by Zoe Sharp
He loaded it quickly, feeding in twelve rounds of Federal jacketed hollowpoints. I fed in the same number of plain old military ball ammo from the box Lucas had given me. I kept my face blank as I did so, concentrated on regulating my heart rate and breathing, slowing my systems down so, when I faced the target and it mattered, I’d be calm and relaxed.
Vaughan finished his task, palmed the magazine back into the pistol and pinched back the slide to chamber the first round. Lucas clipped two paper targets to the pulley system and ran them out to the twenty-yard mark, side by side. Plenty far enough with a gun I’d never fired before.
“So,” Vaughan said, raising an eyebrow in my direction, “are you prepared to put money on who’s the finer shot?”
“How much?”
He pursed his lips. “Shall we say a straight hundred?”
I nodded shortly and pulled my ear defenders into place. The loudest thing in my world was suddenly the sound of my own blood beating inside my head.
I half-expected Vaughan to insist I went first, but he shifted into a stance, legs braced and the Mark 23 held out in front of him in a double-handed grip, and commenced firing without ceremony. The first round out of the big .45 made me flinch, even though I’d been expecting it. The others were just background noise.
The targets were reduced-size B27S, a black head and torso silhouette on a white background, with a series of rings numbered 7 to 9 as the size decreased closer to the body’s center. The last two rings were unnumbered apart from an X dead center.
Vaughan took his time, finished firing and lowered his gun, letting out a long breath. A lazy trail of smoke wafted up towards the extraction system. He’d put all twelve inside the two inner circles, just breaking the line to the 9 ring with the first two. They were low and left, which told me he was jerking the trigger just a little until he settled. He turned to me with challenge in his face. I returned his look without emotion, then picked up the SIG.
I’d already made up my mind to do whatever Vaughan hadn’t. He’d fired slow so I knew I had to fire fast. I waited to see where the first cold shot landed, and as soon as I realized the gun hadn’t been abused, that it was accurate, I put the next seven rounds straight into the center of the target with hardly a pause, obliterating the center X.
Four left.
I deliberately shifted my aim. Two high in the 8 ring, exactly where the target’s heart would be.
The last two rounds I placed outside the numbered circles altogether. They went into the head. Not dead center, but slightly low and within ten mil of each other. Through the mouth, if the target had had one. Killing shots.
As the twelfth shot fired, the working parts slid back and locked on an empty magazine. I put the SIG down on the bench and pulled off my ear defenders. The blurred sounds of the outside world sharpened instantly
I turned and found Vaughan watching me as the door opened and Lucas came in, together with Simone and Ella, who’d taken charge of my jacket. Rosalind had also joined them, and she didn’t look happy to find us here.
“Looks like you win, Mr. Vaughan,” I said as Lucas winched the targets back in.
Vaughan studied the targets for a moment. Despite the cold there was a trickle of sweat at his temple and he was slightly pale. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my wallet, started to count out the dollar bills inside, but he waved them away.
“You have a talent, Miss Fox,” he said, recovering his poise. “What a shame to waste it.”
At that moment the mobile phone in my jacket pocket started making the horrible tweedling noise that indicated I had a new text message. Ella dropped the coat on the floor and dived for the appropriate pocket. Before I could stop her she’d seized the phone and, like any four-year-old worth her salt in this technological age, she’d pressed the button.
“Ella,” I said quickly, “can I see that, please?”
Ella ducked under my reaching arm and darted away, giggling. She avoided Simone, and in the end it was Rosalind who managed to pluck the phone from the child’s grasp. Rosalind moved to hand it over and then, as the screen caught her eye, she stilled.
“What is it?” Simone asked, crowding round to look. “Are you getting dirty pictures from your boyfriend, Charlie?” Even Vaughan craned his neck at that.
I reached over and snatched the phone, but by that time it seemed that everyone except me had seen what the message contained. When I looked at it myself, I cursed silently and wished that they hadn’t.
