Fourth Day (11 page)

She sat back again, rocking, but it was not the hoped-for bombshell. Bane gave a slight smile, his expression almost sad at her childish attempts.

‘Thomas came to us seeking truth,’ he said. ‘And – having found it – he decided to stay.’

‘You expect me to believe it’s really as simple as that?’

‘Why not?’ Bane said. ‘You must be aware that when Thomas joined Fourth Day, he left instructions that if he did not return to the outside world of his own accord inside six months, he be retrieved from our evil clutches – by force if necessary.’

For the first time, a note of self-deprecation, a trace of irony, had crept into Bane’s voice. His knowledge of Witney’s safety net shouldn’t have surprised me. If Witney had gone over, he would have confessed all to Bane.

‘Before that time was up, Thomas arranged for a
representative from this agency to visit with us. I thought Thomas had successfully convinced him that he wished to cancel his arrangements.’

I glanced at Sean again.
Epps
?

He shrugged, frowning.

On the other side of the glass, Bane rose, smooth and elegant, and buttoned his jacket. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘as you’ve been so careful to leave me an open door, unless you have anything else you wish to ask, I think we’re done here.’

Gardner said nothing, just flapped a dismissive, distracted hand. Bane almost reached the doorway, then turned back.

‘If you were looking for someone with an interest in removing Thomas Witney from Fourth Day’s protection, and using whatever means they saw fit to find out what he’d learned during his time with us,’ he said in that compelling voice, allowing his gaze to sweep across the mirrored wall behind Gardner’s chair, ‘then you may find it instructive to speak to that representative. His name, as I recall, was Parker Armstrong. He was part of some kind of specialist close-protection agency out of New York.’

My eyes flew to Sean’s. ‘What the hell…?’

‘Tricky bastard,’ Sean murmured.

Gardner didn’t immediately respond, but I saw from the way her neck tensed just a fraction that this was news to her. And I knew Bane must have seen it, too.

‘Maybe I’ll do just that,’ she said at last, grimly.

He nodded. It was entirely my imagination, but just for a second Bane’s eyes seemed to lock directly with mine through the opaque glass, before he added, ‘I’m sure you’ll have no trouble in finding them.’

It took us a while to disentangle ourselves. Detective Gardner was understandably unamused that, in her opinion, we’d let her go into interview half-cocked.

There was nothing on record to prove or disprove Bane’s allegation about Parker. Sagar claimed he’d never been privy to the meeting, although he could confirm something had taken place, a few months after Witney joined the cult. And afterwards, he said, Witney’s training had begun in earnest.

It didn’t help that Parker’s plane had already taken off and he was conveniently unavailable to answer questions. I shied away from believing he’d deliberately withheld something so important. At the same time I couldn’t help but remember his evasiveness over the whole assignment.

And, particularly, the way Witney’s gaze had swept over Parker as much as Epps at the handover in Santa Clarita, his obvious shock, took on new resonance. ‘
Better late than never, huh
?
’ he’d said.

Because up to that point, I realised, Parker had been
careful not to let Witney catch a direct glimpse of him. Except during the extraction itself, and the midazolam would have ensured he didn’t remember any of us the next day. Was that, I wondered now, cynically, why Parker had chosen to use it?

The only thing we could do with Detective Gardner was plead ignorance and let her blow off steam, patently disbelieving. We were well aware that was all she could do at this stage, with the spectre of Epps hanging over the whole case. I knew Sean was loath to call on the government man to intercede if it could be avoided but, fortunately, Gardner didn’t know that. As we departed, I had a feeling that was the end of any cooperation we might hope to receive from the LAPD.

Sean left curt messages for his partner to call us. Parker’s cellphone would have been switched off in the air, but even well after his New York arrival time, he still hadn’t been in touch. With our own flights confirmed back to the east coast for the following evening, and most of the team already gone, we were just killing time until we could get to the office and have it out with him.

If it hadn’t been for the presence of Chris Sagar, Sean and I might even have enjoyed our last night in the Calabasas palace. As it was, we kept a standard watching brief over him, almost out of habit. For his part, Sagar seemed edgy after his dislocated encounter with Bane. He stuck close, clingy as a dog just back from kennels, ensuring that any personal conversation was kept to a minimum.

