Hard Knocks (46 page)

When he moved aside I found myself staring into Jan’s shock-glazed eyes. The rage that had transported her to the edge of madness was dissipated, spent. She was sitting hunched on the ground half a dozen metres away, breathing quick and shallow, with her right hand curled lifelessly in her lap. I don’t know what happened to the P7 she’d been holding.

Even so, two of the men so recently under her command were standing close by, their MP5Ks trained on her. Another had a medical kit open on the ground and was dealing efficiently with the wound. I’d managed to plant the shot high through the fleshy part of her right arm across the swell of her bicep and despite his best efforts she was losing blood in a steady stream down the sleeve of her jacket.

Hofmann ordered the release of Gilby’s men and Sean. The squaddie who un-cuffed Sean moved back from him quickly when he’d done it, as though afraid of reprisal. Sean merely dropped the handcuffs contemptuously at his feet and came straight over to me. He skimmed his gaze over Jan as he passed, coldly expressionless, but she was unaware of his presence.

“Can you get up?” he asked me. When I stared at him stupidly he grasped my upper arms and hoisted me gently to my feet. I doubt I would have got there without his help. Once I was upright I found I could stand of my own volition, providing I didn’t try doing anything absurdly athletic. Like breathing deep, or walking.

Sean continued to hold me steady even when there was no longer any need to do so, head bent close in to mine so I could see the individual tiny flecks of colour in the irises of his eyes. His thumbs were unconsciously brushing circles against my arms.

He was watching me with that darkly brooding frown on his face, the muscles bunching under his jaw. It took him a while before he was in control enough to speak.

“Don’t
do
that to me, Charlie,” he managed at last on a growl. “We’ve only just got things out in the open between us and now you’ve got some kind of a death wish!” His fingers gripped harder, making my shoulders hunch.

“Sean, go easy,” I said, but my voice wasn’t as steady as I would have liked it to be.

He almost shook me. “Christ, there you were on your knees with your eyes shut like you were waiting calmly for your own execution, and you tell me to go easy!” He stopped, lips compressed, eyes skating over my face. “Jesus, Charlie,” he said, softly now, “sometimes you terrify me.”

“What did you want me to do? She would have killed him,” I protested, shaky. “I’d have stood a better chance of reasoning with a shark than of talking her out of it. You saw how she was! Besides, you were the one who walked up and stuck a gun in her face. And that wasn’t supposed to frighten me?”

“I know,” he said, and being forced to admit it made him glower even more, “but I didn’t actually try and kill her. Governments take a very dim view of foreigners who shoot their security services personnel – however crazy they’re acting at the time. For God’s sake – they would have thrown away the key.”

I looked at him blankly for a moment, then shrugged out of his grasp and backed away from him. Suddenly cold, I rubbed at my arms where he’d been touching them, whispered, “Just what exactly did you think I was trying to do, Sean?”

He stilled, but before he could speak Gilby came over. “Venko got away,” he said quietly. His eyes flicked to me. “I hope you realise what you’ve done, Charlie.”

“I gave him my word,” I said, unrepentant. “If I’d gone back on it he would have murdered all of us, then gone after our families. You were there, Major. You heard him say it.”

I glanced across to where Romundstad and Declan were standing with Heidi Krauss, looking faintly embarrassed. She was still clinging to Romundstad, crying inconsolably into the front of his jacket, hands meshed into the fabric like she was never going to let him go. I remembered Dieter’s hysteria, that day in Gilby’s study. They’d both suffered more than they could bear. More, probably, than they would ever completely recover from.

“He may still try,” Gilby pointed out now, “but if the Germans had got him, Venko wouldn’t have had the chance to carry out any threats.”

I thought of the size and scope of an organisation like Gregor Venko’s. It didn’t die away because you cut off its head. It just grew another. More ugly.

“I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “I did what I thought was right.”

I thought of Gregor’s parting words.
“I will not forget this. I will not forget you . . .”

I’d risked my life, and those of the others, to save his son. I blanked out the possibility that he might blame me for the ambush. Any other way of handling it was too scary to contemplate.

“I’ll deal with it when I have to,” I said, weary to the point of tears. “Right now I just want to go home.”

The Major nodded, exchanged a look with Sean that I didn’t fully catch, and moved away.

I started to move, too, but Sean put his hands on my shoulders and turned me back to face him. “Don’t do it, Charlie,” he said.

His sudden intensity confused me. “Don’t do what?”

“Don’t go back to Cheshire,” he said. “Not permanently, anyway. They’ll smother you. Come back to Kings Langley with me.”

For a moment I was frozen by both hope and fear.

“What are you offering here, Sean?”

He saw my wariness, responded with caution of his own. “Whatever you’re prepared to take,” he said carefully. “A job, for a start. A home.”

If I’d taken half a step towards him he would have matched it. I know he would. I couldn’t quite bring myself to let go of that final reservation. Maybe Sean felt the same way.

It would come, though. If we let it.

“OK Sean, I’ll do it,” I said, and knew by his face that he remembered the last time I’d said those words, back on the day of Kirk’s funeral when he’d first asked me to go to Germany. I saw too that he realised, possibly for the first time, that what I agreed to now I’d also agreed to then.

He didn’t try and hide the relief, just smiled at me. After a moment or so I smiled back.

After all, we’d both accepted that there was no going back to what we’d had before.

But that didn’t mean we couldn’t go forwards.

I flew home three days later. Alone.

