Third Strike (35 page)

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Authors: Zoe Sharp

Tags: #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Bodyguards, #Thriller

BOOK: Third Strike
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“I don’t know what Mr. Collingwood told you, son,” he said. He took a step forwards, speaking each word clearly, so there would be no mistakes, “but I can tell you, right now, that you have been involved in an unsanctioned operation. Do you understand what that means?”
“Sir?”
For the first time, his gun lightened a fraction. To my left, one of the SWAT team rolled his shoulders a little and settled more fully into the stock of his own weapon.
The man with the mustache sighed, took another step. “Mr. Collingwood took it upon himself to encourage Storax to investigate the side effects of one of their drugs without withdrawing it from testing. In order to do this, he lied, falsified his reports, and misused the resources placed at his disposal by the federal government. He may even have believed he was doing the right thing, but in truth he was off the books—off the goddamn planet, if I’m any judge,” he said, temper finally cracking through like a whip. “And I will tell you now that I intend to deal with his transgressions most … severely. He may have convinced you he was a patriot but in reality, son, he was a traitor. A traitor,” he went on, beating the message home with measured strokes, “who has brought disgrace to his country and his office … and to the people who placed their trust in him.”
Uncertainty reamed Buzz-cut’s features. His eyes skimmed over the man with the silver mustache, the SWAT team, calculating the odds. It can’t have taken him long to work out that resistance was, indeed, futile. I cursed him from inside my head, spitting soundless screams, as if I could compel him to yield by will alone.
But still he held.
The silence stretched, gossamer threads that sparked and snapped under the artificial lights. My eyes locked onto my mother’s face, the flutter of her eyelids as God knows what thoughts careered through her mind. If she died here, now, then everything we’d been through—everything we’d done—would have been for nothing.
“What we have to decide here, son,” the man with the mustache went on, halfway across the narrow gulf that separated them now, “is just where your loyalties lie. Did you trust Mr. Collingwood’s word implicitly, or did you actively collaborate with him to develop a bioweapon using a company that’s foreign-owned, operating on U.S. soil? The stand you’re making here leads me to believe you knew all the risks. This is the last stand of a desperate man, son, not a patriot.”
“Sir! I am a patriot, sir!” Buzz-cut rapped out, voice close to breaking.
“Well, in that case, son,” the man murmured, “you’d best prove it to me.”
He took a final step, bringing him within a meter of Buzz-cut. He held out his hand, palm up. After a long, agonizing two seconds, Buzz-cut withdrew the gun from my mother’s skull and let the hammer down slowly. He reversed his hold and handed the piece over to the man with the mustache, grip first in smartly formal presentation.
I heard a collective exhalation, the quiet gush of relief from the SWAT team as they realized that today was not their day to kill or die.
The man with the mustache handed off the gun to one of his men, who crabbed forwards to take it. Another yanked Buzz-cut’s wrists behind him and tightened the PlastiCuffs in place.
Buzz-cut stood, head down, gaze turned inwards, as if replaying all the things he’d done without question, on Collingwood’s say-so. More than he could justify, if his misery was anything to go by. More than he could bear. When he lifted his head, his eyes were glistening.
My mother opened her own eyes, very slowly, the shock blatant in them. Sean elbowed his way through the mill of black and brought out the same pocketknife my father had used to torture Collingwood. He sliced through the ties binding her wrists.
With nothing to hold them, her arms flopped forwards and, when she climbed down from the stool, her legs folded under her. Sean tucked an arm behind her knees and lifted her without apparent effort. She clung to him and let the tears fall freely now. When I fell in alongside she grabbed my hand with icy fingers, paper skin over fragile bones, and wouldn’t let go.
As Sean carried my mother past the man with the mustache, he reached out and put a hand on Sean’s arm. The touch was light, the way it can be when it’s backed by limitless strength and power.
“You and Miss Fox wouldn’t be thinking of taking off again, would you, Mr. Meyer?” he said, making it both a threat and a polite inquiry, all at the same time.
Sean paused just long enough to make his lack of intimidation felt. “No,” he said.
The man nodded. “Good, because this time you
would
have the full weight of the U.S. government tracking you down,” he said. “I believe we have some things to discuss. I trust you’ll make yourself available.”
Sean bridled but kept it in check. “Yes sir,” he said, in the same blankly neutral tone that skated thinly along the borders of insubordination.
“I’m sure that you will,” the man with the mustache said. His gaze shifted onto my father, who’d come forwards, unable to hold back any longer. “This whole thing has been a goddamned mess,” he added in that careful way of his, eyes moving to me now. “It’s going to take some cleaning up.”
