by Zoe Sharp
“I used to find your flippancy at the most inappropriate moments somewhat difficult to take, Charlotte,” he said. “But I find it particularly distasteful after last night.”
“Ah yes—last night,” I murmured, keeping my voice lazily amused even though I felt my fingers tense around the coffee cup. I compelled them to unclamp and set the cup down in its saucer without a clatter. “O-kay, let’s get this over with.”
The waiter was back again, sliding a rack of toast and a teapot onto the table before running away. My father winced a little when he saw the string for the teabag dangling out from under the lid, but he heroically restrained himself from complaint.
“I’m not entirely sure what’s worse,” he said then, conversational. “The fact that he obviously hurt you, or the fact that you evidently enjoyed it.”
“Sean didn’t hurt me,” I said in a similar matter-of-fact tone, snagging a slice of toast and a little pot of strawberry preserve from the middle of the table.
My father linked his fingers together and regarded me over the top of them. “You have fresh bruises on your wrists that weren’t there yesterday,” he said, a dispassionate diagnosis. “Which means not only that you were held down with considerable force, but also that you resisted.”
What do I say to that? That Sean was angry? That he didn’t mean it? That I’d witnessed all too clearly the wave of disgust that had crossed his face when he’d seen what he’d done? So, which was the greater evil to admit to my father—deliberate cruelty or careless brutality?
And because I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make it worse, I didn’t say anything. Instead, I shrugged and took a bite of my toast, but my throat had closed dangerously and I had to chase it down with a mouthful of juice.
“Has he ever … hit you?”
“Yes,” I said, leaving just enough of a pause to push him for a reaction. There wasn’t one. “We spar together. Of course he has.”
A sigh. “Don’t be obtuse, Charlotte,” he said, and the clip was back with a vengeance. “You know exactly what I mean.”
“No, he’s never beaten me up, if that’s what you’re getting at.” I allowed myself a small smile as I took another swig. “I’m hardly in danger of becoming a battered wife.”
That got a response. Instant, more of a flinch than anything else.
I put down my glass, smile fading. “My God,” I said softly. “Is that what you’re afraid of? That we might get married and then it would be official—he’d be your son-in-law and you’d have to accept him? Is that it?”
“Of course not,” my father evaded sharply. “Do you find it quite so difficult to believe that I—we—might be concerned for your welfare?” And, when my skepticism was clearly demonstrated by my lack of answer, he glanced away and added carefully, “People who have been through the kind of trauma that you experienced, often have a certain amount of difficulty forming normal relationships afterwards.” He looked up abruptly, met my eyes. “They self-harm. They look for sexual partners who will hurt them. They need the pain in some way, like worrying at a nagging tooth. I find it … pitiful.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” I asked, limiting my physical response to a raised eyebrow when what I really wanted to do was reach for his throat. “Trying to alleviate some kind of karmic toothache?”
The waiter returned, this time bearing a large oval tray at shoulder height, which he put down on a foldout trestle and began to decant plates onto our table with all the flourish of a casino croupier dealing cards. My father waited until the man had scurried away again before he spoke.
“It defies logic that someone who’s been gang-raped would take any kind of pleasure in being forced,” he said, quietly frozen, “unless they have severe psychological problems. Problems for which we attempted to get you some professional help over a year ago. Yet you stopped going to Dr. Yates after only a few sessions.”
“I don’t have a problem forming a ‘normal relationship’—whatever you might deem that to be,” I said, outwardly calm as I poured milk onto my cereal, hating the way my skin heated at his words. “It’s the fact that I’ve formed one with someone you despise that really pisses you off.”
My dip into coarseness was deliberate but he let it slide this time, and that in itself was interesting.
“We don’t despise him,” my father said, and I noted he could rarely bring himself to use Sean’s name. I realized, also, that by using “we,” he was off-loading part of the blame for his attitude towards Sean onto my mother. How convenient.
