“Yes, but there’s rich and then there’s
rich”
I said. “Whenhe and his oppo broke into the house the other night, I think he was after Ella.”
She paused in the middle of sliding the gray file back into her bag. “A kidnap, you mean?”
I nodded. “And if that’s the case, he’s not going to let a little thing like Simone being dead stop him, is he?”
“You think he might make another try for the kid?”
“I don’t know. I’d certainly be happier if she was somewhere safer than with Lucas, that’s for sure. I don’t trust him an inch—or the kind of people he chooses to do business with. And we still don’t know what made Simone go after him the night—” I broke off again, couldn’t even say it, improvised instead. “The night Jakes was killed.”
Restless, I shifted my position again, rolling a little towards her. Mistake. When I kept still, the pain had been little more than a background ache and I’d grown hardened enough to it to forget the damage that lurked under the surface.
The pain the careless movement caused was a vicious spike in my chest, which was nasty in itself, but followed by a terrible feeling of something tearing inside. I pictured that bloody bullet again, rending its way through my internal organs with a dreadful inevitability about it. I thought of the careful repair work to the damaged tissue that the surgeon with the beautiful teeth had put into saving me. For a moment I could only lie there, motionless, breathing fast and shallow, horribly afraid that in one thoughtless moment I’d just undone everything he’d tried to achieve.
The pain washed up over me and then, at last, began to recede. I re-focused out into the room again and found Neagley was out of her chair and bending over me, frowning with concern. “Charlie, are you OK?” she demanded. “My God, I’ve never seen anybody lose color like that. You want I should go fetch a doctor?”
I gave the slightest shake of my head, as small a gesture as I could get away with. “No,” I said when I could speak again. I could feel the sweat in my hair between the back of my head and the pillow, the fire in my chest. “I’m fine. Sorry—catches up with me occasionally.”
“No shit,” she muttered, shaking her head slowly as she sat down. “You shouldn’t be talking about this,” she said with a flash of anger. “You shouldn’t even be
thinking
about this. You should be sleeping and watching mindless TV and recovering.”
“Yes, but try telling her that,” said Sean’s voice from the doorway.
Neagley’s head snapped up and I saw her expression close in as she regarded him with a cool flat gaze. Maybe she was always wary when she was first introduced to people, or maybe the part of her—the instinct— that was still a cop recognized the inherently lawless element in Sean’s makeup.
“You must be Mr. Meyer,” she said at last, and waited for Sean to cross the room before she offered a handshake. “Frances Neagley—we’ve spoken on the phone.”
“Ms. Neagley,” Sean said, matching his tone to hers. After a moment she gave a flicker of a smile, as though acknowledging she’d been subjected to the same careful scrutiny.
He came round and sat in one of the chairs by the bed and I saw his eyes narrow as they swept over me.
“Any news?” I asked quickly, heading off any queries about my state of health.
“We’ve been digging around some more on Greg Lucas,” he said. “Lucas had a nasty reputation in the army, as we already know. He had a temper on him—used to go out and pick fights with the locals wherever he was posted. He was also one hell of a jealous husband. Made his wife’s life hell and after Simone was born he got a whole lot worse.”
“Worse?” I said, frowning. “No wonder Simone’s mother didn’t want her to contact him.”
“That’s not the whole story,” Sean said. “It seems that not only did he not trust his wife to behave herself while he was overseas, more often than not he took his anger out on the child.”
“On Simone?” It was Neagley who broke in this time.
Sean nodded. “It seems that she made a lot of trips to the hospital as a baby—bumps, bruises, a broken wrist,” he said. I thought of his own childhood, what I knew of it, and could understand the faint trace of bitterness in his voice.
“And nobody noticed?” Neagley said. “Nobody picked up on any of this?”
“Overworked staff and a convincingly concerned mother.” Sean shrugged. “It happens.”
“But if he beat her as a kid, why was Simone so desperate to track him down again?” Neagley asked. She glanced at me. “Did she have some kind of score to settle?”
