so he could lock the arm. But Dietrich was too fast and strong to allow Victor to break it at the elbow.
They hit the floor together.
Victor went down first, Dietrich on top of him. Victor immediately wrapped his legs around Dietrich’s neck, keeping hold of the knife wrist. Dietrich roared and stood, lifting Victor off the floor and slamming him back down, shoulder blades colliding with the floorboards. The breath was knocked from Victor’s lungs, but he kept hold of the wrist.
Dietrich used his free hand to punch at Victor, but though they were hard blows, he couldn’t get his weight behind them. Victor maintained hold of Dietrich’s arm to keep the knife immobile.
Leeson had the small SIG in hand and aimed at the two men fighting on the floor. ‘Mr Coughlin, take the knife out of Mr Dietrich’s hand. Mr Dietrich, you will let him or you will get shot. Mr Kooi, if you don’t then release Mr Dietrich, you will get shot. Doesn’t everyone understand?’ He didn’t wait for anyone to supply an answer. ‘Now, if you please, Mr Coughlin.’
Coughlin hesitantly moved closer.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
‘A stirring performance,’ a voice said from the open exterior doorway. ‘But lacking a certain finesse.’
Dietrich stopped punching and struggling. The aggression slipped from his face. On the floor, Victor couldn’t see the speaker, but in his peripheral vision he saw Coughlin hesitate and Francesca stiffen. But Leeson smiled.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You rejoin us at last, Mr Hart.’
FORTY-SEVEN
Victor released Dietrich’s wrist and scrambled away. The fight had vanished from Dietrich. He seemed to have forgotten Victor even existed, let alone that he had been trying to kill him five seconds before. Dietrich wasn’t looking at him. He was exposed. Vulnerable. But Victor didn’t take the opportunity to disarm his opponent and drive the knife deep into his neck, even though he had been taught never to fail to exploit a weakness, never to give away an advantage. Such single-minded ruthlessness had seen him triumph against the odds several times, but he held himself back now. He didn’t attack because there was something in the new arrival’s voice that stopped him. Something intriguing.
He stood and faced the new guy, taking his gaze off Dietrich because he was no longer a threat.
A man stood outside the open kitchen door. He looked to be somewhere in his mid to late forties. His eyes were small and deep set, pale blue bordering on grey. His skin was weathered brown and red – naturally pale skin exposed to a lot of sun. Deep crow’s feet etched the corners of his eyes. His hair was short, a mix of blond and grey, as was the short beard that covered his cheeks and surrounded thin lips. His expression was one of contemptuous amusement.
His neck was a trunk of muscle as wide as his skull. The bones of his face were dense and prominent beneath the weathered skin. He was about Victor’s height and a little broader. He looked like the few big guys Victor had known in the military: men with natural size and strength, made denser and stronger over many years of hard physical existence, not artificially gained via ritualised weightlifting that built slow-twitch muscle fibre only good at lifting and pushing and too slow and too hungry for oxygen to be of much use when life depended on it.
The man called Hart gestured to Coughlin. ‘Step back from the two lovers.’ He looked at Dietrich. ‘Safety that shiv.’
The urgency left Coughlin’s body language and he backed off. Dietrich obeyed without pause or question. He went to slip the knife back into its belt sheath.
‘No,’ Hart said. ‘Give the weapon to me. You can’t be trusted with it.’
This time Dietrich hesitated a moment. Victor couldn’t predict what he would do next, but he nodded and walked over to Hart, and gave him the knife. He was only a couple of inches shorter and probably weighed about the same, but he seemed tiny and insignificant next to Hart, because he acted as he felt.
Hart motioned and Dietrich moved aside. Hart stepped into the kitchen and Francesca hurried over to him. She threw her arms around his neck and he effortlessly lifted her by the waist from the floor. They kissed, long and hard.
Victor watched for a moment, questions in his mind now answering themselves one by one, only to be replaced by others.
When Hart and Francesca finally stopped kissing, he lowered her down and whispered something to her. Then his gaze