Vetsch gave her his gun, a Colt 45.
“Now sit the fuck down.” He did as he was told.
Hawke stepped forward and checked Martin for weapons, and after pulling a Heckler & Koch USP from a shoulder holster and a flick-knife from his rear pocket, told him to sit down next to Vetsch.
“You guys must be paranoid carrying all this junk around,” Lea said. “And put your hands behind your heads.”
“Baumann will gut you for this,” Vetsch hissed in heavily accented English.
Hawke ignored him. “What do you know about Hugo Zaugg?” he asked.
The men gave each other an uncertain glance and then looked at Hawke in terrified silence.
“Shoot that one in the knee,” Hawke told Lea, pointing at Vetsch.
She stepped forward and cocked her gun for effect.
Vetsch was cool. “We both know I work for Baumann. No one gets close to Hugo Zaugg. Ever. I hear he was very upset about your activities in New York.”
“What about Baumann?” Hawke said, ignoring his comment.
Vetsch’s eyes crawled from Lea’s Glock to Hawke’s eyes. He grinned, his forehead starting to sweat. “Baumann has access to Zaugg, but that is all I know. Everything is compartmentalized.”
“And where is Baumann?” Hawke asked.
“Herr Baumann is very hard to find.”
“You mean he’s wanted by every police force in Europe so he keeps a low profile.” Lea said.
Vetsch shrugged his shoulders. He seemed to be re-evaulating the situation. “Baumann is not the sort of man you cross. He will kill me for telling you this.”
Hawke moved closer. “I want to find Baumann.”
“I will die first.”
“Try that one,” Hawke said, indicating Martin.
Lea pushed the Glock’s muzzle into the top of his knee bone.
“Well, I won’t die first!” Martin said, breathless with terror. “I can tell you how to find Baumann.”
“Silence, you fool!” spat Vetsch.
“He can be found at…”
A second later and everything changed.
Vetsch moved like lightning, the hands behind his back pulling a knife from a shoulder holster and slashing at Lea’s hand before spinning in his seat and cutting Martin’s throat.
Lea recoiled instinctively to check the wound on her hand, dropping her gun. Martin slumped forward, eyes bulging with fear, and then collapsed on the wooden floor tiles where his blood spilled out in a large pool.
Vetsch picked up Lea’s gun and sprinted into the kitchen, slamming the door behind him and wedging something behind it.
“Are you okay?” Hawke asked Lea.
“Yeah, sure. So stupid of me to drop that gun. I’m sorry, Joe — I guess I’ve been out the army for too long.” Her hand was bleeding heavily.
“Forget it.”
Hawke smashed in the kitchen door and saw the window was open. The drapes blew into the room with a gush of icy air. He went to the window and looked out. “A fire escape, but he’s not in the street. He must have gone to the roof. You get to Cairo and get your hand fixed up, then follow me as best you can in the car.”
“You’re not going up there after him?”
“He’s our only lead to Baumann and Zaugg!”
“If you’re going, I'm going.”
“With your hand like that?”
“Screw my hand!” she shouted, grabbing a towel from the side and wrapping it tightly around the wound. “I want my damned Glock back!”
They climbed up the fire escape to the next storey and clambered out onto the roof. It was below freezing now, and ice had begun to form on the tiles, making them slippery and their route across them dangerous and unpredictable.
Lea joined Hawke who was standing in between two tall chimneys and surveying the moonlit rooftops. His breath was visible in the cold night. Ahead, maybe two or three houses, Vetsch was crawling into the frozen darkness, his outline now a silhouette in front of the gentle glow of the city beyond.
“There’s our man,” he said.
“There’s our rat, don't you mean?” Lea held to the bricks for balance in the rising wind.
“Let’s get after him,” said Hawke, setting out across the apex of the roof.
Lea followed, choosing her steps carefully as Vetsch’s more desperate method widened the gap between them.
A blast of icy air rushed off the lake and cut into them. Hawke put his head down and tried to push on, but Lea slipped and fell backwards, her arms flailing helplessly in the cold night as her upper body tipped back over the edge of the roof. She screamed in terror.
Hawke spun around and grabbed her by the belt, pulling her roughly towards him and grabbing her around the waist with his other arm. His parkour had made him immune to the fear of heights and turned any urban environment into a playground for him, but he’d forgotten how any normal person would view running across rooftops in the middle of the night.
“Are you all right?” he asked, this time no jokes. Her face was lit silver in the moonlight.
She nodded, still pale with the fear of what had almost happened. A quick glance over her shoulder at the street below made her shudder as Hawke released her.
“Be more careful from now on, okay?”
Ahead, Vetsch was almost out of sight as he skipped fearlessly along a distant roofline, the ornate copper spire of St. Pierre’s Cathedral rising behind him. For good measure, he turned and fired blindly at them, his bullets crackling away into the night.
“Damn it, Joe Hawke!” Lea said. “What the hell am I doing here? I could be at home, you know!”
“And miss all this? Where’s your spirit of adventure, girl?”
They watched Vetsch descend on one of the fire escapes and hit the street. Hawke searched for the closest way down and caught sight of a much closer fire escape. It took them halfway to street level, where from his view on the lower roof he looked out across the streets of Geneva’s Old Town and watched Vetsch sprinting into the night.
They jumped off the lower roof and gave chase.
Vetsch turned a corner and hit a busier road, with cars and mopeds moving slowly around the Old Town’s ancient streets.
Hawke scanned the road in both directions. Which way did he go?
Then they saw him. He was running through a crowd of people gathered outside a café and trying to disappear into the cheerful throng. They gave chase once again.
Vetsch led them into a maze of backstreets. He turned and fired at them once more, warning them not to continue their pursuit, but Hawke felt differently about the matter, and so did Lea. Hawke returned fire, whacking a chunk of plaster out of a wall a few inches above Vetsch’s head as he darted around a corner.
They raced after him, Hawke cursing himself for letting Vetsch get away, but using his anger to fuel the pursuit.
Around the corner, there was another small square ahead of them, centered around a small stone fountain behind which Vetsch vanished into an alley.
They followed into the darkness to find a dead end where there was only one door, but now closed. Hawke kicked the door hard and it burst open, hitting the inside wall with a loud smack. A staircase led to the next floor, and they could already hear Vetsch breaking his way through another door somewhere above them.
Hawke and Lea kept up their pursuit, and clambered up the stairs as fast as they could only to see Vetsch running through a cosy, well-lit front room of someone’s apartment, screaming at them to keep away.
They followed him, apologizing to the confused and terrified occupants as they went. Vetsch exited the apartment, ran down the stairs and reached the next street.
“I want that little rat!” Lea screamed.
Hawke looked at her. She looked more determined than ever, and he cynically wondered if Lea was using this whole enterprise as a kind of path to personal redemption for whatever it was in her past that she was hiding. Whatever it was she had alluded to over dinner in New York, but then closed up again when he had gotten too close.