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
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 blase 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 glance 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.
Well, maybe I could allow myself just five minutes . . .
***
I jerked awake almost instantly, it seemed, to find that we were barely moving and an hour had passed.
“Where are we?” I demanded, my pulse suddenly stepping up with guilt at my lapse in concentration.
“Just outside Nurnberg,” Sean tossed across and the exasperation showed clearly in his voice. “Bloody traffic.”
I sat up from the slithered position I’d drooped into and looked around me. Ahead all I could see was the tailgate of a massive truck on Swiss plates. Alongside was a pair of middle-aged suits in a BMW. They were either too world-weary, or too polite, to look perturbed at having a car filled with armed desperadoes and a hostage right next to them.
For the next forty-five minutes we barely made a couple of kilometres. The loudest noise inside the car was the slap of the wipers on intermittent across the screen, like an irregular heartbeat. The traffic grew steadily thicker as the morning filled out into rush hour. It was agonisingly slow.
“We’re going to have to stop and fill up again,” Sean said at last, glancing down at the instrument panel. “It may as well be now.” He caught Hofmann’s eye in the rear-view mirror and nodded towards Ivan. “Do you want to hood him up again?”
Hofmann put the SIG in his pocket and slid the knife out of his boot again.
“No,” he said ominously. “If he makes trouble I will deal with him quietly enough.”
Sean left the engine running again, despite the obvious disapproval of the filling station attendant, while he poured in litre upon litre of
I ran in to pay to lessen the time we were off the road and also so that Sean could move the car further away from prying eyes. Even without his hood, Ivan was still handcuffed to the grab rail and looked suspiciously like he was being taken somewhere against his will rather than being rescued. It wasn’t a scenario we wanted to have to explain in detail to anyone, least of all to the police.
It all took up precious time, minute after minute of it. When we rejoined the A6, now heading west towards Heilbronn, I was aware that Gregor was probably already on route to Einsbaden. The wheels were in motion and couldn’t be called back nor cancelled out.
I tried to ring Major Gilby again to let him know our progress, but this time the Manor’s phone line rang out without reply. There’s rarely something good will come about from an unanswered phone. My mind started constructing its own spurious reasons, each more fantastical than the last, but I couldn’t ignore the likelihood that Gregor Venko was already there, and that the Manor had already fallen to his forces.
I caught Sean’s anxious gaze as I ended the dead call. His eyes were red-rimmed from staring into the artificial airflow, fatigue pinching his cheeks into hollows.
I wondered if he could force himself to this kind of stamina naturally or if he’d taken anything in order to sustain it. I couldn’t think of a way to ask that wouldn’t insult him.
“It’ll be OK,” I said, more to reassure myself than him. “We’ll get there.”
“That’s not the worry,” he said, raising a half smile even though his voice was flat. “It’s what we’ll find there when we do.”
***
At Heilbronn we turned south again, back onto the B10 for Stuttgart and the penultimate leg. The traffic stayed obstinately thick and cumbersome. Since Nurnberg we’d been able to average barely eighty miles an hour. I was almost glad when
By the time we were onto the tortuous back roads heading for our destination, Sean’s temper was racked to breaking point by sheer overwhelming exhaustion.
