Fourth Day

by Zoe Sharp

  ‘What? That Witney tried to land one on me?’

  ‘No, that he scored a direct hit with that crack about parental responsibilities.’ He paused, added with a gentleness that almost undid me, ‘If it was me, I’d want to know.’

  Would you?

  My breath hissed out. ‘I’ve never planned to keep anything from Sean,’ I said. ‘I’ve just been searching for the right moment.’ It sounded lame when I said it. But the right moment never came. And by the time I realised that, it was much too late.

  ‘Search harder,’ Parker said, grim. ‘If the hospital hadn’t called me, I wouldn’t know either, would I?’

  No, you probably wouldn’t. ‘Did you tell Bill Rendelson?’ I asked, remembering that bitter glare.

  ‘I didn’t have to,’ Parker pointed out in a steady voice. ‘All agency paperwork comes across Bill’s desk – including medical expenses.’

  Damn. And how long can he be relied upon to keep that little titbit to himself?

  ‘All right,’ I said, defeated. ‘As soon as we’re done here, I’ll find a way to tell Sean.’

  ‘If you feel that’s best,’ Parker said. Was I being over-touchy to read such scepticism into such a short response?

  I took my eyes off the road for just long enough to throw my boss a cynical glance. ‘How long do you think he’d keep his mind on the job, Parker,’ I said tightly, ‘if I dropped something like that on him now?’

  ‘Sean’s a professional,’ Parker said, confident, reaching for his sunglasses, sliding them back on. ‘He wouldn’t let it affect him.’

  Yeah. But there was a hollow ache somewhere high under my ribcage that I recognised as anxiety. Maybe that’s just what I’m afraid of most.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Our destination was a part-completed parking structure on the outskirts of Santa Clarita. On that much, at least, Parker had briefed us before we left Calabasas. There, we would hand Witney over into the care of our mysterious client, saddle up and head back to New York.

  I wasn’t sorry to be going home.

  It still struck me as odd to think of Manhattan that way. The time I’d spent teaching self-defence classes to women in a run-down seaside town on the north-west coast of England seemed a lifetime ago. Several lifetimes, if you wanted to look at it that way. And not many of them happy ones.

  But there was something about New York that sang to me. The colour and the noise, the friendly profanity, the chance to slip unnoticed as a sharp blade through the crowd.

  On the surface, Los Angeles seemed too shiny by comparison, too evenly tanned, its teeth too straight and too white. It was a city altogether too prone to admiring its own reflection in designer store windows as it cruised the main drag, and wouldn’t admit to anything rotten at its core.

  ‘Boss?’ came Erik Landers’s voice over the radio from the lead vehicle. ‘This is it?’ There was enough doubt in his voice to make it a question.

  ‘Affirmative,’ Parker said, terse, into the mic. ‘Top floor. Stay alert, people.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ I murmured, looking at the sagging security fencing, the weeds forcing up through the cracked concrete. ‘I hope you took payment upfront on this one, Parker.’

  ‘Trust me, the last thing this particular client is going to do is try to double-cross us, Charlie,’ Parker said. ‘He just likes to keep things kinda covert, that’s all.’ But when I glanced across I found him craning forwards to check out the high angles and knew, despite his reassuring words, he didn’t like the set-up any more than I did.

  So, why agree to it?

  The three Chevys clambered slowly over the uneven ground, soft suspension wallowing through the iron-hard ruts. According to Parker’s intel, the parking structure was part of an overambitious retail development project that had stalled into a morass of legal wrangling. Meanwhile, the concrete blanched and crumbled as nature did its concentrated best to reclaim what had been taken.

  The mesh gate blocking the entrance to the structure now stood drunkenly open, the chain that had once secured it cut through with neat precision, dangling from the pulled-back hasp with the redundant padlock still attached.

  We climbed steadily up the darkened series of ramps towards the roof, the Chevys thumping over badly fitted expansion strips, their tyres protesting each tight upward corner until at last we broke through into sunlight again.

  The roof was a wide, flat area of rippled concrete, mapped by tar lines and scattered with the abandoned debris of slipshod management.

