Fourth Day

by Zoe Sharp

  Now, Sean leant over and selected one of the digital images. A distance shot of Fourth Day’s compound flashed up onto the screen in cinema-quality high definition, half a metre high.

  ‘Everything we’ve seen of them, from armament to vehicles, shows they’re well equipped, and their gear is either nearly new or at least of good quality and looks well maintained,’ he said, raising an eyebrow in Parker’s direction. ‘What happened to revitalise them?’

  ‘Randall Bane happened,’ Parker said flatly. ‘After the settlement, Fourth Day was broke. Bane bought up the land and buildings for a song. It was assumed he’d turn it into a private ranch, but he kept things up and running, and nobody’s heard jack about the cult since.’ He reached for the laptop himself and put up the original picture he’d shown us of Bane.

  Maybe it was because I’d seen him for real, but that covert photo didn’t begin to do justice to the presence of the man. Where Sean – and Parker, come to that – could radiate menace as naturally as breathing, Randall Bane was something else again. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, except that it made me thoroughly uneasy.

  I glanced at Parker, found his eyes fixed on the figure on the screen. It could just have been the projected colours that made his gaze seem suddenly very hard and bright. ‘Bane’s kind of an enigma. It’s rumoured he made his money in the more volatile areas of the Middle East and the former Soviet Union, but nobody knows for certain and, needless to say, those countries are not exactly free and easy with the United States when it comes to information traffic. You would have thought somebody, somewhere, would have a file on this guy a couple of inches thick,’ he said, ‘but nobody seems to know who he really is, or what he’s doing running a two-bit cult in California.’

  ‘What about the other two guys we saw today?’ I asked, taking a sip of my coffee. ‘Any luck identifying them?’

  Parker pulled his eyes away from Bane’s likeness and clicked up a picture of the two men we’d seen with the M16s. ‘The black guy’s name is Tyrone Yancy. Ex-Marine. Dishonourable discharge in ’ninety-eight. Was having an affair with his CO’s wife. When the CO found out, he slapped her around some. Yancy broke the guy’s jaw. Since then he’s worked construction, militia training, security, whatever comes along that needs muscle.’

  ‘What about the other guy?’ Sean asked. ‘Of the two of them, I would have said he was in charge.’

  ‘John Nu.’ Parker’s eyes flicked to ours. ‘A Brit. Another ex-military man. Corporal in the Parachute Regiment. Saw action in the Balkans and failed Selection for the SAS twice. Left five years ago and has been working the private military contractors’ circuit ever since.’

  ‘A mercenary, then,’ I murmured. ‘Sounds like Bane surrounds himself with interesting people.’ I glanced up. ‘You said he left five years ago, so how long has he been with Fourth Day?’

  ‘Just the last six months. Bane suddenly started recruiting additional security. Took on eight guys, including these two.’

  Sean frowned. ‘How does Thomas Witney fit in to all this?’

  ‘He’s just a guy who suffered a family tragedy and decided to take a little time out from the world,’ Parker said, and there was the blur of evasion beneath the quiet words. ‘Apparently, it was never supposed to be a life-changing event but there were…complications. Now our client wants a retrieval and they’re prepared to go to considerable trouble to achieve it.’

  ‘Yeah, but how much trouble are they expecting us to go to?’ Sean asked. ‘From what we’ve seen of Fourth Day, they’re prepared for something – almost as if they’re expecting an incursion of some kind, and taking on people like Yancy and Nu confirms that. So, just what are we dealing with?’ His tone was deceptively mild. ‘You haven’t exactly been forthcoming on this one, Parker.’

  ‘I’m sorry to go all cloak-and-dagger on you guys,’ Parker said stiffly. ‘But the client’s kinda paranoid when it comes to confidentiality.’

  ‘He must be,’ Sean said, and there was definitely a touch of bite to him now, like a prowling shark. ‘Seeing as you haven’t even told me who the client is.’

  I glanced up from my coffee in surprise. Sean might be a junior partner in Armstrong-Meyer, but he was a partner nevertheless. And Parker wasn’t usually so secretive.

