Hard Knocks

by Zoe Sharp

  Hofmann shrugged. “In your position,” he said, “I would do the same.”

  The back of the Nissan looked tiny, but the big German managed to fold his large frame up small enough to squeeze in behind my seat. It was only as Sean climbed into the driver’s side that I registered for the first time that the car was right-hand drive.

  “How the hell are you going to manage overtaking anything in this when you’re sitting on the wrong side of the car?” I asked.

  Sean flashed his teeth as he twisted the key in the ignition and the twin-turbo engine growled into life like the ringmaster had just prodded it with a chair and a whip.

  “You’ll have to call gaps in traffic for me,” he said. “Just give me the same amount of room you’d go for on a bike and I’ll get us through.”

  I rolled my eyes and suppressed a groan.

  Gilby leaned past me into the car and pressed something in the centre console. There were three faint beeps and then part of the stereo slid out and unfolded upright into a TV screen about seven inches across.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve got Alpine navigation as well?” Sean said, surprise in his voice.

  “Naturally,” Gilby said, unable to suppress the note of pride. “It covers the whole of Europe. Just punch in your destination and it’ll give you the fastest route.”

  Hofmann leaned forwards and gave him the street name on the outskirts of Berlin, spelling it out for him.

  “When you bought this puppy, Major,” Sean murmured as he quickly programmed the Alpine, “you certainly went for all the toys.”

  “Just keep your eye on the exhaust gas temperature and try not to melt the turbos,” Gilby advised, trying to make light of it even though his voice showed the strain he was under. “And don’t trash it. Nissan don’t make them any more. It’s practically irreplaceable.”

  I looked up from stowing the PM-98s in the bottom of my footwell. “Valentine,” I said gently, “if we don’t make it either way then I think finding you another car is going to be the least of our worries.”

  He nodded at that, face serious. “Good luck then,” he said and ducked back out, closing the door on us.

  “OK, is everybody buckled up?” Sean asked. That quick grin again, like a schoolboy who’s found his father’s hidden car keys. That restless edge. “I would ask you not to move about the cabin while the fasten seatbelts sign is on. We may be experiencing some turbulence.”

  From the back I heard Hofmann groan. “Now, for sure,” he said, “we are all going to die.”

  Twenty-six

  Getting from the narrow twisting back roads around Einsbaden to the main autobahn heading for Stuttgart took a perilous nineteen minutes. It made my wild taxi ride on the way in seem like a Sunday cruise.

  I tried not to clutch faithlessly at the base of my seat during that first part of the journey, but I feared that Gilby was never going to get rid of the indentations my fingers made in the leather upholstery. Suddenly I understood why Hofmann had opted for the rear.

  The headlights on the Skyline were far better than my Suzuki’s glow-worm-in-a-milk-bottle effort, but at that kind of speed they took on a delayed reaction, as though we were constantly arriving at the edge of darkness before the xenon bulbs had the chance to fully illuminate it.

  Sean drove to the very limit of visibility, which by my reckoning was some distance beyond the limit of sanity. The lights cut jagged swathes through the scenery as signposts, rocks, trees and junctions leapt towards us with a terrifying lack of clarity, blurring into a subliminal image before they’d ever had the chance to solidify. The broken white lines in the centre of the road became a single continuous streak.

  As for the corners, I’d thought Figgis had taken the bends more than fast enough on his demonstration drives in the school Audis. But that was in daytime. Midnight’s veil lent an extra hallucinatory dimension to the trip that I’d been unprepared for, and I surreptitiously hauled my lap belt as tight as it would go across my hips.

  I needed to. When we came up on the occasional sleepy piece of lumbering traffic Sean had to stand on the brakes so hard I ended up hanging forwards against my seatbelt. Even little old ladies seem to drive like demons in Germany. By comparison, when we were balked by them I felt I could have got out and walked faster.

  To begin with, my fear kept me from calling the gaps that Sean had demanded. I rapidly discovered that if I didn’t do it he pulled out anyway, putting my side of the car into the firing line first. Gradually, as I realised just how quick the Nissan was, just how catapult-like its acceleration, I relaxed my death grip enough to begin to participate more fully.

  And almost – but not quite – to enjoy the ride.

  The Alpine navigation system not only showed a small-scale map of the immediate area on the screen, but also gave out verbal instructions in female tones so calm they were almost tranquillised. The only trouble was that whoever designed it obviously hadn’t been expecting its end user to be driving like a lunatic. Once or twice it directed us to take turnings which seemed to flash up too fast for us to make them. When that happened the system instantly re-routed, without so much as a sigh to rebuke the driver. Sean was very taken with its uncritical approach and I mentally christened it Madeleine II.

  Although I trusted his abilities, it was still a relief when we hit the main A81 to the west of Stuttgart and I no longer had the responsibility for our safety. Sean flexed his fingers on the steering wheel as we pulled on to the twin-lane road, and then he really put his foot down. It hadn’t occurred to me until that point just how much he’d been holding back.

