by Sharp, Zoe
We sipped again in silence. The room began to buzz. I told myself that was the whisky. I’d been too tired to face dinner, so perhaps the effect of the alcohol was amplified and accelerated by an empty stomach.
Or perhaps the buzzing was just inside my head.
“Was it anything to do with . . . Vic Morton? With what you told me—about . . . you and him? I don’t remember that, either. Nothing. It’s all just one big void—kind of grey-black, like a TV set picking up a dead channel.”
For just a moment a kind of warmth flooded me. Sean admitting he didn’t remember something was so much better than him denying it had ever happened.
Progress, of a sort.
He shifted, leaned his forearms on his knees with the glass cradled in his hands, suddenly fascinated by the way the whisky swirled around inside it. “It’s like, occasionally the picture flickers and just for a second I get an image I can hardly catch, never mind know what it means. Subliminal, you know?”
“I know,” I said. The doctors had told us what to expect. They’d explained it in complicated terms, full of jargon that meant as little as Sean’s disjointed memories.
I’d even swallowed my pride and called upon my father’s medical expertise to cut through the excess terminology and give me the bottom line.
He’d come back with a bagful of maybes. Maybe Sean would reforge the neural pathways that connected him to his past, and his past to mine. Maybe he would remember fully or even partially what we had.
Or maybe he would never remember “us” at all.
There were only so many times I could rephrase the same question before it finally hit home that I was not going to get an answer I liked. An answer I could live with.
I stopped asking.
“You weren’t there, Sean,” I said again. “There was nothing you could have done.”
“I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse,” he said, rubbing at the side of his temple in that unconscious gesture. It made me want to gather him close, to hold his head to my breast and rock him to the beat of my heart, a strong and steady proof of life beneath his ear. To stroke my own fingers across the scar as if by doing so I could smooth it all away. I took a knuckle-whitening grip on the whisky instead.
“You didn’t come over to my place to discuss old news,” I said, aware of the uptight tone in my own voice but unable to let go. If I did I might never get a hold of myself again. “So, why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”
Twenty-two
Sean took a long pull on his Glenfiddich, watching my face above the rim of the glass as if he knew what I’d really been asking. He had the darkest eyes and right then, in the subdued cross-flow of light from the bedside lamp and the bathroom, they looked totally black from iris to pupil.
The eyes of someone not entirely human.
I suppressed a shudder. There had been a lot of times when Sean had frightened me on an instinctive, visceral level, as if I was trying to domesticate something wild. Every so often I got the feeling I really shouldn’t turn my back to him.
Now was one of those times.
So I waited, glass cradled in my hands, letting my body heat warm the spirit and the spirit warm me in its turn. It took Sean a few moments to answer my question, but I would have taken anything faster as a sign of glib evasion.
“You were good out there today,” he said at last, his tone dispassionate. “Cool, deliberate, focused.”
I shrugged, awkward. Whatever I’d been expecting, that had not been it.
“Yeah, well, I’ve had some good training.”
He watched me for a moment longer. “So that’s your Achilles’ heel,” he murmured. “Throw accusations and insults at you, you come out fighting. Try a compliment and you crumble.”
“Not so,” I denied, my voice dry. “Sometimes I take a swing at people who are nice to me as well.”
“Doesn’t come naturally to you, though, does it, Charlie? Accepting praise, I mean.” He paused, as if uncertain. “Did I never . . . praise you?”
I swallowed, mouth suddenly dry, but resisted the urge to gulp down more whisky. That way untold danger lay.
“It has been known,” I said carefully. “But you pushed hard, too.”
He nodded like that made sense to him. “Because I wanted you to be the best,” he said, and it was Sean the training instructor talking, not the close-protection expert. Not the lover. “Ever thought that might have been because I didn’t want you to get yourself killed on your first covert op?”
“I never made it into active service with any kind of black ops unit,” I said. “I was out on my ear well before any postings like that were handed out.”
They made sure of it.
I so nearly added, “Your mate Morton knows all about that one. Ask him if you don’t believe me,” but I held my tongue.
“You worked for me as a bodyguard before we came over here to work for Parker,” Sean said, almost to himself. Something about his voice told me he was only repeating what he’d been told. External information rather than internal knowledge.
He looked at me again, gaze switching from my eyes to my mouth. “How could I let you do that kind of work if we were . . .?”
“. . . in a relationship, you mean?” I finished for him.
You think you had that kind of say over what I did with my life?
Perhaps not the most diplomatic of possible answers. Instead, I gave another shrug that had the sheets threatening to desert me. I pulled them more firmly into place. “You pushed me all the harder.” My turn to pause, then a little reproach: “And you trusted me.”
