Hard Knocks tcfs-3

by Zoe Sharp

  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.

  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.

  Twenty-seven

  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 use
d 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 scrabb
led 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.