  Parker’s right eye twitched fractionally, narrowed down. ‘That’s not important,’ he said. ‘What is important is that we extract Witney as soon as possible. You’ve told me yourselves what the situation is in there. He’s nervous of something, surrounded by armed guards. He may have gone in voluntarily but, from what you’ve seen, it kinda looks like he’s having second thoughts.’ He stopped, took a breath. ‘I have given my personal assurance to the client that we will get him out again – no matter if he’s willing or not.’

  It was as close as I’d seen him come to temper. The bark of it was enough for silence to form uneasily around the edges, like frost.

  Keeping my voice bland, I asked, ‘Why the hurry?’

  Parker’s head snapped round, and for a moment I thought his tongue would follow, then he seemed to shake himself, said without inflection, ‘If there’s something on your mind, Charlie, spit it out.’

  ‘The picture you showed us at the original briefing was of a very different man to the Thomas Witney we’ve been watching,’ I said. ‘And he didn’t get that way overnight. How long, exactly, has he been behind the wire, and why the hurry to get him out now?’

  Sean glanced at me and I caught the barest flicker of surprise on his face. Then he fixed Parker with a dark gaze, echoing my own enquiry.

  Parker sighed.

  ‘Witney went in to Fourth Day a little over five years ago,’ he admitted.

  ‘And you were going to tell us this piece of information when, exactly?’ Sean’s voice was never more deadly than when it was soft as now.

  Before Parker could answer, there was noise in the hallway and one of the three-metre-high front doors swung inwards, signalling the arrival of the rest of the team. Parker quickly crossed to greet them, not hiding his relief at the interruption. I glanced up at Sean.

  What’s going on?

  I don’t know.

  The two men came in, said their hellos. Joe McGregor I’d worked with before on numerous occasions. A young black Canadian who’d been through two tours in Iraq on exchange with the US Third Infantry, before deciding he’d had enough excitement. As he dumped his kit down on the tiles he nodded to me and Sean with the wary friendliness I’d grown to expect, ever the total professional.

  But the second man was someone I’d never thought I’d see back out in the field. Not just on this job, but ever.

  Bill Rendelson had been one of Parker’s first close-protection officers, had worked alongside him right up until a radical extremist group sent a parcel bomb to the businessman he was protecting on a trip to South Africa, four years ago.

  I’d seen the photos in the file. The bomb missed its intended target but, in doing his job, Bill left his arm behind in the ruins of a Cape Town hotel suite, and his active service career along with it. The right-hand sleeve of his jacket now hung straight and flat from the shoulder, clipped together halfway down just to make the point.

  Since the amputation, he had adapted his stance to cope with the uneven distribution of his weight, giving his blocky torso a slightly twisted look that mirrored accurately, I’d always felt, his state of mind.

  Neither Parker nor Sean seemed surprised to see Bill, but maybe they just hid it better than I did.

  ‘OK,’ Parker said, once rooms had been allocated and bags carried up the overly grand Scarlett O’Hara sweeping staircase. We were back in the Great Room, the only background music provided by the coffee machine gurgling through a fresh cycle. ‘Now you’re all here, I can bring you up to speed. First of all, it’s been pointed out to me that I should start with an apology.’

  An almost imperceptible ripple went through the assembled group. He settled us with a cool stare, said, ‘I’ve
made it a rule never to send people in on surveillance operations – on any kind of operations – without adequate intel, but I’ve done that here.’

  ‘Why?’ It was Sean who asked the question, calm and without judgement. Their earlier clash might never have occurred.

  Parker glanced at him for a moment and I had a brief mental image of two glaciers impacting with slow but inevitable force.

  ‘Because time is not a luxury at our disposal in this case.’

  ‘Why the rush, boss?’ Joe McGregor asked, unconsciously repeating my earlier question.

  ‘As you know, we’ve carried out these kind of snatches on cults before, on behalf of parents of misguided children, but our target now is a whole different ball game.’

  He brought up two new images on the screen, side by side. The first was the same picture of Thomas Witney that he’d shown to Sean and me before we’d begun our watching brief. The second was a covert surveillance picture, taken earlier that day. I was struck again by how much Witney had changed during his time in the cult.