  You could certainly see plenty from up here, from the distant rush of building traffic on I-5, to the distinctive beige and orange livery of a Southwest Airlines 737 lifting off out of the grandly overtitled Bob Hope International Airport in Burbank. I didn’t have the time or the inclination to admire the view.

  Three vehicles were already in position on the otherwise deserted rooftop. Two more blacked-out Chevy Suburbans that had probably come from the same custom workshop as our own, and a dusty old mid-Eighties’ Ford Econoline panel van. The van, as much rust as paint, looked perfectly at home in its current surroundings, which was, no doubt, why it had been chosen.

  We pulled up with a decent distance between us in which to dance. Immediately, the front passenger door of one of the opposing Suburbans opened and a lone figure got out. He was tall, made taller by a ramrod-straight back and parade-ground stride. His grey hair still Marine Corps-clipped, silver moustache the same. He, too, was wearing dark glasses against the bleached-out glare, and for once I was glad of the barrier. I knew from experience there was nothing to be gleaned from this man’s stone-cold gaze.

  ‘Epps?’ I said, almost a whisper. I turned, staring. ‘We’ve been working for Epps?’

  Parker gave a single staccato nod, bit out, ‘We still are.’

  I’d never been sure exactly what position within the US government security services was held by Conrad Epps. I doubt there were many who could offer a comprehensive job description, and fewer still who wanted to know.

  But when my father had got himself into a mess on this side of the Atlantic the previous autumn, Epps was the one who made it all go away. I had no illusions that Epps had acted for any reasons remotely related to altruism or sentimentality, because I was pretty convinced he was a man devoid of either quality. If it hadn’t coincided with his interests to help us, then nothing I could have said or done would have made him lift a finger.

  And now, if the stiff distaste on Parker’s face was anything to go by, he’d called in the marker for that happy quirk of fate.

  Epps’s team climbed out of their vehicles and assembled like a well-drilled display behind him. Four men with regulation shaded eyewear and regulation haircuts, wearing long, dark raincoats despite the cloudless sky. Two more got out of the old Econoline, more casually dressed, but clearly Epps had bought these men from the same factory store as the others. There were no firearms on show, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close.

  I heard Parker let out a quiet breath, saw his knuckles flex, then he slid the MP5K into the footwell and opened his own door. As he stepped down empty-handed onto the baked concrete, he was nothing but calm. The rest of us followed suit. Sean got out of the centre Chevy and held the rear door ajar for Witney, so Epps got his first look at the object of this cloak-and-dagger exercise.

  Epps stilled for a moment, removed his sunglasses as if making sure, then nodded.

  ‘Mr Armstrong,’ he greeted, raising that deep voice just loud enough to carry. ‘Good job.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Epps,’ Parker returned gravely. ‘I trust this wipes the slate clean between us.’

  ‘That would be a reasonable assumption on your part,’ Epps said, which was neither confirmation nor denial. Perhaps he had learnt a long time ago never to speak in absolutes.

  I’d moved up on Parker’s left, close enough to see the way the corner of his eye narrowed slightly at the exchange. Even Epps, I considered briefly, would be a fool to push him too far.

>   Sean came forwards with Witney walking alongside him. The schoolteacher seemed older, greyer in the piercing reflected sunlight. That smooth coordination I’d noticed in him was gone, so he almost stumbled over the roughcast concrete beneath his booted feet, as though, whatever he’d been expecting, this wasn’t it. When he reached Parker and Epps, he halted.

  ‘A case of better late than never, huh?’ Witney said with that sad little upward hitch of his mouth.

  ‘Indeed it is, Mr Witney,’ Epps said. ‘I should have taken notice of you five years ago. For that, you have my apologies.’

  Witney regarded him. ‘If you had, we wouldn’t be here now,’ he said and the bitterness to his voice almost masked the desperation. ‘There was nothing to find.’

  Epps turned his head a fraction and fixed Witney with a very deliberate stare. A sudden apprehension riffled the hairs on my arms, the back of my neck.

