Third Strike

CHAPTER 6

“Well, congratulations, guys. I do believe this will go down in history as a screwup of monumental proportions,” Parker Armstrong said. He raised a tired smile that lost heart long before it reached his eyes. “As I understand it,” he added with morose humor, “they can see it from space.”

We were in the conference room at the agency. High-tech and spotless, it had been furnished with an eye to luxury and none at all to cost. The suspended ceiling seemed to hang in a cloud of ice blue neon, perfectly highlighting the swirling grain of the maple wall panels. At one end was a projector screen for presentations. It was rarely used, but I knew for a fact the sound system that went with it had cost more than my last house.

Parker was in the power seat at the top end of half an acre of mirror-polished table. Sean and I were shoulder-to-shoulder about halfway along, with Bill Rendelson scowling ferociously at us from the other side.

We’d been offered a seat but preferred to stand. I had to fight the urge to do so at attention. Back straight up, arms straight down so my thumbs were precisely in line with the seams of my leather jeans, knees just slightly bent so I could hold the position for hours if I had to. Only the lack of dress uniforms prevented this from being an action replay of the travesty that was my court-martial.

I felt thoroughly dirty. We were both still wearing the same clothes we’d been arrested in, roughly twenty-eight hours earlier. If it hadn’t been for some fancy footwork on the part of Parker’s legal team, we would probably still be in jail.

The last glimpse I’d had of my father was of him being bundled, handcuffed, into the back of a police cruiser. I’d asked the lawyer who’d got me out what had happened to him, but the man seemed to be billing by the word as well as the minute and my credit was obviously running short.

“I’m sorry,” I said, aware that I was starting to sound like a scratch mix. “But don’t blame Sean for any of this. I’m the one who dragged him into it.”

“Aw, come on, Charlie.” Parker sat back, his voice almost gentle in its admonition, even if his body language betrayed his impatience. “You know as well as I do that Sean makes his own decisions.”

“Of course,” I agreed quickly, before Sean could jump in, “but nevertheless, this was—and should have remained—a family matter.”

“‘Family matter’—is that so?” Parker echoed sharply. “You make it sound like some kind of sick tradition. Does your father always take you along when he goes visiting cheap hookers?’Cause that’s just plain wrong.”

He waited to see if I had anything better to offer him. I did not. A few days ago I would have laughed at the idea of my father even looking at another woman, never mind paying her for sex. Now it was like dealing with a total stranger who’d somehow taken up residence behind his tight-lipped face.

“Or maybe he doesn’t have time.” Without taking his eyes off the pair of us, Parker reached out his hand and Bill hurried to smartly slap a folded newspaper into it, precise as a theater nurse handing over a pair of forceps. “Seeing as how he’s so busy with his alcoholism and his euthanasia.” With a contemptuous flick of his wrist, Parker sent the newspaper skidding across the tabletop towards us, adding grimly, “And there’re one or two things here about you that weren’t on your resume, that’s for sure.”

I reached out and stopped the paper sliding before it slipped over the edge onto the Italian tile, then unfolded it and scanned the story.

Somebody had been raking through the muck of my past history with a pretty fine mesh. They seemed to have caught just about all the most pungent bits of it, at any rate. My father’s current fall from grace was recapped with salacious glee, and my own alongside it. They built me up first—my army commendations, marksman certificates, trophies, Special Forces selection and high hopes—all the better to knock me down again. Laid out in the most lurid terms was the story of the vicious attack by four of my fellow trainees, the revelation of my affair with Sean, my ignominious expulsion.

Journalistically speaking, they picked over the carcass of my career and whooped as they waved the bones in the air. In their eyes, their words, I was damaged goods. They hinted in their snide way that either I had been brutalized out of my humanity, or that I was simply a product of my upbringing. And then they started in on my father again.

Sickened, I let the paper drop back down onto the surface of the table and glanced up. I could tell from the angle of his head that Sean had been reading it, too, and I knew Bill must have done so before he’d brought the paper through to Parker. I felt the heat steal up into my face.

Sean knew what had happened to me that freezing winter night, but only secondhand and at a distance. He’d been posted a few weeks before and it wasn’t until we’d met again, by chance, several years after the event that the truth had come out. And then he’d reacted both with anger and sorrow that had chilled me to the bone.

Now, he regarded Parker with a deadly gaze. “Do you think any less of Charlie because of what she went through?” he asked softly.

Parker shifted in his seat. “Hey, like I said, I’m not the issue here. But it looks like you and your dad are making headlines,” he said, focusing back on me. “This business he’s mixed up in with this dead doctor in New England is a hot story, and this just poured a truckload of gasoline right onto the flames. Nearly all the tabloids led with it.”

I winced. Sensing I was about to launch into another—longer and more profuse—apology, Sean cut in again.