On the screen was a small, grainy digitized image, obviously scanned in from an old color photograph. It showed a man in his forties, wearing Army uniform and smiling into the camera.
“But who is that?” Simone asked, but I saw the rising fear in her eyes and knew she didn’t really need an answer.
I scrolled down. Underneath the picture Sean had sent was a line of text. It said: Greg Lucas?
Eleven
Simone waited until we were on our own outside before she ripped into me. I suppose I should be thankful for that, at least. She got all of three strides past the outer doorway, then whirled to face me, shoulders hunched like a boxer about to strike.
“What the hell’s going on, Charlie?”
“I’m doing my job,” I said, keeping my voice quiet.
“Oh yeah? Your job is to keep us safe,” she said, stabbing a finger in my direction. “Not to go digging around and upsetting my father by making it obvious that you don’t trust him.”
I sighed. “It’s not a question of that,” I said, even though I knew it probably was. I dragged out my phone again, flipped it open. “Look at the picture, Simone. No, look at it! Can you honestly say you can see the resemblance?”
“From a picture like that?” she said, without hesitation. “Could you recognize your father from a blurry snapshot that’s less than two inches square, taken probably thirty years ago, before he grew a goddamn beard?”
Damn. I hated it when she was right….
Her breath huffed out into a cloud around her head in the frozen air. I glanced back at the entrance to the store, just in case our voices were carrying. Rosalind was standing a little way back behind the glass doors, holding Ella’s hand. Ella was chewing her hair and rocking from one foot to the other. Rosalind was watching the pair of us argue with narrowed eyes but it was difficult to tell if she could hear us or not. Maybe she didn’t need to.
“Simone,” I said, “calm down before you upset your daughter any more than she is already.”
“She-”
“Just listen for a moment! Remember, there’s a lot at stake here. Not just your happiness,” I said, not wanting to mention the money out loud. “You’re already convinced this guy is Greg Lucas, that he is your father, but until we get that DNA test to confirm it, we have to keep checking him out. And even you have to admit that he doesn’t seem in any hurry to get that test done, does he?”
Simone stared at the snow beneath her booted feet and took a deep breath, even though she was still humming with anger. “It’s already done,” she muttered.
I stilled. “It’s what?”
She looked up at me and the defiance was back in all its glory. “We took the swabs and labeled them and sent them off this morning.”
I rubbed a hand across my eyes. “You took the swabs—yourself,” I repeated flatly “So—no doctors, no witnesses, no legal standing whatsoever.”
She had the grace to flush. “I don’t give a damn about legal standing! As long as I know he’s my father. Why would he be so keen to have the tests done if he had something to hide?”
Why indeed?This changed things. In fact, it changed them a lot.
“So why the secrecy?” I countered, a little blankly. “Why hide it from me, what you were up to?”
“We weren’t hiding it from you, Charlie,” she said. “It’s just, well, Greg didn’t want Rosalind to find out.”
“Rosalind? Why on earth not?”
She shrugged uncomfortably, shoving her hands in
to her pockets and kicking her feet through the slush, like a naughty kid. The windchill was making my cheeks numb. “He said it’s always been a bit of a sore point— his first marriage. He said he never told her about me, and finding out— when that private eye, Mr. O’Halloran, came to see him—has been one hell of a shock for her. I guess he didn’t want to upset her more than he had done already, so he suggested we didn’t tell her about the test. But we’ve done it—doesn’t that tell you something about him?”
That he’s sneaky and underhanded—even with his own wife? I didn’t think voicing that opinion would win her over, so I didn’t bother. “When will you know the results?”
“A few days apparently. Greg says the lab he got the testing kit from promised a fast turnaround.”
“When did he get it—the kit, I mean?”
Simone opened her mouth, frowned and closed it again. “I don’t know,” she said. “When we went into the den this morning, he had it in his desk. I didn’t ask. Surely the important thing is that we’ve taken the test, isn’t it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. When Simone had first brought the subject up —only yesterday—Lucas had seemed reluctant, or was that just Rosalind’s reaction? Either way, he must have had the kit sitting ready to be used. It spoke of a certain amount of premeditation, of planning. He could be genuine, trying to reassure his daughter. Or he could be just buying time.
