by Zoe Sharp
Then I simply had to wait, like a spider, for them to come to me.
It didn’t take long. There were two of them, dressed in dark clothing and moving with smooth efficiency. All I could see through the downwards-facing slats of the door was their legs to midthigh. They both put their feet down with an almost excessive care, keeping their knees soft. Professionals. Taking either of them by surprise was going to be damned difficult, but taking both of them was going to be well-nigh impossible.
They halted, seemingly right outside the cupboard doorway, as though they could hear my breathing, the rush of my blood. Then one pair of feet continued on towards Simone’s room. The other turned back, heading for the door to my own room, and the one to the master suite.
Divide and conquer. There wasn’t going to be a better chance than this.
I closed my eyes briefly, released a little spurt of anger, feeling the tingle as the flame of it took hold and began to burn. I reminded myself that these people had made the choice to step inside my circle in the dust. They’d crossed the line and whatever happened to them now was because their own actions had brought them to this point.
I opened my eyes, let my breath out slowly and opened the cupboard door a crack, just enough to peer out. The man who’d been headed for my room had disappeared around the corner of the corridor. I slipped out of the cupboard altogether. The second man was stooped at Simone’s door, his left hand on the knob, trying to ease it open without a sound. His head was covered with a close-fitting hood and he was big without being bulky. I was suddenly glad he was crouching there with his back towards me to give me a little advantage. There was something that was probably a gun in his gloved right hand. If I didn’t get this right the first time, things were going to get nasty very quickly.
I took a run at him, two strides and up onto his back. I stamped hard into the back of the calf muscle of his right leg as I went. At the same time I landed a short vicious blow into his left kidney. As his back arched from the impact, I hooked my right hand around his neck, grabbing his Adam’s apple through the thin material of the hood and jerking his head back.
My weight came down, one foot landing heavily on the back of the man’s knee. He let out a low grunt as it folded and he twisted instinctively, trying to bring the weapon to bear, but he was too slow. I stayed on him as he dropped hard to his knees, riding him down, then stepped to the side to swing him away from the door. I released my hold, only for a second, to wrap my right arm around his throat and lock it in place with my other hand just behind the nape of his neck, making sure I kept my head well to the side in case he tried to reverse-head-butt me.
He was expert enough at hand-to-hand to know I’d got a killing grip on him. He started to panic then, scrabbling at my arm, letting the gun drop. The weapon hit the polished wooden floor with a crashing thud that was desperately loud in the darkness.
He thrashed under me. I took up whatever slack remained and jerked him still, knowing that I could cut off the blood supply to his brain any time I wanted to. Or worse.
By the time the other man darted back into view at the far end of the landing, the one I’d grabbed was rigid and motionless. I could smell the fear and the anger rising off him like cheap scent.
The second man was smaller, almost slender. He froze in midstep when he saw the two of us and he was cool enough to pause and consider his options. The nearest window was behind him and to his left, but all I could see of his face was the matte material of the ski mask he wore. I had time to register, despite the mask, that he was wearing glasses. I could tell from the set of his shoulders that he, too, was carrying something in his right hand.
“Put it down,” I said, gruff, “or I’ll break his neck.”
The man with the glasses didn’t move, just continued to stand and stare me out. We were only three meters or so apart and he was armed. At that distance, even in semidarkness with me using my captive for partial cover, he would have had to be a very mediocre shot to have missed.
“Harder than you think,” the man with the glasses said calmly, “to break a man’s neck in cold blood.”
“Easier than you think,” I returned, “to do it while your blood’s up.” I left it a beat, then hardened my voice, knowing it was unlikely he would believe me, even so. ‘And this won’t be my first time.”
I sensed rather than saw his eyes flick to the face of his larger friend. I bunched the muscles in my arms and an involuntary muffled hiccup of sound escaped my prisoner. I could feel him trembling, little more than a mild vibration, and knew he, at least, was convinced.
The man with the glasses let the muzzle of the gun drop slightly. He seemed about to speak when suddenly we heard muffled voices coming from the Lucases’ room behind him. Rosalind’s sharper tones overlaying her husband’s deeper mumble.
The man with the glasses glanced over his shoulder. Clearly he didn’t want to be the filling in a hostile sandwich. I saw him lift his shoulders slightly in a shrug that could have signified either defeat or apology. Then he was moving for the stairs.
As he made a fast but somehow unhurried descent, he swung through the full glare of the moonlight, lighting him fully for the first time. In that split second I mentally photographed the shape of his body and head, the way he moved. I wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a police lineup, but I was damned sure I’d know him if I ever saw him again on the street. Then he’d dropped from view, his footsteps suddenly heavy now the need for stealth was gone.
As his comrade abandoned him and withdrew, the big man erupted, a last-ditch attempt to effect his own release before my reinforcements arrived. Just for a second I tightened my grip, felt the creak of sinews under tension as I considered the wisdom of finishing him and going after the slim man.
Then the door behind me was yanked open and I heard Simone gasp, then Ella’s voice.
“Mummy, what—?”
“For God’s sake, Simone,” I snapped, back over my shoulder, “don’t let her see this!”
