Third Strike

CHAPTER 14

One way and another, we were tied up with the police for most of the day. After the uniforms came the plainclothes men. World-weary and sardonic New York cops, they’d seen everything and heard more. And they made it quite clear that the story my father was now telling was more far-fetched than most.

They were obviously aware of Richard Foxcroft’s name—anyone who had read a newspaper or seen a news report in the last week couldn’t fail to be. I got the distinct impression that the only reason they didn’t outright laugh in our faces was because Parker Armstrong’s name carried weight, despite recent events. The hatchet job that had been done on my father’s reputation, however, was a resounding success.

They’d investigate, the cops told us, but what was probably no more than an accidental hit-and-run wasn’t high on the priority list. If we could bring them something more—like the faintest shred of evidence to support our fanciful claims of attempted murder—they might be more inclined to devote some man-hours to the case.

While they were interviewing him and my mother, I brought Parker and Sean up to speed on the conversation with my father while he’d been patching me up. When I’d finished, both of them looked thoughtful and no less worried than they had before.

“We need to put a lid on this quickly,” Parker reiterated, although I was heartened by his continued use of the word we. He glanced from one of us to the other. “If he’s finally agreed to make a stand, we can do something. Let me make some calls.”

He stood, decisive, and regarded us gravely. “Meanwhile, you’re going to have to keep those two out of trouble. They’ve already come after them once. They’ll try again.”

I got to my feet, too. I’d taken the opportunity to swallow a couple of painkillers and they’d done a decent job at floating the edge off things. Rising was considerably easier as a result. “Thank you,” I said. “And I know you don’t like to hear it, but I’ll say it again—I’m sorry for all of this.”

“Jeez, I know that, Charlie.” He offered me a tired smile and, a rarity, put his arm around my shoulder in a more fatherly gesture than I’d ever had from my own. “Don’t worry, we’ll see it through. And anyhow, you can’t be held responsible for your parents.”

“Tell me about it,” I muttered. “Can’t live with’em. Can’t kill’em and bury’em in the garden.”

After the police had rolled up their crime-scene tape and departed, we gave my parents a choice. Either Sean and I would put them up in the spare room at the apartment, or we’d put a guard on them at the hotel and stick with them whenever they were outside it. After the briefest of consultations, they went for the latter option, which was both a relief and a snub as far as I was concerned.

I noticed Parker go a little pale when I bluntly offered this ultimatum. His whole ethos for executive protection was to keep clients as safe as possible without cramping their style. Some saw it as risky, but it certainly seemed to work for him. Time and again, I’d come across agencies who’d been fired for letting their operatives crowd the principal and vetoing what the client considered normal activities. I liked Parker’s attitude. It went a long way towards explaining why, family money aside, he was doing well enough to run a substantial office in New York and a weekend place in the Hamptons.

Nevertheless, this was not a normal situation, nor the kind of clients he was used to dealing with. I knew that if we didn’t lay some ground rules right from the start, in an emergency things were going to go pear-shaped at somewhere approaching the speed of sound.

I was coward enough to let Sean tell it to them straight. I didn’t think they liked me any better, but at least I felt my father was likely to hold whatever Sean said in rather higher esteem.

“You are not under house arrest and we will not restrict your movements unless our experience and our judgment of the situation tell us it’s vital that we do so,” Sean said, disregarding the cynical twitch of my father’s mouth. “But, these people, whoever they are, are serious. If you take risks with your safety, just remember that you take even bigger risks with our safety. As today should have shown you, we will always attempt to put ourselves between you and the threat. That’s what we do.” He let his eyes slide over me briefly, making a point of it. “Is that clear?”

“We understand,” my father said stiffly.

“Good,” Sean said, and although he kept his face and voice and body entirely neutral, I could tell how much he was enjoying this. “In that case, there are a couple of things you’ll need to remember in case of attack. If we shout ‘Get down!’ at any point, all we want you to do is bend double and keep your head low, but stay on your feet and be ready to move unless we actively push you to the ground. Don’t try and stick your head up to see what’s happening. Don’t try and look round to see where the other one is. You’re going to have to trust us to have you both covered, yes?”