“I’m sure we can work something out,” I said, injecting just as much steel into my own voice.
I thought I saw a wisp of a smile skim across the older man’s face, but it didn’t trouble his eyes.
“Oh, I’m sure we can,” he said.
 
“Here,” Terry O’Loughlin said, “drink this.”
She handed me a cone of water from the cooler in the room she’d coaxed us into after the man with the mustache and his team had departed.
I took what I was offered, grateful, realizing as I did so that I still had Collingwood’s Glock in my hand. For a moment I struggled to recall quite how it had got there.
Still punchy.
Out of habit, I jammed the gun between my thigh and the chair cushion, keeping it within reach, and took a sip of water. It was cold enough to feel the glassy slide of it right down the inside of my ribs, clutching at my heart as it went.
My mother had been clamped to my father’s side ever since Sean had put her down. My father had snatched her close, splaying his hands across her back and burrowing his face into her hair, like he was trying to take the very essence of her into himself. Proof of life.
I heard sobbing, but I couldn’t have said for certain which of them it emanated from.
I desperately wanted to reach for Sean in the same way but I knew, if I did so, I was likely to break into pieces and it would all come spilling out. And I couldn’t bring myself to do that in front of Parker, in front of my parents. Even in front of Sean. So I shrugged off the hand he put on my shoulder, throwing a quick
later
smile in response to his frown of concern.
Vondie was lying,
I told myself again as I pulled away.
No way can it be true. We’ve always been so careful … .
Terry had quietly taken charge, shepherding us gently into what looked like a staff break room nearby, where there were low chairs and tables and the watercooler.
Beside me, Sean sat leaning forwards with his forearms resting on his thighs, shoulders hunched, staring low into nothing.
Pure exhaustion sucked the blood out of my veins. Adrenaline, as I knew full well, was a single-minded taskmaster, strident and brutal. As it dissipated, I felt my system overload by way of retribution. A vicious headache—I told myself it was from the TASER or the drugs—had started hammering at the base of my skull. The more attention I paid to my body, the more I found there wasn’t a part of it that didn’t ache, from my neck and shoulders to the soles of my feet. It was another jolt to remember why.
It had been a long time since I’d killed somebody that way—up close and personal. That part of it didn’t get any easier with practice.
“I won’t ask if you’re all right,” Parker said, hitching the crease of his suit trousers as he sat down opposite. If it wasn’t for those watchful eyes, you’d have thought him urbane, unthreatening. “Because I can see you’re not—any of you.”
“No,” Sean said, and he was looking at me while he said it.
My mind was drifting. I pulled it back on track with effort. “Parker, what the hell are you doing here?” I said. I jerked my head in a vague gesture to indicate the direction in which the man with the silver mustache and his burly entourage had departed. “And who
was
that guy?”
Parker glanced at Sean, then let his gaze shift to Terry, still hovering by the watercooler. “As soon as it became clear that Collingwood wasn’t on the level, I began trying to go over his head,” he said. He let out a slow breath. “Not easy. Nobody likes to hear there’s something rotten at the core of their own organization, and the kind of agency Collingwood is a part of, well, they like to hear it even less.”
“But you convinced them,” Sean said, and it wasn’t a question. It was praise.
Parker took a drink of water, ducked his head in acknowledgment. “Collingwood’s immediate superior was stalling, so I had to fight my way farther up the food chain. Epps—the guy you just saw—let me just say you don’t get much higher without being voted into office.”
“So, he has the power to make all this … go away?” I said faintly. I scrubbed a tired hand over my face, but the image of Vondie’s crumpled body and Collingwood’s damaged spine was imprinted on my retinas. I glanced at my father. He and my mother were sitting thigh-to-thigh on the sofa to Sean’s left, not quite listening, but not quite oblivious to the conversation going on around them, either.
Parker nodded. “Once I laid it all out for Epps, he took immediate action. Guy at his level wants something done, it gets done. We were already in the air with a full HRT—Hostage Rescue Team,” he elaborated for Terry’s and my parents’ benefit, “when Sean’s messages came through.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father straighten, very slowly.
No. Oh no.
Sean must have seen it, too.
“You did what you had to, Richard,” he said, speaking fast. “We had no way of knowing how close Parker was when we went back in.”
“But if we’d only waited a little longer,” my father said, swallowing the bitterness that threatened to spill out over his words, “I wouldn’t have had to do any of it, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Twenty-twenty hindsight,” Sean said with quiet vehemence. “We didn’t know, and couldn’t afford to wait.”
