Third Strike: A Charlie Fox Mystery

by Zoe Sharp

  My mother was perched on one of the high stools that were slotted into each workstation. It had been dragged out into the center of the tiled floor and she sat very upright, with her knees together and, from the awkward set of her shoulders, her hands bound behind her back.

  The man I’d christened Buzz-cut was standing to her right, which made him mine. He had a large-caliber silvered semiautomatic with the hammer back and the muzzle jammed into my mother’s ear, where it wasn’t going to come off target easily.

  As soon as we’d come in, my mother’s eyes flew to mine and stayed there. She was terrified, but I saw the relief creep into them at the sight of us—at the sight of me. The situation was hopeless, impossible, but she saw us and for some reason I didn’t think I’d ever be able to fathom, it gave her hope.

  The pickup driver was far right, splitting our field of fire. Sean’s Glock seemed to lock onto him of its own accord. The pickup driver also held a Glock. Without hesitation, he pointed it right back.

  “Looks like we have a standoff,” Sean said. “Are you prepared to die here, gentlemen?”

  “If we have to,” Buzz-cut said calmly.

  “You must see this is not a winnable situation,” I said evenly. “From either side. You shoot, we shoot. People will die. What’s the point?”

  He shrugged. “Surrender is not an option,” he said, and I saw the fierce pride in him. He skimmed eyes over me that were cold and flat. “You should know that, ma’am.”

  So, he’d been a soldier, recognized like for like.

  “O-kay, so, what happens now?” I said, allowing a hint of impatience to show. “We all wait here till we die of old age?”

  Buzz-cut didn’t answer. Time bunched up around us, slow and heavy, as we waited for the first nerves to fail.

  Then, suddenly, the door behind us punched open. Sean and I darted sideways, ready to meet a new threat, but it didn’t take a fraction of a second to know we were outgunned.

  The six-man team that entered were dressed in SWAT black, armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, utterly focused, and completely multilateral when it came to taking sides. They pointed weapons at all of us.

  I tuned out the yell of commands to give ourselves up and get down on the ground, and kept the sights of the Glock lined up steady on Buzz-cut’s face. Until he lowered his weapon, I was damned if I was going to lower mine.

  The pickup driver was the first to fold. But then, I suppose he had the freshest memory of what it meant to be shot. He came off target, letting the barrel rise as he brought both hands up. Very slowly, using only his finger and thumb, he laid the gun on the ground. When he straightened, his hands were already linked behind his head.

  As soon as the pickup driver surrendered his gun, Sean snapped his aim across to Buzz-cut, nearly giving the two guys who were covering him heart failure. If they’d been any less well trained, less experienced, they probably would have taken him out right there and then.

  The shouting died away. They must have known they were wasting their breath. I wondered how long it would be before the shooting started.

  Then I heard more footsteps slightly behind me, to my right. Two sets. Not the harsh dull clatter of boots on tile, but the lighter tread of good shoes with leather soles. I didn’t take my eyes away from Buzz-cut, even when I saw the way he stiffened at the new arrivals.

  “Sean, Charlie,” Parker Armstrong said in a calm and reasonable voice. “Please lower your weapons.”

  The surprise was such that, for a moment, neither of us moved.

  “In case it’s escaped your attention, Parker,” I said, without turning, talking through gritted teeth to avoid moving my jaw and unsettling my aim, “the guy over there has a gun to the head of a hostage.”

  I had to think of her in those terms. Depersonalize it. It was the only way I could function.

  “It hadn’t,” Parker said, and his voice was dry now, “but I need you to trust me on this.”

  There came a silence into which I swear I could hear the beat of my own heart.

  “If he pulls the trigger,” Sean said in that pleasantly lethal tone I knew so well, “I will kill him, regardless.”

  “And if you don’t, I’ll kill him for you,” Parker said, diamond hard and just as polished. “But it won’t come to that. We will work this out. Stand down, both of you.”