He paused and, after a second’s hesitation, they both nodded.

“One last thing,” Sean said, and now he did allow his voice to go soft and deadly. “This is not a democracy. We will do whatever we have to in order to preserve your lives and keep you safe. What we will not do is stand there in the middle of a firefight and discuss alternatives as you see them, or justify our actions. If we tell you to do something, just do it. Afterwards, we can talk about it all you like.”

“So,” my father said, matching his tone to Sean’s almost perfectly, “what happens when, in the cold light of day, you find you can’t justify your actions?”

There was a long silence while they stared each other down. Here were two men who had both handled death, from one direction or another, and never flinched under the weight of that responsibility.

“I don’t know, Richard. It’s never come up,” Sean said deliberately. He checked his watch, a wholly dismissive gesture, and started to turn away. “But if it ever does, I’ll be sure to let you know … .”

Sean, Parker, and I formed a three-man detail to get them out of the building and into the Navigator that Joe McGregor had waiting by the curb. This time, we took no chances, but whoever had been behind the wheel of the rogue cab did not spring out at us for a second attempt.

Nothing happened on the journey to their hotel, where McGregor took station. He had nothing to report when Sean and I arrived to relieve him in the morning, and nothing untoward happened the following day, either. Unless you counted the excruciating politeness with which Sean and my father treated each other. It screeched at my nerves like a tone-deaf child with their first violin.

We spent the day shopping for a replacement suitcase for my mother, and new clothes to fill it. She picked out another hard-shell case just like the last one. Where previously I might have tried to talk her into something lighter, now I voiced no such objections. Structural suitcases, I decided, were my friend.

Parker, meanwhile, was working furiously behind the scenes and providing us with regular updates on progress—or lack of it.

He’d sent to his various contacts Sean’s rudimentary photos of the couple we’d found baby-sitting my mother back in England. Apart from the fact that everyone seemed to think Blondie’s pic had been taken post mortem, nobody initially offered any clues as to their background.

Then Parker got a possible hit on Don, last name Kaminski. It turned out he was an ex-marine with a disciplinary record, who’d been spat out by the military machine two years previously and disappeared into the private contractors’ market. In other words, he was either a bodyguard or a mercenary.

Parker had uncovered the firm Don apparently worked for. Unfortunately, due to delusions of grandeur on their part, they seemed to think they were equal to—and therefore direct rivals of—Parker’s outfit. The result was that they refused to tell him anything about what their guy might or might not have been up to.

They wouldn’t even confirm Don was outside the mainland U.S., which I felt was a bit pointless, given the circumstances. But, Parker did at least manage to pick up a useful little snippet from an unguarded comment. From that, he deduced that Don Kaminski’s employers were growing increasingly alarmed by the fact they’d lost contact with their man. I thought of May and her shotgun, and the aggressive porcine guards around his temporary prison, and decided that it was probably going to be awhile yet before he got in touch.

It took longer to get any information on the woman I knew only as Blondie, although I admit that the state of her face probably didn’t make her any easier to identify.

We were just coming out of Macy’s department store when Parker called on Sean’s mobile. Sean let the answering machine pick up and didn’t make any attempt to respond to the call until we were back in our vehicle and on the move again. I returned Parker’s call while Sean dealt with the lunchtime traffic.

“Are you all together and close by?” Parker demanded.

“Yes,” I said, being cagey over the phone. “About ten minutes, give or take traffic. Trouble?”

“Nothing desperate,” Parker said. Yes, it could be trouble. “Just get back to the office as soon as it’s convenient, would you?” And yes, it’s urgent. And he ended the call before I could satisfy my curiosity any better than that.

By dint of only a small number of minor moving-vehicle violations, Sean made it back to base inside my ten-minute estimate. We rode the elevator in silence and Bill Rendelson intercepted us before we’d taken more than three steps out into the lobby.

“The boss wants to see you two alone first,” he said quietly to me, not giving away any clues. He turned to my parents. “If you’d come with me, sir, ma’am?” I saw a flicker of impatience cross my father’s face, but he allowed the pair of them to be ushered into one of the conference rooms. Bill promised to be back soon with refreshments, then shut the door on them smartly and hurried across towards Parker’s office, jerking his head much less deferentially that we should follow.