  The original snap had been taken at some formal occasion. One of Witney’s hands was wrapped tightly round the stem of a champagne flute, with the awkward grip of a man more at home grasping the neck of a beer bottle. He looked uncomfortable to have been caught on camera, and despite the half-hearted smile, an air of misery hung over him like misted rain.

  ‘This is Thomas Witney,’ Parker said, for the benefit of McGregor more than Bill Rendelson. It was probably Bill who’d collated the initial data. I glanced across at him, but the big man sat without any sign of impatience on the leather sofa, coffee in his hand, attention on his boss. Only when Parker put up the newer picture did Bill give the screen a long scrutiny.

  ‘Witney went in to Fourth Day because he believed that the cult in general – and Randall Bane in particular – was responsible for the death of his only son, Liam.’

  Another picture came up, of a young man in a scruffy olive drab jacket. Standard student wear from Vietnam to the present day. The shot had been taken on a university campus. He was standing in a group, listening intently.

  He was centred in the frame, the faces of the others slightly softened by the narrow field of focus. The boy looked no older than nineteen or twenty, a thin serious face and naturally pale skin that held a flush of red along his prominent cheekbones.

  ‘Liam Witney became involved with the cult while he was a student at UCLA, dropped out of college and then became a self-styled eco-warrior,’ Parker went on. ‘He joined a radical group who call themselves Debacle, died a few months later during a protest against oil exploration in Alaska. Witney believed Bane encouraged Liam in this direction and, against advice, decided to infiltrate Fourth Day in order to prove it.’

  ‘Was he a cop?’ McGregor asked.

  Parker shook his head. ‘A schoolteacher,’ he said. ‘But he’d been to the cops and gotten nowhere. He felt, rightly or wrongly, that because the boy had been engaged in illegal activity at the time of his death, there had been only a cursory investigation by the law enforcement agencies. He decided to go it alone.’ Parker’s expression hardened. ‘Witney left instructions that if he didn’t come out voluntarily inside six months, he was to be extracted – by force if necessary.’

  ‘So what happened?’ I said.

  Parker cast me a fast, dark look. ‘He cancelled,’ he said shortly.

  There was a long pause, and then Sean asked with quiet sarcasm, ‘And nobody thought to question his state of mind?’

  Parker’s face tightened. ‘Well, it’s sure being questioned now,’ he said. ‘And that’s why we have to get him out of there, fast as possible.’

  There was something about the inflection, the emphasis, that tugged at all of us, but it was Bill Rendelson who said it. ‘Boss, when you say “we” I hope you don’t mean—’

  ‘I’ll be going in with Joe and Sean and Charlie,’ Parker said calmly. ‘I want you here running comms, Bill. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have handle that end of an operation.’

  Bill shrugged the compliment aside as a poor attempt at flattery, scowling. ‘To hell with that,’ he snapped, jerking to his feet. ‘You can’t have both the agency’s partners in the field at the same time. It’s crazy!’ His gaze was scornful as it swept over Parker, more so as it then flipped between me and Sean. ‘It’s bad enough that you’re putting Charlie in when—’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Parker said, cutting Bill dead without troubling to raise his voice. He had that kind of knack. ‘Charlie is one of the most capable operatives we have. I’m putting her and Sean in together because they’re damn good at what they do, and I trust them not to let any personal feelings they might have for each other interfere with their ability to do their job. If you can’t do the same, Bill, you’d best speak now.’ He glanced pointedly at his watch. ‘There’s still time for you to catch a flight back to New York.’

  It was cruel, and very unlike Parker’s normal measured stance. Something flared and died in Bill’s muddy eyes, then he shook his head and subsided, shooting me a quick, poisonous glare that bothered me more than it should have done.

  He knows.

  I busied my hands with putting down my cup, aware of a sudden coldness that had nothing to do with efficient air conditioning. When I looked up again, it was to find Parker watching me minutely.

