by Zoe Sharp
“It’s OK, Ella,” I said. “You go with your mummy. I won’t be far away—I promise.”
She looked up at me with those luminous eyes. ‘Are you going downstairs again?”
I thought of the shadows, and of the fear that would build in a child’s mind from such a night.
“Yes,” I said gently, trying to slay the monsters I could see forming. “I’ll be going downstairs again.”
“We-ell, if you are … can I please have a cookie?”
I heard Simone’s quiet gasp of disbelief.
“YOU are the cheekiest little madam I’ve ever come across,” she said, but her voice was choked. “You can wait for breakfast like everybody else.”
Ella allowed herself to be parted from me, still arguing the case for premeal cookies with her mother. My leg felt surprisingly cold without Ella around it.
I checked their room first, particularly the window locks, but it was clear. I did the master suite next, the first time I’d been in there, but it was also secure. I ducked my head into my own room expecting it to be the same, but as soon as I opened the door I knew there was something wrong, something in the air.
I flicked the light on. Hannibal the giant teddy bear was still lying under the bedclothes where I’d left him, but in the short space of time between separating from his friend on the landing, and reappearing after I’d tackled Aquarium man outside Simone’s door, I found that the slim man with the glasses had definitely been into my room.
Oh, not all the way in, perhaps. He probably hadn’t taken much more than a couple of steps over the threshold, sliding the door quietly closed behind him. I’d certainly never heard a thing, but now, when I peeled back the blankets, I discovered that poor old Hannibal had proved a convincing substitute for me.
Convincing enough for the slim man to have put three bullets into him, at any rate.
I couldn’t feel any particular anger about that. It was line i, page i, for just about any kind of rules of engagement against a protected principal.
First job—kill the bodyguard.
Twelve
By ten thirty that morning, I’d moved Simone and Ella into the Presidential Suite on the top floor of the elegant White Mountain Hotel on West Side Road. The suite was spacious and had a connecting door to the room next to it, which I’d taken.
I’d called Sean and brought him up to speed on the night’s events, keeping my report cool and impersonal, particularly the part about the shooting of the teddy bear. Sean had responded in kind. There would be a time for emotional reaction, but we both knew this wasn’t it.
At Sean’s suggestion, I’d also called the private investigator Frances Neagley in Boston and given her as much information as I could about Aquarium man. She’d listened gravely, superhumanly restrained herself from saying, “I told you so,” and promised to find out what she could. She asked if I was bringing in additional security and, when I said Sean was arranging it, she offered me the temporary loan of her guy from the New York agency, Armstrong’s, until they arrived.
“Well, I could certainly do with some backup, but what about you?” “Right now,” she’d said, “I think your need is greater than mine.” I’d removed the suppressor from the Beretta to make it easier to conceal, and was carrying it in the right-hand outside pocket of my jacket. I knew I’d be in deep trouble if I was caught with it, but if it was a choice between that and facing another attempt on Simone and Ella unarmed, I thought it was worth the risk. Just the weight of it there was a comfort.
The only thing I hadn’t done—at Simone’s absolute insistence—was call in the police. Instinct told me it was a bad idea to try to keep them out of it but, at the end of the day, no harm had been done beyond a broken window and the loss of some stuffing from an oversize bear. I could appreciate Simone’s viewpoint that explanations would have been long and, bearing in mind the Lucases’ ignorance of her financial situation, possibly embarrassing.
Not only that, but she swore she wasn’t going to risk putting Ella through the same kind of press uproar she’d experienced at home. I tried to convince Simone otherwise, but it ended in a clenched-teeth argument with her telling me in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t like it I could go home and leave her to it. I gave in at that point. How could I abandon them now? Besides, it wasn’t the first time people had tried to kill me.
And it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
Nevertheless, when there was a knock on my door shortly before eleven I answered it with caution. I took great care when I looked through the Judas glass to ensure whoever was out in the hallway would not be able to tell when my eye was in line with the peephole.