Inside, Parker Armstrong was sitting in his usual position behind the desk. Opposite him, in one of the client chairs, sat a nondescript little man in a badly cut gray suit. He looked like a second-rate salesman or a clerical drone who has trudged the same furrow for so long he’s worn a groove deep enough to bury himself.

The man looked up quickly as Sean and I entered. He had a mournful, rumpled face, with baggy eyes that were slightly bloodshot, but they didn’t miss a trick. I knew before the door had closed behind us that he’d pinpointed the fact we were carrying, and we weren’t exactly being obvious about it.

A pro, then. But what kind?

“This is Mr. Collingwood,” Parker said as both men rose for the introductions. “He’s with—”

“Er, let’s just say I’m with one of the lesser-known agencies of the U.S. government and leave it at that, shall we?” the man said, glancing at Parker almost with mild reproof. He offered us both a perfunctory handshake, letting go almost before he’d gripped.

Parker stared back, unintimidated. “I like to keep my people fully informed,” he said.

Collingwood ducked his head, smiling apologetically. “I’d be a whole lot happier, at this stage, if we kept this whole thing as low-key as possible, Mr. Armstrong. I’m sure you can understand our … concerns.”

I was getting better at placing regional American accents. Not quite Deep South enough to be Alabama or Georgia. Maybe one of the Carolinas.

Parker nodded reluctantly and waved us to sit down. Sean and I took the chairs on either side of him, positions of support and solidarity that weren’t lost on the government man. Those heavy-lidded eyes gleamed a little as they regarded us.

Despite his observant gaze, Collingwood struck me as an official rather than an agent—the kind who’d once been in the field, but was now firmly anchored behind a desk. His suit had the bagged knees to prove it. He had a briefcase lying closed on the low table near his right hand and a buff-coloured folder, also closed, in front of him, which he fiddled with while he waited for us to settle, fussily lining it up with the edge of the table.

His hands were misshapen across the backs, I noticed, like he’d spent his youth bare-knuckle fighting or suffered from premature arthritis. Perhaps that explained the lackluster handshake.

“Why don’t you bring everybody up to speed,” Parker suggested.

The little man ducked his head again and smiled at us. His hair was very thick, its glossy blackness at odds with his lived-in face. It couldn’t have looked more like a wig unless it actually had a chin strap.

“This business came to our attention because Mr. Armstrong was attempting to identify, ah … this woman,” he said, opening the folder just far enough to peer inside and lifting out a blowup print, which he spun the right way up and slid across the table towards us.

“Yes,” Sean said, barely glancing at the picture. He didn’t need to. It was the one he’d taken of Blondie lying on the floor in my parents’ garage with her eyes closed. The blood from her obviously broken nose formed a mustachelike stain on her upper lip.

Collingwood sat back and rested his elbows on the arms of the chair, steepling his fingers and tapping the ends together so his nails clicked.

“What can you tell me about this photograph?” he said carefully. “First off, where did you, ah, obtain it?”

He looked from one of us to the other. We stared right back, giving him nothing. Collingwood cleared his throat, trying to hide his desperation behind a nervous laugh. “I mean to say, we know when it was taken. That’s the beauty of digital these days—there’s a time code embedded in the image. But we don’t know where. Or under what, ah, circumstances.”

“Perhaps it might help if we knew why you need to know this,” Sean said, pleasant but noncommittal. “Who is she?”

Collingwood’s gaze swung across him, then he gave a weary sigh, raising his hands a little.

“Okay. Her name is Vonda Blaylock,” he said, eyes still on the photo, lying untouched on the tabletop. “And she’s one of ours.” He looked up, his face ever more sorrowful. “Or, leastways, she was … .”

Oh shit.

I glanced back at the photo, as if knowing Blondie’s real name and status as a government agent might change my memory of her in some way. No, I decided, it didn’t. She and her heavy-duty sidekick had still conned their way into my mother’s house, threatened her, frightened her, and been prepared to do untold damage to whoever came to her aid. I relaxed, shrugging off the guilt that had been nudging at my shoulder. All things considered, she’d got off lightly.