  Sean let out his breath on a long hiss, then relaxed out of a shooter’s stance. With a feeling of hollow regret, I did the same. The nearest man in black held out his hand for the Glock. I stared him down and kept it in my hand, letting it hang alongside my leg with my finger outside the guard. He saw the blood in my eye, shrugged, and didn’t make an issue of it.

  Across the room, my mother’s lids fluttered closed, like she was praying. I couldn’t bear to watch, glanced towards Parker instead and saw my boss was back in his usual sobersuited office attire. He looked tired, the lines on his face more deeply etched than when I’d last seen him in the rest stop south of Boston, only days ago.

  He acknowledged our capitulation with no more than the twitch of his facial muscles, but a little of the tension went out of his shoulders. He’d staked his reputation on being able to control us, I realized, and more besides.

  Parker threw a look to the man who was standing silently alongside him. I’ve played my part. Now you play yours.

  The other man was older, someone I’d never seen before, with a silver mustache and cold, cold eyes. He, too, was wearing a somber suit, with a bland tie and spit-polished shoes, but he was military through to his bones. He accepted Parker’s unspoken challenge without a flicker, and lifted his chin, letting his voice carry over to Buzz-cut.

  “You too, son,” he said, low and slow like tires on a gravel road. “Stand down, now.”

  Buzz-cut braced, like he had to force himself not to come to attention.

  “Sir, I am acting under direct orders from Mr. Collingwood—”

  “Mr. Collingwood is no longer … fit for duty,” the man said, slicing him off. He let his eyes trail briefly over me and there was nothing in them. It was like being gazed at by a snake. “He has been relieved.”

  A faint flush appeared across Buzz-cut’s cheeks. “I’m sorry, sir, but my orders still stand. Mr. Collingwood was very clear on that.”

  You had to admire his guts, if nothing else. Six men pointing guns at him and he never flinched, never wavered. Easy to see why Collingwood had chosen this man to do his dirty work.

  My mother’s eyes were still closed. As I watched, a single tear broke loose from the confines of her right eye and trickled slowly down her cheek.

  “Son,” the man with the gray mustache said, with ominous quiet that was more effective than any parade-ground bark, “you know who I am, don’t you?”

  Buzz-cut paled visibly. “Yessir!” he said. And still he didn’t lift the gun away from my mother’s head.

  I caught a slight movement behind Parker. My father and Terry O’Loughlin had moved into the doorway of the lab. They would have been told to stay back, I knew, but could no more obey that command than voluntarily stop breathing. The man with the mustache ignored them both.

  “I don’t know what Mr. Collingwood told you, son,” he said. He took a step forwards, speaking each word clearly, so there would be no mistakes, “but I can tell you, right now, that you have been involved in an unsanctioned operation. Do you understand what that means?”

  “Sir?”

  For the first time, his gun lightened a fraction. To my left, one of the SWAT team rolled his shoulders a little and settled more fully into the stock of his own weapon.

  The man with the mustache sighed, took another step. “Mr. Collingwood took it upon himself to encourage Storax to investigate the side effects of one of their drugs without withdrawing it from testing. In order to do this, he lied, falsified his reports, and misused the resources placed at his disposal by the federal government. He may even have believed he was doing the right thing, but in truth he was off th
e books—off the goddamn planet, if I’m any judge,” he said, temper finally cracking through like a whip. “And I will tell you now that I intend to deal with his transgressions most … severely. He may have convinced you he was a patriot but in reality, son, he was a traitor. A traitor,” he went on, beating the message home with measured strokes, “who has brought disgrace to his country and his office … and to the people who placed their trust in him.”

  Uncertainty reamed Buzz-cut’s features. His eyes skimmed over the man with the silver mustache, the SWAT team, calculating the odds. It can’t have taken him long to work out that resistance was, indeed, futile. I cursed him from inside my head, spitting soundless screams, as if I could compel him to yield by will alone.

  But still he held.

  The silence stretched, gossamer threads that sparked and snapped under the artificial lights. My eyes locked onto my mother’s face, the flutter of her eyelids as God knows what thoughts careered through her mind. If she died here, now, then everything we’d been through—everything we’d done—would have been for nothing.