Outside was Greg Lucas. He was rocking a little on his feet, obviously uneasy, the distortion of the fish-eye lens making the movement more apparent. The dressing taped to his forehead seemed much bigger than I remembered the size of the injury demanding.
I waited a beat. I deliberately hadn’t told him our room number. Had Simone called him? I glanced back at the connecting door to Simone’s room. She was trying to settle Ella down for a nap after her disturbed night and the door was closed. I transferred the Beretta from my jacket to the back of my jeans, under the tails of my shirt, and slipped the security chain.
“Hi, Charlie,” Lucas said. “Can we talk?” He gave me a weary smile, one that attempted to bond us through a shared struggle, one soldier to another at the end of a bloody engagement.
I didn’t want that kind of connection with him. I jerked my head and said, “You’d better come in.”
As soon as he was through the door I shouldered his face up against the wall to the bathroom, regardless of his recent injury, and patted him down. He seemed neither surprised by my action nor offended by it.
“Right-hand side,” he said mildly.
“Good job you pointed that out. I might never have thought to look there.”
“Just trying not to make you nervous,” he said. “We all had a difficult night.”
He was carrying a short-barrel Smith & Wesson .38 revolver in a belt rig on his right hip. I tugged the gun free and stepped back, not taking my eyes off him as I dropped the cylinder and emptied the chambered rounds out onto the coverlet of the bed.
“Simone’s with Ella,” I said. “I’d rather she wasn’t disturbed.”
“That’s OK,” he said. “It’s you I’ve come to see.”
“In that case, make yourself at home,” I said. “Coffee?”
He nodded again. I left the partially dismembered gun on the bed and went to pour two cups from the little coffeemaker on the desk. It was surprisingly drinkable coffee and I was on my third lot since we’d checked in.
When I came back the gun was still where I’d left it and Lucas was over by the window, staring out at the picturesque view of the Echo Lake forest and the mountains beyond.
I joined him, handing over his coffee cup and sipping my own while I waited for him to try to find a way into what he wanted to say. By his silence, I gathered it wasn’t easy
And, somewhat childishly, I didn’t feel inclined to help him out. Instead, I concentrated on admiring the winter wonderland scene outside the glass. It should have been idyllic. In any other circumstances, it probably would have been.
Lucas had aged under stress. The dressing on his forehead was universal skin tone, but his waxy skin was almost white by comparison. He raised his coffee with both hands, as though thankful for something to occupy them.
“You don’t make this easy,” he said at last with a brief smile in my direction.
I sighed, admitting defeat or we’d be here all day. “What is it you want to say to me, Greg?”
He took a breath, as if gathering all the loose ends back into himself. “They could have killed her last night, couldn’t they?” he said. “Simone and Ella, I mean. They could have killed them both.”
I shrugged. “But they didn’t,” I said. ‘And you and I both know that wasn’t their plan, don’t we?”
He stiffen
ed, made a conscious effort to relax, then saw I’d noticed both reactions and gave up on trying to hide either. “Do we?”
“Oh, come on, Lucas!” I said, allowing some bite to show through without letting my voice rise because the last thing I wanted was Simone hearing us. “Think about it for a minute—the masks, the suppressors on the guns, the fact they didn’t even bother getting close enough to my bed to find out I wasn’t in it before they wiped me out. It was a kidnapping attempt, pure and simple.”
He stuck his nose back into his coffee cup, almost gloomy, as though hearing it out loud somehow made it more real for him. Eventually, he looked up, looked right at me and said, “I want you to take Simone and Ella home.”
I took a moment to drain the last of my coffee, then put the empty cup down on the desk behind me, using the time it gave me to consider.
“Why?”
He blinked. “Why?” he repeated. “Charlie, as you’ve just pointed out so correctly, someone tried to kidnap my daughter last night.” He leaned forwards slightly, lowered his voice. “Right out of my house.”