My mother reached out and threaded her fingers through her husband’s. Her gaze was fixed on his face, which was still pale and shiny from the aftermath, anxious at his obvious distress. He glanced sideways at her and flinched away from the absolute trust he saw there, like it burned him.
Because he no longer trusted himself.
“I’ve always prided myself on being a rational man—one who doesn’t let my emotions rule me,” he said in that remote voice. “I know you sometimes find me cold, Charlotte. I am required by my profession to be clinical, but I have never considered myself to be without compassion.”
He broke off, swallowed again. “But I realize now that what I did back there … in that room, was utterly indefensible in human terms. I can offer no justification for it.”
“They would have killed her,” Terry said suddenly, conviction in her voice. “I think Collingwood would have killed all of us.”
“Perhaps,” my father said, dismissive, like maybe she was humoring him. “But he didn’t get the chance, so we’ll never know for certain.” He looked up, met my eyes and I saw the violent slur of emotions washing behind his own. “I honestly do not know how you live with yourself, Charlotte. Doing what you do. Knowing what you can do. Why do you think I worked so hard to save that man after we were ambushed in Boston—in spite of what he’d done? So my own daughter wouldn’t have another death on her hands, on her conscience.” He took a breath to shore up his voice enough to go on.
“But now I have to live with the fact that while I was in that room, torturing another human being, I had no doubts whatsoever about what I was doing. None. And I should have done, don’t you think?”
And with that, my cold, detached and rational father put his face in his hands and wept like a child.
 
A month after we got back from Texas, I sat alone in the lofty apartment in Manhattan, staring at a small white box on the coffee table in front of me. I’d faced loaded guns with less trepidation, but that small white box scared the shit out of me.
I’d gone ten blocks out of my way to visit a pharmacy I’d never been to before on the edge of Chinatown. I loitered at the back of the store until the checkout came free, so I could snatch up my purchase and rush it through, hardly breaking stride. Guilty as a teenage kid buying their first pack of condoms.
The irony of that comparison wasn’t lost on me. I’d already worked out that the only time Sean and I had been too careless—in too much of an all-fired hurry—to think about such basic precautions, had been that time in the hotel in Boston. That one time. But sometimes, I knew, one time was all it took.
I knew I’d been putting off finding out for certain if Vondie had been lying when she’d read out the results of that allencompassing blood test with such sly conviction. That’s the secret of a good interrogator, after all, to inject a writhing, squirming sense of self-doubt into the subject. To catch you off balance and batter you down, and to strike while the soft skin over the jugular is exposed.
She’d stripped away my bravery down to bone-level fear and I’d responded in the only way I knew. I’d killed her.
So, what kind of mother would I make?
I thought of my own parents and, somehow, knowing they’d been in the room next to ours, had heard with mortifying clarity what might turn out to have been the conception of their grandchild, made it all the worse.
Surprisingly, perhaps, I’d been in regular contact with my mother since I’d got back. She seemed to have emerged from the events of the previous month with a kind of serene calm, rediscovering an inner core to herself that had been long buried.
“I just feel lucky to be alive,” she told me frankly, during one of the chatty transatlantic calls I’d grown, strangely, to enjoy. “It’s so easy to waste the time we have, don’t you think?”
I wished my father had responded with the same composure but, as my mother had come out into the light, so he’d withdrawn, like the little figures on an ornamental clock. He’d taken a leave of absence from his surgical work at home, my mother told me, was considering early retirement. I didn’t get my father’s take on it directly. He never seemed available to come to the phone.
The mysterious Mr. Epps, meanwhile—true to his word—had done some considerable cleaning up on our behalf. In return for complete silence on the subject of the whole Storax affair and Collingwood’s involvement in it, Epps had seen to it that Vondie’s death, and what had been done to Collingwood, was swept under the carpet. My only thought was that it must be one huge carpet—with a bloody big lump in the middle of it.
Collingwood, so I was told, had suffered a partial paralysis of his right leg, and other areas of impaired function. I didn’t inquire as to the details. It was not quite enough to put him in a wheelchair, as my father had so eloquently outlined, but it did mean he had to rely heavily on a cane to take the daily half hour of exercise that was all his current incarceration allowed. I doubt I’ll ever know if my father spared him the full cut by chance or choice, but I’m inclined towards the latter.
Epps magicked away the charges arising from my father’s enforced visit to the brothel in Bushwick. The Boston hospital suddenly clammed up on the subject of Jeremy Lee’s accelerated demise. We were not even questioned over the shooting of Don Kaminski during the roadside ambush Vondie had organized just outside Norwood. But, on the downside, Miranda Lee’s death remained officially a suicide.
