Third Strike

CHAPTER 3

“You finally made it in, huh?” Bill Rendelson said. There was a row of clocks hanging on the glossy marble wall above the reception desk where he held court, and he pointedly twisted in his chair so he could check the one set to New York time. “The boss wants to see you—like, yesterday.”

I’d barely stepped out of the elevator before Bill had delivered his ominous message. He heaved his blocky frame upright and stalked across the lobby to knock on the door to Parker Armstrong’s office.

Bill could have buzzed through to let Parker know I was here, but he liked to rub it in. He’d been with the agency since the beginning, so the story went, and three years previously he’d lost his right arm at the shoulder in a parcel-bomb attack on the South African businessman he was protecting. His principal had survived unscathed, but Bill’s active service career was over.

When Sean and I had first started working for Parker, I’d assumed from his abrupt manner that Bill had taken against us for some reason, but it was soon clear that he didn’t like anyone very much. I often wondered if Parker’s keeping Bill on—in a job so close to the heart of things but without actually being able to get out there anymore—was an act of kindness or cruelty. Sometimes I thought perhaps Bill had his doubts about that, too.

Now, he pushed open the door in response to his boss’s summons, and jerked his head to me. I stiffened my spine and walked straight in without a pause, nodding to him as I went. He gave a kind of half sigh, half grunt by way of acknowledgment, and yanked the door shut behind me as though to prevent my premature escape.

Parker Armstrong’s office was understated and discreet, like the man. Modern, pale wood furniture and abstract original canvases. Not for him the usual gaudy rake of signed photos showing chummy handshakes with the rich and famous.

The office occupied a corner of the building and was high enough not to be easily overlooked—no mean feat in any city. Parker’s desk sat across the diagonal, so his chair was protected by the vee of the wall, his back to the windows, to allow potential clients to be slightly intimidated by the view.

He was on the phone when I walked in, and I expected to have to wait while he finished the call, but he wound up the conversation almost right away, stood and came round the desk to meet me.

Parker was a slim man, tall and serious. His hair had once been dark until hit by an early frost, and that made him difficult to put an age to. His face was handsome without being arresting, the kind that the eye would glance over, rather than rest on. Perfect for the line of work he’d chosen. And yet, if you looked closely enough, you saw something more in Parker, a depth, a strength, a watchfulness.

He was wearing a dark single-breasted suit with the jacket unbuttoned, and a narrow tie. I was glad I’d taken the time to put my business face on and change out of my scruffs. Wool trousers and a silk shirt in the obligatory New York black, the collar high enough to hide my more obvious scars.

“Charlie,” Parker said, steering me towards one of the leather armchairs near the desk. “Take a seat. You want coffee?”

A gentle accent, not immediately placeable, the U.S. equivalent of classless. I’d heard him add twang or blur to it, depending on the company he was keeping. A natural chameleon. There was a lot about him that reminded me of an older Sean. Perhaps that was why Parker had offered him a partnership in the first place.

I shook my head and he moved across to the filter machine he had permanently on the go in the corner. “You sure? It’s Jamaican Blue Mountain—just in.”

His taste in expensive coffee was practically his only vice—or the only one I’d found out about, at any rate. He had fresh-roasted beans delivered by the pound from McNulty’s aromatic old-fashioned store in Greenwich Village.

“So,” I said, wanting to take the offensive rather than wait for him to do so, “you’ve spoken to Nick.”

Lifting the coffee cup to his lips only partially obscured the quick grimace, his mouth twisting up at the corner.

“Yeah.” He arched an eyebrow. “He’s not a happy guy.”

“He should have kept his hands to himself,” I shot back.

“Maybe so,” he allowed, “but you coulda been a little more, ah, diplomatic in giving him the brush-off.”

I shrugged to cover the fact I’d already realized that. “Maybe.”

Parker sighed and put the cup down, regaining his seat like a judge about to pass sentence.

“Close protection is all about attitude, Charlie,” he said, sounding tired now. “Mind-set. You gotta see the big picture, weigh all the options. React to a high-threat situation—not just fast but smart, too.”

Here it comes … .

There was a hollow panic rising under my rib cage. I swallowed it down along with my pride, and admitted, “I do recognize that what I did this morning probably didn’t exactly qualify as smart.”

For a moment Parker regarded me with eyes that seemed kindly, but missed nothing and forgave less.

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

I waited, heart rate beginning to pick up, for the blade to fall.

Then he smiled.

“But I’ll bet it was damned funny,” he said.

My shoulders dropped a fraction.

“Well … yes,” I said faintly. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

The smile broadened so that his whole face joined in, and slipped into a chuckle that he attempted to dilute with another mouthful of coffee.