Sean had stayed on to help sort out the mess Ivan’s capture, retrieval and release had caused, and to finally close the case on Kirk’s death. Major Gilby had decided to come completely clean about what had really happened there. About O’Neill’s part in Blakemore’s death, too, and Rebanks’s nasty little sideline. Even the truth about the accident which had claimed the life of McKenna’s uncle might finally emerge.

Gilby was going to be lucky to stay out of prison, never mind keep Einsbaden Manor intact. I just hoped he was right about the spread of Dieter Krauss’s influence. He was going to need it.

It was, Sean told me with a weary smile, all going to take some time. He would call me as soon as he got back to the UK. We would take things from there.

“No backing out now, Charlie,” he’d murmured, touching the side of my face as he said it.

“No,” I’d agreed. “No backing out.”

Before any of the rest of us were allowed to go we went through a debriefing by the Germans that reminded me almost of the Resistance-to-Interrogation exercises I’d endured in the army. In the end, though, they decided the line they were going to take was that none of this had ever happened. We would all do as well to remember what it was we had to forget.

I asked Hofmann what they were going to do with Jan, but the look on his face told me I didn’t want to know. He warned me that Gregor Venko seemed to have gone underground and had taken his family with him. It had been read as a sign he was about to get dangerous, to start a campaign, and I should watch my back.

The only good news he brought was that Elsa was set to make a full recovery from her flesh wound, even if she was going to have to wear a one-piece bathing suit in future.

Madeleine managed to reschedule my ticket so I flew direct to Manchester without the hassle of the stops and changes I’d gone through on the way out. I carefully scrutinised my fellow passengers as they boarded, but none of them looked like an Eastern European assassin except the head stewardess. I didn’t eat the airline food, just in case, but I probably wouldn’t have done so anyway.

I rang home before I left and my father agreed without hesitation to meet me at the airport. He was waiting at the barrier when I cleared through Customs.

He studied my face gravely for a few moments without speaking. I don’t know what he saw there, but the smile he gave me was hesitant. As though he recognised the events I’d gone through and he was just a little afraid of what they’d done to me.

It wasn’t until I was in the passenger seat of his Jaguar, heading along the M56, that he spoke, his voice neutral.

“Was it—” he paused, as if searching for the correct phrase and came up with, “—very bad?”

I stopped peering into the mirror on my sun visor, trying to watch the cars following us, and turned to face him. His fingers rested apparently lightly on the rim of the steering wheel, but his eyes were a little too fixed on the road ahead.

What could I tell him? That I’d gambled with his safety. That I’d recklessly endangered his secure, comfortable existence and that of my mother. And for what? To help the psychopathic child of an equally psychotic father escape justice. What had I achieved by that?

Heidi’s future
, I told myself.
My own survival
. Suddenly it didn’t seem like a convincing argument.

Finally, I said, “Yes.”

He nodded. “So what are you going to do now?”

“Sean’s offered me a job again,” I said. “This time I think I’m going to take it.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Close protection,” I said. “A bodyguard.”

He glanced across quickly. “Quite apart from my feelings on the subject of Sean Meyer,” he said grimly, “are you sure that’s a wise decision, Charlotte?”

No, I wasn’t. Especially not when I couldn’t shake the feeling that Sean didn’t entirely believe my intent when I’d winged Jan. He knew first-hand just how good a marksman I’d been in the army, but even so he’d still been certain that the shot I’d so carefully calculated to wound and disable had been aimed to kill. What kind of long-term prospects did that leave open to us?

Now I shrugged rather helplessly. “The army didn’t want me,” I said, aware of the tiredness in my voice. “What else am I good for?”

He made no answer and we didn’t speak again until he pulled up onto the gravel outside my parents’ house, forty-five minutes later. I looked up at the ivy-strung walls and measured architecture. I knew that it looked just the same as it had done when I’d left. It must just be me who was different.

I climbed out and moved towards the front door, mentally gearing myself up for a reunion with my mother. I was wondering how to break the news that they were going to have to get a panic alarm installed, when he stopped me.

“There was a delivery for you yesterday,” he said. “Don’t you want to see it?”

Just for a second I tensed with a thousand nasty possibilities before common sense took over. I shrugged again. He eyed my apathy with a moment’s concern, then pressed the button on the Jaguar’s alarm remote which also operated the garage door. It lifted gradually.

Inside, right at the back, was my old RGV Suzuki. Next to it, looking so much bigger by comparison, gleaming like an oiled-up bodybuilder, was a Honda FireBlade on a brand new plate. I walked towards it slowly, feeling the prickle of the hairs rising at the back of my neck.

My father followed me in and was watching my reaction. He reached past me for a manila envelope that was tucked behind the front screen and handed it over.

“It came with this,” he said. “I thought perhaps you ought to be the one who opened it.”

I slit the top flap with my thumb and pulled out a sheaf of papers. The top one was a bill of sale from a London dealer, made out in my name and stamped Paid in Full. Stapled to the top left-hand corner was a piece of plain white card. On it, a flamboyant hand had written just a mobile phone number and the words, “Sometimes you CAN have what you want. Thank you.” It was signed, “Gregor.”

“Who’s Gregor?” my father asked.

I put the papers back into the envelope and looked at the bike. It was gorgeous. I ran my hand over paintwork on the tank that was so smooth and so unblemished it was silky to the touch. There was zero mileage on the clock, and the release agent still shone like skin on the virgin tyres.

“Oh, he’s just someone I did a favour for,” I said softly.

Definitely a promise then, not a threat.

My father looked at me, waiting for me to go on. At last he said, “It must have been some favour.”

“Yes,” I said, and realised that I was smiling. “Yes, it was.”