Hard Knocks (43 page)

The four men who’d been guarding Ivan were gathered in the tiny hallway. They had not put down their weapons, and for a moment I feared we’d been rumbled.

One of them put a hand on Hofmann’s arm. “You do know what Major König will do,” he said with a heavy foreboding, “if you should . . . lose him.”

“Yes,” Hofmann said firmly, “I do.”

The man shrugged, then he stepped back and allowed us to go.

It was still raining when we hit the street and Ivan faltered as his sock-clad feet tripped into soggy puddles. We ignored his protests and half-dragged, half-carried him to where the Skyline was waiting for us.

Getting him into the car proved a struggle until Hofmann hissed, “What’s the matter, Venko? Don’t you want to see your father again?” Then Ivan folded with a stunned compliance.

We shoved him in behind Sean’s seat. Hofmann re-cuffed the boy’s hands to the grab handle above the rear window and squeezed in alongside him, swapping the Lucznik for one of the SIGs to keep him covered. I gave the big German back his knife. He took it without comment, tucking it away inside its usual hiding place in his boot.

Sean and I snapped the front seats back into position and jumped in. The Skyline’s engine cracked up on the first turn, despite the prolonged abuse it had just suffered. Before he put the car into gear Sean glanced over his shoulder.

“They knew, didn’t they?” he said quietly. “What you were really up to, and yet they let us do it.”

“Yes,” Hofmann said, his impassive face giving away nothing. “Now, Major König may return at any time and when she does, she will not be happy with any of us. I would suggest we go.”

It was 4:28 am. We had almost exactly five and a half hours.

If the return journey to Einsbaden had been a mirror image of the way out, we would have made it back to the Manor with nearly a couple of hours to spare before Gregor Venko’s deadline.

But it wasn’t, and we didn’t.

To begin with, it all went according to plan. I used Sean’s mobile to call Gilby and let him know, briefly and cryptically, that we’d retrieved his present and were on our way back with it, hopefully in time for the party. He took the news with a tense abruptness, so that I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or if he felt we’d dragged our feet over the task.

We reactivated the Alpine and let
Madeleine II
’s dulcet tones guide us out of the residential district and back onto the road past Potsdam heading for Dessau. There were no other cars taking the same route behind us, no sign of sudden pursuit or interception. As we regained the A9 I couldn’t help a feeling of relief that we’d made it this far unmolested.

It was raining steadily now, coming down slash-cut through the beams of the lights. Even with the Nissan’s intelligent four-wheel drive, Sean had instinctively backed off. Having said that, we were still thundering south at a little over a hundred and forty miles an hour. In hardly any time at all, Dessau was in the rear-view mirror and Leipzig was looming.

I was aware of a sense of blasé relaxation about our speed. I had to remind myself that although my Suzuki would do just short of one-forty, I’d only maxed it out once on a deserted stretch of bone-dry motorway. Even so, it was a grit-your-teeth, hang-on-for-grim-death kind of experience, and I’d been secretly quite glad when I decided I’d had enough. In the big Nissan it was just all so easy.

After staying quiet for the first section of the journey, Ivan became vocal just south of Leipzig. He demanded to know, first in German, then in what could have been Russian, and finally in English, who we were and why, if we were working for his father, we were keeping him shackled like this. There would, he warned in a voice that trembled with outrage, be trouble of a kind we could scarcely imagine when Gregor found out how we’d treated him.

I twisted in my seat. Hofmann rolled his eyes at the rhetoric, but didn’t make any answer. I grinned at him and turned back forward. We continued to ignore the boy’s childish bluster until finally, in a small voice, he admitted to feeling car sick. Only then did Hofmann reach across with a heavy sigh and remove the hood from Ivan’s head.

If anything, that move seemed to frighten him more than being kept in the dark had done. I remembered back to a time when I’d been attacked by two masked men who’d ransacked my Lancaster flat, a year before the fire that had eventually driven me out of the place. At the time I’d been comforted by the fact that they’d hidden their faces from me. Taken it as an indication that, whatever else their intentions, at least they didn’t want me dead. If so, why bother to conceal their identities? The same possibility had obviously occurred to Ivan now, but he was too stubborn or too proud to voice it.

His eyes flicked from the SIG Hofmann was loosely but expertly pointing in his direction, to the Lucznik I had slung across my knees. As much as he could do with his wrists manacled above his head, he allowed himself to slump back into the corner of the seat and fell into a petulant silence.

When I next turned to glance at him, he was apparently sleeping, with his head tilted sideways, resting on his upraised arms, and his lips slightly parted. In that guise he looked too young, too innocent, to have masterminded the kind of vicious killing spree that was suspected.

Nevertheless, I made a silent vow not to turn my back on him if I could help it.

Ahead of us and off to the left, the sky was just beginning to lighten as the sun rose out over the Czech republic and stretched long shadowed fingers towards the eastern border of Germany. I watched Sean putting every ounce of effort into piloting the car safely south and tried not to think about the last time any of us had seen our beds.

As it was, someone had weighted my eyelids when I wasn’t looking. I blinked and realised several kilometres had passed in the meantime. God, I was so tired everything had begun to ache again. Sean had the car’s air con system turned down cool enough to keep him sharp, but it was just making me more sleepy.

Well, maybe I could allow myself just five minutes . . .

***

I jerked awake almost instantly, it seemed, to find that we were barely moving and an hour had passed.

“Where are we?” I demanded, my pulse suddenly stepping up with guilt at my lapse in concentration.

“Just outside Nürnberg,” Sean tossed across and the exasperation showed clearly in his voice. “Bloody traffic.”

