Fourth Day

by Zoe Sharp

  ‘Does it matter?’ Sean asked, the last vestiges of his Lancashire accent flattening his vowels. ‘Either way, he’s going to be bloody difficult to extract.’

  ‘Of course it does. Whereas one is unfortunate, the other means they know we’re coming for him, in which case—’

  ‘Two Bravos,’ he interrupted as movement flared in my peripheral vision. ‘Inbound. North-east corner. Rifles.’

  Still keeping it slow and smooth, I eased the glasses across. Two men had stepped into view between the buildings. One was tall, with skin so black it had a tinge of blue. He was built like an American football player, that impression emphasised by the way he carried himself. The other man was smaller, lighter skinned, with overtones of several races in his Eurasian features, combining to give him a certain regal air. From the way they interacted, the Eurasian was in charge, and it wasn’t just the way they were dressed that set them apart from the other occupants of the compound.

  Both men wore desert pattern camouflage, like you’d buy from any outdoorsman store or military surplus supplier for a weekend’s hunting. But the long guns in their hands were not shouldered on their webbing straps, the way returning hunters would carry them, but cradled ready, like a patrol.

  ‘M16s,’ I said, and moved up to focus on their faces. ‘When the hell did Bane bring in armed guards? Can you get a shot of them?’

  Sean already had the viewfinder to his eye, adjusting to compensate for the falling light. The shutter release was set on continuous. It whipped quietly through a rapid series of shots as the men advanced. If they were on any databases, we would ID them.

  I panned back and found we weren’t the only ones following the progress of the pair. Witney had stopped all pretence at instruction, hands resting limply on his thighs as he watched them pass. In contrast, his spine was tense enough to crack. I felt rather than saw him start to sweat.

  The group of children still concentrated on their teacher as the two men walked by. The Eurasian man raised a hand from the stock of his gun in what might have been no more than a friendly wave, a casual salute. Or might not. Witney nodded in jerky reply.

  A couple of his pupils also cheerfully returned the wave. The sight of men with unshouldered weapons was obviously so common a sight to the children in this place that it didn’t even warrant a second glance from the others.

  That alone was enough to chill me to the bone.

  I reacquired the girl with the baby. Like Witney, she too had faltered, her gait more uncertain now. Her unease communicated itself to the child who stiffened in her arms and began to struggle. There was a long pause, then a thin high wail reached us.

  The two men with the guns halted, both turned almost blindly towards the sound. The big guy took a step in her direction. The girl whirled, hunching over the child as if to hide or protect it, and scurried towards the building from which she’d emerged, with the little figure clutched tightly in her arms. I watched her until she was all the way out of sight, feeling the wrench of isolation as the closing door cut off the child’s screeching cries.

  ‘What?’

  I glanced across, found Sean watching me with darkened, piercing eyes. I could read nothing in his face.

  ‘There was a possible threat to the woman and the child,’ I said, aware of a sudden tension in my shoulders. Aware, too, that it was a thin excuse.

  ‘Maybe those two just don’t like the noise,’ Sean said, choosing not to call me on it. ‘Can’t say I blame them for that – it goes right through you.’

  I hid the flinch, said quickly, ‘It’s designed to get your attention, otherwise we’d have all died out by now. I just didn’t like the way they looked at her.’

  ‘We’re not here to save them all, Charlie,’ he said, flat. ‘Don’t let yourself get sidetracked. Our focus is on Witney. One at a time, OK?’

  I didn’t respond. We watched in silence as the impromptu class came to an end and Witney led the dozen or so children inside in what seemed unnaturally ordered pairs. Every other class group of kids I’d seen was more like a controlled explosion. I opened my mouth to comment, if only to try and ease the pressure shimmering between us, when the cellphone in my breast pocket began to vibrate. It was all I could do not to gasp at the sudden buzzing against my ribs. I reached up and tapped the receive button on my wireless earpiece.

  ‘Fox.’

