Zoe Sharp - [Charlie Fox]

by Absence of Light (epub)

  He frowned. “I am sure I do not need a personal nurse.”

  “Not a nurse,” I said. “I meant someone to ensure your safety - a bodyguard.”

  Thirty-seven

  Santiago Rojas glanced quickly between the two of us.

  “A bodyguard?” he repeated. “But why?”

  “We believe the man who robbed you may return,” Marcus said after a short pause. He gave the jeweller the shortened version of our trip back to the street of boutique stores and of the unknown sniper. “It could have been a random looter, but you may not want to take chances.”

  Rojas nodded carefully. “I-I cannot believe all this trouble over so small a prize. If my delivery had not been delayed …” He gave a lopsided shrug.

  Behind him the lift doors binged and opened again. This time it was Dr Bertrand who strode into the lobby. Joe Marcus excused himself at once and went to meet her. I noticed they moved out of earshot before they began speaking in low tones.

  “Who is the lady?” Rojas asked.

  “Dr Bertrand. She’s the one who treated you at the scene.”

  “Ahh, then I must thank her also before I leave.”

  “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that,” I said, mentally crossing my fingers.

  “Did you find out any more about the beautiful young lady with the ruby ring?” he asked then. “Dubois, I think you said her name was.”

  I shook my head. “It turns out Gabrielle Dubois was not her real name. She and her partner, Enzo Lefevre, were jewel thieves wanted by Interpol,” I said. “Looks like there may have been more than one plan in the works to rob you.”

  “No! I cannot believe it. They seemed so … ordinary. And so much in love. Do you know … what was her real name?”

  “That we don’t know - yet. We have someone working on it.”

  Marcus and Dr Bertrand finished their conversation and came over. To my surprise she offered the injured man a smile that was at least polite if not exactly effusive.

  “Hola Senor Rojas. ?Como se siente?” she rattled off in Spanish.

  Rojas looked momentarily stunned, then he stumbled into speech. “M-mucho mejor, gracias. Gracias a su pericia. Sin usted …”

  My own Spanish had improved working for Parker, to the point where I could work out she’d asked how he was feeling and he’d told her he was much better, thanks to her expertise, because without her …

  She paused as if to consider and then nodded her agreement with his evaluation.

  A harried-looking woman in a white coat appeared from a doorway and hovered where she could catch Dr Bertrand’s attention.

  “If you will excuse me, I ‘ave a patient to attend to.” To Marcus she added a curt, “I will not be long. Wait ‘ere.” And then swept out without waiting for a response from either man

  Rojas subsided into his wheelchair looking a little overwhelmed by the encounter.

  “She is a force of nature, is she not?”

  Marcus’s mouth twitched up at one corner. “That she is.”

  “I would very much like, if it is possible, to say thank you also to Hope and the dog who found me. Is she here?”

  “They’re outside,” Marcus said. “You’ll see R&R’s helo sitting out on the parking lot. She’s there with the pilot who brought you in.” His eyes flicked to me. “I’m sure Charlie will be happy to take you.”

  “Excellent,” Rojas said. “But I do not want to be any trouble?”

  I wondered what Dr Bertrand intended to discuss with Joe Marcus that was so urgent, and too private to have me around. I hid my irritation behind a smile and gripped the handles of the wheelchair. “No trouble.”

  But almost as soon as we got outside, my cellphone rang insistently in my pocket. I halted to fish it out and check in the incoming number. Parker.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said to Rojas. “It’s my boss and I really need to speak with him. Are you OK for a few minutes?” The wheelchair was not one the occupant could propel themselves.

  “Do not worry. I think I see the helicopter Mr Marcus talked of - the parking lot is just behind those tents over there, yes? And I am sure if I become lost then I can ask the way. Please, I think I can manage to go to meet my rescuers on my feet, if you would not mind returning this?” He tapped the arms of the wheelchair.

  The phone continued to ring. “Of course,” I said, already stabbing my thumb on the receive button. “Thank you. If you’re sure?”