I sat up from the slithered position I’d drooped into and looked around me. Ahead all I could see was the tailgate of a massive truck on Swiss plates. Alongside was a pair of middle-aged suits in a BMW. They were either too world-weary, or too polite, to look perturbed at having a car filled with armed desperadoes and a hostage right next to them.

For the next forty-five minutes we barely made a couple of kilometres. The loudest noise inside the car was the slap of the wipers on intermittent across the screen, like an irregular heartbeat. The traffic grew steadily thicker as the morning filled out into rush hour. It was agonisingly slow.

“We’re going to have to stop and fill up again,” Sean said at last, glancing down at the instrument panel. “It may as well be now.” He caught Hofmann’s eye in the rear-view mirror and nodded towards Ivan. “Do you want to hood him up again?”

Hofmann put the SIG in his pocket and slid the knife out of his boot again.

“No,” he said ominously. “If he makes trouble I will deal with him quietly enough.”

Sean left the engine running again, despite the obvious disapproval of the filling station attendant, while he poured in litre upon litre of
Super bleifrei
. The Skyline seemed to have an appetite for fuel that was of alcoholic proportions. It had consumed an exorbitant amount since our last stop, but economy was not supposed to be one of its assets under these conditions.

I ran in to pay to lessen the time we were off the road and also so that Sean could move the car further away from prying eyes. Even without his hood, Ivan was still handcuffed to the grab rail and looked suspiciously like he was being taken somewhere against his will rather than being rescued. It wasn’t a scenario we wanted to have to explain in detail to anyone, least of all to the police.

It all took up precious time, minute after minute of it. When we rejoined the A6, now heading west towards Heilbronn, I was aware that Gregor was probably already on route to Einsbaden. The wheels were in motion and couldn’t be called back nor cancelled out.

I tried to ring Major Gilby again to let him know our progress, but this time the Manor’s phone line rang out without reply. There’s rarely something good will come about from an unanswered phone. My mind started constructing its own spurious reasons, each more fantastical than the last, but I couldn’t ignore the likelihood that Gregor Venko was already there, and that the Manor had already fallen to his forces.

I caught Sean’s anxious gaze as I ended the dead call. His eyes were red-rimmed from staring into the artificial airflow, fatigue pinching his cheeks into hollows.

I wondered if he could force himself to this kind of stamina naturally or if he’d taken anything in order to sustain it. I couldn’t think of a way to ask that wouldn’t insult him.

“It’ll be OK,” I said, more to reassure myself than him. “We’ll get there.”

“That’s not the worry,” he said, raising a half smile even though his voice was flat. “It’s what we’ll find there when we do.”

***

At Heilbronn we turned south again, back onto the B10 for Stuttgart and the penultimate leg. The traffic stayed obstinately thick and cumbersome. Since Nürnberg we’d been able to average barely eighty miles an hour. I was almost glad when
Madeleine II
began to give us the countdown warnings to our final junction. That feeling didn’t last for long.

By the time we were onto the tortuous back roads heading for our destination, Sean’s temper was racked to breaking point by sheer overwhelming exhaustion.

He drove with a kind of controlled violence now, taking blatant risks to get past other vehicles. Yet still he seemed to maintain a light deft touch on the Skyline’s controls as it screamed and scrabbled and snorted along the narrow roads. Like a master rider on a horse that was totally insane.

***

Ten o’clock.

The deadline came and went, and still we were half a lifetime from Einsbaden. The village had always seemed so close to the Manor, but now some giant joke of fate kept moving it further away.

But, when we finally skittered between the griffin-topped gateposts and I checked my watch, I discovered that despite the increased congestion we had shaved a further two minutes off the outward trip from the Manor to the autobahn. Nevertheless, it was now ten-ten.

Ten minutes too late, perhaps?

The barrier on the driveway was down. Sean cursed, shifting his foot off the accelerator and beginning to brake. We’d barely shaken off speed when two figures stepped out from behind the guard hut and pointed submachine guns meaningfully in our direction.

For a second I thought that Major Gilby had posted a couple of his men to watch for our return, but as soon as the thought had formed I dismissed it. He didn’t have two to spare.

I registered the fact that they were strangers at the same instant that the Uzis they were carrying began to sing. The flashes from each muzzle became a continuous blaze as they opened fire. I ducked down behind the level of the dash top as my side of the windscreen crazed.

Sean got back on the power without any thought to a progressive throttle. The Skyline leapt forwards, snarling, and ran towards the men with the guns. I heard the whiz and twang of the rounds hitting the bodywork, but the big car shook them off and kept coming.

Too late perhaps, our attackers realised Sean wasn’t trying to evade them. The front edge of the bonnet hit the barrier, snapping it off and hurling it aside like a broken lance. One of the men jumped for cover, rolling into the trees.

We clipped the other man’s thigh with the front wing as he moved just too slowly to avoid us. He flew backwards with a grunt, dropping the Uzi and disappearing from view. Sean never even looked in the mirror.

“Well, that gives you your answer about Gregor,” he said tightly. “He’s here.”

I sat up again and shook the fragments of broken glass off my clothing. I’d picked up a couple of scratches from the splinters on the backs of my hands. Other than that I’d been lucky.

The holes in the windscreen would have been at head height if I’d been taller. Sean’s height, for instance. I realised they’d been aiming for the driver, but they’d been thrown by the fact that – to them – he was sitting on the wrong side of the car.

I readied the PM-98, keeping my finger outside the trigger guard for the moment. Hofmann released Ivan’s hands from the grab rail, re-cuffing them in front of him so we could get him out quickly. Gregor’s sighting of his son could be vital if we were going to avoid being shot to pieces.

The front of the Manor forecourt was deserted, but Sean must have spotted something because he snatched the wheel over at the last moment and headed for the parking area at the rear of the house.