by Zoe Sharp
“Oh,” I said blankly. “OK.”
Parker grimaced, whether at the obvious reluctance in my voice or the fact I seemed to have forgotten the head wound, I wasn’t sure. But, he bit off whatever retort he might have made. Instead, he went to the rear of the car and retrieved a first-aid kit. It wasn’t the usual perfunctory box of plasters and antiseptic cream. This was about the size of a briefcase and far more comprehensive than any rental car company might provide. Parker must have brought it with him.
“New office mandate?” I asked as he set the kit down on the roof of the car and flipped open the lid.
“Merely a sensible precaution on risky assignments.”
“You’re here working?” I frowned. “I hope you haven’t had to leave a client unprotected for this.”
He didn’t respond to that right away, but gripped my upper arms and pressed until I subsided into the passenger seat. My acquiescence seemed to surprise him. I felt his eyes on me as he pulled on a pair of disposable gloves, parting the hair behind my right ear.
“We’re here for you, Charlie,” he said then, quietly. “If we have a client at all right now, you’re it.”
That threw me, held me still and silent while he crouched alongside me to apply kaolin-coated QuikClot gauze to the side of my skull, holding it in place until the blood stopped oozing. Perhaps that was why he’d said it.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if Epps was behind Parker’s sudden appearance here in Italy. Epps had told me he couldn’t provide overseas support. Had he called in favours from my former employer to cover that angle? Or resorted to blackmailing him, also? That was far more Epps’s style.
In fact, I wondered if Epps had kept him in the loop right from the start. Was Epps the reason Parker had been so apparently vindictive about cutting off my lifelines, one by one? Had he been pressured into making it look good, in case anyone took an undue interest?
Or had he been pressured into making sure my options were so limited that I’d accept Epps’s proposal regardless. It was a less appealing thought.
I scanned Parker’s face, only a few inches from my own. His gaze was firmly on what he was doing. Too firmly. Then he flicked his eyes to mine and, just for a split second, I saw something close to shame.
And then it was my turn to flinch.
“I’m sorry,” Parker said automatically. “I’m trying to go easy on you.”
Yeah, well. It’s a pity you didn’t feel that way weeks ago…
I said nothing, just waited. A few moments later he sat back on his heels and stuffed the soiled piece of QuikClot back into its wrapper for disposal. He stripped off the gloves and folded them inside, too.
Then he sighed again, rubbed a hand around the nape of his neck.
“Look, I’m sorry, Charlie,” he said, looking uncharacteristically uncertain. “I never meant to push you into doing anything…like this.”
“Like what?”
He glanced at the guy nearest to us but his attention was still on the car. “Like working for the First Family of organised crime.” Parker’s voice had dropped to a furious whisper. “Eric Kincaid is bad enough, but Darius Orosco? Have you entirely lost your mind?”
“No, just my job, my home, and—I found out subsequently—my ability to easily replace either.”
His head went back as if I’d punched him. “Hey, the job is all on you, Charlie. You know damn well I never wanted you to quit in the first place.”
“And you know ‘damn well’ why I did,” I shot back. I took a breath, aware I’d let my voice rise, and lowered it again. “You lied to me, Parker.”
I could have killed a man because of you. In fact, I suspect that you were rather hoping I would.
He shook his head. “I may not always have told you everything, Charlie, but that doesn’t mean I flat-out lied to you.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that lying by omission was still lying but suddenly I didn’t have the energy to get into it.
“Why did you blacklist me?” I asked instead.
“Where did you hear that?”
“What’s that got to do with it?” I paused a moment, decided to turn the screw. “Eric Kincaid told me, actually. I’d already turned down his job offer once. What prompted me to accept the second time was finding out how limited my options had become.” How limited you’d made them.
Pain flashed through Parker’s face. He disguised it with an edge of contempt. “So now you’re working for a guy who sells arms to the highest bidder—including terrorists.”
I was overcome with weariness again. All this verbal sparring with Parker would get us nowhere. It wasn’t even fun.
“What Kincaid does with his business is his business,” I said evenly. “But I’m not working for him—or for Orosco, come to that. I’m working for Kincaid’s wife, Helena. Family members are considered strictly non-combatant, apparently—the arms-dealing equivalent of the Illuminati have a unilateral agreement to prove it. Something to do with honour among thieves and all that.”
Parker digested this in silence for a moment.
“Tell me, why does a woman who’s ‘strictly non-combatant’ have need of a bodyguard?”
I nodded. Parker’s ability to cut straight to the heart of it, scalpel-sharp, like a surgeon making his first incision, was one of the things I liked best about working for him. No, it was one of the things I used to like.
“Because someone’s broken that agreement,” I said. “And if anything happens to Helena, it will start a war between the different organisations.”
“If Mrs Kincaid is off-limits, as you say, who’s foolish enough to go after her?”
“That’s a very good question,” I agreed, unwilling to give him anything more than I had already. “One I was trying to work out myself.”
“And?”
“And I thought I might be getting somewhere.” I gave him a rueful smile and dabbed a hand to the back of my head. This time, it came away dry. “But then some idiot ran me off the road and my best lead did a vanishing act.”