  He smiled. “It is no trouble,” he said and hoisted himself slowly out of his seat using his unplastered arm. I watched him walk away, hesitantly at first and then with increasing confidence when he didn’t end up falling flat on his face, carrying his bag of rags. Perhaps he wanted them as a memento of his close call.

  “Hi boss,” I said into the phone. “What’s up?”

  “You with someone? Can you talk?”

  “I was seeing off Santiago Rojas, the guy we pulled out of the rubble of the jewellery store a few days ago. He’s just discharged himself from hospital to free up a bed.”

  “Nice guy,” Parker said. “He checks out clean, you’ll be glad to know. No criminal record, no shady deals. He worked for a diamond merchant in Sao Paulo for years before family pressure made him leave to set up his own store over there.”

  I steered the wheelchair with one hand, turning it in an awkward circle and pushing it back through the glass doors into the lobby area. Joe Marcus, despite Dr Bertrand’s order, was nowhere to be seen.

  “Family pressure?”

  “Yeah, the family are all devout Catholics. They didn’t approve of his lifestyle, shall we say.”

  “He does seem to be a bit of a flirt.”

  Parker laughed. “Yeah, but you’re not quite his type, Charlie.”

  I frowned, thinking of Rojas’s manner, those sensual hands, his admission of the affair with Commander Peck’s wife, and his reaction to Dr Bertrand’s icy beauty.

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Well, they didn’t approve of the fact he was gay, of course,” he said, losing the smile in his voice now. “You mean you couldn’t tell?”

  “Not a flicker. Quite the opposite in fact. Are you sure he’s not bisexual?”

  “Not according to the information we have. Otherwise he would have given in and married one of the procession of eligible young ladies his parents kept presenting him with, just to make them happy. By all accounts he was a dutiful son.”

  “I don’t like this,” I said. “Something’s not right here. Look, Parker, can I call you back - ?”

  “There’s just one other thing before you go,” he said quickly.

  “Can it wait?”

  “No, I don’t believe it can. It’s about Hope, and you need to hear it.”

  Thirty-eight

  Joe Marcus reappeared just as I finished my call with Parker, putting away his own cellphone.

  “Looks like we got that woman and her baby just out in time,” he said. “I’ve just gotten word the whole of that apartment building collapsed about ten minutes ago.”

  I thought of Wilson’s warning that they’d wanted to leave me in the cellar during the last aftershock and didn’t respond.

  To be honest, I was still reeling from the information Parker had given me.

  “Joe, we need to talk.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. About Hope - ”

  Behind us, the lift doors pinged and slid back, and Dr Bertrand came out at her usual speed. Perhaps she had been a greyhound in a previous life.

  “I ‘ave done what I can for them,” she announced. “I must get back to work. There is much still to do.”

  Marcus started to fall into step with her but I moved in front of the pair of them.

  “No,” I said. “Nobody’s going anywhere until I get some answers.”

  The two exchanged a glance and I didn’t miss the way Marcus edged sideways a little to widen the gap between them, making two targets harder to watch.

  “Is this about the Frenc
hman?” Dr Bertrand asked.

  “What Frenchman?”

  I’d opened my mouth to ask the same question only to find Marcus had beaten me to it.

  Dr Bertrand looked irritated by our lack of understanding. “The man in the wheelchair of course.”

  “Rojas? But he’s South American - from Brazil.”

  She shook her head, utterly devoid of doubt. “But when I spoke to ‘im in Spanish and ‘e answered, ‘e speaks Spanish with a French accent. Couldn’t you ‘ear it?”

  Marcus saw the wheelchair where I’d left it just inside the doors.

  “Where is he?”

  Where you sent him. “On his way to see Hope and Lemon.”

  “You left her alone with him?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. “Parker called and I never got that far. If she’s at the Bell, Riley will be with them.”

  I saw by the way Marcus’s jaw tightened that he was regretting directing Rojas to Hope as I much as I was for not ignoring that phone call from Parker and accompanying Rojas all the way.