Just before he hit the sack, Sagar announced, somewhat defiantly, that he’d like to go out for a run first thing in the morning. Neither Sean nor I objected.

‘If I gotta sit for eight hours on a goddamn bus, I’m gonna stretch my legs,’ he said, and I couldn’t blame him for that. It was probably prudent of Epps not to waste government funds delivering him back to northern California by the same plush means as the outward leg, but it smacked of pettiness all the same.

‘Suit yourself,’ Sean said with a shrug. ‘But I’ve got the letting agent coming by early to do a walk-through – make sure we didn’t steal any of the fittings.’

‘I’ll go,’ I offered, noting the little gesture of wry relief from Sagar. ‘I could do with the exercise myself.’

So, with the not-yet-risen sun turning the sky ashy pink above the dew-glittered hills, I found myself out on the terrace the next morning. I was in an old polo shirt and sweats that included a hooded zip-up top, doing warm-up exercises.

Almost exactly a year previously, I’d taken a 9 mm round straight through my left thigh. At the time, the second bullet – the one that had gone tumbling through my chest cavity – had seemed the greater evil. Time had proved the leg injury more costly, both in terms of physio and temper.

I’d worked bloody hard to rebuild the wasted muscle carved out by the passage of the round through my flesh, to regain full mobility and strength. Even so, I knew the fact I walked entirely without a limp now was as much down to luck as it was to determination on my part. The bullet’s path had somehow threaded past the vital nerves, bones and sinews. I could just as easily have been crippled for life.

A noise to my right had me straightening fast. I turned to see Chris Sagar in the open doorway. He was dressed in sweat pants and a vest and looked still half-asleep.

‘Good morning!’ I said with unnecessary cheerfulness.

‘It is?’ he grunted, stumbling out onto the terrace and flopping into some half-hearted quad stretches.

I lifted my left foot onto the back of a chair and folded my body down over my knee slowly. There was still tension in the underlying tissue, but overall the leg felt pretty much OK.

‘You were the one who wanted to be up and at ’em at this hour,’ I pointed out as I swapped onto the easy side.

‘Did you have to remind me?’ he groaned. ‘I like the benefits of exercise, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy the process, y’know?’

I raised an eyebrow as I rolled into a lateral stretch, aware of the solid weight of the SIG lying in the small of my back under my shirt. ‘Well, if you’ve changed your mind, speak now. I’m happy to go back to bed.’

He grinned at me then. ‘Hey, is that an invitation?’

‘Only if you like your food liquidised and fed to you through a straw.’ It was Sean who spoke, coming out of the French windows, barefoot and dressed in a loose black karate
gi
. He spoke lightly, but his eyes didn’t entirely share the joke.

‘Hey, sorry, man,’ Sagar said, flushing. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘You don’t need to apologise to me,’ Sean said mildly as he came past us. ‘I’m not the one who’s likely to break your jaw.’ He skirted the lap pool and moved out onto the open area of terrace overlooking the canyon, dropping almost immediately into the first of his formal morning
katas
, so practised that each move flowed into the next, brimming with a lethal grace and utter focus. The similarities between Sean’s level of contained concentration
and that demonstrated by Randall Bane were not lost on Chris Sagar.

‘Uh, you all set?’ he mumbled, as though trying not to attract Sean’s attention again.

But for a moment my eyes were locked there, and my imagination had ghosted in a little figure alongside him, a tousle-headed boy perhaps, in a miniature outfit, scowling with the concentrated effort of matching his movements to those of his proud father.

Sean pivoted towards me. His face was a blank mask, his gaze inward, showing nothing. I forced myself not to pass a defensive hand across my belly.

‘You OK?’

I turned to find Sagar watching me.

‘Yeah, sure,’ I lied, dry-mouthed. ‘Let’s go.’

I let Sagar set the pace, half-prepared for him to take off like a rabbit at a greyhound convention, but he didn’t seem inclined towards heroics. We started out at a fairly sedate jog, only picking up speed once we realised our comparative levels of fitness.

