HARD KNOCKS: Charlie Fox book three

by Zoe Sharp

  “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 frownin
g. 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 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 glan
ce 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.