  ‘We’ll know, soon enough,’ Epps said and, without shifting his gaze, louder over his shoulder, ‘All right. Let’s move this along.’

  The two men from the Econoline stepped in and grabbed Witney’s arms, one on either side. They were big men and he was not, and there was nothing gentle about the way they handled him.

  ‘What do you want with him?’ I demanded. ‘What’s he done?’

  Epps shifted his icy focus onto me. I refused to flinch, despite the eerie sensation that you could look right through those bottomless eyes of his, all the way down into hell. Sean and Parker closed in on either side, as though that alone would stop Epps crushing me like an annoying fly if he felt the urge.

  ‘As far as we are aware, Mr Witney is not personally responsible for any wrongdoing, but the information he is withholding is another matter,’ Epps said, his voice chillingly neutral. ‘At this time, we are taking a particular interest in the Fourth Day organisation, and we believe Mr Witney is… intimate with its command structure.’

  ‘You’re after Bane,’ Sean said. ‘Why?’

  Epps shifted his gaze. ‘I don’t believe, Mr Meyer, that I am required to explain my actions to you.’

  Witney, who’d faltered at the turn of events, now began actively to resist. The two men made what seemed to be only a fractional alteration in their stance, but their grip went from assistance to control in an instant. When the schoolteacher still twisted against them, they took him professionally to his knees and held him there long enough to zip PlastiCuffs onto his wrists behind him. It was interesting how much trouble he caused them for such a simple manoeuvre.

  Almost as one, Sean and I stepped forwards. Two of Epps’s people mirrored our actions, blocking our path. When we sidestepped, so did they. I thought of the gun on my hip, knew I’d probably be dead before I had it drawn.

  ‘Please don’t be foolish, Charlie,’ Epps said, and his unexpected use of my first name was a threat all by itself. A whole collection of them. I know you, it said. I know everything there is to know about you and the people closest to you, and I will use it – all of it – against you if I have to.

  To my onward shame, I stopped.

  The two men manhandling Witney, meanwhile, reached the Econoline, opened the rear doors and threw him inside like a side of meat. Unable to break his fall, he landed face down, the air slamming out of him.

  One of Epps’s men rolled him onto his side so his feet cleared the door and I caught a glimpse of Witney’s face. Not terrified, as I would have expected, but pale with boiling anger. The closing door cut short my view.

  The men climbed into the front seats, cranked the engine, and headed for the exit ramp leading back down into the bowels of the building. The old Econoline sounded a lot sweeter than it looked.

  I swung back to Parker, would have let rip had I not caught the hint of stress in his tight-lipped face.

  ‘You will, of course, give us twenty minutes to clear the area before you move your team out,’ Epps said to him, as though nothing of the struggle we’d just witnessed had ever happened. Officially, I don’t suppose it had. ‘We want to keep this low-key.’

  For a long moment, I thought Parker would argue. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed when, at last, he gave a short nod and let his gaze drop away.

  Epps dealt the barest glimmer of a smile, as if he knew precisely what such capitulation had cost. Knew, and didn’t care. He cast a brief dismissive eye across the rest of us, then turned his back with an almost lazy disregard. His broad shoulder blades beneath the pale raincoat made a very tempting target.

  We watched him walk away.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Sean asked the quiet question.

  ‘About Epps?’ Parker said, giving us both a tired smile. ‘Why? What difference would it have made?’

  I thought about my glib reassurances to Witney that very morning. Not a prisoner, exactly…I’d told him. Not in your best interests to leave us just yet…. Would I have used those words if I’d known what was coming?

  ‘What do you think is going to happen to him, Parker?’ I asked. ‘Do you honestly believe Epps is going to turn him loose when he’s sucked him dry?’

  Parker’s face twitched, and there was just a tinge of the same sadness that had passed through Witney. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t.’

  Sean was still glowering. Parker let out a slow breath, looked about to say more, when there was a sudden flurry amid Epps’s people.

  His team were too proud to run, but one approached him at a swift jog, finger jammed against his earpiece. ‘Sir! We have a situation.’