  Over the next half-dozen kilometres or so I watched in amazement as the speedo needle climbed. Where before it had never dropped below sixty, now it rocketed past a hundred, then one-fifty. Was that in kilometres an hour? The peril sensitivity section of my brain shut down, totally refusing to compute the numbers.

  “Sean,” I said carefully as a truck in the next lane was sucked backwards past us like it was falling, “just how fast are we going – in real money?”

  His eyes dipped fractionally. “In miles an hour?” he said. “About one-seventy.”

  His face was cast pale in the instrumentation lighting, his jaw clenched in pure concentration, eyes narrowed. But I could tell that some small part at the back of his mind was smiling. This must have been every car-mad schoolboy’s fantasy come true, and Sean lived for danger. It was his life, his work.

  If I let it, it could be mine, too.

  The LCD display at the top of the centre console gave out vital engine temperature readings as the car thundered relentlessly on into the night. It was hot enough to grill steaks on just about any part of the motor you could name.

  At Heilbronn the Alpine’s voice politely directed us to turn east onto the A6 for Nürnberg. For a long time none of us spoke further, trying not to distract him.

  Sean had settled into a rhythm that kept the Skyline barrelling along at around a hundred and fifty miles an hour. After a while the speed became almost hypnotic. At Nürnberg we took the A9 for Bayreuth and Leipzig. We were eating up the miles, tearing them up and scattering the pieces behind us, but Berlin still seemed an impossible distance away.

  “At this rate,” Hofmann said from the back seat, his voice betraying his surprise, “there is a chance we will get there in time.”

  I twisted round just far enough to be able to see Hofmann’s face. “By the way,” I said, loud enough to be heard above the roar of engine, wind and tyre noise. “What did you and Elsa argue about that first day, on the terrace?”

  Hofmann leaned forwards slightly to catch the words and frowned, remembering. “Ah yes,” he said. “She thought she recognised me, from her time in the police no doubt. I thought my cover was blown. I had to tell her she was mistaken more forcefully than I would have liked.”

  I shifted my feet, my boots disturbing the weapons piled in the footwell. The action jogged my memory. “And it was you, wasn’t it, who set off that damned alarm i
n the armoury?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “It wasn’t my idea to do that to you, Charlie, but Major König was in the bathroom in your quarters relaying orders over her radio. She thought you were also trying to locate Ivan and she wanted you stopped.”

  I recalled Jan’s particular irritation the night I’d attacked Rebanks. Unlike Elsa, she hadn’t been interested so much in what I’d been up to, I realised now, as how I’d managed to get away with it.

  “I didn’t know anything about Ivan at that point,” I said. “I was just trying to find out what happened to Kirk.”

  “Ah yes, Kirk Salter,” Hofmann rumbled, “we knew all about him, of course.”

  “And you did nothing about it?” I asked, incredulous.

  “What could we do?” he asked with a shrug. “By the time we found out what Major Gilby was up to, the boy had already been taken and Salter was already dead. We would not have sanctioned such an operation had we been told about it in advance, but afterwards, well, we would have been foolish to ignore the possibilities.” He sighed heavily, his contrition apparently sincere. “It might have helped prevent more deaths. Already there have been so many.”

  Ahead of us, a car pulled out to overtake a convoy of trucks. The driver must have been doing over a hundred, but to us he was little better than a moving roadblock. Sean swore softly and I just had time to snap round straight in my seat as he stood on the brakes and dropped down two gears. As soon as the obstruction had cleared he was back hard on the gas again, romping the big bruiser of a car back up to its cruising velocity in sixth.

  It was only then that I turned to Hofmann again. “If you wanted to prevent further bloodshed, why did Jan take Ivan now,” I demanded, “when all our lives are at stake?”

  “We knew that Herr Meyer had been asking questions about Venko,” he said, nodding to Sean, “and naturally we knew of his reputation in hostage situations. When he turned up at the school Major König assumed that an exchange was imminent and she must have decided to act.”

  “Without consulting you,” Sean put in, his voice clipped either with anger or just by the fact that the majority of his brain was taken up with keeping us rubber side down on the black stuff.

  “I know you find it difficult to believe that I am being honest with you,” Hofmann said, “but I had my own theory about these kidnappings. One Major König did not want to entertain.”

  “And that was?”

  Hofmann paused, as though reluctant to put his ideas forwards just in case we, too dismissed them out of hand. He hutched forward a little further, so his head was nearly between the seats and he could speak to both of us more easily. I hoped he realised he was in perfect launch position for the front screen if we crashed.

  “These kidnappings are not Gregor Venko’s style. They’re too violent, too unpredictable. He’s an old-style gangster who still believes in honour among thieves,” he said, and I still had difficulty hearing him speak so fast and fluent. “To leave children slaughtered for no reason, to go back on his word – it’s just not Gregor.”

  “You almost sound as though you like him,” Sean said tightly.