I shook my head slowly. “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “Before we left London she said she couldn’t really remember anything about him and I believed her. Could have blocked it out, I suppose.”
I was starting to slur my words a little, I noted. It was catching up with me again. Every breath scraped my lungs, my mouth was arid, and my thigh was throbbing so hard it was making the whole of my lower leg ache. I wondered what time I was due some extra pain medication and hoped fervently that it was soon.
I heard the murmur of Sean’s voice and Neagley saying something in reply, but they seemed to be coming from a long way away, hazy and indistinct.
Stay with it, Fox. Come on….
I
don’t remember closing my eyes, but I must have fallen into a doze. Next thing I knew, I woke to hear my father’s voice, quietly furious, at the end of the bed. I opened my eyes a fraction and found that Neagley’s chair was empty, but I had no idea how long she’d been gone.
“I thought you were supposed to be concerned for my daughter’s welfare,” my father bit out. His voice was uncharacteristically harsh, as though there might be some danger of cracks appearing in that famously unemotional façade. “She nearly died, for God’s sake! It’s bad enough that she’s chosen to throw in her lot with you, Meyer, but I will not have you jeopardizing her recovery by exhausting her like this —do you understand me?”
“Yes sir,” Sean said. I could hear the tension in his voice, the holding himself in check, and I wondered if my father really comprehended what was likely to happen if that control broke.
“I still can hardly believe she would willingly come back to America again—not after what happened the last time.”
“It was supposed to be a low-risk job, or I wouldn’t have sent her,” Sean said with an attempt at patience. “We thought—”
“Did you?” my father snapped. “Did you really
think
about what you were doing? She went through months of therapy to try and get over what she went through in Florida. Wasn’t that supposed to be a low-risk job, too, hm?
Months
of therapy,” he repeated, “to try and salvage my daughter out of the psychopath you helped create! And now what?”
For a moment Sean was silent. I felt sure the pair of them must be able to hear the sudden acceleration of my heartbeat and I was glad I wasn’t still wired up to the heart-rate monitors, or my pulse would have been setting sprint records. I wasn’t sure what was worse—listening to them bickering over me, or the prospect of being caught eavesdropping on the conversation.
“Maybe that’s the cause of the trouble,” Sean said. “Charlie was a damned good soldier. And it wasn’t just that she had enormous natural talent—it had to do with mind-set. She had the right mind-set for the job. Her ability to kill—which scares the shit out of you so much—was always there. You may have hated it, but she was perfect for Special Forces.”
“So perfect that the army allowed four of her colleagues to rape her and halfway beat her to death before she’d even finished her training, and then conspired against her to ruin her reputation,” my father said, his voice so contorted with anger that I hardly recognized it. “But she came back from that. It took years, but she came back from it. And yes, I know we were wrong, her mother and I, to keep you away from her afterwards, but we felt she needed a clean break from the past. You were still in the army, part of the machine that had let her down so badly. Besides, what future did she have as some kind of camp follower?”
“Is that how you think of her?” Sean said with a deadly softness drawling through his tone. “How very flattering.”
I heard rather than saw my father make a gesture of impatience. “We were making progress with her,” he said. “And then you arrive back in her life and suddenly all that careful work is destroyed.”
“Have you ever thought,” Sean said, still ominously quiet, “that your interference might have brought her to this?”
“Oh no, don’t try to lay the blame for this on me, Meyer! We both know who’s responsible.”
“Do we?” Sean said. He paused, as if picking his next words with great care. “She hesitated. She
had the
guy … and she hesitated.”
“You’re talking about taking a life, for heaven’s sake. Any normal person would hesitate.”
“But Charlie’s not a
normal person.
She’s a bodyguard. And in this job, you can’t afford to let your emotions take over. Losing a principal is bad enough under any circumstances. Trust me, I know But as soon as you begin to doubt yourself—or others begin to doubt you—you’re finished.”
‘And you doubt her because of this?” My father’s voice was suddenly very serious, very intent and almost hopeful.
