by Zoe Sharp
‘Yeah, I’m OK,’ I said, leaning back against the headrest. Ahead of us, a passenger jet was pulling out of LaGuardia and lumbering doggedly skywards. I could sympathise.
I was tired, I recognised. The kind of bone-deep utter weariness that long-term stress produces. But I kept on going through the motions, treading water, marking time.
Waiting.
We were in one of the Lincoln Navigators Parker favoured as general runabouts, heading back towards Manhattan where Armstrong-Meyer had its prestigious offices. I wondered briefly how long Parker would keep the ‘Meyer’ part of the name intact, without the man himself to back it up.
From behind the wheel, my boss flicked me a brief speaking glance. His eyes were hidden behind Ray-Bans, but I didn’t need to see them.
‘If you’re not sure about this job, tell me now and I’ll assign someone else.’ To his credit, there was nothing to react to in his matter-of-fact voice. Sympathy was the last thing I could cope with.
I lifted my head. ‘I thought you didn’t have anyone who fitted the bill.’ That was how he’d persuaded me to go out to the Willners’ in the first place. Not that persuaded was quite the right word, but neither was bullied. Cajoled – that was more like it.
Anything to take my mind off Sean Meyer.
‘I don’t,’ he agreed candidly. ‘Mrs Willner specifically requested a female close-protection officer, one who was young enough to get on with her daughter. Apparently Dina developed a crush on one of the house security guys last fall, and she doesn’t want a repeat performance.’
I raised an eyebrow at that. The guy who’d answered the door to us this morning was obviously more than just an ordinary flunkey, and when Caroline Willner had suggested I go down to the beach to wait for her daughter’s return, I’d seen at least two other bulky members of staff who had the unmistakable carriage of ex-military men. No doubt they had their share of war stories, calculated to impress someone as impressionable as Dina. Had I ever been that young at twenty?
‘What about Gomez?’ I said. ‘She’s closer to the daughter’s age than I am. OK, she lacks a little experience, but her instincts are sound.’
‘I need her for Paraguay.’ He smiled faintly. ‘You could trade with her if you like, but I kinda assumed you’d want to stay close to New York for a while.’
I dredged up a smile of my own. ‘Yes … thank you.’
It didn’t matter that I knew I could be back from just about anywhere in the world in less than twenty-four hours. A lot could happen in a day. Or, nothing could happen at all. Not for one day, not for a hundred days. Three months, one week, four days of suspended animation.
Parker sighed. ‘It’s OK, Charlie,’ he said gently. ‘If I was in your position, I’d want to stay close, too. I just thought … you need to work. At least the farthest this kid is likely to travel is up and down the east coast, from one party to the next.’
I swallowed and stared sightlessly at the scenery flashing past beyond the tinted glass, feeling disconnected as a ghost from the lives outside. I’d stopped trying to tell myself that it could all be so much worse, because deep down I knew that wasn’t true anymore. Concentrating on a job – any job – had to be better than the wretched loneliness of my own thoughts. For a while this morning, out at the Willners’ place, I’d felt almost … normal.
And the prospect of a temporary change of scene, of living in, somewhere that wasn’t silent and filled with empty spaces, had definite appeal. At this point, I might even class it as essential.
I took a breath, made a conscious effort to divert my brain into more productive tracks. ‘What’s your take on this birthday bash Dina’s so set on?’
His hands relaxed very slightly on the wheel. ‘Could be she just wants to show off the pretty new toy her mommy bought for her.’
My lips twisted. ‘Ah, that would be me, then – this season’s must-have accessory.’
‘Yeah, something like that.’ He flicked me another glance as he changed lanes around a slow-moving bus. ‘Whatever her reasons, you can’t fault the logic of her argument.’
‘In favour of going, you mean?’
He nodded. ‘Without any official reports, we’re working blind. Anything you can learn about what happened to the other victims might make the difference to Dina being taken or not.’