For what?
After all, who was to say that the address of the lab wasn’t just that of some crony, waiting to send back a sheaf of official-looking paperwork? I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a genuine result and a clever fake, and I was betting Simone wouldn’t, either.
The door was pushed open and Ella came running out, leaving Rosalind inside. The little girl flew over to Simone, who bent to scoop her up. Ella put both arms round her mother’s neck and held on tight to the collar of her coat.
“What is it, sweetie?”
“Are you being cross with Charlie?”
Simone sighed. “No, sweetie, we just needed to talk about a few things, out here in the quiet.”
Ella turned, fingers clamped into fists, and threw me a curveball. “You’re not angry with Grandpa and Grandma, are you, Charlie?” She pinned me with that clear violet gaze. It lanced straight through my chest and slid into my heart, sly and brutal as a blade. A revelation.
Damn. When did this child manage to climb under my skin so deeply?
I reached out a hand and brushed Ella’s curls back from her face, even managed to dredge up a reasonable facsimile of a smile from somewhere.
“No,” I said, my voice soft. “Of course not.”
She smiled at me, full, open and without guile and stretched out both arms, reaching for me. I hesitated for a second, then let Simone hand her over to me. Ella cuddled on tight, burying her face into the collar of my shirt, her hair tickling the underside of my chin. I held her very close, breathing in the soft smells of the baby shampoo Simone used to bathe her, and strawberries. For some unaccountable reason, I felt my eyes dampen and I determinedly put it down to the rawness of the wind. But right at that moment I would have killed or died for her, without a second thought.
And that’s when it really hit me. If Lucas and Rosalind did turn out to be trying to pull a fast one, it wasn’t just Simone’s heart they were going to break.
I looked back through the doors to where Rosalind was still watching us. For a second I allowed everything that was running through my mind to channel into that one hard stare. After only a moment, she turned away. I felt the rage lose its color until it was dirty gray like the snow, and just as cold.
If this was no more than a cruel hoax, how would Simone even begin to explain it to her daughter? They didn’t really love you, Ella—they were just pretending….
My mind snapped back to the target I’d just fired at on Lucas’s range. The last four shots. Two in the heart. Two in the head. And if anybody threatened my principals, I knew I had the guts to shoot like that for real. I’d already proved it.
Ami angry with them, Ella? No. But if they hurt you, that’s when you’ll see me really angry….
For the next two days, everything was calm. Rosalind and Lucas were perfect hosts. They played the role of doting grandparents with aplomb and spoiled Ella rotten. Felix Vaughan was notable by his absence. No more information arrived about Lucas from Sean—good or bad. Knowing there was nothing further I could do until the DNA test results came back, I’d just have to stay close to Simone and Ella, and wait for the first sign of trouble.
It came at four in the morning, when no doubt they expected that everyone would be asleep and at a low physical ebb. It was the textbook time for a grab raid. Ask any policeman—state or secret—and he’ll tell you the same thing.
Unfortunately for them, I hadn’t been in the U.S. long enough for my body clock to fully reset to local time. Four A.M. in North Conway was nine A.M. at home. I’d been awake for an hour and a half by then and figured I’d slept late as it was. I’d got up, silently, in the dark, pulled on my sweatpants and a T-shirt, and quietly eased through some stretching exercises and a few isometrics.
I normally ran when I was at home, and if I wasn’t on a job I spent four mornings a week in the gym, usually with Sean pushing me through a tougher workout than I would manage if I’d been doing it alone. The days I’d spent with Simone and Ella hadn’t allowed for more than some hurried callisthenics first thing each morning, just to stop me seizing up.
I didn’t need a light on to see what I was doing, so I worked in the dark, and I found myself thinking about Simone. And about Ella.