“So you’re afraid for your safety,” I said, a deliberate taunt delivered in a bland tone, maybe a small payback for that car park stunt the day we’d driven up here.
His lips thinned. “No, but I’m certainly afraid for their safety,” he shot back. “Aren’t you?”
“Of course,” I said evenly. “And I did my best to ensure it this morning. I’ve already taken steps to make sure any further attempts won’t succeed, either.”
He seemed suddenly uncertain how to proceed. “Well… good,” he said. He gave a rueful smile. “She was a lovely kid. I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed her, but I’d rather send her away now than lose her again for good.”
I turned slightly, so I was facing him, and saw … something. Something that flitted in and out of his eyes, quick as a fish, then was gone.
Guilt. Not big guilt. Not weigh-you-down-and-crush-you-with-the-sheer-bone-numbing-size-of-it guilt, but guilt, nevertheless.
“How long have you known?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Neither you nor Rosalind has asked the right questions about all this, Lucas—like ‘why?’ for a start,” I said. “That should have been the first thing you wanted to know. Armed men break into your house in the middle of the night and make a damned serious attempt to snatch your daughter and granddaughter from under your nose, and you just don’t seem surprised about it. Where’s the righteous anger, the outrage?”
He kept his eyes resolutely on his cup, even though it was as empty as my own had been. I lifted it out of his fingers and put it down on the desk. It landed with more of a rattle than I’d been intending.
“Look, there are things going on here —I can’t explain,” he added when he saw I was about to speak. “You’ll just have to take my word for it. I thought I could keep Simone separate from it all, but I can’t. There’s a chance,” he went on, flicking his eyes to my face as if to check how I was taking all this. “There’s a chance that last night was aimed as much at me as at Simone’s — “
He broke off and I gave him a thin smile. “Her money?” I finished for him.
He nodded, folding his arms so that his shoulders were hunched, as if he were cold.
“Yes, OK, we know about the money,” he admitted, sounding every one of his years. “Ever since Barry O’Halloran came to see me.”
“He told you?” I said, surprised.
“He didn’t have to. He told me my daughter was looking for me and as soon as I realized how much effort had been put into finding me, I ran her name through a search engine on the Web. There were any number of hits from the tabloid newspapers back in England.”
Ah, of course
“So you discovered your daughter was a millionairess and lo and behold you suddenly decided you did want to be found after all.”
“I’d already made that decision,” he said with dignity. “I would just rather have waited until the business we’re involved in here was over and done with.”
“Which is?”
“That’s got nothing to do with you, Charlie.”
“It is if you want me to persuade Simone to go home,” I said mildly. “I’m guessing Felix Vaughan is an integral part of whatever’s going on.”
“You’re right. And, I admit, when I first heard about it, I thought that some of that money would sure help get us out of the hole we’ve got into with him, but not if it’s going to put her in danger. Nothing’s worth that. So, do what you have to, Charlie, but persuade her to go home.”
“I’m not leaving.”
We both swung round to find Simone in the connecting doorway between the two rooms, one hand on the frame. She came in and closed the door quietly behind her, watching through the diminishing gap, presumably that Ella didn’t wake. Simone gave the Smith & Wesson on the bed a single almost incurious glance as she passed it.
“Look, Simone, honey—”
“No, Daddy, I want to stay,” she said, touching his arm, her use of the word “Daddy” more confident than the first time she’d tried it, whatever doubts might have been raised in the meantime. “I can help. All this money—what good has it done me so far?” She lifted her shoulders, suddenly looking very young and almost gauche. “If it will help you—you and Rosalind—tell me how much you need, and take it.”
To his credit, Lucas only hesitated for a moment.
“No,” he said, and there was a quiet finality to his voice, so that I perhaps caught a glimpse of what must have been the old Lucas, of the SAS sergeant who’d terrorized new recruits to the point of insensibility, and I was just a fraction more inclined to believe in him. “Simone, I want you and Ella out of here as soon as possible. Listen to Charlie. It’s not safe for you here.”