Storax announced a delay in the launch of their new treatment for osteoporosis. Manufacturing inconsistencies were cited as the main reason.
There wasn’t much even Epps could do about the news reports that had already gone out regarding my father, or the opinions that had been formed from his own damning statement on TV, which I’d seen at the gym with Nick that day. It seemed a long time ago. But without any ongoing charges to propel the story forwards, it was already old news.
Now, too restless to sit, I jumped up, stuffed my hands into my trouser pockets and paced to the window.
It was edging towards November, early evening. A wet day, where a sneaky wind had surfed between the skyscrapers to tug at hats and umbrellas down at street level. It had driven the rain down the back of my bike jacket and penetrated the fingers of my gloves as I’d ridden the Buell home through traffic. And I hadn’t cared.
I loved my job. More than that, it fitted me, gave me a unique sense of place, of belonging. I didn’t have to explain to these people who I was, or excuse what I could do. They already knew and they accepted me in spite or maybe because of it.
I thought back to the conversation I’d had with Madeleine when Sean and I had gone to Cheshire to retrieve my mother, and I realized that I could finally tell her yes, at last, I had the respect for which I’d been searching.
And maybe it was better not to think about the price.
When we’d got back from Houston, Parker had put me straight back into the field without hesitation, even before I’d passed the Stress Under Fire course in Minneapolis. I’d returned from that the week before, to find Sean on assignment in Mexico City. He’d be gone another week, maybe two.
More than long enough to formulate a way to tell him … whatever I needed to.
I turned away from the sliding pattern of rain on the outside of the glass and looked across the room to where that damned white box lay, taunting me. Even buying the bloody pregnancy home testing kit was a form of defeat, I considered. It gave credence to Vondie’s invention. Somewhere in the back of my mind I heard her laughing at me still.
But I was late. Nothing unusual in that. My body clock had always been skewed and the slightest stress or trauma tended to knock it off its stride. Taking a hit from a TASER, an armful of dope, a life—it was enough to put a crimp in anyone’s day. But it meant I could no longer pretend this might not be a real possibility.
I took a deep breath, snatched up the box as I passed the coffee table and locked myself in the bathroom, even though I was on my own in the apartment.
I had to read the instructions three times before they sank in, followed them to the letter, and set the plastic stick on the vanity, next to the Tag watch Sean had given me. The packaging on the kit boasted 99 percent accurate results in less than a minute.
Sixty seconds, and then you’ll know … .
I sat on the edge of the bathtub with my arms wrapped round my body as if to ward off pain, and stared at the second hand as it made its stately sweep.
And, quite unbidden, an image of Ella came into my mind. The little girl whose mother’s life I’d failed to protect in a frozen New Hampshire forest the winter before. Four-year-old Ella had sneaked under my skin and made off with my heart when I wasn’t looking. I’d nearly died trying to save her mother. I’d been fully prepared to do so in order to save the child.
But to do it, I’d had to let the monster out. The cold-blooded monster inside me that could kill without pause or pity. She’d glimpsed it, and been so terrified I’d been ordered to sever all contact with her, permanently. I’d missed her, I realized, more than I’d allowed myself to admit.
And, riding in on the back of that revelation came a bubbling excitement, a dreadful kind of secret joy, that the kind of love I’d felt for that child, and set aside, might be mine again.
Thirty seconds. Come on, come on!
I thought of my father. Would he forgive me, finally, if I presented him with a grandchild—a grandson, to make up for the disappointment of a daughter in the first place? We’d had brief moments of connection along the way, but the greatest of them had been the one that had ultimately driven us furthest apart.
Now, he couldn’t even bring himself to speak to me. Did he look at me and see what he’d become, I wondered. Did he blame me for that?
Forty-five seconds. Did that damn watch stop?
I wavered. The fear drenched me in a cold wash. A child. How the hell could I bring up a child to know right from wrong, when I spent each working day with a gun on my hip and had a body count in double figures? How could I be trusted, if I was tired, sleep-deprived, pushed beyond endurance, not to snap and do something even I would find abominable?
And, disregarding Vondie’s gleefully dismal predictions, how would Sean
really
react to the news he was going to be a father?
It won’t happen. False alarm. She was lying. It’ll be fine … .
I checked my watch again, to find my minute was up, reached for the plastic stick with hands that were slick and not quite steady. For some time after that, I stared dumbly at the indicator, reread the instructions even though I knew there was no room for doubt about the result. It was indisputably, definitely, positive.
So, Vondie hadn’t been lying after all.

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