“Well, you make a pretty good show of it, unless he’s useful for”—I paused, miming exaggerated thought process—“oh, I don’t know—keeping you alive, maybe?”
“It sounded like a war was breaking out in there,” he muttered then, his voice low, near to shaken. “It sounded like he was killing you, Charlotte. What the devil were we supposed to think?”
I put my spoon down with great care.
“How about anything but the worst all the time?” I said, fixing him with a stare that was as laconic as I could make it. “He’s a good man, with standards and a sense of honor, if you could only see it. And we love each other.”
I paused, hoping for some kind of acknowledgment of a valid point. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get one. “You were young once and in love, surely? Did you never have that desperate, all-out, break-the-furniture-and-to-hell-with-the-consequences kind of sex?” I demanded. “If not, then I rather think I pity you.”
I expected a cutting retort. To my utter amazement, not to mention my embarrassment, something flickered through his face and he blushed. My father actually blushed. He opened his mouth to deny it, of course, but I held up a peremptory hand.
“No!” I said quickly. “Don’t tell me! On second thoughts, I withdraw the question because, to be quite honest, I really do not want to know … .”
We finished breakfast largely in uncomfortable silence, with me desperately trying to dislodge the unwanted mental image of my parents engaged in rough sex. The metaphorical elephant was back, but for some reason now the picture in my head had it wearing a PVC corset and fishnet stockings, and carrying a saucy lash.
My father signed both meals to his room, and we rode the elevator up again without speaking, reaching his door first. He swiped the key card through the lock and pushed the door open almost without a pause. I followed him in, both of us coming to an abrupt halt just inside the doorway at the sight which greeted us.
My mother was sitting on the small sofa near the window, washed and dressed. Sitting alongside her, almost knee-toknee, was Sean. He was wearing yesterday’s suit with a fresh shirt and his usual tie, his hair still damp from the shower. Both of them were laughing and they looked up sharply at our unexpected entrance. Briefly, I saw the flash of guilt from my mother, that she’d been caught fraternizing with the enemy.
I shot a quick sideways glance at my father’s face and saw something cold and dark and tightly furious blaze there before he slammed the shutters down.
Sean met his gaze in cool challenge, as if daring him to make a big thing of this. For a moment they dueled silently, then my father turned away with the excuse of asking my mother if she wanted breakfast. His voice was politely neutral, but his shoulders told a different story.
“Thank you, no,” she said. “We’ve just had a cup of tea and that will be quite sufficient, I think.”
Sean pointedly continued his stare, then rose with casual grace and strolled towards us.
“I think perhaps we should go back and see Miranda Lee this morning,” he said. “See if she knows about the alterations that have been made to her husband’s records. If she saw them beforehand, she’s another witness. If we leave soon, we should miss the morning rush.”
My father nodded stiffly, moving aside to let him pass. I stood my ground and, as Sean drew level, I reached out and grabbed his sleeve.
He stopped, flicking his eyes down to my hand and then up to my face. Hi
s expression was wary, almost uncertain.
I stepped in to him, let go of his jacket to reach up, curving my hand to his clean-shaven cheek and pressing my lips very softly against his. For a moment, sheer surprise kept him immobile before he responded. A gentle chaste kiss that nevertheless served as an instant inflammable reminder of how the night had progressed.
I kept my eyes open, watched his flutter closed and open again slowly as I pulled back a little. There was confusion in them, yes, but a kind of joy, too. His pupils were huge.
“Good morning,” I murmured, husky and a little defiant, acutely aware of our audience.
He reached up, brushed a stray lock of hair back from my forehead with an infinitely gentle finger, as if needing to demonstrate he could touch me and not leave a mark.
“Yes,” he said, and he was smiling. “It is now.”
By the time we’d packed, loaded up the Navigator and checked out, it was a respectable-enough hour to call ahead and warn Miranda Lee that we were coming back, just in case she’d made plans.
