by Zoe Sharp
Mrs Heedles cleared her throat. “And they’re not the only federal agency with Armstrong-Meyer on speed-dial. You were involved with some government black-ops outfit in the Middle East just before you supposedly resigned, I believe? I haven’t yet been able to discern which one.”
“I did resign. There’s no ‘supposedly’ about it,” I said. “And I was hardly working for them. Let’s just say that our objectives intersected. After that it was a case of ‘if I can’t control you, I might as well support you.’ Something like that.”
Orosco gave a grunt which eloquently expressed his opinion. Kincaid studied me for a moment longer, then said quietly, “You’ve gotta admit it looks bad, Fox. Either you level with us, or…” He shrugged. I could fill in the blanks myself.
The silence stretched and snapped between us. Eventually, I slumped back in my chair, let my breath out. “OK. The problem is Parker,” I said flatly. “He has a bit of a…thing for me.”
“A thing,” Schade repeated. “Is that a reciprocal kind of thing?”
“I like Parker—a lot,” I hedged. “He’s a very decent guy but…it’s complicated. I was involved with someone. Someone close to him.”
“‘Was’?” Kincaid picked up on the past tense more quickly than I would have liked. “Who?”
“The Meyer of Armstrong-Meyer. And before you ask, no, we’re no longer together.”
Orosco let out another grunt. “So you hop from screwing one partner to screwing the other.”
I kept hold of my temper with an effort, flashed him a glare that should have flayed the skin off his bones if it hadn’t been as thick as rhino hide. “Sean and I were together before we came over from the UK—before Parker offered him the partnership.”
“And you came along for the ride, straight into a job on easy street. Slick.”
“She’s good,” Schade said quietly, no trace of humour in his voice for once. “No way would a guy with Armstrong’s reputation keep her on the books if she wasn’t.”
“She still got canned, though, hey?”
“I quit.”
“Yeah, whatever you say.”
“The reason Armstrong cut you off when you left—the non-competition clause, forcing you to vacate your apartment, recommending your gun permits were pulled,” Kincaid said, almost to himself. “It wasn’t just his professional pride you hurt, was it?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, said carefully, “I never gave him any reason, while I worked for him, to think there could ever be anything between us. He knew how I felt about Sean.”
It was Helena who asked, “Ending things—with this guy, Sean—it wasn’t your decision?”
I rubbed my temple. I needed a short sleep and a long shower, not necessarily in that order. “No. Sean was injured—shot. He was in a coma for a long time. When he came round”—I shrugged again—“well, things were never quite the same after that.”
“I’m sorry, Charlie.”
“Yeah, so am I.”
“This is all very sad, dear,” Mo Heedles said, “but what made Mr Armstrong come all the way over to Europe after you? Did you contact him?”
I shook my head, said dryly, “Apparently, he heard I’d fallen into bad company.”
“Sounds like the dude has a major white knight complex,” Schade said.
“Something like that…”
Kincaid sat back in his chair, suddenly enough for the others to glance at him. “OK,” he said.
Orosco looked startled. “‘OK’? Seriously?”
“Seriously, Darius. She’s with us,” Kincaid said. “I’m convinced. Let it go.”
Orosco looked about to argue further, then changed his mind, tried for a casual tone as he clapped his son-in-law on the shoulder. “Sure, Eric. Whatever you say.” But his eyes never left me, and their gaze was poisonous.
“We’re meeting with our buyers the day after tomorrow,” Kincaid said, talking to me directly now. “Helena’s staying here, so I want you with us.”
I shook my head. “Defence isn’t good enough any longer,” I said. “I’m not going to walk in there and wait for them to attack us, like last time. I want to be further out, picking off the trouble before it gets close enough to start anything.”
“A sniper,” Schade said. “You think we should put you in a position where you could have one of us in your crosshairs?”
“If you don’t trust me enough to do that—to take the fight to the enemy—then I may as well leave now because, as far as I’m concerned, we’re done.”
50
I may have suggested going on the offensive, but it was with defence firmly in mind that I took myself off on a tour of the chateau’s exterior later that afternoon.
What I found was not encouraging.
From the front and sides, the building was very impressive, with the squat stone towers at each corner and numerous smaller turrets and castellated areas of rooftop which would provide excellent points for surveillance. Once the drawbridge was up, even with the moat drained and grassed over, it provided a stern and sturdy façade.
The long straight driveway and vast lawns worked in its favour, too, giving a clear field of fire with no cover beyond a low network of ornamental hedges for enemy forces. From ground level they might have worked, but a lookout in one of the high towers with a decent pair of binoculars would spot anybody approaching when they were still miles away.
Of course, the castle had been built with only the flight of an arrow to worry about, or possibly the arc of a trebuchet. I wasn’t sure how well its walls—thick stone as they were—would stand up to attack from an automatic assault weapon or RPG, never mind anything heavier.
Still, the windows were little more than glassed-in slits until you got to the third floor. Most of the lower windows had iron bars surrounding them. It almost made me wonder if they were designed to keep people out, or to keep them in.
I kept walking, calculating the distance to the woods and the stable block, then turned to look at the rear elevation and stopped dead in my tracks.
