us, the chances were I wouldn’t see the knife until it was hilt-deep in my throat.

***

After Dessau we crossed the river Elbe and then Berlin was suddenly within our grasp. I was used to distances unfolding in miles, rather than kilometres. That, combined with the sheer speed we were travelling, made the city seem to be actively rushing forward to meet us.

Once we reached the outskirts, Sean slowed to a less obtrusive pace. It was raining steadily here and the road surface sparkled in the dance of the lights.

The Alpine directed us to the street we’d asked for, then Sean switched off the unit, folding the screen back into the dashboard, and relied on Hofmann’s instructions from the back seat. It was almost 4:00 am, and the run-down residential district he took us into was so quiet it could have been under curfew.

Hofmann guided us without any hesitation. I wanted to trust him, but when we finally pulled up in the gloomy shadow of a dilapidated apartment block, I couldn’t help the feeling that this could all be one hell of an elaborate trap.

Sean left the engine ticking over to cool down while he twisted in his seat. “OK, what are we likely to be facing here?”

I glanced at him. He’d driven nearly four hundred miles at the kind of speeds that would have challenged a Le Mans racer, but somehow he was still alert, on his toes.

“If we are lucky, and Jan is
not
there,” Hofmann said, “I may be able to talk the boy away from them. If she is—” He broke off and shrugged, plainly unhappy. “Then it may come to a fight. Maybe three men. Maybe four. MP5Ks and sidearms. We tend to favour the Heckler & Koch P7 pistol.”

The “we” in that last remark really brought it home to me what we were expecting of Hofmann. That we were asking him to stand against his own comrades. Hardly surprising that he might show some reluctance to engage them in a fire fight.

I picked one of the PM-98s out of my footwell and handed it to Sean. He caught my eye and nodded almost imperceptibly. I picked up another, handing it back over my shoulder.

Hofmann took the Lucznik with a slight bow, recognising the act of faith for what it was. He checked the magazine and cocked the first round into the chamber with the practised ease of a man who’s done this many times before. Sean and I did the same, easing the safety back on. I racked the slide on one of the SIGs and dumped it into my right-hand jacket pocket, just as a back-up.

As we got out of the Skyline I felt the fresh bite of the rain on my face. We left the big car crouching by the kerbside and crossed the empty street with the submachine guns held close. Hofmann led us round to the front of the block and up the front steps, with me behind him and Sean bringing up the rear.

We climbed to the fifth floor under the dim, vacant gaze of the naked lightbulbs on each landing. The matting on the stairs was worn to the woven backing in the centre of each tread. Our boots sounded harsh against the night, but the faded doors we passed stayed resolutely shut. The residents had clearly heard too many intruders in the early hours and had long since chosen total deafness as the way to deal with them.

Finally, we stopped in front of a doorway no different from any of the others. Hofmann silently motioned to us to stay a little behind him, and to keep the guns out of sight of the Judas glass. My heart was trying to jump out of my chest as he knocked on the woodwork, firmly, with no apparent pattern. I heard the shuffle of movement from inside the apartment.

Whoever was inside must have recognised Hofmann, even if we were strangers. There was only a short pause before the door was opened by a man remarkably similar in build and manner. Hofmann brushed past him impatiently and, before he had the chance to object, we followed.

“Where is the boy?” Hofmann demanded in German. “We have a security breach. Major König wants him moved immediately!”

I managed to contain my surprise at this tack. There was, I noted, no other easy way to do it. If Jan was here to contradict him we were neck-deep in trouble anyway, and if she wasn’t? Hell, it might just work.

Hofmann strode further into the shabby apartment, glancing round him. All the time he was barking commands, berating his colleagues for their lax procedure. Someone had been sloppy he told them. Gregor Venko’s men could be breaking down the door at any moment.

As he stalked from room to room, Hofmann was carefully pinpointing the four men in the apartment, calling them together, improving our field of fire. Sean moved casually sideways, giving him a better angle. I held the PM-98 negligently down by my thigh, but the safety was off now and my finger was inside the trigger guard.

The men were indeed using HK submachine guns, as Hofmann had predicted, the SD model with the bulky silencer at the end of the barrel. Someone had been in the middle of cleaning an HK pistol, too. It was stripped to its constituent parts and laid out neatly on the chipped yellow formica table in the living room. Well, that was one less to worry about.

“So where is Ivan?” Hofmann snapped. “We need to withdraw him to a more secure location and we are wasting vital time!”

“But Major König will return in less than an hour,” protested the man who’d answered the door, his eyes drifting to the wall clock. “She will want to supervise his removal personally.”

“The Major has sent us to get the boy now,” Hofmann said, which was the truth – if you didn’t ask which Major. He pushed his face in close to the other man’s. “If we wait an hour,” he ground out, also no lie, “it will be too late. We must go now.”

“Is there any word of the girl Venko’s holding?” another man asked.

I turned at the question, flicked a glance to Sean and found him frowning. So, the security services were far better briefed on the situation than we’d thought.
And still Jan took Ivan.

Hofmann straightened up. “No,” he said, expressionless. My translation might not have kept up, but I could have sworn he added, “Unless some miracle happens, it will be too late for Heidi.”

For a moment there was silence. Nobody spoke. Then the man nodded slowly, got to his feet and led the three of us to the entrance to one of the cramped bedrooms.

They’d handcuffed Ivan Venko to the iron head of the narrow bed, which had been pulled into the centre of the room away from the walls. He was wearing a purple silk shirt, one sleeve of which had been ripped at the shoulder. He’d been stripped of his shoes and the belt was gone from his designer jeans. His ears were completely covered and he’d been blindfolded, too.

I’d been through something similar myself during my army training. No sight, no sound. It had been hard to take, even when I’d known it was just an exercise. I could almost feel sympathy for the kid.

Hofmann held out his hand for the keys, which the man gave up without demur. Ivan cringed when he was touched, blinking away tears as the blindfold came off and the light stung his eyes. Hofmann used the boy’s discomfort to refasten the cuffs behind his back without a struggle, pocketing the keys. Then he hauled Ivan to his feet and shoved him in my direction.

I grabbed hold of him with reluctance, not least of which was because, close to, the boy stank of stale sweat and abject fear. It rolled off his body in waves. Even so, the look Ivan cast me was one of haughty disdain, but I expect he must have been used to having girls hanging on to his arm.

A lucky combination of a sinuously slender build and an arrangement of features that included high slanted Slavic cheekbones had provided him with good looks that would have turned heads anywhere. Allied to his father’s power and money, I’m sure it had given him a social position that was practically unassailable.

Only the eyes scared me. There was nothing behind them, as if the price for all that exquisite external structure was a black and rotting soul. I was reminded of a pedigree dog. Beautiful to look at, but with hidden inbred defects.

Ivan didn’t want to walk with me and he was just crazy enough not to respond to being prodded with the barrel of the Lucznik, either, digging his heels in. Hofmann leaned down and pulled the knife out of his boot. It came free with a metallic slither that snapped the boy’s eyes round.

“Here,” Hofmann said, handing me the knife. “If he gives you trouble just make that pretty-boy face of his a little more . . . interesting.”

After that I only had to offer the tip of the blade up towards Ivan’s cheek for him to comply with docility. Even when Hofmann tipped a rough cloth hood over his head, he did little more than squirm briefly.

With me on one side, and Sean on the other, we hustled the boy blindly back through the flat. All the time I was waiting, heart painfully contracted, for Jan to burst in, for the game to be up, but our luck held.