Hard Knocks

by Zoe Sharp

“Madeleine’s been doing some digging. Apparently Heidi isn’t the first to have been taken. There have been six abductions in the last year that match the same pattern. Snatched by a small but heavily armed group who aren’t afraid to shoot first and ask questions later. They’ve left a trail of bodies halfway across Europe.”

  “Elsa said the housekeeper and one of the bodyguards was killed in the raid,” I agreed. I glanced up. The wind was sending clouds rushing past the face of the moon, making the light level rise and fall across the roof like a swinging lantern.

  “It isn’t just bystanders.” I could feel rather than see Sean shaking his head. “According to my source, four of the victims turned up dead as well, regardless of whether the ransoms were paid or not.” He paused. “Not encouraging odds as far as the Krauss girl is concerned.”

  “So why did Gilby’s bunch go off at the deep end when Elsa brought the subject up?” I wondered aloud.

  “That’s not a difficult one,” Sean said. “The bodyguard who died was one of his former pupils. So was the lad who lost a leg.”

  “Nasty.” Hardly surprising that the Major had reacted like someone had just jabbed him with a cattle prod. I wondered if Elsa knew the connection when she prepared her little speech and, if so, what she’d hoped to gain from it. I made a mental note to ask her the first chance I got.

  “Yeah, that’s what happens when you get shot with a hollowpoint,” Sean said. “It tends to do a lot of damage.”

  “Just like Kirk. Is there a connection, or are hollowpoints just this year’s dumdum fashion accessory?”

  I heard the smile in Sean’s voice. “I doubt it,” he said. “There are a lot of them about. People prefer them because they dissipate their energy into the first body they hit, rather than passing on through to the next man. Less chance of hitting someone on your own team.”

  I pondered on that one for a moment. “Any ideas who’s behind the kidnappings?” I asked.

  “It looks like the handiwork of a guy called Gregor Venko.”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” I said. “What kind of name is Venko?”

  “I’d be worried if you had heard of him. Nobody seems to know exactly where he came from, but he walked out of the ruins of the former Yugoslavia with a dubiously-acquired personal fortune and an organisation that the Mafia would – and have tried to – kill him for. He’s involved in everything from gunrunning to political assassination, drugs, prostitution, illegal immigrants. If there’s money to be made out of it, just about any place in eastern Europe, then good old Gregor’s had a hand in the deal somewhere.”

  “Sounds like a real charmer,” I said. Another vicious blast of wind sliced its way through my jacket and embedded itself firmly in my ribs. I shivered, pulling my collar up more tightly around my chin.

  “He is, by all accounts. His ex-wife spends all her time sozzled out of her skull in a resort on the Black Sea, and his son—”

  As he spoke there was a noise from somewhere below. A bang like that last gust of wind had caught an open door and slammed it shut.

  “Wait one,” I interrupted. I put the phone down next to the chimney and rose cautiously to my feet. I crept over to the low wall that looked down over the back of the house and peered over the top of it.

  Below me, walking quickly along the path that led away from the house towards the armoury and the ranges, was the figure of a man. The moon had darted out into view and was bright enough to lay a sharp-edged silhouette along the ground behind him.

  The man was wearing a greatcoat that came almost down to his ankles, but even so I recognised Gilby’s distinctive upright gait. He was carrying something, but I couldn’t quite make out what it was.

  I watched for a few moments longer and was just about to move away when another figure detached itself from the shadows of the house and made off after the Major. This second man kept to cover like a pro, moving swiftly and quietly.

  As though warned by some sixth sense, Gilby stopped, circled slowly as though expecting to find someone behind him. I saw his head rise, scanning the windows of the house and even the roof line. My imagination made him pause over my location, made my heart bounce with fright. Then he turned and carried on.

  I let my breath out shakily and edged back over to my chimney.

  “What is it?” Sean demanded, tense, when I was back on the line.

  “I heard a door. Looks like Gilby’s off to the ranges, though it’s a bit late for weapons’ practice. Somebody’s following him.”

  “Did you see who it was?”

  I shook my head then realised, as Sean must have done, that it was a pointless gesture. “No. It’s too dark and whoever it was he wasn’t trying to be seen, if you get me. If he goes again tomorrow night, I might try to get a closer look.”

  I could have been mistaken, but I thought I heard Sean suck in a breath. “You be careful,” he said.

  I frowned. “It’s what I’m here for, Sean.”

  “I know it is,” he said, and there was no doubt about his serious tone. “But just remember it was what Salter was there for, too.”

  “I hardly think,” I said dryly, “that I’m likely to forget.”

  “Has anyone mentioned Salter?”

  I paused. So much seemed to have happened since my arrival in Germany that the death of Kirk Salter had almost been pushed to the back of my mind.

  “No,” I said at last, “but we don’t get out onto the gun range until tomorrow. I thought that might be a good time to bring the subject up.”