  “Gregor’s a ruthless criminal. You need have no qualms that I’m going soft on you, Herr Meyer,” he said grimly. “Two weeks before Christmas I went to the funeral service of a man from his organisation who had agreed to pass us information. Gregor sent the man’s tongue and his ears to his widow gift-wrapped in a Tiffany box. We never found the rest of his body.” He shook his head and finished with great sadness that seemed for all the world to be genuine, “A pair of ears and a tongue do not go far towards filling a coffin.”

  “And still you think these kidnappings are not his style?” I said with just a hint of sarcasm.

  “No,” Hofmann said seriously, then added, “but they are Ivan’s.”

  “Ivan?” Both Sean and I said the name simultaneously. He flashed me a quick grin. In tune, it said, together.

  “Yes,” Hofmann went on, not noticing our brief, silent exchange. “He’s shown all the classic psychopathic tendencies since childhood. He started torturing animals, then worked his way up to other children. His mother sits in a sanatorium just outside Odessa and drinks like there will be no tomorrow. Who or what do you think drove her to do that?”

  I listened to Hofmann’s speech and yet I remembered Gregor’s pride when he spoke his son’s name. Parents could be blind to the faults of their offspring. Or were supposed to be, at any rate. Sometimes I wondered if mine had my shortcomings under a magnifier instead.

  “And what does Gregor do about his son’s nastier side?”

  “He’s aware of it, of course. He’s taken him to every disreputable shrink in Europe, but they can do nothing.” Hofmann shrugged. “So, all Gregor can do is surround him with bodyguards and try to keep him out of trouble.”

  “So you think Ivan’s been doing the kidnaps off his own bat, that Gregor really didn’t know about them?”

  “That’s what I believe, yes,” Hofmann confirmed. “It’s why Ivan had to buy guns from a two-bit player like Rebanks – because the last thing he wanted was for his father to find out.”

  “So that’s the real reason why Ivan’s minders were so desperate to get him back,” I realised out loud. “Not on behalf of daddy, but before he found out what had been going on and came down on them like a ton of hot bricks.”

  “I think that Gregor only discovered his son was missing shortly before he paid Major Gilby a visit. That is why he is willing to do a trade – to put right what Ivan’s done. He’s been clearing up after him since the boy was seven.”

  “Ivan is Gregor’s weakness,” Sean said. “He’ll be his downfall.”

  “I agree, and I have told Major König in the past that we should concentrate our efforts in that direction,” Hofmann said. He sat back in his seat, so that his voice became disembodied in the gloom. “It is just unfortunate that she’s chosen this moment in time to decide to listen to me.”

  ***

  We romped on northwards through Germany, only stopping briefly to satisfy the Skyline’s voracious thirst for high-octane petrol. The normally generous seventy-litre fuel tank was diminished by the severely reduced fuel economy of running at these speeds. We were forced to stop every hundred and thirty miles or so.

  The kilometre countdown signs for Bayreuth came and went, and then we were heading for Leipzig and I, too, began to allow the faint hope to form that we might just make it.

  I asked Hofmann another question over my shoulder, but there was no answer. When I squirmed round in my seat I found the big German had lolled his head back against the side glass, his jaw hanging slackly. Unbelievably, he’d gone to sleep.

  “It’s nice to see someone’s relaxed,” I said quietly to Sean. I jerked my head. “Hofmann’s spark out.”

  “You can tell he’s been a soldier,” he said. He smiled. “You might want to grab some kip now yourself. You never know when you’ll get the opportunity again.”

  “I’m OK,” I said, “and I’d rather stay awake.”

  As I said the words it struck me how frightened I should have been feeling. I did a quick mental search, just in case a huge example of classic denial of the situation was sitting lurking in the back of my mind, but found nothing. I was keyed up, yes. My stomach was clenched tight like I’d done a rake of Todd’s sit-ups, but there was no panic there.

  I’d been in action with Sean before, stared death in the face and been terrified. But not for myself, I realised.

  For him.

  “I’m sorry, Charlie,” Sean said suddenly and for a moment I frowned at him, backtracking to try and work out an immediate reason for him to be apologising to me. It took a moment to register that there wasn’t one. So we were back to that confrontation we’d had outside the Manor. It seemed so long ago I could barely remember what had been said. Maybe that was my denial.

  As the Skyline motored on Sean kept his eyes on the road, almost fixed to the vanishing point ahead of hi
m. “I don’t know what I can say or do to change things,” he went on, his voice low and tense. “I wish to God I could!”

  “I don’t want you to do or say anything, Sean,” I said, surprised at how calm I sounded, how perfectly reasonable. “I know you weren’t the cause of any of it, but that doesn’t change what happened.”

  I paused, tried to put some kind of order to my jumbled thoughts. “When you look at me,” I came out with, “all I want is for you to still see me underneath it all. Not some faceless victim. Does that make sense?”

  For a few seconds he didn’t answer and the heavy frown was back. “You’re asking me to pretend it never happened,” he said, neutral and cautious. “Is that it?”

  I sighed. “No,” I said. I stared out of the darkened glass of the side window, aware only of the flash of the passing road markers like a continuous stream of stars in hyperdrive and the morbid pulse of my thoughts. I turned back to Sean. His face was set.