Templar's Quest

40

Standing in the midst of the chaos, Dolf watched impotently as Finnegan McGuire escaped on the back of a motorcycle.

Unable to think straight, he staggered to a nearby bench and collapsed. Head clutched in his hands, he felt as though he’d just wandered into an asylum. So much was going on – people shouting and rushing about – the only thing that he could process was the fact that the motherfucker McGuire had stolen his grandfather’s truncheon. That and he’d bested Dolf in a fist fight.

I should have won that bout.

Just then a black Scottish terrier darted over to the bench. Curious, the dog sniffed at him. A few seconds later, it growled ferociously.

‘Get lost!’ Dolf hissed, ready to hurl the shaggy beast across the plaza if it came any closer.

The owner, a leash dangling from her hand, breathlessly rushed up to him. ‘I’m awfully sorry, but in all the madness, Sadie flew the coop and I – My God! There’s blood all over your face! Do you want me to call an ambulance?’

‘I want you to take your furry piece of shit out of my sight! I hate dogs!’ Dolf glared at the annoying American woman with the sing-songy accent. ‘In my country, we grill little dogs on a spit.’

Bending at the waist, the woman hurriedly scooped the squirming animal into her arms. ‘Aren’t you a miserable excuse for a human being!’

Tell me something that I don’t know, bitch.

Lacking the enthusiasm to hurl a parting insult, Dolf unzipped his jacket and, raising the hem of his cotton T-shirt, wiped the blood from his face. Like most former boxers, his nose had been broken so many times, he’d lost count.

Bewildered, events having transpired too rapidly, he wondered how he was going to explain the debacle to Herr Doktor.

Per usual, his life was a big fucking catastrophe, this just one in a long series of disasters. Every time he thought he’d done the right thing, he’d later discover he’d fucked everything up. Just once, he wished things would go his way. But they never did. Always things went left instead of right. Like what happened with that fucking Turkish fruit vendor.

Three months after his sister Annah had been raped, she’d slashed her wrists in the bathtub. In her suicide note, she claimed that Stefan, Dolf’s best friend in the Blut Brüder, had entered her bedroom one afternoon while she was getting dressed and sexually assaulted her. Dolf felt as though a sledge-hammer had been swung at his head. Why couldn’t Stefan have raped someone else’s sister? Why his? And why did Annah have to ruin his life with her tell-all suicide note? He’d already killed the Turk.

Having been the one to find his sister floating in a tub of bloody water, he tore up the piece of lined notepaper and threw the shreds into the incinerator.

Betrayed by Stefan, he left the Blut Brüder gang. That’s when he started to hang out at the boxing gym. Since he was on the dole, he offered to wipe down the ring, get equipment, hold the punching bag, whatever odd chore needed to be done. In exchange, he could work out at the gym free of charge. Eventually, Dolf was asked to be a sparring partner for some of the up-and-coming boxers. Excited, he saw this as his big chance to catch the eye of a boxing promoter. But it never happened. He’d lost his touch. Without his ‘vitamins’, he was just an average boxer with a strong punch, lacking the speed and agility of a prize fighter.

A big fucking catastrophe.

Reaching into his pocket, Dolf removed the GPS transmitter. According to the data on the small screen, the tracked target had yet to move from the hedgerow.

How could that be? With his own eyes, he’d seen McGuire leave the plaza.

Either McGuire had discovered the tracking device on the computer and left it by the hedgerow or his two companions now had the laptop.

Although he’d been ordered to kill McGuire and commandeer the medallion that he carried in his canvas bag, what if he killed the red-haired man and abducted the woman? Herr Uhlemann could ransom her for the medallion.

Dolf stared at the transmitter. It was a good plan. Better to kill someone than no one. And when he returned to the foundation’s office suite with the bitch in tow, everyone would see that he was a valuable asset. Then, finally, he would get his due. Prove to all of the naysayers that he was more than a mere chauffeur.

He just needed to find his Mark 23 pistol, the motherfucker McGuire having kicked it into the bushes.

Fully prepared to crawl on all fours and dig through the dirt with his bare hands, Dolf lurched to his feet and ran back into the maze.