  “How are you going to play it – with the shooting?”

  “Like one of the hopeless and pathetic females they already assume me to be,” I said, and couldn’t entirely help the sneer in my voice.

  “More fool them for underestimating you,” Sean said softly. “You watch your back though, Charlie.”

  There was a warmth there that threatened to turn my brain a little mushy.

  I shook it off.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I always do. And speaking of watching my back, I picked up an interesting tail during my driving lesson today.” And I told him all about the four men in the Peugeot.

  “It certainly rattled everyone, although Figgis tried to make out it was all part of the set-up,” I said. “The Major’s trying to play it cool, but he goes off at the deep end if any of the instructors disappear on their own for too long.”

  “It begins to sound like the place is under threat,” Sean murmured. I could almost hear his brain beginning to turn over.

  “I did wonder,” I agreed. “What if we consider the possibility that Kirk wasn’t killed by the school, but because he was here? Some kind of warning, perhaps?”

  “If that’s the case why dump his body and cover up the connection? If Gilby’s being threatened by an outside source, surely having one of his men shot dead would put the authorities on his side?”

  “It could also shut him down,” I pointed out. “Maybe that was the intention. Does Gilby have any opposition round here who might want him out of business? Or failing that, who’s he upset in a big way recently?”

  Sean promised to try and find me some answers before we spoke again. We didn’t linger over our goodbyes. I switched off the phone when I’d finished the call, preserving the battery even though the indicator was still showing it fully charged.

  I crossed the roof grateful to be getting back inside. I pulled the outer door closed behind me, and slid the bolts back into position, then I turned.

  A man was looming behind me in the gloomy stairwell.

  I gave a gasp of shock, took a step back, and felt my feet shifting into a stance almost of their own volition. I had to stop myself from bringing my hands up. Had to abort the blow I’d been about to launch.

  There had been a time when I would have gone for a defensive block before I’d have ever thrown a punch. It was what I’d taught my self-defence students. And I’d believed it was the right way.

  Painful – not to say nearly deadly –
experience had taught me that a pre-emptive strike was by far the best defence. To hell with fair play. To hell with waiting for the other man to make the first move. This wasn’t sport. He wasn’t your opponent. He was your enemy.

  And if there were consequences, well so be it. Consequences could only be faced if you were around afterwards to face them.

  “Now just what would you be up to, Fox?” demanded the thick Belfast tones that could only be O’Neill. He spoke softly, let the accent threaten by association.

  I put my hand on my chest and noticed that his eyes followed it. I made a play of trying to steady my breathing. “Christ, you frightened the life out of me!” I said. “Don’t do that.”

  O’Neill moved forwards into the light and grinned. The scar pulled his face into a lopsided tilt, but he wasn’t to be deflected. “Well? What were you doing out on the roof?”

  I shrugged. “Doing a recce,” I said. “Major Gilby told us that we should learn the layout of the Manor for this exercise he’s planning for us next week.”

  I was suddenly thankful for such a decent excuse. It was so much more convenient to use the truth rather than have to invent a lie. “The roof’s a great vantage point, and you could get to the rooms on the second floor via the balcony, no trouble. I thought it was worth checking out.”

  He eyed me shrewdly, head on one side. “You’re not just a pretty face, are you now?” he said slowly. “Up here alone are you?”

  I remembered Rebanks’s sly comments about having to get past the instructors if we wanted to investigate the men’s quarters. I felt my face begin to colour. “Yes,” I said, more than a little defensive.

  “Hmm, so you didn’t bother to share your thoughts about the roof with anyone else then?” He regarded me for a moment longer and it was hard to know if he was impressed or disappointed. “Not much of a team player are you, Fox?”

  ***

  The following morning, right after the usual punishment that was phys, we had our first introduction to firearms. Sean had told me to expect a motley collection of old Bulgarian Makarov pistols, but when we trooped down to the indoor range I discovered that Gilby had updated his armoury since then. A line of very new-looking SIG Sauer 9mms were waiting for us on a bench to one side.

  “Now then,” Rebanks said, “hands up anyone who has ever handled or fired a gun of any description before?”

  About half the group raised their hands. This included Hofmann and Elsa, which I would have expected given their backgrounds. More of a surprise was Jan, who also put her hand up. After a moment’s hesitation, I raised mine, too. I reckoned it was easier to fake a reaction as a bumbling amateur, rather than as a complete beginner.

  “OK, in that case most of you will already know that these are lethal weapons. They only have one purpose in life, and that’s death. There’s no safety catch on these babies, so stay alert. You fuck about with these, you don’t take them seriously, and you will end up killing someone,” Rebanks said with an evil grin. “Do I make myself clear? OK, let’s get on with it.”

  He ran quickly through the different parts of the weapons, how to load and unload the magazine, how to tell if they were safe and clear, what to do if you had a stoppage.