  We started to run, out of the lobby of the hospital and through the maze of temporary structures and tents toward the open area where there were half a dozen helicopters from various aid agencies and rescue organisations were parked up.

  I stopped, let Marcus come past me. He’d been in the helo when it landed so he surely knew where they’d left it. But when he stopped too, staring about him, I realised we were in serious shit.

  “Where are they?” Dr Bertrand demanded, catching us up without appearing significantly out of breath.

  “Gone. Dammit!”

  “Gone?” For the first time the doctor’s voice cracked with stress. “‘Ow can they ‘ave gone? And where?”

  “It’s a helo, Alex. They could have gone just about anywhere.” He pulled out his radio and tried hailing Riley. There was no response.

  “Tell him you’ve got a pickup for him,” I said. “Make it casual.”

  Marcus gave me a dubious look but did as ordered.

  “Sorry mate, I’m a bit held up at the moment.” Riley’s voice over the background noise of the Bell’s engines sounded as laidback as ever. Only his choice of words gave anything away. “I’ll get back to you when I’m free.”

  “Soon as you can then,” Marcus said and clicked off. “‘Held up’? Oh yeah, they’re being held up all right.”

  “By Senor Rojas? What does ‘e want with them?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not Rojas.” That got their attention, although Joe Marcus was halfway to the same conclusion anyway. “I think the man we’ve accepted as Santiago Rojas is actually the French jewel thief, Enzo Lefevre.”

  “But Commander Peck, ‘e identified the body in the morgue as Lefevre.” She sounded outraged at the inferred slight to her professional reputation, as if someone had deliberately set out to blot her near-perfect record.

  “The guy had no face, so maybe Peck assumed,” Marcus corrected her, “based on his proximity to the body of the woman, Dubois. Without other means of ID - like the personal items that were stolen - we had no reason to think otherwise.”

  “And now?”

  “You said yourself that he speaks Spanish with a French accent - ”

  “Circumstantial,” she dismissed. “‘E could ‘ave ‘ad a French nanny as a child.”

  “Rojas came over from Brazil because his religious family were putting pressure on him over his homosexuality,” I said. “Yet he told us he’d had an affair with Peck’s wife.”

  Marcus nodded. “And Peck backed him up.” His eyes met mine. “Now why would he do that, hmm?”

  I hit redial on my phone without breaking his gaze. When the call was answered I said briefly, “Parker, how quickly can you send me over a picture of Santiago Rojas?”

  There were no superfluous questions, just the sound of computer keys in the background. “OK, it’s on its way to your cell. Need anything else?”

  “No - thanks. I’ll call you.”

  A few moments later my phone bleeped to signal an incoming picture message. The jpeg image unfurled down the screen with agonising slowness. When it had finished downloading I handed the phone to Marcus.

  “Not the same guy,” he said flatly.

  Dr Bertrand said nothing, but her lips had tightened into a compressed line and her face was white.

  “‘Ow do we find them?”

  “We call the police,” I said.

  Thirty-nine

  Wilson asked no questions when I told him simply that someone had grabbed the R&R’s helo and taken hostages. We caught up with him, newly stitched and with his left arm in a sling, already aboard the police Eurocopter on the pad near the hospital entrance, with the engines fired up.

  As the three of us ducked under the main rotor and would have run toward it, Joe Marcus grabbed Dr Bertrand’s arm.

  “Alex, you should stay here.”

  “No!” she said. “She is as much my responsibility as yours, Joe.”

  He shrugged and let go without further argument. We reached the Eurocopter and scrambled into the rear.

  The pilot finessed the Eurocopter into the air and asked, “Which way?” over his shoulder.

  Wilson twisted toward us carefully from the co-pilot’s seat. “Any ideas where they’re headed?”

  “If he’s any sense then I’d guess the nearest border,” Joe Marcus said.

  “And if he’s no sense, eh?”

  “For the moment, let’s just get up there and see what we can see.”

  The pilot shrugged and powered upwards. The Eurocopter was newer than the Bell and faster by probably forty-five knots, but unless we knew where to chase that advantage was negated.