“How bad’s the damage?”

“Bad enough,” Parker said flatly. He rubbed a hand across his eyes, slowly, pausing to squeeze the bridge of his nose before allowing the hand to drop away.

Bill’s face had darkened. “Besides all the questions about Fox’s colorful past,” he said, “we’ve been fielding accusations all day that we, as an agency, condone illegal activity by our clients and turn a blind eye to whatever they do while they’re under our protection.” He spoke without inflection, but the words were more than enough on their own.

Parker let out a breath, wry. “I think our legal bills this week will be enough to put both my lawyer’s kids through college.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, narrowly resisting the urge to hang my head. “Easy for me to say, Parker, I know, but I am. If I hadn’t believed my father was in genuine danger, I never would have gone in there in the first place.”

“Hell, I know that, Charlie,” he said. That weary smile again. His disappointment was harder to take than his anger would have been. “I knew when I hired you—both of you—that you were not the type to walk away from a situation, and I wouldn’t ask you to. I’m just having a real bad day.”

Something in his tone alerted me and I was aware of a plummeting sensation in the pit of my stomach, like an express lift or the first long drop of a roller-coaster ride. And I knew.

“The banking people pulled out,” Sean said suddenly, as though he’d been plugged straight into my central nervous system, too. It was not a question and I saw from both Parker’s and Bill’s faces that it didn’t need to be.

Parker opened his mouth, frowning, then shut it again and shook his head a little.

“I had a call this morning,” he admitted, “from the personal assistant to the personal assistant to the CEO—not the guy himself—informing me that they were reconsidering their options. Which is doublespeak for ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ I guess.”

“I’m—” I began.

“—sorry. Yeah, I know,” he finished for me. “Question is, what do we do about it?”

“Well, can’t you re-present to the bank?” I said. “Won’t they let you explain the circumstances behind what happened and—”

“Do you want us to go?” Sean cut in, chopping me off in mid-breath as well as mid-sentence. “If it would cause you the least embarrassment to be seen to take decisive action, I won’t hold you to the agreement we have.” He paused, impassive, as though this didn’t mean everything to him when I knew plainly that it did. I knew what it was costing to keep his voice so coolly polite, indifferent, and—from Parker’s sudden immobility—he did, too.

For a moment neither man spoke. Bill twitched, as though desperate to put it to a vote and I knew which way he’d go. The silence stretched, gossamer thin in the over-dry, purified and conditioned air.

“For God’s sake,” Parker said at last, “will you take that damned stick out of your ass long enough to sit down? Both of you,” he added. “No, I don’t want you to go, okay? If you hadn’t been on board, Sean, we wouldn’t have stood a chance with the bank in the first place. This dies down fast, maybe they’ll come around. And if not, fuck’em. There’ll be other clients.” He gave a rueful little smile. “But not if we don’t figure this out—pronto.”

Parker rarely used bad language and, when he did, he sounded uncomfortable, as though it was something he felt was required of him rather than coming from the gut. There was more than a hint of bravado there, too. I knew what he’d put into trying to secure this contract and losing it would cost more than money. It was a question of face. In this game, reputation was everything.

I thought of the months of hard work, of the investment that had just been laid to waste and I wondered, had the positions been reversed, if I would have been so gracious. Probably not, I realized with a certain sense of shame. After all, my father had screwed up big-time as well, and look how I’d reacted to him … .

Without speaking, both Sean and I reached for the nearest chairs, slumping into them. As soon as I relaxed, my leg started muttering about being overworked and underpaid. Below the level of the tabletop, I surreptitiously jammed my thumb and forefinger hard into the muscle along the front of my thigh in an effort to persuade the nerves to gate.

Parker glanced at the pair of us, almost defiant, the hint of a smile lurking at the edge of his mouth. “So, Charlie, question is, what do we do about the situation with your dad?”

Across from us, Bill made a sound, like he was clearing his throat, but it could have been a growl. It was pretty clear that his choice of immediate action would have been to have both of us flayed alive and thrown off the roof of the building.

“‘We’?” I queried.

“I need this situation contained, and I need it contained fast,” Parker said. “I thought your dad was a well-respected guy. When we hired you, our searches on your family”—and he smiled slightly in apology “—came up clean. What the hell happened over the last six months?”

“I’m as amazed by his behavior as anyone else,” I said. “I dread to think how my mother’s going to react when …”

My voice trailed off slowly before I could finish. I felt three pairs of eyes swivel in my direction but I didn’t see them. My sight had turned inwards, riffling through the disordered filing cabinet of memories and senses.

“If you feel anything for your mother, Charlotte,” my father had said, “then just leave me here and go before it’s too late.”