  I saw Epps’s purposeful stride hitch. ‘What kind of a situation?’ he demanded. ‘They can have scarcely cleared the perimeter.’

  ‘Er, that’s just it, sir,’ the man said, paling under that stony gaze. ‘They haven’t reached the perimeter. We can’t raise them.’

  And then everyone was running, and all those guns I’d sensed earlier were out and cocked and ready.

  Two of the Suburbans belonging to Epps’s team set off with a yelp of tyres, jolting down the ramp. I leapt for the driver’s seat of our own vehicle, threw the HK53 to Parker and twisted the key in the ignition.

  We followed Epps’s men downwards with caution, not wanting to get mixed up in a friendly fire scenario. I kept the big Suburban to a walking pace, giving cover. Parker was to my left, the compact assault rifle pulled hard up into his shoulder, forefinger outside the trigger guard. In the driver’s door mirror, I could see Sean with a similar weapon. Both men put their feet down carefully, softly, and their eyes were everywhere.

  We found the Econoline on the ground floor with its nose hard up against the mesh security fencing near the entrance, surrounded by Epps’s people. The engine was still running and the doors were open. The guy who’d been driving was slumped half out of his seat onto the concrete, feet tangled up with the pedals. In that position, the gaping wound to his throat had caused him to bleed out rapidly into the dusty concrete, like a sacrificial goat.

  The other man had managed to get a couple of strides from the passenger door before going down. Epps was bending over him. As we reached the scene, he rose without expression, dusting his hands.

  ‘Neck,’ he said briefly. There was nothing in his voice and even less in his eyes.

  I climbed down from the driver’s seat, walked over and glanced into the rear of the Econoline. The only thing inside the van was a single pair of discarded PlastiCuffs on the scarred metal floor.

  But Thomas Witney had vanished like he’d never existed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  At 6:45 that evening we stood by the door of a hangar at Van Nuys Airport, while the sun dropped fast behind the smoky hills towards the Pacific. I watched it bleed a trail of the palest blues and pinks, the colours absorbed by the stumpy control tower. Air traffic in and out of the airport seemed tireless and unending. In the rapid onset of dusk, the lights of the planes showed as fierce bright pinpricks against the darkening sky.

  We’d stayed in Santa Clarita only long enough to carry out a
fast but thorough search of the area surrounding the abandoned development. Plenty of time to realise that, if Witney was escaping on foot, he would have qualified as an Olympic-standard sprinter.

  He’d also somehow managed to extricate himself from a set of PlastiCuffs, which had been applied by experts, and had concealed in his simple clothing a blade sharp enough to slash a man’s throat, despite being thoroughly searched before we’d taken him out of the house in Calabasas.

  Either we were all getting very sloppy, or he’d had help. A shiver ran across my back, despite the day’s residual warmth. If our security had been breached, who knew what form Epps’s retribution would take.

  With the cold efficiency I’d come to expect of him, Epps had called in a professional clean-up crew to deal with the bodies, and an enclosed trailer to remove the Econoline to a forensics lab. Then he’d brusquely ordered us to follow him. Parker had put McGregor in charge of his own team’s continuing search, with two vehicles at their disposal. He was good, but we were not holding our breath on a result.

  Parker had also left very specific instructions for Bill Rendelson, should the rest of us fail to return within a reasonable time frame. Nice to know the boss wasn’t entirely trusting when it came to our client.

  We climbed into our remaining Suburban, Sean at the wheel and Parker alongside him, and drove south to Van Nuys in a fast-moving convoy, using the high-occupancy vehicle lanes to cut through the evening rush. Epps’s men kept us firmly boxed in all the way.

  ‘So, did Witney jump, or was he pushed?’ Sean asked eventually into the tense silence.

  ‘When I spoke to Witney this morning, he certainly seemed to think that by taking him out of Fourth Day, we’d put him in some kind of danger,’ I said. ‘He told me Bane would pay us double what we were getting to return him.’

  ‘Looks like he may have found a cheaper way.’ Sean’s reflected gaze in the rear-view mirror was filled with an angry reproach. ‘And you didn’t think to mention this before?’