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 König 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 König 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.
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 Madeleine II’s dulcet tones guide us out of the residential district and back onto the road past Potsdam heading for Dessau. There were no other cars taking the same route behind us, no sign of sudden pursuit or interception. As we regained the A9 I couldn’t help a feeling of relief that we’d made it this far unmolested.
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 blasé 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.