“Yeah, I can believe that,” he said slowly. “Like I said, you were good out there today, Charlie. Bloody good, if you must know. It makes me wonder . . .”
His voice trailed off and I was the one left wondering where he’d been heading with that thought.
Wonder what, Sean? You wonder if Vic Morton’s been filling your head with lies about me? About how I only managed any kind of advancement on my back? About how I used “crying rape” as an excuse because I wasn’t good enough to make it and couldn’t face the ignominy of walking away of my own volition? Why don’t you ask that kind of question out loud, Sean? Oh boy, then you’ll see me come out fighting . . .
But some battles you know from the outset you can’t win.
He looked up, straight into and through my eyes, into my mind—just like he always could. All I could see in return was my own face reflected back at me.
“It makes me wonder if you were right to call Parker about me. To tell him you didn’t think I was ready,” he said, stark—and so out of left field it came from another field altogether. “After today I don’t think I’m ready either.”
A part of me wanted to agree with him and reach for the phone, but another part knew what that would do to him—to any chance of us. Instead I found myself saying, “It’s a skill like any other, Sean. You acquired it once. You can do it again.”
“How do you do it?”
I stared at him blankly. “Do what?”
“All . . . this.” He gestured with both hands, glass still in one but almost empty now. “The job. The life. I mean, Christ Jesus—getting shot at while you’re walking down the street—or parking your car, or taking a sightseeing flight. All of it.”
I went very still inside. My God, it . . . scared you, I realised. Today actually bone-deep-and-shaken scared you.
But the very fact that I’d finally found something—anything—that put the wind up Sean Meyer did not give me any satisfaction. In fact, it put the wind up me to a far greater degree.
Sean had always been my rock, my anchor point and my centre. When I feared I might have crossed the lines of violence into a no-man’s land from which there was no safe return, he’d been the one whose calm voice of reason had talked me back in. The one who convinced me I might still be a viable member of the human race after all.
Without him I’d already come dangerously close to lo
sing that grip on my humanity. I’d killed a man—not for self-defence or to defend another—but to extract a form of justice that was as primitive as it was extreme.
An eye for an eye.
And my most fervent hope, when I learned Sean had woken from his coma, was that one day I’d be able to tell him what I’d done. That one day I’d maybe even get his blessing, or at least his forgiveness.
The old Sean would have approved. Hell, he would have fought me for the privilege. But the new Sean . . . that was a different matter.
Now, I shrugged, hunted for words I didn’t have and suspected probably did not exist.
“I do it because . . . it’s who I am,” I said at last, and saw a frustrated gesture forming at what he assumed was a throwaway answer. “No, let me finish, Sean. You told me once that I was perfect for Special Forces—that Colonel Parris was a fool to let me go. But he did let me go—with a boot up my backside to help me on my way.” I still remembered that conversation with Sean, every word of it. OK, so I’d had to pull a gun to get him to sit still long enough to listen. But listen he did—in the end.
Looking at his face now I knew he had absolutely no recall of it.
I sighed. “Close protection is about the nearest I can get to that life and still live with myself.” I tried a smile. “The nearest I can get without ending up in prison, that is.”
I remembered, too, a lecture from my father some time ago. After Sean and I had reunited, after I’d headed down the road which led me here. Up to that point, the deaths on my hands had all been judged justified. But what would happen, he wanted to know, when it all became so easy—so second nature—that I took a life I couldn’t justify?
“If you stay involved with Sean Meyer you will end up killing again,” my father said. “And next time, Charlotte, you might not get away with it.”
“Out there today, pinned down in that crashed helo with the fuel pouring out of it and taking fire”—Sean shook his head as if to clear it—“I was fucking terrified, if I’m honest.”
“And you think I wasn’t?”
“If you were, you hid it bloody well.”
“Just because you couldn’t see it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,” I said. “Fear helps keep you alive—if you use it rather than let it use you. It’s what tempers recklessness, makes you think through an action, however briefly, before you do it.”
“I was close to losing control,” he admitted abruptly, unconvinced.
I reached out then, tentative, put a hand on his bare forearm and tried to ignore the fizz of contact through every nerve. Hairs riffled along my own arms, but the touch also set off a more basic chain-reaction that pooled in my belly. I tried to ignore it.
“Everybody with half a brain is scared under fire,” I told him. “What matters is how you deal with it.”
His gaze was locked on my fingers where they rested on his arm. “Simple as that?” he murmured dryly. “And who dispensed that little pearl of wisdom?”
I knew his reaction was an instinctive denial of something he must have known, deep down, was true. Even so, the edge of derision to his voice stung enough for me to remove my hand. I washed down the last of my whisky and held the empty glass out towards him.
“You did,” I said.
Twenty-three
“Excuse me,” Sean said, “but that’s bullshit—and you know it.”