  ‘Charlie – sit rep?’ The voice didn’t need to identify itself for me to recognise the cultured New York tones of Parker Armstrong. Sean’s senior partner. My boss.

  ‘It’s quiet,’ I murmured. ‘We’ve had eyes on the target all day – and much good it’s done us. He hasn’t left the compound and he’s never alone. Looks like Fourth Day have got themselves some additional security.’

  ‘He’s under guard?’ Parker asked, terse.

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said dryly. ‘If we’re really unlucky it could be more in the nature of a human shield. Oh, and someone needs to update the guy’s file. Just how old is the picture you showed us?’

  There was a pause, an uncharacteristic hesitation, unusual enough for me to pick up on it. ‘Five or six years,’ he said at last, and there was a trace of reluctance in his voice, hardening as he added, ‘It’s what we had available, Charlie.’

  Safely unseen, I let my eyebrows climb. Sean caught the gesture and fired me a warning glance of his own.

  ‘O…K,’ I said, knowing this was not the time to pursue the cons of outdated intel. ‘How long do you want us to sit out here and wait for a slip-up in the security arrangements?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Parker said dryly. ‘Pull out for now. The rest of the team should be landing shortly. I’ll bring everyone up to speed as soon as you get back.’

  He cut the connection without wasting time on goodbyes, which was indicative of urgency, I judged. Parker was nothing if not unfailingly polite.

  I glanced to Sean. ‘Right, we’re out of here,’ I said. His only reply was a raised eyebrow of his own. ‘Parker’s promised a briefing.’

  ‘About time,’ Sean muttered, taking his weight on his elbows and beginning to inch himself backwards out of our makeshift hide.

  Even without the binoculars trained directly on the compound, I caught the flash of colour below us and we both froze, ignoring the natural reflex to duck back into cover.

  The girl we’d seen with the distressed infant came bursting out of the doorway from the main building, arms windmilling, as though she’d just jerked herself to freedom. Of the child, there was no sign.

  She hit the ground running, clenched fists pumping up to full speed, heading straight for our position. Unless she jinked, in less than four hundred metres she’d literally trip right over us.

  The reason for her flight was only a couple of seconds behind her. The pair we’d seen with the M16s barged out of the doorway and started in pursuit. No longer armed, the two men were no less menacing empty-handed. And they didn’t waste their breath shouting. They knew she wasn’t going to stop unless they forced her to.

  My hand snaked behind me to the SIG P228 that lay concealed in the small of my back, made sure it would glide out of the Kramer inside-the-waistband clip. ‘Sean—’

  ‘Hold your position,’ he cut in through clenched teeth. And just in case that didn’t dissuade me, he reached over and grasped my arm at the wrist. I tensed under his grip, felt the iron resistance.

  This time of year, sunset was around five and the light was dropping fast now, grainy in its descent, smearing the contours of the terrain into deception. Two hundred and fifty metres from us, the girl misjudged her step and went sprawling. A proper face-plant in the dirt. She lay winded for maybe a second, then she was scrabbling onto hands and knees. Small whimpered sounds of fright escaped her as her pursuers gained and pounced. The Eurasian guy, lighter and faster, grabbed her shoulder. The big black guy latched onto her outstretched arm, yanked her upwards.

  Automatically, all the right defensive manoeuvres unveiled behind my eyes, a rapidly expan
ding blur of sound and motion, as if someone had fired up an instant wireless link between us, so that I was right there, inside her head, inside her body.

  Physically, we couldn’t have been more different. Where she was dark, I was fair. Where she was skin and bone, I’d worked hard to acquire muscle without bulk. There was maybe five or six years between us, but it seemed like a generation in terms of mindset and experience. She had already given in, but I had sworn a long time ago that I would never again submit.

  So in my mind’s eye I watched my own ghosted image swarm over her and take command.

  An elbow into the long thigh muscle of the one who’s grabbed my shoulder, dead-legging him. A clenched backfist up into his groin and he falls away. His partner’s thinking capture, not containment. The big guy’s trying to pull me to my feet. So I let him drag me up, swing me round, ignoring the hold he’s got on my arm. He’s not got a decent lock on yet. Big mistake.