41
By the time we reached the airfield near Perugia, the Kincaids’ Gulfstream was long gone. No surprises there.
“What now?” Parker asked.
“France,” I said. “I know where they’re headed. I can pick them up there.”
He glanced across at me, waiting for elaboration I was not inclined to provide.
We were in a replacement rental car—a big Mercedes this time. At my insistence, Parker had left his guys to sort out the wrecked Renault and brought me on alone. There was a slim chance the Kincaids might have waited for me. In that event, arriving with an entourage of obvious professionals was not likely to go down well.
As things turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered.
“You’d have thought they’d leave some kind of message for you here,” Parker said. “Tried to re-establish contact, at least.”
“Would you?”
While we were on the drive over, I had given him a rough outline of what happened on Isola Minore. I left out certain strategic details but he got the gist of it.
“No point in making it easy for them to pick up the trail,” I said. “If they had discovered I wasn’t Helena and…disposed of me, then logically here would be their next port of call.”
He shook his head. “I still can’t believe you pulled that stunt. You took a hell of a risk, Charlie, and not just that they wouldn’t know the difference. As soon as they’d gotten hold of you they might have killed everyone else—Mrs Kincaid included—to leave no witnesses.”
“They tried,” I said, remembering the scorching exhaust gases of the RPG skimming over the top of me heading for the Sikorsky.
She was well away by that time. I know she was…
“Anyway, Parker, don’t pretend, in similar circumstances, you wouldn’t have done the same thing.”
“Maybe.” His voice was dry. “But I can’t say they would have believed I was Mrs Kincaid for very long
.”
Despite everything, I smiled. Maybe that was why he said it.
“Thanks, by the way,” I said. “I appreciate you riding to the rescue, however it turned out.”
“You’re welcome.” He fired up the Merc’s engine. “I’m guessing you have the clothes you stand up in and not a lot else. You need to stop off at a mall before we hit the road?”
I twisted in my seat. “What do you mean, ‘before we hit the road’? Where exactly do you think we are going?”
He shot a cuff, checked his watch. “It’s probably eight hours from here to Geneva. We should be able to make it there in time for a late dinner, then go on in the morning.” He put the car in gear and started rolling, apparently oblivious to my expression. “Where did you say in France?”
“I didn’t.”
He ignored the warning bite in my voice, shrugged. “OK, we’ll work that one out tomorrow.”
“Parker, stop—”
“We’ll need to get you cleaned up if we’re gonna get a room tonight without them calling the cops. That’s a nice jacket, by the way.”
I looked down, realised I was still wearing Helena’s designer label. I hoped I hadn’t got too much blood on it. Ah well.
“Parker, stop the damn car.”
He shook his head. “Not if you want to eat overlooking Lake Geneva this evening. I know this fabulous hotel in—”
“No!” My turn to interrupt, close to a shout. “You are not driving me to France.”
“No?” He ducked his chin back, gave a mirthless chuckle. “Charlie, you’ve got no money, no phone, no ID. So, how else you gonna do it, huh? How else you gonna get there, inside twenty-four hours, without my help?”
I didn’t have an answer and he knew it. I slumped back in my seat, defeated and scowling.
“Yeah,” he said, “I thought not…”
42
It must have been the bang on the head. There’s no other explanation I can think of why I allowed myself to be sidetracked for so bloody long. Five hours, to be exact. We were somewhere between Milan and Turin on the A4—a six-lane autostrada through flat, fairly featureless scenery.
Darkness gathered, sucking the remaining light out of the day. I’d been dozing in the passenger seat. Suddenly, I sat bolt upright, causing Parker’s hands to twitch on the Merc’s steering wheel.
“You OK?”
“Yes… No… Parker, how did you know where to find me? And what did you mean when you said ‘if we have a client at all right now, you’re it’?”
“Epps,” he said, confirming my earlier suspicions. Despite that, I felt the tug of disappointment. It’s one thing to hope someone’s come after you because they want to. Quite another to find out they didn’t have a choice.
“When?”
“When what?”
“When did he…approach you?”
A last-minute manoeuvre by a car ahead and resultant bunching traffic took Parker’s attention, so it took him a moment to reply. I tried not to betray how important that answer was to me.
“Yesterday.”
“Right.” I swallowed past the stone in my throat. It sank to my chest and lodged there. I kept my voice light. “You didn’t waste any time getting over here, then.”
“Yeah, well, Epps had all the arrangements in place. More or less.” He grimaced. “We had Kincaid’s flight plan to the airfield, but we were told you’d be going on by road. The helo threw us. We hoofed it over to Trasimeno. Arrived in time to see you being dragged out of a boat and bundled into a vehicle. We followed, were just working up a tactical breach when the two of you came out. The rest you know.”
“I was hooded in the boat,” I pointed out. “How did you know it was me?”
He glanced across and I saw the flash of his teeth in the glow from the car’s instrument lighting. “I don’t need to see your face to recognise you, Charlie,” he said. “We’ve worked together long enough for me to know the way you move.”