  “What we have to decide here, son,” the man with the mustache went on, halfway across the narrow gulf that separated them now, “is just where your loyalties lie. Did you trust Mr. Collingwood’s word implicitly, or did you actively collaborate with him to develop a bioweapon using a company that’s foreign-owned, operating on U.S. soil? The stand you’re making here leads me to believe you knew all the risks. This is the last stand of a desperate man, son, not a patriot.”

  “Sir! I am a patriot, sir!” Buzz-cut rapped out, voice close to breaking.

  “Well, in that case, son,” the man murmured, “you’d best prove it to me.”

  He took a final step, bringing him within a meter of Buzz-cut. He held out his hand, palm up. After a long, agonizing two seconds, Buzz-cut withdrew the gun from my mother’s skull and let the hammer down slowly. He reversed his hold and handed the piece over to the man with the mustache, grip first in smartly formal presentation.

  I heard a collective exhalation, the quiet gush of relief from the SWAT team as they realized that today was not their day to kill or die.

  The man with the mustache handed off the gun to one of his men, who crabbed forwards to take it. Another yanked Buzz-cut’s wrists behind him and tightened the PlastiCuffs in place.

  Buzz-cut stood, head down, gaze turned inwards, as if replaying all the things he’d done without question, on Collingwood’s say-so. More than he could justify, if his misery was anything to go by. More than he could bear. When he lifted his head, his eyes were glistening.

  My mother opened her own eyes, very slowly, the shock blatant in them. Sean elbowed his way through the mill of black and brought out the same pocketknife my father had used to torture Collingwood. He sliced through the ties binding her wrists.

  With nothing to hold them, her arms flopped forwards and, when she climbed down from the stool, her legs folded under her. Sean tucked an arm behind her knees and lifted her without apparent effort. She clung to him and let the tears fall freely now. When I fell in alongside she grabbed my hand with icy fingers, paper skin over fragile bones, and wouldn’t let go.

  As Sean carried my mother past the man with the mustache, he reached out and put a hand on Sean’s arm. The touch was light, the way it can be when it’s backed by limitless strength and power.

  “You and Miss Fox wouldn’t be thinking of taking off again, would you, Mr. Meyer?” he said, making it both a threat and a polite inquiry, all at the same time.

  Sean paused just long enough to make his lack of intimidation felt. “No,” he said.

  The man nodded. “Good, because this time you would have the full weight of the U.S. government tracking you down,” he said. “I believe we have some things to discuss. I trust you’ll make yourself available.”

  Sean bridled but kept it in check. “Yes sir,” he said, in the same blankly neutral tone that skated thinly along the borders of insubordination.

  “I’m sure that you will,” the man with the mustache said. His gaze shifted onto my father, who’d come forwards, unable to hold back any longer. “This whole thing has been a goddamned mess,” he added in that careful way of his, eyes moving to me now. “It’s going to take some cleaning up.”

  “I’m sure we can work something out,” I said, injecting just as much steel into my own voice.

  I thought I saw a wisp of a smile skim across the older man’s face, but it didn’t trouble his eyes.

  “Oh, I’m sure we can,” he said.

  CHAPTER 35

  “Here,” Terry O’Loughlin said, “drink this.”

  She handed me a cone of water from the cooler in the room she’d coaxed us into after the man with the mustache and his team had departed.

  I took what I was offered, grateful, realizing as I did so that I still had Collingwood’s Glock in my hand. For a moment I struggled to recall quite how it had got there. Still punchy.

  Out of habit, I jammed the gun between my thigh and the chair cushion, keeping it within reach, and took a sip of water. It was cold enough to feel the glassy slide of it right down the inside of my ribs, clutching at my heart as it went.

  My mother had been clamped to my father’s side ever since Sean had put her down. My father had snatched her close, splaying his hands across her back and burrowing his face into her hair, like he was trying to take the very essence of her into himself. Proof of life.

  I heard sobbing, but I couldn’t have said for certain which of them it emanated from.