  “One last thing,” Rebanks said as we were each handed our own gun and a box of shells. “Quite a few people who come on these courses decide they’d like to take a couple of live rounds home with them as a souvenir.” He eyed the group. We all tried to look innocent, as though that was the last thing to cross any of our minds.

  “If that thought had occurred to you, forget it!” he went on. “For those of you who’ll be going back to the UK, they take a pretty dim view of it over there now anyway and we don’t appreciate you nicking it from us, either. So, at the end of every session here you’ll be required to give what we call a range declaration, right? If you’re then found with anything on you that you shouldn’t have, you take the long walk out of here. Clear?”

  We all murmured our understanding. It was the same procedure as I’d followed on every army range I’d ever been on. Except the penalty then was somewhat more severe.

  Blakemore, O’Neill and Todd were acting as Rebanks’s assistants for the class. They fitted us out with ear defenders and eye shields, which were loaded into a universal plastic carry tray with a handle in the middle. It was a good way of keeping everything together and also, I acknowledged, it stopped us putting things into our pockets.

  I was put into the first group to shoot. We moved through a pair of soundproof doors into the range itself, a low-roofed slot of a room with scarred walls and a huge sand berm heaped up at the far end to catch the fired rounds.

  There were eight lanes marked out, with a solid counter about four feet high that ran right the way across the firing position. I picked the far left-hand lane and plonked my carry tray down on the counter top in front of it.

  McKenna was in the lane next to me. After his outburst of the previous morning, he seemed quiet and withdrawn.

  “OK, I won’t ask you to try and produce groupings at this stage,” Rebanks said, condescending. “Just aim for the target and that’ll be enough for me. Fire when you’re ready.”

  I took my time over getting sorted, fussed over making sure my ear defenders were in the right place, aware all the time of Todd standing behind me. I didn’t know if it was my imagination, but the big physical training instructor seemed to be watching me more than the others.

  Once my ears were covered, the sound of my breathing became loud and rasping inside my head. I concentrated on slowing the rate for a moment or so before I picked up the SIG and slid the magazine into the grip. As Rebanks had pointed out, there was no conventional safety catch, so as soon as I pinched back the slide to chamber the first round, the weapon became active. I hadn’t fired the P226 model before, but as soon as it settled in my fist it felt right. It fitted.

  I held the gun in both hands, bringing it up until I knew by instinct that the front and rear sights had come into alignment. We were using standard military paper targets that showed the head and shoulders of a snarling soldier. They were pasted to a flat board and set at the seven metre distance on the range.

  To my right, McKenna fired his first shot, jerking the trigger and only just managing to clip the extreme top edge of the board, which splintered wildly. Out of the corner of my vision, I saw Todd shift to stand behind him instead.

  I let out my breath and squeezed the trigger, aiming for the eye of my target. The gun fired with a muffled bang, but very little recoil. The trigger action was smooth and progressive.

  When I checked my target, the eye was gone.

  I glanced sideways and saw that the rest of the targets were gradually filling with random holes. I carefully emptied the rest of my magazine in what I hoped was a haphazard pattern around the board, deliberately bypassing it altogether with the last two, which I put straight into the berm at the back of my lane.

  “OK everyone,” Rebanks called. “Place your weapon on the counter in front of you, pointing down range, if you don’t mind, and let’s have a look how you’ve done.”

  We all did as ordered, pulled off our ear defenders and eye shields and the outside world suddenly got brighter and louder again. There was a wisp of smoke drifting inside the range, even with the extractor fans switched on. I breathed in the faintly familiar cocktail of cordite, gun oil, and nervous sweat.

  Rebanks sauntered along the line, dishing out comments and criticism. Mostly the latter.

  The standard varied enormously. Shirley must have been holding her gun with the barrel drooping, because she’d only managed to get two onto the target at all, right at the bottom edge. After her poor performance in the driving session that morning, she was looking thoroughly dispirited.

  Hofmann came out on top, placing all his shots within a four-inch square area right in the centre of his target, and he was looking pretty smug about it. Rebanks made much of him, but to be honest I would have expected better from an ex-
military shooter, particularly at such close quarters.

  “OK, that was only mildly horrible,” Rebanks said cheerfully when he’d finished. “Now let’s try and get some groupings going, shall we?”

  We reloaded and fired again. Two lanes down Declan had a stoppage which he struggled to clear. He didn’t have the brute strength to force the slide back to eject the jammed round. In his desperation he started getting careless about where he was pointing the business end of the barrel as he wrestled with the gun.

  Rebanks stopped us all shooting immediately while he tore the Irishman off a strip. “You have a problem, you keep the pistol pointing down the range at all times, is that clear, Mr Lloyd?” he yelled. “This is not a toy, it’s a deadly fucking weapon. We’ve never had an accident yet where anybody’s been injured on this range, but you do that again and I’ll shoot you myself. D’you understand me?”