“Nick’s a nice guy, but he’s a wanna-be,” Parker said. “Always dropping hints about how he’d be a good guy for me to have on the team. I guess now he’s seen what a real pro can do, he’ll shut the hell up about it and I’ll finally get some peace.”

I sat there, blankly, wondering if I’d really just done what I thought I’d done. Got away with it.

“What about my assessment?” I said, still looking for the catch. “I didn’t finish it and—”

“Charlie,” Parker cut in, shaking his head. “Way I heard it, you just threw a guy nearly twice your size and weight halfway across a room. I think it’s safe to say you’re fit enough to get back to work, don’t you?”

I still hadn’t come up with a suitable reply when there was a perfunctory knock on the door. It opened without waiting for permission and I knew without turning around who’d just walked in.

Parker looked over my shoulder at the new visitor and his face lit up again.

“Hey, Sean,” he said. “Come on in. I was just telling Charlie she’s all out of excuses.”

“Mm,” Sean said, “I would have thought she is.”

I turned then, alerted by the coolness in his tone, and found Sean watching me closely. I knew him, on every kind of level, better than I’d known anyone, but at times like these I didn’t know him at all. He was impossible to second-guess. I felt that near-black gaze like liquid on my skin.

Even years after he’d first terrified me as the toughest instructor on the Special Forces training course I’d crashed out of in such spectacular fashion, he still thoroughly unnerved and unsettled me.

Deliberately, I turned away, just in time to see Parker’s eyes flicking speculatively between the two of us. He knew we had a relationship outside work—of course he did—but he’d never asked questions and we’d never given him cause to. A state of affairs I didn’t intend to disturb.

“She needs a further assessment,” Sean said now.

“Sean, I’m okay.”

“Physically, yes,” he agreed evenly.

“Yes,” Parker said, regarding me carefully. “I get what you mean.”

Sean crossed the office floor, making almost no noise on the tiles. He leaned his shoulder against the window reveal to Parker’s left and folded his arms. Like Parker, he was wearing a dark suit and looked as at home in it as he once had in army camouflage. There was probably only ten years between them, but at that moment they could almost have been father and son. Both men eyed me silently, as though I was suddenly going to crack open for them to read.

“Well, would somebody mind spelling it out for me?” I said with a touch of bite. “What? You think I’m going to run away the next time someone points a gun at me?”

“No,” Sean said. “I think you’re more likely to make sure they don’t get the chance.”

“Overreact, you mean?”

“It’s a possibility.” He gave a negligent lift of one of those wide shoulders. Sometimes, for a thug, Sean could be very elegant. “We have to be sure—and so do you.”

My father’s words were suddenly loud and mocking inside my head. You’ve already proved you can’t be trusted to do a job without injuring yourself and others. What possible use could they have for you?

“There’s one way to find out,” I said, as calmly as I could manage, chin rising to meet the challenge. “Put me back out there. You’ll soon know if I’m up to it.”

“Hey, whoa,” Parker said, holding his right hand straight up, side on, and tapping his left flat across the top of it to form a T. “Time out, guys.” He didn’t raise his voice, but he rarely had to.

“For starters,” he went on, glancing at me, “there’s no way I’m going to use any of our clients to find out if you’re gunshy, Charlie. Not that I think for a moment that you are, but it would a real stupid move on my part, okay?”

I made a conscious effort to let my hackles subside.

“Okay,” I agreed meekly.

“You’ve been doing great behind the scenes these last few months. Bill tells me the guys reckon nobody runs a team like you do. You’re terrific on logistics. You don’t sweat the small stuff, but you don’t overlook anything, either. And you always remember to feed them.”

The praise surprised me, not least because of its source. “But I don’t want to be—”

“—stuck behind a desk all day,” Parker finished for me. He indicated the office we were in with a sweep of his hand. “Trust me,” he said wryly. “I know all about that one.”

“There’s a course coming up in Minneapolis next month,” Sean said, drawing our eyes back to him. “Stress Under Fire. I’ve already booked you a place on it.”

“You got her in?” Parker said. “Good work. They’re usually pretty full.”

Sean allowed himself a smile. “Ah well, I booked it a month or so ago.”

“Stress Under Fire?” I queried, still processing the double-edged information of Sean’s faith and lack of it.

“Does exactly what it says on the can,” he said. “Checks out your reactions. What decisions you make and the way you make them when you’re in the thick of it. It’s tough. You pass that, nobody will question whether you’re ready to get back out there.”

“A liability to those around you,” my father had said. “You know as well as I do that they’ll never quite trust you again.”

“And if I fail?”

Sean said nothing.

Parker smiled again, the action crinkling the corners of those watchful eyes.

“You won’t,” he said.

“So, do you think I’ll fail?” I asked.