I fell silent. Since I’d joined Parker’s outfit I’d worked family protection details numerous times. Usually in places like Mexico or Columbia, where prevention was always better than the alternative. There, it was a toss-up whether the hostage would be returned alive, even if the ransom was paid. And if it wasn’t, well, less than a quarter of hostages in Latin America survived rescue attempts, and only a tiny fraction of kidnappers were ever caught. If the ransom was large enough, a whole rake of people could be included in the pay-off, including local police officials.
But this was not some dusty South American backwater. The parents must have known the odds of detection and capture were far better here, that by keeping silent they had, in effect, given the kidnappers a licence to continue their deadly game. So, what were they so afraid of, that it was worth risking their children’s lives?
‘Is it coincidence, I wonder, that all three families paid up without going to the cops?’
‘Might be, but I kinda doubt it,’ Parker said. ‘Which means they were targeted very carefully. Somebody knew they had the available cash and the inclination to pay up clean and fast.’
‘An inside job, you mean?’ I murmured. ‘And if they all had the kind of general security Caroline Willner employs, you’d need pros to make the snatch in the first place. Disgruntled ex-employees perhaps?’
‘Maybe. I’ll check it out. Finding a common link between the victims is our best lead to tracking down a multiple kidnapper.’
I gave him a long level stare while he pretended to be absorbed in negotiating traffic. ‘Either I’m supposed to be protecting Dina or playing detective,’ I said mildly. ‘Which is it, Parker?’
‘The two objectives are not mutually exclusive.’ He allowed himself a fractional smile. ‘You may think you hide it well, but lack of exercise is sending you as stir-crazy as that horse of Dina’s.’
I paused a beat, then said, ‘Even if I do go with her to this regatta thing she mentioned, I’ve no authority to question these other kids. They may still be traumatised, not want to talk about what they’ve been through.’
Every kidnap victim reacted differently, but all too often there was guilt at the sacrifices made by the family, resentment at their own helplessness, and an overwhelming general sense of fear at going out and doing normal things again. Feelings that could last for weeks or even years after the event. Some former hostages never fully recovered.
‘Sure,’ Parker said, and there was satisfaction in his dry tone. He had me hooked, and he knew it. ‘And that’s why they’re all turning out for a birthday party aboard a million-dollar yacht, huh?’
I opened my mouth and shut it again, acknowledging defeat. ‘Good point. Well made.’
‘I thought so.’ He smiled out loud then, creasing the corners of his eyes and taking years off his face, and added casually, ‘Mrs Willner wants you on duty first thing tomorrow morning.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I had nothing else planned.’
‘You were organising logistics for Paraguay …?’
‘All in hand. I emailed my report to Bill Rendelson before we left this morning.’
‘That was fast work.’
‘Ah well, I try constantly to disappoint Bill with my unexpected efficiency.’ It was better than admitting I didn’t sleep much these days, either.
Parker sighed. ‘You don’t have anything to prove, Charlie,’ he said quietly. ‘If anyone ever thought you were just along for the ride, they kinda revised that opinion a long time ago.’
‘Even Bill?’
‘Even Bill,’ he agreed gravely.
Bill Rendelson ran Parker’s office with an iron fist inside an equal
ly iron glove. Invalided out of active duty after the loss of his arm, his only pleasure now, it seemed, was in dissatisfaction with the rest of the staff – and me in particular. I’d only seen one brief flash of humanity from him, gone so fast it might have been a trick of the light, never to be repeated since.
But if I’d been about to comment, it was cut short by Parker’s cellphone ringing from its hands-free cradle on the dashboard. He had, of course, switched it off while we were at the Willners’ and the calls began to pile in now.
He talked on the phone almost constantly for the remainder of the journey onto Manhattan Island, swapping easily from one subject to another, going over itineraries without pause for thought or recollection, smooth, unflustered and professional. An ideal boss.