I called her from my phone as Sean swung the Navigator through sunny Boston streets. It was warm enough not to wear a jacket unless you had something you wanted to conceal underneath it. Both Sean and I wore jackets.
My father had been terse since my little display of open affection towards Sean in their hotel room, but I felt liberated and reckless. Even though there was a part of me that was desperate to know what the hell Sean and my mother had been discussing so earnestly while we’d been gone.
Now, I recognized, was not the time to ask.
Miranda took awhile to answer her phone, and sounded distracted when she finally did so.
“It’s Charlie Fox,” I said. “Um, Richard and Elizabeth’s daughter,” I added when she didn’t immediately respond.
“Oh yes, of course! I’m sorry, Charlie. I’m a little out of it right now, but I’m glad you’ve called,” she said and gave a nervous laugh. “In fact, if you hadn’t, I’d probably have tried to call you.”
“Why?” I said, and it was the tone as much as the question that had Sean’s attention snap in my direction. “What’s happened?”
“You know how I mentioned about Terry O’Loughlin—in Storax’s legal department? Well, I had another e-mail just in—but it’s kind of weird.”
“Weird how?” I said. Now, my father was leaning in close from the rear seat.
“Well, it’s really brief—a warning. Just tells me to be careful and not to trust anyone.” Another short laugh. Definitely nerves. “I mean, after yesterday—discovering the house was broken into and everything, it’s freaked me out, you know?”
“I’m not surprised,” I said. “It sounds like Storax is playing mind games with you. Trying to scare you.”
“Yeah, well, it’s working.” She let out a shaky breath. “But what should I do?”
“Have you made any plans to go to your friend’s place—Vermont, wasn’t it?”
“I’m already packed,” she admitted. “I checked into a motel last night and only came back to the house this morning to get a few things. I was going to leave again right after lunch.”
I checked my watch, calculated the journey time. “Hang on till we get there, can you? We’re just getting onto the interstate. Unless we hit traffic, we should be with you inside an hour.”
“Okay, yes,” she said, in a rush. “I didn’t want to ask, but … thank you.”
I ended the call and relayed the gist of it to the others. “It sounds like Storax have got her rattled,” I finished. “Which is probably the point of the exercise.”
“Yeah,” Sean said, pulling out to overtake a line of Kenworth trucks, “and at the risk of scaring her even more, what do we tell her about what we found—or more to the point, what we didn’t find—at the hospital?”
My father took a moment to reply, but whether this was because he was considering his answer, or trying to bring himself to have a normal conversation with Sean, I wasn’t sure.
Eventually, he said, “We still don’t really know what Storax hopes to achieve by all this.”
“They’re covering their backs, surely?” I said, twisting so I could carry on a conversation with him in the rear seat more easily. He was sitting directly behind me, which made it more difficult. “They have to know there’s a chance that some of the patients being treated will suffer the same kind of side effects that Jeremy Lee did. And if they didn’t know that before his death, then they sure as hell did afterwards. It makes no sense that they haven’t completely withdrawn it and stopped the trials. By continuing, aren’t they opening themselves up to another thalidomide fiasco?”
“Withdrawing it could potentially cost them a great deal of money,” my father said. “And might allow a competitor to steal a march on them. Better for Storax if they can work on the problems quickly, without anyone finding out about them.”
“But if the rate Miranda said her husband deteriorated is anything to go by, surely the side effects would have shown up pretty quickly?” I pointed out.
My father shrugged. “Not necessarily. Jeremy was of Korean descent. Korea has one of the lowest instances of osteoporosis in the world. Of course, there’s considerable research to suggest this is largely due to environmental factors rather than genetics, but it’s an interesting point.”
“None of it’s enough to go to all this trouble over, though, is it?” Sean demanded. “Overdosing Lee, falsifying his records, setting up an elaborate operation to ruin your career? Never mind what they were prepared to do to your wife.” He tilted his head slightly to smile reassuringly at my mother in the rearview mirror—a gesture that had my father’s frown deepening into a scowl.
