Hofmann looked at him rather sadly. “It is on the outskirts of Berlin,” he said. “Major Konig would have flown him out of Stuttgart by helicopter thirty minutes after she’d taken him from you. I’m sorry.”
He looked round at our shocked and disappointed faces. The hope we’d begun to build was gone, sucked away like the air from a dead balloon.
“Where exactly is the safe house?” Sean wanted to know, even though it could only have been an academic question.
Hofmann sighed. “It’s more than six hundred kilometres from here, Herr Meyer,” he said heavily. He checked his watch. “You now have less than eleven hours to make it there and back. It is a hopeless task unless you have access to a private jet.”
Sean smiled at him, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile. “No, but I think we can come pretty close to a flying machine.” He turned to Gilby, and there was a quiver about him now, a scent he’d picked up and was ready to run with. “Major,” he said. “Can I borrow your car?”
***
Although he didn’t want to admit it, Gilby seemed to agree with Hofmann that trying to cover that kind of ground in the time we had just couldn’t be done. Sean met their dissension with a silent, determined disregard, refusing to be deflected.
There was something about Sean that inspired a kind of confidence. He could have told you he was going to jump over the moon on the back of a cow and you’d have found yourself merely asking, “Jersey or Friesian?”
Maybe that was why Gilby handed over the keys to the Nissan Skyline without the kind of argument I’d been expecting. The only thing that did cause controversy was Sean’s assertion that he wanted me to ride shotgun with him.
Todd was keen to go himself and even Major Gilby would clearly have preferred to have had one of his own men in on the trip. Sean shook his head.
“We must have Hofmann, and this car’s a two-squash-two at best, not a four seater,” he declared. “With any luck there
“So why let her fill up one of the seats?” Todd challenged. “Me or Figgis would be twice as much use.”
“I don’t think so.” Sean eyed him coldly. “Charlie and I have been in action together before,” he said. “She won’t let me down. I know just how far she’s prepared to go.”
He met my eyes, just briefly, and I saw a calm and steady trust there. A tangible sense of relief breezed over me.
Todd was looking disgusted. “Yeah, all the way, by the sounds of it,” he complained.
Sean turned and pinned the phys instructor with a savage glare. It would have taken a better man than Todd not to flinch under it. “You have no idea,” Sean said softly, and walked away from him.
Outside someone had switched on the floodlights. They blazed out over the gravel to where the Skyline sat waiting, giving a faintly oily cast to the car’s paint.
It was a brutal machine, resting rather than merely parked. Somehow you knew that the folds in its bodywork had been sculpted like skin over muscle, rather than the components living within the limitations of exterior line. No compromise.
Without knowing why, the car scared me. It was the kind of vehicle that tempted you to kill yourself all too easily, like a big bike, or an offshore powerboat. It was bred for speed, for risk. I had no illusions that Sean was going to take it steady just because it was dark with a hint of ice in the wind. I glanced across at his set face. This was going to be a battle of wits and wills. All or nothing.
Figgis met us then with a fistful of SIGs in speed-draw holsters and three of the PM-98s hanging over his shoulder. “Take your pick,” he said.
“We’ll take the lot,” Sean said. “Don’t bother to wrap them.”
“What about him?” Figgis asked quietly, nodding towards Hofmann.
“Not yet,” Sean said. He glanced at Hofmann’s impassive face. “No offence.”
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.