I’d always accepted that part of the job description of close protection was that I might have to lay down my life for my principal, and I’d been willing to do that. Not eager, perhaps, but willing, nevertheless.
The proof of that willingness was tucked away in a fold of cloth at the bottom of my bag. Two stopped 9mm rounds I’d deliberately put myself in the path of. I carried them as a kind of talisman. The only difference was, the person I’d been protecting then had been Sean. At the time, I would have died for him. And now, I realized I felt the same way about Ella.
Sean had warned me against making decisions based on emotion. But now I didn’t have a choice. Did that make me better at my job, or worse?
I was just finishing up the last of my hamstring stretches when I heard the noise from downstairs.
It was only a tiny ripple of sound, the scrape of a chair leg on the wooden floor, perhaps, quickly stilled. Not enough to have woken me if I hadn’t already been alert. I froze with my chin an inch from touching my left knee and straightened up very slowly, trying not to let my clothing rustle. The waning moon was still high and bright above the trees outside the bedroom window, but I squeezed my eyes tight shut as though that would divert auxiliary power to my hearing instead. Then I stood absolutely still for five seconds. Ten.
Nothing.
I shifted over to the bed, moving as softly as I could, and groped for the pair of trainers I’d left alongside it. I knew it was wasting time to put them on, but if I was going to have to do a full intruder search that meant going outside and it was around eleven degrees below freezing out there.
A pair of beady eyes stared at me from across the room. Hannibal, Ella’s sinister giant teddy bear. On impulse, I lifted him off his chair and slid him under the quilt on the bed. From the doorway, in the half-light, he would just about pass for me. If you happened to think I was a rotund dwarf with both ears on the top of my head and a severe facial hair problem.
I was already well aware that the doors in the Lucases’ house operated on well-oiled hinges. Even so, I opened the door from my room onto the landing with extreme caution, gripping the knob hard so it didn’t rattle. The moonlight reflected harshly off the snow outside and sliced through the gloomy proximity of the trees, plenty strong enough to cast exaggerated shadows from the nearest window frame.
I t
ook half a dozen noiseless steps across the landing, ducked and peered down through the spindles towards the living and dining area. For a moment I saw nothing untoward. Then a creepily elongated shadow flitted across the polished wooden floor below, a momentary blip at the corner of my field of vision that quickly disappeared.
When we’d arrived at the Lucases’ house I’d automatically checked out their security alarm system and been surprised to note it was an older type, not particularly sophisticated and lacking any additional triggers other than door and window sensors. Even I could have bypassed it, and I was far from an expert. Sean would have been in there in seconds.
I edged back from the stairwell and paused to steady my breath. We had at least one intruder, who might or might not be armed. All Lucas’s guns, as far as I knew, were in the strong rooms in the basement and I dismissed them without any real consideration. Even if I knew where he kept his keys, getting to a weapon would mean leaving the bad guys with uncontended access to my principals, and that was a nonstarter. Especially without knowing their objective here.
I wondered briefly if Lucas had a safe in the den, but even as the thought formed I somehow knew that robbery wasn’t the motive for this incursion. And if they weren’t here for financial gain, there weren’t many palatable alternatives. I didn’t have the manpower—not to mention the firepower—for a counteroffensive. That left stealth, and guile.
I glanced along the landing to the door to Simone and Ella’s room. Sense told me to attempt an evac, but I couldn’t risk going in and startling them. Ella had a tendency to get very loud when she was frightened and the last thing I wanted was to tip off the men below that we were on to them, or push them into extreme action. After all, I still didn’t know what their intentions were. Criminal, almost certainly, but if they didn’t pose a real and immediate threat to my principals, it wasn’t my fight. What I needed was a hiding place where I could keep out of sight, but be close enough to intercept anyone who tried to get to Simone and her daughter.
I crawled farther back from the stairwell. Halfway along the landing was a walk-in storage cupboard with a louvered door. It was largely filled with shelves containing spare bedding, but there was still enough room for me to squeeze in at the front as well and get the door shut, although I had to hold it closed.