“Oh my God,” I murmured. “My mother …”

“Do you think your mom even knows what’s happening?” Parker asked, not quite catching it. “If she doesn’t, then I don’t envy you the task of telling her what her husband’s been up to.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s trying to protect her.”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Bill said, unable to maintain his silence any longer. He threw up his one remaining hand in frustration and I saw his other shoulder hunch as the ghost of his amputated arm tried to join the party. “Okay, so this guy got caught with his pants down, but, hey, that’s okay because he’s ‘trying to protect her.’” The sarcasm overflowed to the point where it dripped. “How the hell do you figure that?”

“No matter what I, personally, might think of my father,” I said, pinning him with a fierce gaze, “I happen to know he’s a brilliant surgeon. And you know what makes him so bloody good at his job? It’s because he’s put whatever classifies as his heart and his soul into what he does for more than thirty years. I find it very hard—no, make that impossible—to believe he’d just throw all that away for the chance of a cut-price lay.”

“People change,” Parker pointed out. “They have … breakdowns, crises, or they simply burn out. Ever considered that?”

It was Sean who shook his head. “To burn out professionally you have to have some kind of emotional overinvestment in your work, and Richard Foxcroft’s a very cold fish,” he said. “But I would say that he does care about his wife—very much so.” He glanced sideways at me. “And his daughter.”

I gave a bitter, incredulous bark of laughter. “Well, he’s got a bloody funny way of showing it.”

“You didn’t see how he was, Charlie,” he said softly. “Back in February, when you were shot. He might have a bloody funny way of showing it, but he cares all right. I never thought I’d hear myself standing up for the bloke, considering he hates my guts, but don’t kid yourself that he doesn’t care about you.”

“So much so that he tells me I’m a useless cripple,” I shot back, disregarding our current audience, feeling my lip begin to curl. “Yeah, right, how stupid of me! How could I possibly have mistaken that for anything except paternal affection? And then we find him about to screw an underage prostitute. What are you saying—that perhaps my mother bought it for him as a wedding anniversary present?”

“Guys, guys,” Parker murmured, eyes flitting from one to the other. “Uh, can we get back to the matter at hand here?”

“This is the matter at hand,” Sean said, and his face was as cold as his tone now and his eyes were very dark, as close to black as anyone I’ve ever met. All I could see in them was my own reflection and, from what I could read of it, I was flustered and angry and defensive. It wasn’t a good look for me.

“The whole reason you went to see your father yesterday morning, Charlie, was because you knew he’d lied to you the day before,” Sean said patiently, spelling it out. “But his behavior goes against everything you know of the man. Why are you so quick to believe the worst of him?”

The silence that followed his question lasted only around four seconds, but it passed like a slow decade.

“Maybe,” I said, low, “it’s because he’s always been so quick to believe the worst of me.”

“O-kay,” Parker said, more of a drawl. “But if we disregard the possibility—for the moment, anyhow—that he’s gone totally off the rails, what makes you think this would have anything to do with your mother?”

“Because, despite Bill’s skepticism, he’s always done everything he can to shelter her—from unpleasantness, from bad news, from blame. From life, come to that.”

Parker frowned at the bitterness evident in my voice. “So, let me get this straight,” he said. “He’s confessed that he’s a drunk and a liar. And now, from what you’ve said, he couldn’t wait to get himself caught with a hooker. How is that protecting his wife?”

“It could only be,” Sean murmured, “because he was afraid of something worse.”

I snapped back into the here and now. “I need a phone,” I said, aware of the hollowness in my voice.

Parker stared at me for a moment longer, then nodded to Bill, who sighed heavily but kept his continuing disgust to himself. He plugged a handset into the conference-call system that was a permanent fixture in the center of the table. It was clear from the way he practically threw the handset at me that he didn’t think much of Parker humoring us like this.

I checked my watch and ran through the mental calculations. New York was five hours behind the UK. It was a little before one in the afternoon here, which meant it was nearly six in the evening back home.

I dialed the number. As I listened to the line play out at the other end, I realized, on how few occasions I’d bothered to phone home.

Sean leaned across and punched the button for the speaker. When I glanced at him, he merely said, “This I have to hear.”

It took my mother a long time to answer. When she finally did, she gave her usual telephone greeting sounding strained to breaking point, as though under some unbearable pressure.

No change from normal there, then.

“Hello, Mother,” I said. “It’s me.”

There was a long pause. Sean’s eyes flicked to mine and I saw his eyebrow quirk. It shouldn’t have been a trick question.

“Darling … how lovely to hear from you,” she said at last, with that false brightness she always employed when speaking to her only daughter. “How are you? How’s your poor leg coming along?”

The second bullet I’d taken had hit my back high up around my shoulder blade and had ended up planted somewhere in my right lung, which had then collapsed. My heart, so they’d told me, had temporarily stopped at the scene but I don’t remember too much about that.