We fell into a matching rhythm, pounding up the dusty shoulder of one of the winding canyon side roads. The temperature was perfect at this time of day, just cool enough to be pleasant and just warm enough to dry the sweat on our bodies almost as it formed. I tried not to think about the tobacco-tinged air I was sucking into my lungs.

Sagar had an awkward running style, almost shambling, but he covered the ground with deceptive speed.

‘Why do this if you don’t enjoy it?’ I asked.

He flashed a sheepish smile. ‘You wanna know the truth? Bane, that’s why,’ he said with engaging candour. ‘He had this idea you should do something you didn’t wanna do, every day, y’know?’

‘Really?’ I said, trying not to let the doubt show in my voice. I took another half-dozen strides. ‘Why?’

‘He’s big on this whole mind-and-body thing,’ Sagar said. ‘I mean, I hated getting out of bed in the morning to go run, but I did it because he always made me feel like I’d be letting myself down if I didn’t. And I always swore I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to.’

‘And now you don’t have to?’

‘Yeah,’ he grumbled. ‘I do it just about every day. That’s the trouble with Bane. He spouts all this crap about you finding your own path, but you kinda get the feeling he’s always there pulling your strings, y’know?’

‘Like the book he’d lent to Witney, you mean –
Catcher in the Rye
?
’

Sagar’s stride faltered. ‘You got that, huh?’ he said and the sheepish look was back in full swing. ‘I didn’t want to bring it up, in case you guys thought I was making something out of nothing, but—’

‘I know Hinckley was obsessed with the book before he tried to knock off President Reagan, and Mark Chapman had a copy on him when he shot John Lennon,’ I said with a sideways glance. ‘They do teach us how to watch out for loony stalkers in this business, you know.’

‘Sorry, yeah,’ Sagar said, flashing a quick smile. ‘And there was this other guy – somebody Bardo – killed an actress called Rebecca Schaeffer,’ he went on. ‘He was carrying the book when he shot her.’

‘Interesting, but hardly conclusive,’ I pointed out, altering my stride as the incline steepened towards a left-hand hairpin, feeling my muscles begin to tighten. ‘The thing sells in its hundreds of thousands. Not everybody who reads it
is a lone assassin. Next you’ll be telling me Bane had you listening to heavy metal so you could absorb the hidden satanic messages.’

‘You can mock,’ Sagar protested quietly, starting to lose his breath now. ‘But you saw what he was like yesterday, Charlie. You felt it, just like I did. And you could tell he was lying about Witney being afraid, couldn’t you?’

Denying it would have meant lying to him myself, and I wasn’t prepared to do that just for the hell of it. I saved my breath for the hill.

Just before we hit the blind corner, I glanced back casually over my shoulder, as if checking for traffic. Three hundred metres behind us was a dusty Chevy Astro van in a
self-consciously
nondescript shade of beige. It hadn’t been there the last time I’d checked.

I couldn’t remember if it was a requirement to have a front licence plate in California but, if so, the van was in violation of the code. I caught a glimpse of two men in the front seat. They were wearing those hunting hats with a peak and ear flaps you can tie off under your chin. Technically, it might be winter but that was overkill unless your aim was concealment.

Uh-oh
.

‘Come on, Chris, enough slacking,’ I said, keeping any alarm out of my voice. ‘Time to pick up the pace, hmm?’ and lengthened my stride.

Sagar’s pride had him putting on a spurt alongside me, so we pounded through the turn in step. As soon as the van lost sight of us, I grabbed his elbow and flung him sideways towards the edge of the roadside. A sand-pitted steel crash barrier was all that separated us from the steeply sloping canyon side.

‘Hey!’ he yelped, baulking. ‘What the—?’

I didn’t answer. One look over the precipice was enough to tell me there was no escape that way. The ground was made up of loose earth and landslide gravel. It was punctuated by tenacious spiky vegetation and rocks big enough to cause serious injury if you lost your footing, but no use as decent cover. It was a long way down.

Swearing under my breath, I checked the road ahead. It ran straight for probably another five hundred metres before the next winding corner. The gradient would slow and tire us before we reached it. If this really was an ambush, they’d picked their location well.