He’d proved an ideal friend, too, over the past three months, when the shock and pain and all-consuming sense of loss had sometimes threatened to overwhelm me. Sean was, as Parker had once pointed out, my soulmate.
I expected Parker to go directly to the office in midtown, but to my surprise he continued north, eventually pulling up outside the front entrance of my apartment building on the Upper East Side.
Strictly speaking, the building was Parker’s – or some wealthy relative of his at any rate. It was in a prime location and should have been financially way out of reach, but the heavily subsidised rent had been another of the incentives that lured Sean and me to New York in the first place.
As I reached for the door handle, Parker put his hand up suddenly and I stayed put, waiting for him to tie up the last call. The Navigator sat idling by the kerb, sporadic traffic passed, the sun came and went behind high cloud. An elderly lady, wearing a huge amount of make-up and swaddled in furs, tottered by dragging a small shivering hairless dog by its diamanté-studded collar and lead. She was a regular fixture of the neighbourhood and I’d never seen her without the fur – or the dog with any – even in the height of summer. Life with all its oddities, staying the same and moving on.
After no more than a minute or so, Parker hit the End button and removed his sunglasses.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Look, Charlie, I want you to keep in close contact on this one. If you need help, call me – day or night – OK?’
‘O … K,’ I said slowly. ‘What are you not telling me?’
He shrugged. ‘You know as much as I do.’
‘So why the fuss?’
‘I’m worried about how you’re holding up, that’s all,’ he said at last. He put his hand on my arm, lightly, saw my surprise and lifted it away again. ‘You’re looking tired, Charlie. You should get some rest.’
‘I will – later,’ I said. I opened the door and climbed out, glanced back to find him still watching me, narrow-eyed. ‘After I’ve been to see Sean.’
He smiled briefly, put the car into gear and drove away, and as I watched him go I wondered what he’d really been about to say.
CHAPTER FIVE
When I walked into Sean’s room, he was lying on his right side in the bed, with his back to the doorway.
‘Hi, it’s me,’ I said softly. ‘I brought you coffee.’
He didn’t respond. It was warm in there and the sheet was rumpled around his waist. Above it, I could see the steady rise and fall of his ribcage as he breathed, the bones forming a series of ridges under the skin like sand along the tideline.
He was thinner than he’d been at Christmas, the visible shoulder angular and pointed where once it had been as sleekly clad in muscle as Dina’s white horse. Just as graceful, and just as dangerous to underestimate.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, gripping the frame and uttering the usual silent prayers. That this time it would be different.
It wasn’t.
Carefully, as if afraid of waking him, I moved round to the other side of the bed. He had always been a light sleeper, almost catlike in his reflexes, but his face was soft in total relaxation. I reached out a hand, hesitant, and stroked the pale skin of his upper arm. Under my fingertips, I felt a little quiver of response and I watched his face minutely, as I always did. His eyelids, with their ridiculously long dark lashes, remained resolutely closed, as I had known they would. But, inside my own chest, something twisted.
Sean’s coma had lasted since his near-fatal gunshot injury in California, a hundred days ago. After the shooting, he’d been airlifted to the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center. The surgical team there had spent seven painstaking hours removing the shattered fragments of skull from his brain and repairing the damage caused by the path of the single 9 mm round. It had been a glancing blow rather than full penetration, but that had been enough.
In the several weeks that followed, it was to LA that Sean’s mother had briefly flown to weep with quiet dignity by his bedside. A calm, sad woman who’d known her share of grief, she’d talked of Sean in the past tense as if he were already lost to her.
My own parents offered to make the trip but I’d refused – to, I suspect, their secret relief as well as my own. My father might have retired from his own speciality as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon, but he would have cut to the heart of the medical jargon with a little too much clinical precision for me to stomach back then.
The doctors had been initially dubious that Sean would survive at all, but he’d defied their gloomiest prognoses. He’d responded well after surgery, to the point where they were able to remove him from the ventilator and allow him to breathe unaided. Sometimes he reacted to touch, moving under my fingers, and sometimes to speech, turning his head towards the sound of my voice.