  The instant I’m up far enough to use my feet, I do so, exploiting his own grip for added momentum. A swift, hard, downward stamp to the outside of the knee, hearing the graunch and splinter as the joint collapses.

  I shake him loose, and then I’m off and running again. Free, and filled with a fierce, raging pride…

  My vision cleared, heart rate slowing. Two hundred and fifty metres away, the girl was still on her knees in the dirt. The men still had her by the arm and shoulder and she’d drooped under the burden of capture. She was weeping, great wracking sobs of wrath and heartbreak. Briefly, I considered another challenge to Sean’s restraining hand again but, with a last squeeze, he let go, withdrew.

  I turned my head, found him watching me intently. And suddenly that cool gaze angered me. Not just his confidence that I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise our purpose here, but because he was right. If I wasn’t professional enough to ignore such distractions, then what was I?

  But there were questions here. What was Thomas Witney’s connection to the girl, I wondered? Were the guards there to keep people out, or keep people in? And what were they afraid of?

  Sean’s eyes flicked back to the girl, and her captors. They had her on her feet now, were leading her towards the building she’d so nearly escaped, one on either side. Her keening had reached a pitch where she was almost incoherent with it, losing coordination along with whatever burst of energy had fuelled her failed attempt. They were forced to support her, keep her upright as she stumbled along, pliant, between them.

  Just as the three of them reached the doorway, it opened and a new figure stepped out. Sean had the camera to his eye and I heard him suck in a sharp breath as he recognised the newcomer. It was hard not to.

  Parker had shown us pictures of Randall Bane, but they were poor-quality images, snatched perhaps from a moving car, through glass, on the fly. They’d showed a man with a high-domed head, close shaven in the style that his follower, Thomas Witney, seemed to have taken to heart.

  But by contrast, the man behind Fourth Day was tall, well over six feet, and fast approaching fifty. The covert photograph had been taken as he walked along a city street with a long stride that flapped the skirts of a well-cut overcoat around his legs. He had been surrounded by people but somehow elevated above them. Command radiated from him like a Roman general.

  If I’d been staring at him through the scope of a sniper’s rifle, I wouldn’t have needed to see his badge of rank to know he was a high-priority kill.

  Now, Bane folded his arms almost delicately and waited for the girl to be brought before him. The men let go of her when they were only a couple of metres away. Without their support she dropped straight to her knees, shoulders bowed so the vertebrae of her spine formed a peak at the back of her neck, utterly subjugated.

  A cold fear pooled in my belly. I’d seen this pose before, in South America, and the Balkans, and the parts of Africa they don’t mention on the wildlife documentaries. When he reached towards her, it took a blinded moment for my mind to recognise that his hands were empty.

  Instead of the execution I’d been half-expecting, Bane touched the top of her head, so lightly it was almost a caress. She lifted her face very slowly, fearful, and then through the magnification of the glasses I saw wonder there, as if she, too, had been expecting a bullet. He said something, only a few words, and let his fingers skim the side of her cheek with a softness that made me shiver.

  He spoke again, receiving a downcast nod in reply, then held out his hand to her and there was something vaguely sensual about the gesture.

  After the briefest irresolution, the girl put her hand in his, allowed him to help her to her feet, slide his arm around her shoulders. The four of them went back inside the building. The door closed behind them with a faint rattle that was barely audible at our current distance, amid the clicking of the insects all around us, and the rustle of a sudden winding breeze.

  Beside me, I heard Sean hiss out a long breath. When I looked back across, it was to see a muscle jumping in the side of his jaw. His head turned slowly to meet my eyes and I put words to what was going through both our minds.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I muttered. ‘Just who the hell are these people?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was a question I repeated later, after Sean and I had hiked out of Fourth Day’s land on the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains, retrieved our rented 4x4 from a rest area, and gone hand to hand with traffic on Interstate 210 that crawls across the northern edge of the city of Los Angeles. Two hours later, we were back in Calabasas, where Parker Armstrong had set up his temporary base of operations.