I felt the reassuring weight of the SIG in the small of my back, debated for maybe half a second then reached under my shirt and drew it. Below us, the van’s engine revved as the driver accelerated towards the corner, abandoning the stealthy approach.

Sagar yanked his arm free and stumbled to a halt, eyes on the gun a little wildly.

‘Charlie—’

‘For God’s sake, Chris, keep moving!’ I jerked my head to the far side of the road. ‘If they make a run at us, get over the barrier there and back down onto the lower stretch of road.’ It might be just as treacherous but at least it wasn’t far to fall on that side, and from there the gradient was all downhill. It would take them time to turn the van around, or force them to continue the pursuit on foot. Anything to even up the game.

I swallowed down the shiver of tension invading my system. Everyone is afraid in a situation like this. Being afraid is normal. It’s what you do with your fear that defines you.

‘I’ll hold them as long as I can,’ I told him, hoping he’d get past the landed-fish stage long enough to take action. The image of Thomas Witney’s tortured body bloomed large and ugly at the front of my mind. ‘Go!’ I snapped. ‘Run like hell and do not come back for me.’

He might have been about to argue but then the van lurched into view, leaning hard as it loaded up the suspension through the turn, and the time for talk was over. There was no doubt in my mind now, even before the nose dipped under heavy braking, the front doors already opening.

I brought the SIG up, double-handed, and took two quick sideways steps to put Sagar at my back. My finger curved around the trigger, beginning to take up the mechanism, but I held my fire. Contrary to popular belief, taking potshots at a moving vehicle is a very hit-and-miss affair, especially with something as small as a 9 mm pistol, but our current threat assessment had come up minimal at best. A fact I now cursed silently.

I had thirteen rounds and no spare magazine.

When I glanced back, Sagar remained frozen to the spot for a moment longer, staring at the rapidly approaching vehicle with disconnected fascination. I shoved my shoulder against his, knocking him sideways, and that finally broke him out of it. He gave a kind of strangled cry and bolted for the edge of the road, but the van driver swung across after him. Panicked by the pursuit, Sagar tripped over his own feet and went sprawling messily to his knees on the stony surface of the road.

I just had time to consider that, whatever his role had been inside Bane’s organisation, field agent wasn’t it.

The van jolted to a halt with its front corner about
three metres away from us. I hesitated only long enough to identify my first target. Then the rear sliding door flew open, and the decision was made for me.

A man crouched in the opening. His face was half-hidden beneath a woollen cap and his shoulders spoke of
well-muscled
bulk. As he opened the door with his left hand, he brought a weapon up to firing position in front of him with his right. Whatever fear that plagued me finally evaporated at that point. Now the waiting was over, I surrendered to experience and sheer survival instinct almost with relief.

I aimed without thinking about it, a reflex action, and put my first two rounds into the centre of the man’s body mass before he had a chance to fire.

He folded with a surprised grunt and dropped the weapon, which clattered somewhere onto the metal floor of the van. That same instinct told me to keep firing until he went down, but I was only too aware of my limited supplies and he was already falling away backwards, beginning to cough. I let him go.

Maintaining a sense of open spatial awareness is one of the hardest things in a firefight. Adrenaline constricts your field of focus until all you can see is the object immediately in front of your sights. Avoiding that tunnelling-down takes countless hours of training. Being regularly shot at for real helps, though. If you survive, you learn.

As it was, while I was dealing with the guy in the back of the van, I was minutely conscious of the front-seat passenger jumping down onto the road, the thump of his boots hitting the surface, the way he brought his arms up around the trailing edge of the door, hands clasped together as he swung towards me. A big black guy. As well as the hunting hat,
he had on a bulky tan canvas jacket and jeans. Could have been a construction worker on his way to site.

Without a pause, I snapped my aim across and fired through the door glass, putting the first round into his upper arm and the second into his chest as he spun. He let go of the weapon in his hands, which landed on the asphalt amid a shower of broken window fragments. Then his legs went from under him. He slid down the bodywork with the blood gleaming dark against the tan of his jacket and shock in his face.