Tom O’Day looked vaguely shocked by the blunt declaration. He glanced at me but I kept my face professionally blank. The old Sean—the polished version who’d run his own highly successful close-protection agency for five years after the army—would not have been so forthright in tone, even if he might have echoed the sentiment.
It was the morning after the helo crash. We were in Blake Dyer’s suite with the remnants of his belated breakfast still on the table. In view of the events of yesterday, though, the table was no longer quite so close to the window as it had been.
Tom O’Day had arrived while our principal was still eating, and studiously ignored the packed suitcases standing in the suite’s hallway. We’d already persuaded Dyer to recall his pilot. A flight plan was filed for later that morning to take him straight back to Florida as soon as a slot opened up. I confess that he hadn’t taken much persuading. If anything he seemed relieved to have the decision forced on him.
The memory of the missile striking the tail rotor, the brief but terrifying plummet, the shock of impact. It was all still very fresh in Blake Dyer’s mind and was likely to remain so.
As well as the ubiquitous and silent Hobson, O’Day had Autumn in tow. He and the cool blonde chatted with Dyer inconsequentially over coffee and croissants for maybe half an hour. After he’d expressed admiration for my principal’s courage and iron constitution, O’Day got down to business.
“Need you to do something for me, Blake,” he’d said, looking his old friend straight in the eye. “Need you to put yesterday’s excitement down to some random act of violence and stay on. Can you do that for me?”
It was at that point Sean made his interjection. It ran so close to the immediate thoughts passing through my head that for a second I wasn’t sure which of us had actually spoken.
Tom O’Day might have looked shocked, but Blake Dyer put his coffee cup down slowly. His eyes met those of Autumn, sitting opposite. She was wearing a designer trouser-suit today with a long-sleeved jacket, probably to hide the bruises from the crash. But from her bored expression she may as well have spent yesterday morning at some mid-town gallery, gazing at mildly inferior works of art.
“There was nothing random about it, Tom—as I’m sure the young lady here will tell you,” Dyer said at last, nodding towards Autumn. “They were after somebody most particularly—no doubt about that. And the death toll could easily have been seven instead of one if it wasn’t for this fine pair of professionals from Armstrong-Meyer.” He indicated Sean and me, keeping station on opposite sides of the room. “And the casualties could well have included two people sitting at this very table right now.”
Tom O’Day cleared his throat. “Aw hell, Blake, you think I don’t know that?” he demanded. The animation went out of him for a few moments and he suddenly looked a decade older. “But I’ve spent best part of two years putting together this whole dog-and-pony show. If one of my oldest friends turns tail at the first sign of a little trouble, how’s that gonna look?”
“If you call firing some kind of ground-to-air missile at us ‘a little trouble’ then I’d hate to know what you think of as a major disaster,” Blake Dyer said.
O’Day leaned forwards in his chair. “Hurricane Katrina was a major disaster, Blake,” he said quietly. “And the tragedy is still ongoing—folk down here have been abandoned and ignored by their own government. Kicked to the kerb like so much garbage. We have a chance to make a real difference to these people. You really going to let a small minority ruin all the good work we’re trying to do here?”
Blake Dyer dabbed his lips with his linen serviette, put it down very deliberately. “Hard to play the poverty card when they’re toting military hardware.”
Tom O’Day gave a dismissive shrug. “We’re shipping so much out to the Gulf and Afghanistan that stuff like that goes missing all the time,” he said. “RPGs are a dime a dozen at just about any surplus store.”
Blake Dyer raised an eyebrow but didn’t contradict his assertion. “You’ll still get my cheque, Tom,” he said, “but it will be in the mail—after I get home to the sunshine state.”
O’Day sighed, as if he really hadn’t wanted to bring out the big guns, but had been given no option. “You’re godfather to my son,” he said flatly. “Apart from me and his mother, the boy has no other family. He’s taken on a big role in all this—finally shouldering some responsibility. How’s it gonna look to Jimmy if you don’t stick around to see it?”
“That’s a low blow, Tom,” Dyer said, but his mouth quirked just a little. “Even from you.”
“Yes, it surely is,” O’Day agreed
cheerfully. “You feeling guilty yet?”
There was a pause and then both men were smiling. And Sean and I were not.
I stepped forward. “Sir—”
“No, Charlie. I’m afraid Tom’s right,” Blake Dyer said without taking his eyes away from his old friend. “Cancel the plane, would you? I think I’m going to stay ’til the fat lady sings.”
It was casually phrased, but there was no doubt in my mind that if we tried to change his mind again we’d run headlong into a steel plate wall.
Tom O’Day sat back in his chair looking thoroughly satisfied. Well, I hadn’t thought he’d got a sale-or-return deal on all that champagne.