  Calabasas nestled into the hills of Santa Monica just above Malibu, and Parker had arranged use of an eight-bedroom mansion, part of an upmarket gated community on the outskirts, not being one to slum it if he didn’t have to.

  Although it boasted magnificent views and undoubted seclusion, the house had been built into what seemed like the side of a cliff, which struck me as a precarious location considering California’s uncertain geology. Nobody else seemed overly concerned that we might be woken suddenly in the middle of the night to find ourselves at the bottom of the nearby canyon.

  ‘Fourth Day was formed back in the Fifties,’ Parker said now. ‘Nobody’s quite sure of their original doctrine except it’s a fairly black-and-white interpretation of good and evil. Hence the name.’ His voice took on that of a preacher from his pulpit. ‘“And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night… And to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness… And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.” Book of Genesis.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist. Read into it what you will.’

  ‘When do you get to the bit about scaring young girls half to death?’ I murmured.

  Parker frowned. ‘Well, they managed to convince some wealthy donors to bankroll them, claimed some success with delinquency and drug addiction. For a time they kept pretty much to themselves, stayed below the radar, but by the mid Eighties things had moved in a more extreme direction.’

  ‘How extreme?’

  Parker glanced at me for a second, as if gauging how much I needed to know. Unusual, because as a rule there was little hesitation about him. Tall enough to appear deceptively slim, Parker hid a wiry frame beneath well-tailored dark suits, and a calculating brain behind an often bland expression. A native New Yorker, he was good-looking without being outright handsome, seeming able to subtly alter his looks, his voice, even his age, almost at will. He’d greyed prematurely, which I’d learnt was a family trait, but his gaze had aged faster still, cool and watchful. He and Sean were very much alike in that respect.

  ‘There were rumours of rape and incest among the followers, use of hallucinogenic drugs, widespread abuse.’ He smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes. ‘You name it, these people made an art of it.’

  I thought again of the girl’s fright, and her despair. ‘How come these damn cults never advocate abstinence
, chastity, and not marrying your own prepubescent granddaughter?’ I said, wry more than bitter. ‘And why didn’t someone shut them down?’

  ‘Various people tried – relatives, mainly,’ Parker said, and I heard a flinty echo in his voice. ‘But nobody could prove any of it, and Fourth Day’s lawyers made ’em wish they’d left well alone.’

  ‘So that was it?’ I demanded roughly. ‘They were just allowed to do whatever they liked, so long as it was behind closed doors?’

  ‘Eventually, they couldn’t keep a lid on it. A group of former members got together and threatened legal action about eight years ago. Fourth Day settled, but it finished them.’

  ‘That’s not what we’ve been seeing,’ Sean said, pouring coffee from the filter machine on the credenza. Good coffee was Parker’s vice and his virtue. This particular grind was full and rich and dark, the smell of it alone reminding me of New York pavement cafés in the summer with the beat of traffic echoing against the high stone and steel and glass. Sean handed me a cup and sat on the arm of my chair with his own, close but not quite touching.

  Compared to Parker, Sean was wider, heavier, more overtly aggressive in his make-up. Time in the corporate world had given considerable polish to his working-class origins in a small northern English town, but there was still no mistaking what lay beneath the surface gloss.

  We were using the Great Room as the nerve centre. It had an eighteen-foot ceiling and one wall made entirely of glass, which looked out over the lap pool and the far distant hillside of similar, exclusive and excluding homes. Parker had hit the switch for the massive full-length curtains as soon as we’d arrived, and they hadn’t been opened since. We were not here to enjoy the view.

  One end of the room was dominated by a huge fireplace that had apparently been lifted wholesale from a French chateau. A motorised home movie screen was dropped down in front of the chimney breast. There was a laptop hooked into the projector, into which we’d downloaded the pictures taken during the course of our surveillance.