“But-”
“Don’t argue, princess.” He touched her cheek and the tender gesture silenced her better than a slap.
He crossed to the bed, picked up the Smith & Wesson and refilled it with short, efficient movements, before slipping it back into his holster.
“I know I haven’t been much of a father to you,” he said, straightening his jacket to cover the gun, “but I won’t put you in harm’s way now if I can help it. Do what’s sensible. Go home.”
As he reached the doorway, Simone made a noise alongside me that could almost have been a whimper. When I looked, I saw tears beginning to form along her lower eyelids. Lucas sighed.
“You know it’s breaking my heart to do this, but I have to think of what’s best for my daughter, not for me,” he said gently as he pulled open the door and stepped through it. “See that you do the same for yours.”
The man whom I’d seen guarding Frances Neagley that day in the bar of the Boston Harbor Hotel arrived at the White Mountain just before three in the afternoon. He was big and quiet to the point of seeming shy around women, but his eyes were constantly on the move and he carried a 9mm Glock in a shoulder rig under his left arm. His name was Jakes, he told me in his soft-spoken Deep South accent. He had orders from his boss, Parker Armstrong, that he was to stay with us until they could send more people up from New York. I was glad to have him.
I’d spent most of the afternoon trying to persuade Simone to call it a day. She had taken some convincing, but she finally agreed to a tactical retreat. My biggest card was Aquarium man. The way he’d engineered his meeting with her in Boston and then led the attack on her up here in Conway had certainly unnerved her. It gave me a crack and I drove a wedge into it for all I was worth. By the time Jakes arrived, she’d caved.
I’d called Sean and within half an hour he’d called back to say we were booked on flights out of Logan the day after tomorrow, giving us time to get back down to Boston without breaking our necks in the snow. As I’d ended the call I’d checked the time. Less than forty-eight hours and we’d be in the air.
As soon as we’d checked in to the White Mountain, I’d asked the front desk to organize us a rental car. Wit
hout Lucas on hand, we were stranded without transport, and I didn’t think Charlie the limo driver would be prepared to slog all the way up to North Conway just to collect us.
The hotel had arranged for a four-wheel drive of some description on a one-way hire and said they’d drop it off that afternoon. At about five thirty, the front desk rang to say the rental company’s representative was in the lobby and would I go down to deal with the paperwork?
I picked up my jacket from the bed. Simone was watching my TV while Jakes read to Ella out of one of her storybooks in the other room. Something about a little princess and a frog, if the snatches I heard were anything to go by Jakes showed no sign of embarrassment as he read out the appropriate sections in his version of a frog accent, which seemed, bizarrely enough, to be distinctly Scottish. Ella was sucking her thumb as she listened to him, captivated.
I ducked my head into the room and he looked up, flashing me a quick grin without breaking off the tale.
“I won’t be long,” I told him. “Put the chain on behind me.”
There was only one person obviously waiting in the lobby when I got down there, a mustachioed man with a dark complexion, wearing a peaked cap with earflaps that stuck out from the sides of his head like a semialert hound’s. He was wrapped up in a thick ski jacket that he hadn’t bothered to unzip despite the roaring open fire at the back of the lobby, and he was carrying a clipboard.
“Miss Fox?” he said, thrusting a gloved hand out. “Howya doing? Say, you wanna go check over the vehicle first, then we can come back inside and get you all signed up?”
“No problem,” I said, glad I’d brought my jacket. “What have we ended up with?”
He held the door and followed me through it out into the sudden drenching cold. “Excuse me?”
“What kind of vehicle?” I expanded as he strode away towards the parking area at the side of the hotel. I had to hurry to keep up, shivering inside my jacket. The wind had picked up a little and it knifed straight through to my bones the moment we stepped out of the door.
“Oh, the vehicle?” he said, suddenly sounding vague. “Well, it’s right over there, so you can see for yourself.”