“I think Charlie doubts herself,” Sean said at last, “and the worst thing is that I think she started doing so long before she was shot.”
T
he next day they got me out of bed and tried to work out some kind of a system so that I could move about under my own steam. My right arm had finally started to show some signs of life, which was a good thing. The downside was that it showed these signs of life in the form of a buzzing in my fingertips, extreme sensitivity that meant I couldn’t bear anything to touch my skin, and spasms like cramp in every muscle from my elbow downwards.
The wound to the back of my shoulder was such that I had very little control over my trapezius muscles. Gripping anything in my right hand was dubious, and raising my arm in any kind of lateral movement was out altogether.
My back around the site of the wound was stretched and tender, although the skin itself was numb. It made me fearful to overstress any of it, in case it all pulled apart. There was an odd feeling of tension and restriction under the surface, like a shirt that hasn’t quite been buttoned up in the right holes. The thought of having to use my back muscles to operate a pair of crutches actually made me feel faint.
But I also couldn’t put any weight through my left leg. The bullet had entered through my hamstring muscle at the back and exited through the quadriceps at the front. The fact that it had bypassed bone, arteries and major nerves on its way was a miracle but, even so, I had all the strength of a runt chicken in my lower limb.
In the end, the physiotherapist gave me one crutch for the left side and walked slowly alongside me as I staggered half a dozen paces down the corridor getting the hang of leaning on it. All the way, I dragged my left foot and damned near bit through my bottom lip in an effort not to break down and weep with the sheer bloody effort it entailed for apparently such small reward.
One of the nurses found me a chair to collapse onto and the physio held my hand while I shook and gasped like a marathon runner at the end of the home stretch and contemplated the vast distance back to the sanctuary of my bed again.
“It’s going to be a long road back, Charlie,” he told me, disgustingly cheerful, “but you’re lucky to be here at all, and it will come, if you’re prepared to work hard.”
Work.
I’d spent a lot of time thinking about work—about my job —since I’d laid there and listened to Sean and my father discussing me so coldbloodedly In the absence of anything better to occupy my mind, I’d picked apart every sentence, second-guessed every nuance, and come to a couple of conclusions that were more painful to contemplate than any physical injury I might have suffered.
As soon as you begin to doubt yourself—or others begin to doubt you—you’re finished.
Those words, more than any others, haunted me. What was the point of coming back, if there was nothing to come back to?
It had nothing to do with me having let my emotions dictate my actions out there in the forest. I’d tried over and over to analyze those final few minutes, but however I looked at it, I couldn’t have justified shooting Lucas as he stood there holding Ella. Whichever way I dissected the facts, he hadn’t been threatening her life—he’d merely been trying to save his own.
If I’d taken the shot, I wouldn’t just have traumatized the child, I would have been guilty of murder. If it had been the first time I’d used lethal force, a good legal team might have swung some kind of a plea.
But it wasn’t.
I tried to work out how many lives I’d taken and found, to my horror, that I couldn’t precisely remember. And that made it so much worse.
Or others begin to doubt you….
What if Sean had lost his faith in me? And who could blame him? I’d failed to protect a principal. Not only that, but I’d allowed a principal to be killed, not by a lone assassin or a known threat, but by the very people who should have been coming to our aid.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that as far as Sean was concerned—as far as the reputation of his company was concerned— it was a disaster. I knew that if it got out that he and I had anything other than a professional relationship, that would make things ten times worse. Sean was known to be a highflier. His staff were well paid because they were the best, and proud of it. But in truth that also meant there were plenty out there just waiting for him to crash and burn. Above all else, I hated the idea that I might be the cause of his downfall.
Suddenly it was like being back in the army, just after my attack. I wasn’t just physically at a low ebb but mentally bruised and emotionally battered as well. I needed Sean more now than I’d ever done, but I knew I could not—would not—drag him down again.
W
hen Sean walked in that afternoon, my unsettled thoughts must have made my greeting wary in some way. He studied me for a moment before responding, as though he could read my mind. No surprises there. He’d always been too sharp for comfort.