“Oh…bugger,” I said aloud.
As I should have realised from the interior, the rear of the chateau had been considerably remodelled at some point in its history. Where once might have been arrow slits and fortifications above the moat were now two rows of delicate French windows.
Those on the upper storey opened onto Juliet balconies with only faded wooden shutters to protect them. The lower storey windows led out directly onto a wide flat terrace. This had been created at the expense of the moat, which had been filled in and levelled.
Without doubt, this arrangement let in more light and air, but it also let in anyone who wanted to stroll across the grass and lightly tap out a pane of glass. It wasn’t exactly the last word in high security.
I swore under my breath as I squinted upwards. The best I could hope for was that any would-be attacker would be blinded by the reflected glare of the sun from all that glazing.
The far left-hand of the lower French windows opened at that moment, and Gilbert de Bourdillon stepped out.
“Ms Fox. You do not look as though you entirely approve of my ancestor’s embellishments.”
“Architecturally, they do wonders,” I said. “Defensively, though, I’m not so sure.”
“Blame the Chinese,” de Bourdillon said. When I raised an eyebrow, he laughed. “They invented gunpowder sometime in the ninth century, I believe it was, although it didn’t make its way to Europe until the thirteen-hundreds. When it did, fortified domains such as this became somewhat redundant, I’m afraid.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “No point living in a cold, damp castle if it’s not going to save you. Ah, no offence intended.”
“Considering I have spent a good deal of my tenure trying to ward off the effects of just such cold and damp, none taken,” he said equably. “Anyway, in the late eighteenth century, Philippe-Henri de Bourdillon was hoping to marry the rather beautiful daughter of an Italian nobleman, so the story goe
s, but the lady in question expressed doubts about coming to live here. He was so besotted that he had the entire south façade refashioned as you see it now, in time for the lady and her family to visit. But, apparently, she took one look at the front of the chateau and found it so forbidding that she refused to alight from her carriage.”
“So she never got to see what he’d done in her honour.”
“She did not.”
“What a pity.”
“Indeed it was. Philippe-Henri never married. On his death, the estate passed to the son of his younger brother, Bertrand.”
“Do you know the entire family history by heart?”
“All learned at my mother’s knee.” He smiled. “Who was who, and who did what.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Have you made any major modifications?”
“Improved the heating system, which was ancient and appalling. And I restored the stables, which had been turned into garaging. That kind of thing,” he said. “There was always an armoury of sorts, in the cellars, but I suppose I returned that to its original use, also. Nothing major.”
I nodded to the faded façade. “And what about the next generation? What do they have in mind for the place?”
The smile faded. I saw it fall away inside him, vanish from his eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “Of course, it’s none of my—”
“They died,” he said. “Car crash. My wife. And…my sons. Fifteen years ago. The older boy would have been twenty-one, this year.”
I murmured another apology. He turned away to stare out over the gently rolling countryside beyond the chateau, though I doubted he saw any of it. His hands were clasped behind his back. The fingers gave a brief, convulsive clench.
“Now there’s a cousin. South America somewhere. Distant, but his claim is valid, so the lawyers tell me.” Disdain dripped from his voice. “He has announced his intention to turn the place into some kind of hotel and amusement park.”
“Who inherits is your choice, sir, surely?”
“One would think so, yes,” he said, without conviction. “But a thousand years of unbroken family line…is not something one can easily ignore…”
51
“Here,” Schade said, laying a canvas gun bag in front of me. “You want to be a sniper, you need the tools for the job.”
I glanced up at him. It was the following morning. I’d spent a fitful night in one of the many guest rooms of the chateau. The bed was a full-dress four-poster. Its frame must have been ten feet high, even if the bed itself was barely long enough for me to stretch my legs out.
I’d read somewhere you’re supposed to change your mattress every eight years. I doubted this one had been changed in the last eighty. Or maybe even eight hundred. It sagged unbelievably when I climbed onto it and the only way to sleep at all was to do so partly propped up.
Showing me the room, Gilbert de Bourdillon told me it was believed that in the Middle Ages the diet caused the aristocracy to suffer from almost constant acid reflux, to the extent where sitting up to sleep was a necessity. Either that, he said, or they thought lying flat should be reserved only for the dead.
The irony of that did not escape me.
Either way, the sagginess of the ancient mattress meant a half-reclining position was the best I could manage. Every creak and groan from the old stones and pipes and boards had me snapping back to wakefulness anyway.
When Schade knocked and strolled in, I’d been sitting on the floor, attempting to stretch out some kinks by introducing my forehead to my knees.
I uncoiled from the pose and reached for the zip on the bag he’d put down. Inside was an FR-F2 sniper rifle. I let out a low whistle as I slid the weapon clear of its cover, taking care not to snag the telescopic sight mounted on top of the receiver. The F2 was a tried and trusted weapon that had been standard issue to the French military for years. Chambered for the old NATO-calibre 7.62mm rounds, it possessed decent range and stopping power. It would have been nice to complement it with my SIG but you can’t have everything.
“Very pretty,” I said. “Where did you get hold of one of these? Although I don’t suppose they’re as rare over here as they are in the States.”