The driver should have been on me by now, but the cab was empty, the door standing open. I crabbed sideways round the front end of the van, keeping below the level of the glass, eyes everywhere. He might have seen his comrades go down and decided to scarper, but I wasn’t betting on it.

I glanced at Sagar again as I edged past him. He was still on the ground, floundering, defenceless.

‘Charlie, what the—?’ he began, his voice high and loud, buzzing. I waved him sharply into silence, but it was too late.

The wheelman reared out from behind the van and charged us. He was wearing a dusty green bomber jacket and was slighter than the other two, carrying less obvious muscle.

As he appeared, he flung his right arm up and back and, at the same time, I heard a shell being racked into the chamber of a pump-action shotgun.

It was deliberate misdirection, that noise. It was exactly how an extendable baton is designed to sound as its telescopic segments unfurl and lock instantly into place. To
paralyse by noise association and give the wielder time to deploy the weapon to full and devastating effect.

I shot the wheelman before he’d time to get within striking distance, knowing I had to take him down fast. Two groups of two rounds, body shots, fired as fast as I could work the trigger. Even so, momentum kept him coming, almost lurching into my arms as he stumbled and went to his knees at my feet. I jumped back, tracking him with the SIG all the way down. His face, contorted, was close enough for me to smell cigarettes and spice on his breath.

It was only as he fell, gasping, that I realised he wasn’t dead. That none of them were dead and all of them should have been. I was using hollow point Hydra-Shok rounds that flared on impact to deliver maximum internal damage as they shed velocity. They’d all been on target. So…

Ignoring his yelp of protest, I punted the wheelman over onto his back and dragged open the zip on the bomber jacket. Underneath it, strands of yellow Kevlar tufted through the four holes I’d put in his lower chest.

Body armour
.

There was no heavy-duty ceramic trauma plate in the pocket at the front of the vest, and if the way the wheelman groaned when I dug the heel of my hand into the centre of the grouping was anything to go by, he’d cracked a couple of ribs as a result of the multiple close-quarter hits.

I straightened, keeping hold of him, and kicked the baton out of reach. It hadn’t been fitted with a baton cap and skittered happily off the edge of the roadway under the barrier.

‘Come on, up!’ I commanded, wrapping my fist into the back of the man’s collar and hauling him to his knees. He
resisted until I jabbed the business end of the SIG close up against his right eye. The end of the barrel was still hot enough to brand him where it briefly touched his skin. He double-flinched – first from the burn and second in case I shot him because of it.

‘The next one,’ I murmured, ‘goes somewhere it won’t grow back.’

He made a flutter of capitulation with his hands, allowed me to half-drag him round the nose of the van. When I let go he rolled onto his side, clutching his chest, and stayed there.

Yeah, sunshine, they don’t warn you how much it hurts, do they
?

The guy from the passenger seat was still sitting with his back up against the bodywork. Blood was seeping down his left arm but he made a flimsy attempt to block me as I checked under the canvas jacket. Sure enough, he was also wearing armour. I looked for the gun he’d dropped among the mess of glass, found it nearly concealed beneath his thigh.

But when I lifted it out, I found he hadn’t been carrying a gun at all. The weapon was a TASER, capable of delivering a fifty thousand-volt charge at anything up to ten metres. I’d had the misfortune to be hit with one only a few months previously and it wasn’t pleasant – plenty nasty enough to put you on the ground and keep you there. It didn’t compete with being shot, but in my personal experience there wasn’t all that much to choose between them.

I hefted the TASER for a moment, considering, then flung the stun gun out sideways, saw the passenger’s eyes follow its looping trajectory over the crash barrier. Saw the fear jerk in them.

Then I heard a slight scrape from the rear of the van and took two quick sidesteps, bringing the SIG up again.

The first guy I’d shot was sitting up, legs splayed, rubbing uneasily at his chest. As I moved into view, he reached automatically towards his own fallen weapon on the floor of the van. Now I had the chance to look at it properly, I could see it was another TASER. If the lack of blood was anything to go by, he too had a vest. He was enough of a pro to freeze when he saw the gun in my hands and the intent with which it was being pointed in his direction. I’d already shot him once without hesitation, but still he weighed up the odds.