“How much does Storax stand to make out of this—if it goes ahead?” I asked, as much to distract him as anything else.
“Osteoporosis is becoming a major problem,” my father said, mentally shaking himself like a dog coming out of water. “When you take the worldwide licensing, a treatment as successful as Storax’s seemed to be, would be worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, in annual revenue.”
“Even so,” I said. “I feel we’re missing something. There’s got to be more to it than that.”
“I agree,” Sean said. “One thing that’s been bothering me is how Storax managed to get their hands on someone like Vonda Blaylock at such short notice. Kaminski was already contracted to them for security—that much we know—but Blaylock is a government agent. How did they recruit her? And why?”
“Perhaps they knew that something like Jeremy Lee’s death would happen, sooner or later,” I said. “And, it never does any harm to have a backup plan.”
For once, the gods of congestion smiled on us. We made better than average time and left the main freeway at the exit we’d taken only the day before, following what I would classify as a fast A road that began to twist and turn. Then off again onto a minor road that sliced, curving, through a thickly wooded area.
There was very little other traffic now. Sean drove with easy precision, to the point where I could leave him to it and stay sitting mostly sideways to chat face-to-face with my parents.
So, I wasn’t in the best position to brace myself when Sean jumped on the brakes hard enough for the antilock system to activate. There was a whump, and the Navigator lurched sideways abruptly, wallowing, the quiet hum of its tires on the asphalt transformed into a harsh metallic grinding.
“What the—?” I began.
“Stinger,” Sean managed, fighting to control the abruptly unwieldy vehicle.
“A missile?” my father demanded, more outrage than alarm. “Someone just fired a Stinger missile at us?”
“Wrong Stinger. Spikes on a chain across the road,” I said shortly. “We just lost all four tires.”
The SIG was out in my hand, but I didn’t remember drawing it. I was twisting constantly in my seat, scanning the road all around us, searching for the ambush that could only be moments away. “Will it drive?”
�
�I’m doing my best,” Sean said. “But if it comes to a chase, it may well be quicker to walk.”
A flash of movement to the driver’s side caught my eye. The front end of a bloodred Ford pickup truck, big as a fire engine, shiny bull bars reinforcing the grille like a battering ram. It was heading straight for us out of a narrow side road that disappeared up into the trees. The truck covered the ground rapidly, with a roar of its massive V-8 engine that I heard even over the racket made by the Navigator’s stripped and battered wheels.
“Incoming!” I shouted.
Sean let go of the steering wheel and got his hands out of the way. Good job, too, or the vicious kick when the pickup hit us would have broken both his thumbs. Both doors and the B-pillar buckled, the side-impact air bags exploded and the windows shattered, raining down glass onto both Sean and my mother, who was sitting directly behind him.
The force of the crash whipped the Navigator into a graunching broadside across the road and onto the grass. The bare rims of the alloy wheels dug in and nearly flipped us, thrashing the cabin around like we were being shaken in the jaws of a monster. I clung to the door grip, peripherally aware of my mother’s terrified screaming in the backseat.
“Down!” I yelled at Sean. He instantly threw himself sideways, flat across the center console. I reached over the top of him with the SIG and put three rounds into the front screen of the pickup where I judged the driver’s head would be, the empty brass pinging off the inside of the Navigator’s dash. “Clear!”
“Out—now!” Sean said, rearing up to launch himself over to my side of the vehicle.
As soon as we’d come to a stop I’d punched my seat belt release and piled out backwards, keeping the SIG up to cover Sean as I checked our escape route.
Sean wrenched open the rear door and bodily dragged my father out. He landed heavily on his knees on the grass, dazed, shaking his head as if to clear the ringing from the cumulative concussion of explosive air-bag charges and gunshots. The shock of close-proximity live firing in a confined space took some getting used to, and he hadn’t had anything like the practice.