“Our host,” Schade said. “When it comes to his firearms, he’s a connoisseur.”
It had surprised me to discover that de Bourdillon, an aristocrat whose family tree took up an entire wall in the library on the upper floor, was actually a fellow trader in arms. Mind you, his ancestors had found glory in more wars than I’d had dinners—of any temperature—so I suppose it wasn’t as big a leap as all that.
I unclipped the small box magazine and worked the bolt to check the chamber was clear before lifting the rifle into my arms. Usually, such weapons are configured for blokes with a build far bigger than my own. I wasn’t exactly petite, but I wasn’t a gorilla, either.
To my surprise, the thin butt pad fitted comfortably into my shoulder and my right hand dropped onto the grip without a stretch. I raised an eyebrow at Schade. He shrugged.
“The dude likes to tinker,” he said. “He sized you up ’soon as he found out you could handle a long gun.”
I folded out the bipod legs mounted halfway along the forestock, set the rifle down carefully on the threadbare Persian rug and rolled into a comfortable sprawl behind it. With my cheek resting on the padded stock, the eyepiece at the rear of the sight was perfectly aligned.
I looked up, found Schade watching me without expression. “I’ll need a few rounds to get my eye in.”
“Wouldn’t expect anything else,” he said. “De Bourdillon has somewhere we can use to zero.”
I sat back on my heels, suddenly cautious. “OK. When?”
Schade gave another shrug. “No time like the present.”
Schade left me to get ready. I changed into black jeans, boots, and a long-sleeve shirt—it was good to have access to my luggage again. I took the stone spiral staircase down with the F2 back in its bag, slung over my shoulder.
Voices led me to the dining room where we’d eaten after my arrival yesterday. It did not escape my notice that the conversation faltered as soon as I walked in.
I paused just inside the door, could almost taste the atmosphere. Mo Heedles and Schade were seated at the table. Darius Orosco was standing on the far side, leaning with both hands knuckle downward on the tabletop, as if arguing a point. All of them looked as though they had something yet to say and did not welcome the interruption. I thought briefly about offering to go out and come in again.
“You all set?” Orosco asked, but the question was directed towards Schade rather than me.
“Yeah, boss,” Schade said.
“Are you sure you should be going, dear?” Mo Heedles asked me.
I lifted a shoulder to indicate the strap of the gun bag. “Schade’s just taking me for some target practice.”
She frowned. “But can Helena manage without you?”
“She didn’t mention wanting to go out anywhere today.”
“Perhaps you should check, anyway, just in case—”
“Leave it, Mo,” Orosco cut in, his voice harsh. “Helena’s fine. And if Eric wants this kid on board tomorrow, we gotta make sure she’s up to it, hey?”
Mo looked about to argue further, but something about the way Orosco was glaring across the table changed her mind. She let it go with a glance at Schade and a murmured, “Well, if you’re sure…”
“I’m sure, and I do not need you goddamn second-guessing me,” Orosco snapped. In the light coming in through the tall windows, a fine spray of spittle flew from his lips. “I built up this goddamn business from nothing—nothing. You hear me? I did it. Without Eric and sure as hell without you. Just you remember that, hey?”
Silence followed his outburst. Mo, her pale cheeks flushed, seemed suddenly fascinated by the marquetry pattern around the edge of the dining table. Schade slouched in his chair, eyes on the portrait of some long-dead de Bourdillon on a prancing horse that hung beh
ind Orosco on the opposite wall. He might as well have been considering the composition of the paint.
Eventually, I took a breath. “Well, then…shall we go?”
All three of them looked at me as if I’d said something out of turn, but nobody made a comment. The moment passed.
Schade got to his feet. “Sure,” he said. “If you’re so keen to get to it, who am I to argue?”
52
When we walked out of the chateau, our boots thudding on the wooden drawbridge, the Mercedes I’d ‘borrowed’ from Parker Armstrong was still parked where I’d left it the day before.
“We’ll take your ride,” Schade said. Considering we were loaded down with targets, weapons, a spotting scope, and an old olive drab ammo can almost full of 7.62mm rounds, I wasn’t about to argue.
I fumbled for the button on the key fob to pop open the boot and we loaded our gear. Schade went for the passenger side, so I assumed that meant I was driving.
“Where are we heading?” I asked as I turned the key in the ignition.
“Far side of the estate. The land goes on for miles. Easier to go by road, though. Take a left outta the driveway and I’ll tell you where to turn.”
Rural French roads had a blanket speed limit of eighty-five klicks—a needle’s width over fifty miles an hour. I kept to it. There was no way I wanted to have to explain our cargo if we were pulled over by the local gendarmes.
“I’m surprised nobody’s come looking for this yet,” Schade said, tapping the armrest to indicate the car as a whole.
“You and me both,” I agreed.
“You think your old boss will have followed you to France?”
I hesitated a moment, then shook my head. No-one could accuse Parker of being slow on the uptake. Whatever mixed messages I might have sent by spending the night in his bed, I reckoned stealing his car and doing a runner pretty much said everything there was to say about the possibilities for any kind of a relationship.
