Hex instead of chars problem

Hi

I need to write a little Windows utility in C++ to retrieve data from a
mysql database that belongs to a Linux backup program called Bacula. The
data I am getting consists of hex values where I would have expected a
character string e.g. instead of Abcd I get 41626364. Something to do with
Unicode I expect but I can't find out how to deal with it. Any suggestions
greatly appreciated.

TIA

Graham Dicker