  ‘You OK?’ he murmured. It was casually put, and could simply have been in response to Bill’s obvious hostility over the forthcoming operation. But it wasn’t.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, forcing a smile. ‘I’m fine.’

  Sean, meanwhile, was interrogating all of us with a silent lethal gaze. I kept my face neutral and hoped that, for once, his ability to read me like an open book was going through a dyslexic phase.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘What’s going on with you and Parker?’

  It was later – late, in fact. I lay alongside Sean in the half-light of the bedroom we were sharing.

  ‘Going on?’ I echoed carefully. ‘Nothing, and I bloody well hope you’re not implying—’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘But he’s clearly concerned about you for some reason.’ He lifted up onto one elbow, stared down at me in the gloom, as if feeling his way, and added softly, ‘Tell me.’

  I drew in a quiet breath. ‘After we got back from Texas, I suffered a few side effects from…what happened there,’ I said, which was fine but hardly went the distance. ‘You were away – Mexico. I didn’t want to distract you while you were on the job.’

  ‘But that was before Christmas,’ he said, and maybe it was because of the darkness but I heard a mix of emotions in his voice – bafflement, with a touch of accusation. ‘And you told Parker but not me.’

  ‘I ended up in hospital for a check-up,’ I admitted, which skated so thinly over being an outright lie it was in imminent danger of falling through. I shifted uncomfortably, glad he couldn’t fully see my face. ‘So, of course Parker knows – the company insurance scheme had to pay for it.’

  ‘And that’s it?’ he said.

  My hesitation was fractional. ‘Of course.’

  He sighed. ‘If there’s anything that will affect this operation, Charlie, I need to know.’

  ‘There’s nothing,’ I said, more firmly, rolling onto my side away from him, even as a little voice in the back of my mind whispered, ‘Coward.’

  His hand stroked smoothly across my shoulder, thumb sliding into the slight indentation of the old bullet wound in the back of my scapula, tracing its outline like a rosary. I knew then, beyond any doubt, that he loved me, despite or possibly because of my flaws and imperfections.

  So, why did that realisation bring a wash of silent tears oozing past my eyelids?

  I lay quite still while I fought this inconvenient burst of unwarranted emotion, and gradually his caress slowed. Eventually, he leant down and pressed a kiss into my hair, murmuring, ‘Goodnight, Charlie.’

  I didn’t answer, even though we both kne
w I wasn’t sleeping, and I felt the mattress stir as he turned on his side away from me. I knew all I had to do was roll over and reach for him, but I just couldn’t do it and I had no idea why.

  If he’d kept the job out of the equation, I thought in desperation, perhaps I’d have finally found a way to tell him the truth. That when we’d returned to New York from the events in Houston three months before, I’d found myself pregnant with his child.

  ‘Well, there’s no doubt about it – you’re pregnant,’ the young doctor said. ‘I would say seven or eight weeks.’

  Still reeling, I muttered, ‘It’s seven and a half.’ And when she raised her eyebrows, I added, ‘I may not have a medical degree, but I can still count.’

  ‘Well, er, congratulations?’

  This last was hesitant, definitely a question. She must have realised from my face that her diagnosis was not exactly the outcome I’d been hoping for.

  ‘Thanks.’ Suddenly glad I was sitting down, I stared dully at the corner of her desk where the cheap veneer had split to reveal the chipboard underneath. Well, you can’t expect solid hardwood furniture in a free downtown clinic.

  My father, who had long since escaped the UK’s underfunded state medical system for the rarefied atmosphere of private practice, would have been horrified to see me in such a place. I had no intention of ever telling him I had cause to be there.

  The doctor sitting opposite looked about eighteen, a Chinese American with a long, thin neck rising giraffe-like from the shapeless collar of her white coat, and dark circles under her eyes. Now, she sighed, twisting in her seat to face me, and I saw her check out my ringless hands, clasped together in my lap.

  ‘Do you know who the father is?’

  I gave a lopsided smile, assailed by a brief but vivid flashback to a half-wrecked hotel room in Boston, of the exultation in Sean’s eyes as we’d lost control of everything, including our senses, in the heat of fury and passion. ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘I know.’