  I desperately wanted to reach for Sean in the same way but I knew, if I did so, I was likely to break into pieces and it would all come spilling out. And I couldn’t bring myself to do that in front of Parker, in front of my parents. Even in front of Sean. So I shrugged off the hand he put on my shoulder, throwing a quick later smile in response to his frown of concern.

  Vondie was lying, I told myself again as I pulled away. No way can it be true. We’ve always been so careful … .

  Terry had quietly taken charge, shepherding us gently into what looked like a staff break room nearby, where there were low chairs and tables and the watercooler.

  Beside me, Sean sat leaning forwards with his forearms resting on his thighs, shoulders hunched, staring low into nothing.

  Pure exhaustion sucked the blood out of my veins. Adrenaline, as I knew full well, was a single-minded taskmaster, strident and brutal. As it dissipated, I felt my system overload by way of retribution. A vicious headache—I told myself it was from the TASER or the drugs—had started hammering at the base of my skull. The more attention I paid to my body, the more I found there wasn’t a part of it that didn’t ache, from my neck and shoulders to the soles of my feet. It was another jolt to remember why.

  It had been a long time since I’d killed somebody that way—up close and personal. That part of it didn’t get any easier with practice.

  “I won’t ask if you’re all right,” Parker said, hitching the crease of his suit trousers as he sat down opposite. If it wasn’t for those watchful eyes, you’d have thought him urbane, unthreatening. “Because I can see you’re not—any of you.”

  “No,” Sean said, and he was looking at me while he said it.

  My mind was drifting. I pulled it back on track with effort. “Parker, what the hell are you doing here?” I said. I jerked my head in a vague gesture to indicate the direction in which the man with the silver mustache and his burly entourage had departed. “And who was that guy?”

  Parker glanced at Sean, then let his gaze shift to Terry, still hovering by the watercooler. “As soon as it became clear that Collingwood wasn’t on the level, I began trying to go over his head,” he said. He let out a slow breath. “Not easy. Nobody likes to hear there’s something rotten at the core of their own organization, and the kind of agency Collingwood is a part of, well, they like to hear it even less.”

  “But you convinced them,” Sean said, and it wasn’t a question. It was praise.
<
br />   Parker took a drink of water, ducked his head in acknowledgment. “Collingwood’s immediate superior was stalling, so I had to fight my way farther up the food chain. Epps—the guy you just saw—let me just say you don’t get much higher without being voted into office.”

  “So, he has the power to make all this … go away?” I said faintly. I scrubbed a tired hand over my face, but the image of Vondie’s crumpled body and Collingwood’s damaged spine was imprinted on my retinas. I glanced at my father. He and my mother were sitting thigh-to-thigh on the sofa to Sean’s left, not quite listening, but not quite oblivious to the conversation going on around them, either.

  Parker nodded. “Once I laid it all out for Epps, he took immediate action. Guy at his level wants something done, it gets done. We were already in the air with a full HRT—Hostage Rescue Team,” he elaborated for Terry’s and my parents’ benefit, “when Sean’s messages came through.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father straighten, very slowly.

  No. Oh no.

  Sean must have seen it, too.

  “You did what you had to, Richard,” he said, speaking fast. “We had no way of knowing how close Parker was when we went back in.”

  “But if we’d only waited a little longer,” my father said, swallowing the bitterness that threatened to spill out over his words, “I wouldn’t have had to do any of it, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Twenty-twenty hindsight,” Sean said with quiet vehemence. “We didn’t know, and couldn’t afford to wait.”

  My mother reached out and threaded her fingers through her husband’s. Her gaze was fixed on his face, which was still pale and shiny from the aftermath, anxious at his obvious distress. He glanced sideways at her and flinched away from the absolute trust he saw there, like it burned him.

  Because he no longer trusted himself.

  “I’ve always prided myself on being a rational man—one who doesn’t let my emotions rule me,” he said in that remote voice. “I know you sometimes find me cold, Charlotte. I am required by my profession to be clinical, but I have never considered myself to be without compassion.”