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 Konig 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 Konig 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.
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 Konig 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 Konig 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.