Vonda. Not a name I’d come across before. It suited her, sort of, although she’d always be Vondie to me.

“When you say she’s one of yours, does that mean she was on an assignment of some kind?” Sean asked, picking his words to be as neutral as possible.

Collingwood winced, as if he’d been hoping for something more reassuring than that. Or at least something different. There was a light sheen of sweat coating his forehead. “Not exactly,” he said. “She’s been on leave for the last couple of weeks. Look, can you at least tell me if she’s still alive or—”

“She was when that picture was taken,” I said, taking pity on his patent distress.

“Well, thank the good Lord for that,” he said, slumping back in his chair, hands dangling. “That shot came down the wire and we thought … I thought …” He stopped, shook his head and added, almost to himself, “Whatever she’s gotten herself into, she didn’t deserve—”

“Just what has she gotten herself into, Mr. Collingwood?” Parker asked, still in that dangerously quiet tone.

“Hm?” Collingwood looked up, distracted, and Parker had to repeat his question. “Well, I can’t go into details—you understand—but we suspect that Miss Blaylock has been doing a little, ah, freelancing, put it that way. Either on the company dime, or on her own. I had a conversation with her about it, gave her the opportunity to come clean.” He looked at the photo again. “She didn’t take it—just put in for vacation time. An internal inquiry was scheduled for when she got back at the start of this week, but she never showed, and all our attempts to locate her have failed—until that arrived.” He jerked his head to the photo. “What happened to her?”

I did.

Rejecting brutal honesty, I said, “She took part in a scheme to blackmail my father, Richard Foxcroft, by kidnapping my mother.” I was watching his face while I spoke to see if any of this was news to him. If it wasn’t, he gave a pretty convincing display of bewildered consternation. “In England,” I added, as though that made it so much worse.

“Are you sure about this?” He looked blankly around us, as if we were all going to crack up and admit that we were joking. “I mean, ah, how reliable is your intel?”

“Very,” I said. “By the time we arrived to, ah, remedy the situation,” I went on, matching my style of delivery to his, “your Miss Blaylock was pretty well dug in and prepared to repel boarders. How else do you think she ended up with her nose splattered all over her face?”

Collingwood wiped a thoughtful hand across his chin and I heard the slight rasp of his fingers against the stubble. The guy had a few tufts of body hair protruding from the ends of his shirt cuffs and just below his Adam’s apple, too. He must have had to shave twice a day just to stop people calling out Animal Control.

“So you took the picture,” he said. “I did,” Sean said. He shrugged, untainted by guilt of any kind. “We wanted to know who she was and who she was working for, and she wasn’t keen to tell us.”

“So all you did was ask, huh?” Collingwood demanded with outright suspicion. “No rough stuff?”

“I may have raised my voice towards her,” Sean said blandly, carefully sidestepping what he’d done to her companion instead. “But the fight was over by then. And I’m hardly a torturer.”

No, he wasn’t, I reflected, but he was a damned good interrogator. Cold, ruthless and utterly relentless. I’d been on the receiving end during my Special Forces training and, even though a part of me had always clung to the shrinking reality that it was all just a game, his innate menace and his aptitude for arrowing in on fear and weakness had terrified everyone who’d had to endure it.

“We reasoned that identifying her would be by far the best way to neutralize whatever threat she presented,” Sean continued, sounding perfectly reasonable.

“And afterward?”

Sean met his gaze straight and level. “We left Ms. Blaylock relatively unharmed.” He always was a better liar than me, too.

“But you’re telling us you had no idea of where she was going, or what she was doing?” Parker asked at that point, deflecting whatever doubts Collingwood might have been about to express. “Do your people normally inform you if they’re traveling overseas, for instance? Are they flagged at Immigration?”

“No—o,” Collingwood said slowly, sounding like he was drawing the word out to give himself time to think. “They’re not obliged to tell us. It was only after she disappeared that we ran checks and found she’d bought a plane ticket to the UK.”