“Ah.” It took conscious effort not to squirm in my seat. I grabbed for safer ground. “Is Epps still holding that cult business in California over you?”
Parker shook his head. “We closed out that tab a long time ago.”
“So, what else does he have on you?”
“To get me to come after you, you mean?” Parker’s gaze was on the road, but I caught the way the muscles tightened around his eyes. “He asked. I said yes.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” he confirmed. “To be honest, I was glad of the excuse.”
I gave a short laugh, devoid of humour. “There would have been easier ways to keep in touch.”
He said nothing. The last pale pink band of sky at the horizon had disappeared. Any remaining warmth went with it. I shivered, flipped the heater control for the passenger side up a notch.
“Supposing that simply keeping in touch was…not enough?” Parker said quietly then. “Not enough for me, that is.”
I sighed, rubbed a hand across my eyes. They felt full of grit. So did my brain.
“It all seems…a bit too little, a bit too late, Parker. I can’t—”
“I did not send you out there to kill Sean.” His voice was abrupt, almost fierce.
I froze, heart thundering. My mind did a fast rewind to another conversation I’d had with Parker, sitting in the belly of a C-130 Hercules. It seemed both a long time ago and nowhere near long enough.
“If Sean has gone after this guy for revenge, it’s a one-way deal. You know as well as I do, he can’t come back.”
“You’d turn him in?”
“I couldn’t do that to him. Prison would kill him. Better to give him another way out.”
“One round in the chamber and tell him to do the honourable thing, you mean?”
“If he’ll take that option.”
“And what if he won’t? After all, this is a man you think has gone ‘clean off the rails.’”
“If he can’t be reasoned with, then he has to be stopped. Like you said—Iraq’s a dangerous place.”
“Jesus, Parker. You’re talking…assassination.”
And he’d nodded as he told me he didn’t think I was up to that part of the job.
The scene folded in on itself as rapidly as it had appeared. It left behind a buzzing in my ears and the agitated swirl of nausea high up under my ribcage.
“Didn’t you? Funny, but that’s not quite how I remember it went.”
“I just…wanted you to think about Sean not being there anymore,” he said. “About him being gone, and what that might…mean.”
“Sean’s been gone since he took that round to the head,” I said bluntly. “The man who came back may have looked like him, and he may have sounded like him, but…” And suddenly that stone in my throat was making my voice hoarse, so I had to clear my throat before I could go on. “But it wasn’t him. Not really. It was close, though. Fuck, was it close—close enough that I fooled myself. For a while…”
Eyes still fixed on the road ahead, Parker reached a hand across the centre console, palm upwards. I hesitated, but only for a moment. Then I put my hand into it. His fingers closed over mine, squeezed. I shut my eyes.
“I know,” he said softly, and it might have been my imagination, but his voice seemed a little thicker than usual. “I know. We both did.”
43
Because we were in the European Schengen zone, officially we didn’t need passports to go from Italy into Switzerland, but there was always the chance of a random spot-check. As we approached the Italian end of the Mont Blanc tunnel, I confess to a twinge of unease about my lack of documentation. Parker told me to relax and produced my spare passport, like sleight of hand, along with his own.
“You left it in the safe at the office,” he said in answer to my unspoken question.
“And you only mention this now?” I’d assumed the spare was somewhere in storage with the rest of my belongings. I suppose it had been, in a way.
Because we worked occasion
ally in Israel as well as Arab countries, I’d been able to obtain a second passport. It had saved a hell of a lot of hassle in the past and looked like it was going to do so again.
He smiled. “Face it, if I’d told you back at the airfield, you’d have grabbed it and ran.”
I said nothing. He’d got that right, so there was nothing to say.
Annoyingly, Parker looked in control, as though nothing would floor him. I felt in tatters by comparison, emotionally and physically.
It was only as we headed into the tunnel itself that I felt calm enough to return to an earlier conversation. “Before, when you said Epps asked you to come out here, and you said yes… Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you say yes? You couldn’t have made your low opinion of me much clearer, when you came to tell me to get out of the apartment.”
Parker sighed. “Not my finest hour,” he agreed. “I was angry. I freely admit it. Angry, and disappointed, and frustrated. At myself as much as you. And Sean, of course.”
“He let you down.”
“He let us both down.” He ran a hand across his face. “And I felt, by walking out, you were doing the same thing.”
“So, what changed?”
“I realised…acting like I did… Well, I didn’t behave any better, did I?” His smile was rueful. “I was trying to track you down when Epps reached out. Felt like a second chance.”
“What did Epps tell you—about why I’m over here?”
“Not much. Does he ever?”
I thought of the few snippets of intel the Homeland man had fed me. “No, I suppose not.”
“Care to read me in?”
“Not really my secrets to tell.” I gave a shrug that was genuinely regretful—mostly. “I’m sorry.”
“OK,” he said. “How about I run some scenarios by you? Hypothetically speaking, of course. See if anything sounds…plausible?”
“This is not a game of twenty questions, Parker.”
“It’s a long drive and the scenery on this part sucks. Humour me.”