It was later. Much later. We were home in the apartment we’d rented on the Upper East Side. The minimal view of Central Park should have been enough to ensure the cost of it was stratospheric, but one of Parker’s relations owned the building. Parker had abused the family connection to squeeze the rent down to a level that was merely exorbitant, as part of a tempting relocation package.

“Of course not,” Sean said.

His face was in shadow, but in my mind he spoke too quick, too easy. I tried to acknowledge that I was just being touchy. That I would have taken any pause as a sign of hesitation rather than due consideration of the question.

As if he’d heard my thoughts, he sighed, his chest rising and falling beneath my cheekbone. I could hear his heart beating strong and steady under me. Incomplete assessment or no, we were both more than fit enough for our pulse rates to quickly drop back to a slow rhythm after exertion.

“If I thought that, I wouldn’t send you,” he said, his hand skimming lazily along my upper arm. “I trained you, after all. You cock it up and it makes me look bad.”

It was dark outside, in as much as New York ever gets dark. The lights in the apartment were out but we hadn’t drawn the window blinds and the rattle and glimmer of the city slipped in through the open glass like a slow-footed thief. For the first six weeks or so, the unaccustomed bursts of noise had woken me constantly during the night. Now I found it all vaguely soothing.

We hadn’t had a chance to talk since our encounter in Parker’s office earlier that day. We’d spent the afternoon, and most of the evening, entertaining a group of high-ranking executives from a major banking corporation. The bank was trying to forge development links with certain South American countries, where its personnel would be prime targets for kidnap and extortion.

Parker had spent several months—not to mention a considerable amount of money—quietly trying to convince the bank the dangers were sufficient to subcontract all its safety precautions out to us. If tonight was anything to go by, it looked like he’d finally succeeded.

He’d taken a few of the top guys out on the town and had called in every spare operative on his books to provide a maximum force, minimum fuss, security detail for them. We’d gone to extraordinary lengths to be visible in the most unobtrusive manner possible.

Parker had put me working the inner ring, closest to the principals. Mostly, he’d done it because he was aware that women blended in much better in low-profile social situations than hulking great blokes. I’d certainly learned to dress like a young city exec since I’d been working for him. But it was also a good opportunity to show faith in me—admittedly without much risk. Either way, I was profoundly grateful.

Parker had kept Sean at the forefront, too, and he knew how to play the game when it came to sweet-talking potential clients. We’d taken them to watch the sun go down over cocktails in a rooftop bar on Fifth Avenue that had a great view of the Empire State Building, then gone on to eat in one of the best restaurants in trendy TriBeCa.

It could have been romantic, had we not been working, and had we not been in a group whose main characteristic was an ego to match the size of the investment portfolios they handled, and the cocky self-assurance that went with it.

So, Sean and I had hardly exchanged a word all evening, and nothing in private. We hadn’t even traveled home together. I’d changed at the office and taken the Buell, and Sean had stayed for the debrief with Parker and arrived by cab two hours later.

He’d got back to find me sitting curled up on the sofa in the airy living room, making a poor attempt to read a survival equipment catalog. I’d glanced up as he’d walked in stripping off his jacket and tie, unclipping the Kramer paddle-rig holster containing the .45-caliber Glock 21 he habitually carried. He was tall, deceptively wide across the shoulder without having the overdeveloped neck of a gorilla, and devastatingly but unself-consciously good-looking. My mouth had gone instantly dry at the sheer intensity of his face.

So it was only afterwards, as the cool air dusted the sweat from our bodies, that I finally had the chance to ask the question uppermost in my mind.

He shifted slightly and let his fingers drift along my spine, circling outwards to delicately trace the fading scar of the bullet wound in the back of my right shoulder.

“It’s not that I don’t have faith in you, Charlie, you know that,” he said gently. “But what you’ve been through changes you. Christ Jesus, you nearly died. It can’t not.”

“It was probably worse from the outside, looking in,” I said, knowing that was only partly true. “And anyway, I didn’t die.” Hell, not long enough for it to count.

But as I said it I tried not to think about the Vicodin I’d taken before the start of the evening. I was too scared of getting hooked to take the painkillers regularly, but they’d successfully taken the edge off the ache that had plagued me all day.

I blocked out my father’s stinging comments. You may be walking without a limp any longer, but your health will never be exactly what one might describe as robust again. A little light office work is about all you’re fit for.

Had Parker seen that? Is that why he’d made that comment about me being good at organization—because he wanted me to keep me reduced to nothing more?

Sean’s fingers stilled a moment and I realized I’d braced myself against the memory. I took a quiet breath and let my limbs float heavy.