So, he’d known Vondie had left the country long before I’d told him about my mother, I realized. And knowing we knew meant the rules of the game shifted slightly, that now he had nothing to lose by giving us a little more. Collingwood reached for the buff folder again and leafed through it, still careful not to let us get a look at the contents.

“Here you go—she flies into Manchester, England, just over a week ago. After that, we lose her. She just drops right off the grid. According to the Brits, she hasn’t used any of her credit cards or even switched on her cell phone since she landed. She missed her return flight, didn’t turn up at work when she was due. I don’t mind telling you that we’re seriously concerned for her safety.”

“Was she traveling alone?” I asked, trying to keep any inflection out of my voice.

Collingwood ducked his head again, then made a little side-to-side movement, which I took to mean yes/no/maybe.

“She booked and paid for the flight herself, but we pulled the manifest,” he said cautiously, opening his case for that piece of paperwork and handing it over. I took it without comment, leafed through the pages. It came as no surprise to find Don Kaminski on there as well, but I let my eyes drop past his name without a waver, sedately read all the way to the end and put the sheaf down onto the table.

When I looked up I found Collingwood had been watching me closely. But if the disappointed twitch in the side of his face was anything to go by, I hadn’t shown him what he’d been hoping to see.

Where his left hand hung over the arm of the chair his fingers performed an unconscious little dance, rubbing the pad of his thumb across his fingertips, back and forth like he was checking the viscosity of oil, or asking for a bribe. I wondered if he was even aware he was doing it.

“Okay, people—cards on the table time,” he said at last, tiredly. “We believe Agent Blaylock has been working with a guy called Don Kaminski, but I’m sure this information comes as no surprise to any of you—seeing as how you initially sent around a mug shot of Kaminski at the same time as that picture.” He nodded to the blowup of Vondie and allowed himself a wry smile. “I’m assuming from the fact that you stopped asking about him, that means you ID’d him pretty fast. Am I right?”

Parker inclined his head a fraction, a faint encouraging smile on his lips. It was the first movement he’d made since he sat down again. On either side of him, Sean and I were doing our best impersonations of the sphinx at Giza.

Collingwood gave a snort of frustration at our lack of a more emphatic response.

“Look, I know the business you’re in is pretty tight-knit, cliquey, so if you identified Kaminski and the outfit he works for, you’ll already know about his current contract and you’ll understand our, ah, interest?”

If Kaminski was working for the Boston hospital, I couldn’t for the life of me work out how someone like Collingwood might be involved, but I had a feeling if we played this right, we might just be about to find out.

I tried not to hold my breath, tried to force my muscles not to tense. Parker, with heroic restraint, merely gave a polite, almost bored nod, as though this was all information we were well aware of and he wished Collingwood would cut to the chase.

“So, what exactly is your interest, Mr. Collingwood?” he said, his face deceptively placid.

Judging by his weary expression, Collingwood took Parker’s question as awkwardness rather than ignorance. He gave a gusty sigh. “Storax Pharmaceutical, of course.”

Storax.

The name couldn’t have hit me any harder if it had been plastered all over the front of the taxi that had tried to run me down.

Storax. The company that manufactured the drug Jeremy Lee had been taking before he died—with or without his knowledge. The company that had obligingly sent two of their people up to Boston allegedly to assist in his treatment. Where had they been, I wondered, when the good doctor had been administered his fatal overdose?

My father had been convinced that it was the hospital who’d been covering up some kind of clinical error, but now Collingwood had shed a whole new light on the situation. The question was, what should we do about it?

“And why exactly is one of the lesser-known government agencies interested in Storax?” It was Sean who asked the question, which was just as well—I wasn’t capable of speech. I was amazed that Sean could sound so calm in the face of the information Collingwood had just dropped, apparently unwittingly, into our laps.

Collingwood’s eyes narrowed, as if he realized he’d said more than he should, and I could see his mind backtracking, trying to work out what advantage we might gain from it. After a moment he seemed to come to the conclusion that he had nothing to lose by saying more.