  I checked my watch. Riley could have been in the air and travelling flat out at a hundred and twenty knots for fifteen minutes now. The diameter of the search zone was increasing all the time.

  “Do we know who’s taken your people hostage?” Wilson asked. “And what do they want?”

  Marcus explained briefly about Santiago Rojas, our theory that he was Enzo Lefevre, and about Riley’s cryptic radio message.

  “If this Lefevre is a pro that’s good,” he said. “Means he’s less likely to do something stupid with them.”

  “We know he’s killed once already,” I said. That earned me a sharp glance from Dr Bertrand. “If he swapped identities, who do you think shot the real Santiago Rojas in the chest - this mysterious third man nobody can find?”

  “Sounds like your pilot can take the pressure, though,” Wilson said. “What’s his call sign? I’ll get my guy to give him a shout and pretend to be Air Traffic Control, something like that. Worth a try, eh?”

  “But there isn’t any ATC operating over the city, is there?” I asked.

  “No.” Marcus gave me a grim smile. “We’ll just have to hope Lefevre doesn’t know that.”

  Wilson spoke to the pilot. A minute or so later he handed back to us a folded aviation chart with a heading scribbled onto it, wincing as he bumped his injured arm.

  “Damn, I think he was wise to us. That bearing makes no sense unless he wants to end up on top of a mountain.”

  “I’ve worked with Riley for a long time,” Marcus said. “He would have given us something even if he had a gun to his head.”

  I peered at the chart. From the hospital which had been ringed in pencil, the heading the Aussie had given took them out of the city to the northeast, which wasn’t a logical route to anywhere. I opened the chart out and scanned it. Almost at once I recognised one of the areas Hope and I had been given to search.

  “What about a reciprocal?” I said. “Rojas’s store is directly southwest of the heading he’s given you.”

  “Could be,” Wilson said. “Better to go somewhere than nowhere, eh?”

  He showed the chart to the pilot who swung the Eurocopter onto a new heading and gunned it. If he’d had lights and sirens he would have been using those too.

  “Why would ‘e go back there?” Dr Bertrand
asked. “‘E must know we are after ‘im.”

  “Because of the gems,” I said. “If there was no third robber then he and the woman - Gabrielle Dubois - must have robbed Rojas themselves, but we know he didn’t have anything on him when he was found.”

  “So he’s gone back to look,” Marcus said. “But we searched and didn’t find anything.”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t have Hope and Lemon with us.”

  His expression hardened. “All this for a few stones.”

  “Lefevre mentioned a new delivery that was supposedly delayed,” I pointed out. “But he was lying about everything up to that point. Why not about the delivery as well.”

  “So you reckon there’s a fortune in precious gems out there for the taking, eh?” Wilson said. “Not surprising he decided to risk it.”

  I shook my head. “I think there’s more to it than that - ”

  At that moment the pilot leaned over his shoulder. “Coming up on the location.”

  “Put us down short,” Marcus said. He pulled the Colt out from under his shirt and racked a round into the chamber. “I don’t want the bastard to know we’re here.”

  Forty

  Joe Marcus might have been ten years out of uniform, but before that he’d been twenty years in the USMC and he hadn’t forgotten a trick.

  The two of us picked our way across the deserted streets and the rubble, moving fast but careful, guns out in our hands. The SIG felt inadequate for the task. What I wouldn’t have given for an M16 or an HK53 compact assault rifle for this kind of urban combat.

  We’d had difficulty persuading Dr Bertrand and Wilson to stay with the helo. Both had wanted to come with us and Marcus had been blunt in his refusal.

  “You’ll slow us down.”

  From the way Dr Bertrand scowled at him, it was probably the first time she’d been told she wasn’t fit to do something. Wilson looked pained but seemed to accept the truth of it.

  “Shout if you need backup though. We can always land the bloody helicopter on ‘em, eh?” His pilot did not look overly enthusiastic at this prospect.

  We worked our way in to the opposite side of the street to the location of Santiago Rojas’s jewellery store. The only signs of life were carrion birds and the occasional scurrying rat.