I thought of the size and scope of an organisation like Gregor Venko’s. It didn’t die away because you cut off its head. It just grew another. More ugly.
“I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “I did what I thought was right.”
I thought of Gregor’s parting words.
I’d risked my life, and those of the others, to save his son. I blanked out the possibility that he might blame me for the ambush. Any other way of handling it was too scary to contemplate.
“I’ll deal with it when I have to,” I said, weary to the point of tears. “Right now I just want to go home.”
The Major nodded, exchanged a look with Sean that I didn’t fully catch, and moved away.
I started to move, too, but Sean put his hands on my shoulders and turned me back to face him. “Don’t do it, Charlie,” he said.
His sudden intensity confused me. “Don’t do what?”
“Don’t go back to Cheshire,” he said. “Not permanently, anyway. They’ll smother you. Come back to Kings Langley with me.”
For a moment I was frozen by both hope and fear.
“What are you offering here, Sean?”
He saw my wariness, responded with caution of his own. “Whatever you’re prepared to take,” he said carefully. “A job, for a start. A home.”
If I’d taken half a step towards him he would have matched it. I know he would. I couldn’t quite bring myself to let go of that final reservation. Maybe Sean felt the same way.
It would come, though. If we let it.
“OK Sean, I’ll do it,” I said, and knew by his face that he remembered the last time I’d said those words, back on the day of Kirk’s funeral when he’d first asked me to go to Germany. I saw too that he realised, possibly for the first time, that what I agreed to now I’d also agreed to then.
He didn’t try and hide the relief, just smiled at me. After a moment or so I smiled back.
After all, we’d both accepted that there was no going back to what we’d had before.
But that didn’t mean we couldn’t go forwards.
Epilogue
I flew home three days later. Alone.
Sean had stayed on to help sort out the mess Ivan’s capture, retrieval and release had caused, and to finally close the case on Kirk’s death. Major Gilby had decided to come completely clean about what had really happened there. About O’Neill’s part in Blakemore’s death, too, and Rebanks’s nasty little sideline. Even the truth about the accident which had claimed the life of McKenna’s uncle might finally emerge.
Gilby was going to be lucky to stay out of prison, never mind keep Einsbaden Manor intact. I just hoped he was right about the spread of Dieter Krauss’s influence. He was going to need it.
It was, Sean told me with a weary smile, all going to take some time. He would call me as soon as he got back to the UK. We would take things from there.
“No backing out now, Charlie,” he’d murmured, touching the side of my face as he said it.
“No,” I’d agreed. “No backing out.”
Before any of the rest of us were allowed to go we went through a debriefing by the Germans that reminded me almost of the Resistance-to-Interrogation exercises I’d endured in the army. In the end, though, they decided the line they were going to take was that none of this had ever happened. We would all do as well to remember what it was we had to forget.
I asked Hofmann what they were going to do with Jan, but the look on his face told me I didn’t want to know. He warned me that Gregor Venko seemed to have gone underground and had taken his family with him. It had been read as a sign he was about to get dangerous, to start a campaign, and I should watch my back.
The only good news he brought was that Elsa was set to make a full recovery from her flesh wound, even if she was going to have to wear a one-piece bathing suit in future.
Madeleine managed to reschedule my ticket so I flew direct to Manchester without the hassle of the stops and changes I’d gone through on the way out. I carefully scrutinised my fellow passengers as they boarded, but none of them looked like an Eastern European assassin except the head stewardess. I didn’t eat the airline food, just in case, but I probably wouldn’t have done so anyway.
I rang home before I left and my father agreed without hesitation to meet me at the airport. He was waiting at the barrier when I cleared through Customs.
He studied my face gravely for a few moments without speaking. I don’t know what he saw there, but the smile he gave me was hesitant. As though he recognised the events I’d gone through and he was just a little afraid of what they’d done to me.
It wasn’t until I was in the passenger seat of his Jaguar, heading along the M56, that he spoke, his voice neutral.
“Was it—” he paused, as if searching for the correct phrase and came up with, “—very bad?”
I stopped peering into the mirror on my sun visor, trying to watch the cars following us, and turned to face him. His fingers rested apparently lightly on the rim of the steering wheel, but his eyes were a little too fixed on the road ahead.
What could I tell him? That I’d gambled with his safety. That I’d recklessly endangered his secure, comfortable existence and that of my mother. And for what? To help the psychopathic child of an equally psychotic father escape justice. What had I achieved by that?
Finally, I said, “Yes.”
He nodded. “So what are you going to do now?”
“Sean’s offered me a job again,” I said. “This time I think I’m going to take it.”
“What kind of a job?”
“Close protection,” I said. “A bodyguard.”
He glanced across quickly. “Quite apart from my feelings on the subject of Sean Meyer,” he said grimly, “are you sure that’s a wise decision, Charlotte?”
No, I wasn’t. Especially not when I couldn’t shake the feeling that Sean didn’t entirely believe my intent when I’d winged Jan. He knew first-hand just how good a marksman I’d been in the army, but even so he’d still been certain that the shot I’d so carefully calculated to wound and disable had been aimed to kill. What kind of long-term prospects did that leave open to us?
Now I shrugged rather helplessly. “The army didn’t want me,” I said, aware of the tiredness in my voice. “What else am I good for?”
He made no answer and we didn’t speak again until he pulled up onto the gravel outside my parents’ house, forty-five minutes later. I looked up at the ivy-strung walls and measured architecture. I knew that it looked just the same as it had done when I’d left. It must just be me who was different.
I climbed out and moved towards the front door, mentally gearing myself up for a reunion with my mother. I was wondering how to break the news that they were going to have to get a panic alarm installed, when he stopped me.
“There was a delivery for you yesterday,” he said. “Don’t you want to see it?”
Just for a second I tensed with a thousand nasty possibilities before common sense took over. I shrugged again. He eyed my apathy with a moment’s concern, then pressed the button on the Jaguar’s alarm remote which also operated the garage door. It lifted gradually.
Inside, right at the back, was my old RGV Suzuki. Next to it, looking so much bigger by comparison, gleaming like an oiled-up bodybuilder, was a Honda FireBlade on a brand new plate. I walked towards it slowly, feeling the prickle of the hairs rising at the back of my neck.
My father followed me in and was watching my reaction. He reached past me for a manila envelope that was