“Storax Pharmaceutical contracts with the U.S. government to produce certain, ah, vaccines. Anything more than that is classified information,” Collingwood said, ducking his head again like a boxer expecting to dodge blows. “But let me just say that we keep an eye on their other activities. A very close eye. Storax is just about to be granted worldwide licenses for this new bone drug of theirs, based largely on the success of clinical trials to date. If there’s a problem and they’re covering it up, we need to know and we need to know fast.”

“If Storax holds government contracts, surely you have some authority to go in and do some kind of audit,” I said.

He gave a sad little shake of his head at my naïveté. “Storax is a global corporation,” he said. “A multibillion-dollar enterprise. Heck, they probably have more people on the payroll just to lobby for them in Washington than our agency has on its entire payroll, period. We can’t fight that unless we have an ironclad case. They’ll shut us down in a heartbeat. And that brings me to your father, Miss Fox. Where is he, by the way?”

“Somewhere safe,” Parker said, jumping in before I had the chance to answer, even if I’d had the inclination to do so. “What is it you want with him?”

“If Storax is falsifying any of its research, I’m sure you can appreciate the implications for the national security of this country, Mr. Armstrong,” Collingwood said heavily. “If Richard Foxcroft has any evidence to support his claims that Dr. Lee was given that overdose as some kind of cover-up, we need to talk to him.”

“Why should we trust you?” I said flatly. “If Storax is behind what’s been going on, they’ve fought dirty so far and it’s damn near ruined him. Don’t you think he’s had enough?”

“We need to know what he knows,” Collingwood said, stubborn. “I don’t suppose I need to remind you how, ah, difficult we could make life for your father if he doesn’t cooperate?”

Parker pushed his chair back and rose, the movement sudden but smooth and controlled all at the same time. He leaned forwards slightly and planted both his fists very deliberately onto the desktop, letting his shoulders hunch so that Collingwood was left in no doubt about the width of them, normally so well disguised by careful tailoring.

“Do I need to remind you that one of your agents is guilty of kidnapping?” he asked, his voice gentle enough to make me shiver. “That she and Kaminski threatened to torture and rape a defenseless old lady? How would that look on tomorrow’s front page?”

“Almost as bad as the old lady’s highly respectable husband getting caught in a bordello with a teenage hooker,” Collingwood shot back. He gave another gusty sigh. “Look, this is getting us nowhere. I just want to recover my agent and find out what her involvement is with Storax, and what they’re hiding. Foxcroft can help.”

He returned Parker’s glare with a cool stare of his own before shifting its focus to me. The upper corners of his eyelids folded down until they almost touched his lashes, making his gaze seem deceptively sleepy. “You want a way to get your father out of the mess he’s in, and no doubt he wants to get to the bottom of this other guy’s death up in Boston. Am I right?”

Slowly, reluctantly, I nodded.

Collingwood smiled at me. “See? Same goal.”

“This is all very romantic,” Sean said, his voice dry, “but how do you intend to consummate this marriage of convenience?”

Collingwood frowned briefly at the flippancy. “We trade,” he said. “First off, you, ah, assist me in recovering my rogue agent.”

“Always assuming that we have any ideas in that direction,” Sean agreed placidly. “And in return?”

Collingwood shrugged. “I listen to Foxcroft’s side of the story, drop the word in the right ears to make sure all that, ah, trouble he got himself into over in Brooklyn goes away,” he said, “and in return he gives me his professional take on the death of this guy Lee, and any possible connections he can make between that and Storax.”

We fell silent. It was an answer. In fact, from where I was sitting, it was the only answer—or the start of it, at least. Collingwood’s fingers were twitching again as he regarded us.

“Well?” he demanded. “Do we have a deal?”

“I think that’s up to the good doctor, don’t you?” Parker murmured. He glanced at me, eyebrow slightly raised. I nodded slightly and he leaned forwards, pressing the intercom button on his phone. Bill Rendelson’s voice barked from the speaker in acknowledgment.

“Bill, ask Mr. and Mrs. Foxcroft to step into my office, would you?”

Parker let go of the intercom button and sat up to face Collingwood’s obvious consternation that one of his objectives, at least, had been within such easy reach. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”