But he didn’t wake up.
The fact that the guy who’d shot him had been caught – that I had caught him – was no consolation, I’d found.
As soon as Sean was stable enough to travel, Parker had chartered a private flight and brought him back to New York, to a specialist neurological rehabilitation centre where they were experienced in dealing with long-term coma patients. Here they fed him, kept him hydrated and gave him passive physio to keep his joints in working order, even if his muscles were wasting. I’d been coming every day since then.
I flipped the lid from the coffee and put it down on the side cabinet, close enough for the aroma to reach his nostrils, and dragged the visitor’s chair closer to his bedside. Out of habit, I glanced at the cardiac monitor, wired to patches on his chest. I was no medical expert, but I’d grown to know the rhythms of his body well enough to recognise there had been no change.
Sean’s hair was longer than he would probably have preferred, falling dark and straight over his forehead. I pushed a lock of it back from his temple, revealing the narrow scar that streaked back into his hairline from the corner of his left eyebrow. If he continued to wear his hair in a style less military to the one he’d always favoured, I realised, it was likely people would hardly notice. The surgeons had made a neat job of putting the pieces back together. Time alone would tell how much was missing on the inside.
A nurse appeared in the doorway, a motherly figure in brightly patterned scrubs. Nancy. She lived across the river in New Jersey and enjoyed the reading time offered by her daily commute. Her husband was in the construction industry and she had two sports-mad teenage sons who drove her to affectionate distraction. I’d come to know a lot about Nancy.
‘Hello, Charlie,’ she said, her voice slow and musical, as always. ‘It’s time to turn him.’
I helped her shift Sean onto his back, his limbs slack under our careful hands. He had to be moved every few hours to prevent sores and Nancy was often the one who did it. She had a gentle touch and bottomless compassion and it seemed to me that if Sean made one of his apparently random physical responses – a twitch or a turn of his head – it was for Nancy that he moved most often.
She rearranged the sheet low across his stomach, checking the monitor patches were still firmly attached, and the gastric tube that disappeared into the wall of his abdomen. Initially, they had fed Sean using a nasogastric tube down his nose and through h
is oesophagus, but that, I was told, could lead to complications. As soon as it became obvious this wasn’t going to be over quickly, they’d inserted something more permanent, through which puréed food could be squirted directly into his stomach.
The thought of it did little for my own appetite. When Sean finally awoke, I thought, refusing to consider another outcome, he would be about ready to kill for a taste of the daily coffee I brought to tempt him.
Nancy smiled serenely and departed. I tucked my fingers into Sean’s open hand and began to tell him about my visit to the Willners, about the recent kidnappings and Dina’s apparent glee at my employ. I sought his opinion, unvoiced, on the wisdom of Dina going to the party she was so keen to attend, and reported Caroline Willner’s own hesitation over the same event. And all the time I wondered if doing this was for his benefit, or my own. Sean always had been a good listener.
‘These three kids who’ve been taken so far all live on Long Island, at least part of the time,’ I said. ‘I say “kids”, but they’re late teens, early twenties, but so far that’s all we know. I suppose this party is a good opportunity to look for patterns, but at the same time, there’s the risk that if someone is watching them – working security for one of the families, maybe – am I exposing Dina to danger by agreeing that she go? We don’t know how the victims were selected, or even how they were taken. They can’t remember much after the initial abduction, apparently, which probably means some kind of pre-med relaxant, like we used in California for that cult extraction – remember?’
I paused. Sean’s head seemed to rock a little in my direction. Involuntary, no doubt, as most of his movements were, but it still felt like he’d reacted with discomfort, as if trying to warn me of something. I’d read about coma victims who were actually locked into their paralysed bodies but totally aware of everything going on around them, screaming silently into the void, sometimes for years. Like being buried alive.