“See what?” I heard Simone take a step out onto the landing. Her voice was low with shock. “Charlie, what the hell d’you think you’re you doing?”
“What you pay me for,” I said. “Now get Ella back into your room and lock the door.”
For once, she didn’t argue. I heard the door close behind her and realized sweat was dribbling past my left eyebrow I leaned close to where I judged the man’s masked ear to be, and whispered, “You’ll never know how lucky you just were, sunshine.”
He made a strangled grunt that sounded a lot like, “Fuck you!”
With a sigh, I let go of my choke hold and kneed him roughly between his shoulder blades, punting him down onto his face. He landed hard, the air gusting out of his lungs so that it was easy enough to haul both his wrists as far up his back as the tendons would allow
At that moment, the bedroom door at the far end of the landing was yanked open and Greg Lucas came stumbling out, dressed in pajama trousers and a toweling robe. Rosalind was right behind him and before I could stop her she’d reached out to flick on the landing lights.
I flinched under the harsh bulb, momentarily blinded. The man tried to use the distraction to break my restraint, but I had leverage on my side and I used it, piling on top of him so my weight helped hold him down.
“There’s another guy,” I threw at Lucas. “He headed downstairs, and he’s got a gun.”
If I was expecting the ex-SAS man to give chase, however, I was disappointed. When my eyesight recovered enough for me to glance up at the pair of them, they hadn’t moved, both staring wide-eyed at the man I had pinned on the ground in front of them.
“Lucas!” I snapped, and he finally seemed to register the urgency in my voice. He looked up, a little dazed, and shook his head as if to clear his ears but made no moves to check out the lower floor.
“Get me something I can tie him with,” I said to Rosalind.
“Like what?”
I jerked my head towards Lucas’s robe
. “His belt will do.”
They unthreaded the thin cord belt from its hoops and handed it over without a word. I tied the man’s hands together behind his back as tightly as I could manage, not caring about whether he still had circulation or not. The belt was on the thick side to be totally secure, but at least it was long enough for me to tie his ankles as well, cinching them up and back towards his wrists so his spine was bowed awkwardly. I hoped it hurt.
When it was done I patted him down quickly, just in case he was hiding another weapon. Nothing. I reached over and picked up the gun he’d dropped when I’d first grabbed him.
The gun was a Beretta M9, a 9mm standard-issue U.S. Army pistol, but with an extended barrel to take a quick-detach Advanced Armament suppressor. I thumbed the release just behind the trigger and dropped the fifteen-round magazine out, just to check, but it seemed our boy had come prepared. I shoved the full mag home again with the flat of my hand.
Before I got to my feet, I reached down for the man I’d caught, yanking the mask roughly off and tossing it aside. I rolled him over slightly— as much as I was able to with his hands and feet bound together— so his face was in the light. It gave me my first proper look at him.
And as soon as I did so, I realized I’d seen him before. It was the man from the Aquarium. The one who’d lured Simone out of the sea lion display and charmed her enough for her to call him and set up the scene of their next encounter on Boston Common. Or what would have been, if I hadn’t got in the way of it. How the hell had he followed our trail up here— unless Simone had called him? I let go of him and swore under my breath. Rosalind glanced at me sharply.
“You know him?”
“Unfortunately,” I said, my voice grim.
I watched the guy’s face while I spoke. He was utterly calm, almost relaxed. If anything, there was the hint of a smile pulling up the corner of his mouth, as though he found something about this whole situation faintly amusing. As if he knew something I most definitely didn’t. It made my spine itch.
“Who is he?” Lucas said, anger beginning to override his inertia. “What the hell was he trying to do?”
I bit back the snappy retort I’d been about to make and eyed them both.
“I need to check downstairs,” I said. “Can you watch him?”
Lucas nodded, his lips thinning, and picked up a lamp from the side table near the cupboard where I’d hidden. As a lamp it was ugly, with a heavy twisted brass stem, but as a temporary cudgel it had a beauty all of its own. He whipped the plug out of the wall socket, coiled the wire like a lasso, and nodded to me.
“Oh, I’ll watch him.”
“I’ll stay with Simone,” Rosalind said, her face very white. She edged past me and the man on the floor, seemingly unable to take her eyes off the Beretta.
Simone opened her door immediately in response to Rosalind’s quiet knock. “Is it safe?” she asked, opening the door a little wider to admit the older woman.
“No,” I said shortly. “Stay inside.”
The door closed again quickly behind them. I turned to Lucas.
‘Anything comes up that stairway that isn’t me,” I said, “hit it.”
“Got it,” he said, flexing his fingers around the lamp.
I edged carefully down the staircase, holding the gun with my arms outstretched. The man with the glasses would not, I knew, have waited around in the house. If he had any sense he would be long gone by now, but I still had to make sure. I did a slow, careful survey of the ground floor, finding the double doors from the dining area out onto the deck slightly ajar.
There was no sign of a forced entry, which meant either our visitors had acquired a key, or the doors had been left unlocked. I closed them and slid the bolts home, as sure as I could be that they’d been bolted up tight when I’d checked them before we’d turned in the night before. Lucas and Rosalind had still been moving around, I remembered, and I berated myself for not coming down and doing another check after I’d heard them come upstairs. I had taken it for granted that for anyone with his kind of military background, securing your location would be a habit ingrained so deep you’d never lose it.