“Depends on what you classify as normal, I suppose,” he said. “I’ve been there, too, don’t forget. I know how it changes your perception of things—of how far you can go—because you know what the ultimate consequences are for failing.”

“I know you’ve been hurt—shot, beaten, threatened with execution—but trust me, Sean, you have no idea,” I said, hearing the rough note in my voice.

His hands stilled again, then tightened around me, cradling my head. I felt his lips brush my hair, then one of his fingers trailed delicately down the side of my neck and across the base of my throat, following the faint line of an old scar that was another constant reminder never to drop my guard. Shame it hadn’t always worked.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “That was crass.”

“Yes it was. I can still function, you know,” I said, unwilling to let him off lightly. “I’m not completely socially stunted. Didn’t I prove that tonight?”

“You did,” he said. “In fact, you were so successful in not looking like a bodyguard that one of the prats from the bank actually asked if you were, ahem, part of the entertainment package.”

I stiffened for a moment, then a giggle escaped me and before I knew it we were both laughing.

“My God,” I said. “What did you say to that?”

“I told him, only if he was likely to find it entertaining to be disemboweled slowly through his navel.”

“I bet you didn’t.”

“You’re right, I didn’t,” he admitted. “I smiled as though he’d said something witty and informed him with excruciating politeness that you were one of our top operatives and that, if he valued certain parts of his anatomy, perhaps he shouldn’t repeat that kind of speculation within Parker’s earshot—or yours, for that matter.”

The amusement subsided and, just when I thought I’d got away with it, Sean asked quietly, “So, are you going to tell me what happened between you and Nick today?”

My turn to sigh. I rolled onto my back and stared up into the gloom while I recounted the news report I’d seen on TV, and the subsequent encounter with my father. I debated on editing the content slightly, but in the end it all came spilling out practically verbatim, until finally I talked myself to silence.

Somewhere in the grid of streets below us, a car cranked up and accelerated away. I listened to its blowing exhaust through two gear-changes before the noise was swallowed up by the background chatter of the city.

Sean still hadn’t spoken. I listened to the tenor of his breathing and smiled at the ceiling

“Stop it,” I said.

“What?”

“Gloating.”

“I never said a word.” He did injured innocence rather well. “Did I say a word?”

I rolled partway back so I could prop onto an elbow and look down at him. “You didn’t have to. I can hear you cackling from here. It’s very juvenile.”

He grinned outright then, wholly unrepentant. “Well come on, Charlie,” he said, not trying to hide the amusement that glistened in his voice. “Even you have to admit—after all that rampant disapproval—it’s bloody funny to find out your old man’s finally fallen off his high horse.”

“No,” I said slowly. “That’s the trouble—it isn’t funny. Even if I discounted half the things he said afterwards—”

“Which you can’t.”

I let my breath out fast, an annoyed gush. “Yeah, right, that’s easy for you to say. You haven’t spent half your life trying to get his attention and the other half wishing you hadn’t succeeded.”

“That’s just it,” he said, and he’d matched my tone. “I can view him as an outsider—God knows, he’s always done his damnedest to make me feel that way. He’s a coldhearted bastard at times, but he doesn’t have the emotional capacity to be vindictive. And he’s not a drunk.”

He tilted his head so I knew he was looking directly at me. I felt the prickle of it across my skin even though I couldn’t see his eyes.

“Reasons?”

He crooked one arm behind his neck to support it. “You’re physically fit. We both know that and, hell, he probably knew before we did. Calling you a cripple is gross exaggeration and he’s not a man prone to flights of fancy. So why did he say it? What did he hope to achieve?”

“O-kay,” I said, reluctantly absorbing his words. “But what about the drinking problem? How can you be so sure about that?”

He gave a soft, bitter laugh. “My father was a drinker, remember?”

I’d never met Sean’s father. Long before Sean and I first met, the man had been killed in an inebriated car crash, which wrecked his ambition to die of liver failure at the earliest age possible. By all accounts, he had not been a happy drunk. I squeezed Sean’s arm.

“I’m sorry.”

“Forget it.” I felt him shrug. “All I meant was, I know the signs and your old man doesn’t have them. Besides, how long do you think he could keep the shakes quiet when he spends every day holding a scalpel?”

I sank back onto the sheets, frowning.

“But I heard him admit to it, completely unequivocally, on camera, and it’s the kind of admission that will totally ruin his career—if it hasn’t done already. Why the hell would he say that, if it’s not true?”

“Seems like he said a lot of things today that weren’t true,” Sean said. “You either accept he’s flipped his lid and we book him a nice padded room at Bellevue, or you go and bully the truth out of him.”

He paused and, though I couldn’t see his face clearly I could hear by his voice that the smile was back full strength. “After what you did to Nick today, I’d say you’ll have no trouble on that score.”