During the early stages of my recovery I’d had mobility problems with my right arm and hand. At the time, it had seemed that the through-and-through wound to my leg was minor by comparison, but it had proved to have longer-lasting effects, and now that was the part everyone focused on. My mother was no exception.

“The leg’s fine,” I said, which was mostly true. “I’m fine.” I suppose that was mostly true, also.

“Oh. Good,” she said. Another pause before a splintered little laugh. “Was there anything in particular you wanted, darling, only I’m rather in the middle of something right now. It’s the church fête next week and I’m making a batch of treacle tarts.”

I could picture her, a blur of high-tension activity, in the tall kitchen of their Georgian house in the expensive part of Cheshire. She’d cajoled and bullied and eventually worn down my father into having a Smallbone of Devizes custom kitchen installed about ten years previously. I’d been in my teens but I could still remember the chaos and excitement of the transformation from 1950s ugliness to an expanse of blue pearl granite worktops and limed-oak cabinets under an array of halogen spots.

She ruled her sparkling domain like the most temperamental celebrity chef, creating wonderful dishes that seemed to drive her so close to the brink of nervous exhaustion to produce, it took away the pleasure of actually eating them.

“Speaking of tarts,” I said bluntly, ignoring the sudden consternation on Parker’s face, “have you heard from my father today?”

“Your father?” my mother said vaguely, as if we were discussing a casual acquaintance. “I don’t believe so, darling. He’s, um, away at the moment.”

I suppressed a sigh. Up until her retirement the previous year, my mother had been a local magistrate and, contrary to popular satire, she was far from the bumbling picture of the rural judiciary that was so often portrayed. Hard to believe now that she’d once been praised and feared for her incisive mind.

“Oh, yes?” I said. “Run away with a younger woman?”

“Well, really,” my mother said, but there was more stiffness than heat. “He’s attending a medical conference. You know how often he’s called upon to lecture these days.” She paused again, uncomfortable, but she’d always been a bad liar. “I—I spoke to him only yesterday. He sends his love.”

I heard a slight sound in the background at her end of the line and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had visitors.”

“W—what? Oh, no—just the radio, darling. I was going to listen to the six o’clock news when you rang. Anyway, I must go. Things are starting to burn.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said.

“No, don’t do that,” my mother said quickly. “I have people coming round for dinner and I shall need all day to prepare. I don’t expect you remember the Hetheringtons, do you?”

“Yes … yes, I do,” I said, and allowed my voice to take on a slightly disappointed tone. “Well, in that case, Mother, I’d best leave you to it.”

“Yes, all right,” my mother said faintly, her relief at my imminent departure evident. “Thank you for taking the trouble to call, Charlie. We don’t see enough of you these days, you know.”

“I know,” I said, and ended the call. I stared for a moment at the surface of the table as though the future would eventually present itself in the pattern of the grain.

“Wow, she sounds like one tense lady,” Parker said.

“I wouldn’t read too much into that,” Sean said. “She always sounds on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”

I looked up. “She’s in trouble.”

Bill grunted. “How’d you work that one out from a conversation about baking?”

I turned to eye him coldly. “Because there’s no way my mother would be making tarts a week before they were needed. She’s a perfectionist, and they’d be stale.”

Bill’s grunt became a snort. He rammed his chair back and got to his feet as if he could no longer bring himself to sit through such crap. I let him take half a dozen paces.

“Quite apart from the fact that my father has never sent me his love in twenty-seven years, she called me Charlie,” I said quietly. “She never does—absolutely hates it. They both do. I was always Charlotte at home, right up until I joined the army. She told me once that nothing reminds her of me as a soldier quite like hearing that name.”

“So you think she might be trying to make some reference to your military career? Then the comment about not seeing enough of you,” Parker said. He never took notes and his recall was practically recording quality. “You think it might indicate she needs that kind of help?”

“Maybe.” I shrugged. “But the real clincher was the fact she mentioned the Hetheringtons,” I said. Bill had stopped and turned back almost in spite of himself. “No way are the Hetheringtons going for dinner at my mother’s tomorrow night.”

“Right,” Bill said. “Another cryptic clue?”

“Well, they certainly wouldn’t be able to eat much,” I said coldly. “Seeing as they’ve both been dead for five years.” I looked from Bill to Parker to Sean. “They lived not far from my parents for years. Nice people. They were shot and killed by intruders who broke into the villa where they were staying on holiday in Turkey.”

“So that wasn’t the radio in the background,” Parker said grimly.

I shook my head. “She never has the radio on when she’s cooking—too distracting,” I said. “There are people in the house with her, right now. And I can only imagine what they’ve threatened to do to her, but it’s made my father prepared to ruin himself to prevent it.”