Or maybe it was. Which left all kinds of other unanswered questions, most of which I didn’t want to examine too carefully right then.
I did a quiet pass around the ground floor, then eased down into the basement as well, just in case, but there was nothing amiss down there. Lucas’s storage looked untouched. Not a robbery then. But I already knew that.
Just as I reached the ground floor again, I heard a muffled cry and a tremendous crash from somewhere above me. Then the endless falling splinter sound of glass breaking. I almost didn’t need to scan the stairwell as I ducked past it to know that someone had just taken a dive out of the landing window.
The window looked out onto the half roof that covered the deck surrounding the house. From there it was a relatively short drop to the ground. I pelted for the front door, cursing as I fumbled with the locks and threw the door open.
The darkened figure of a man dropped into view from the roof. He rolled easily through the fall and then lurched away across the drive, running hard.
Even though I knew I shouldn’t, I gave chase. I was barely halfway across the driveway when I heard the roar of an engine in the road, the scrabble of tires on the loose shoulder and the protesting whine of an overstressed transmission.
My stride faltered. No point in continuing a hopeless pursuit when my principal was still not secure. I ran back to the house, slamming home the locks on the front door as I went. I jogged back up the stairs, trying to avoid the worst of the shards of glass that now littered the treads.
The window at the top of the stairs was gone completely, the drapes flapping listlessly in the faint breeze. The frigid air came tumbling into the house like water into a torpedoed ship, rolling down the stairwell as it sought to flood the place from the ground up.
I found Lucas sitting with his back to the stairwell, legs splayed. Rosalind was on her knees in front of him, dabbing at her husband’s bleeding forehead with a hand towel.
“What happened?”
She shot me a dark look. “He got loose,” she gritted out, her voice brimming with a suppressed fury that eventually vented into shrillness. “Greg could have been killed!”
Lucas ducked away from her ministrations the way a horse avoids flies. “I’m OK. Don’t fuss,” he said, blurry, gesturing vaguely to the looped coils of Aquarium man’s erstwhile bonds. “I guess I wasn’t quite watching him as close as I should have been, huh?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, remembering the smug little smile Aquarium man had given me. “I should have made sure it was tight enough to cut his damn circulation off.”
Simone’s door opened and she put her head out again. Why couldn’t the woman just do as she was told… ?
“Daddy!” Simone cried when she caught sight of Lucas’s injury. She ran out and knelt in front of him, grasping for his hand.
“I’m fine, honey Don’t you worry,” he said, giving her a reassuring squeeze. “It’s just a scratch. I guess I’m not quite as quick on my feet as I used to be, huh?”
Simone gave him a tremulous smile.
I felt something brush against me and found that Ella had sidled out onto the landing, sucking her thumb, and had ducked under the muzzle of the Beretta to attach herself to my right leg. She was wearing white pajamas with pink ponies on the front and clutching the battered Eeyore so tightly his glass eyes were bulging. I transferred the gun into my other hand and stroked the side of her face. Her skin was warm and very soft. She snuggled harder against me, not speaking.
“What did they want?” Simone asked in a subdued voice.
My hand stilled in Ella’s hair.
“Isn’t it obvious?” I said. I held up the Beretta so she could see the suppressor on the end of the barrel, keeping it away from Ella’s view. “You don’t bring this kind of thing to a burglary, Simone. This was a snatch.” She paled and
started to shake but I couldn’t leave it there. ‘And guess who brought this with him?” I added.
If anything, Simone grew paler still. “Who?” she demanded.
“Your friend from the Aquarium,” I said. “The one who you called and set up that meeting with that day on Boston Common. I don’t suppose you also told him we were coming up here and—”
“No!” she cried. “How could you think I’d put Ella in danger after—?” And then it was her turn to break off, aware she’d nearly said more than she was willing to, more than was wise, in front of the Lucases. “How could you think that?” she muttered, more quietly.
I felt my shoulders weight. This was getting us nowhere. I turned to Rosalind and Lucas. “I think we should call the police,” I said. “Do you need a medic as well?”
“No,” he said. “It looks worse than it is. I’m fine.”
“Do we really need to involve the police?” Simone asked quickly.
I stared at her. “You can’t be serious,” I said. “Two armed men break in here in the middle of the night and you’re asking me if we really need the police? Get real, Simone! I should insist we pack up right now and get you both on the first flight out of here.”
“I’m not leaving, Charlie,” she said. Her voice had deepened the way some people’s do when they’re losing their balance on the edge of breaking down. I’d pushed her about as far as I could tonight and I hadn’t the heart, or the energy, to make a stand over it now.
I sighed. “Look, let’s talk about this later, OK?” I said. “Let me just do a quick checkup here. You and Ella ought to go back to bed for a few hours, see if you can get some sleep.”
She nodded and reached for Ella, but the little girl clung all the harder to my thigh. I had a sudden flashback to the hallway of the house in London, when the paparazzi had struck.