DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (11 page)

“Sir, I—”

He chuckled, mopping his mouth on the napkin. “Forget it, Charlie. I was there, remember? Hell, young Jimmy had a face like thunder. Never seen him look so riled.” He leaned across and gave my arm a reassuring pat. “If I hadn’t known the boy I probably would have taken a swing at him myself.”

Relief invested my answering smile with a touch more warmth than it might otherwise have had.

Sean made a tiny noise in the back of his throat that could have been a growl. He levered away from the wall and strode across the suite.

“I’ll check the ETA on the helo,” he said brusquely as he went. “Charlie will escort you down when you’re ready to go, sir.”

There it was again. Just the faintest emphasis on the word “escort” giving it a whole host of different meanings. None of them especially flattering.

I glanced at Blake Dyer. He merely raised an eyebrow and made the slightest duck of his head in Sean’s direction.
Go after him
.

I pushed back my chair, murmured, “Excuse me a moment, would you?” and hurried out after Sean without waiting for a reply.

“Sean!” By dint of jogging along the corridor, I caught up with him near the door to the stairwell. He was still conscious enough of his reduced fitness levels to automatically go for stairs rather than take the easy option.

“What do you want, Charlie?”

Another double-edged question.

“I want to know what’s making you behave like—”

“—a bear with a
sore head
?” he shot back, face bone white.

I took a breath. “I was going to say ‘like an amateur thug’, if you must know, but I expect there are similarities,” I said, my voice mild. “I know you have a problem with me, Sean, but if we’re going to do this job you’re going to have to put it aside—for the next couple of days, at least, or—”

“Or what?” he demanded. “Or you’ll phone New York and ask Parker to recall me, is that it?”

What the . . .?

He squared up to me and his eyes went flat, his voice deadly soft. “When were you planning to tell me you’d already made that call, eh?”

I said nothing. There was nothing I could say that wasn’t a lie, at least in part.

He knows.

And I could take a pretty good guess how he’d found out.

That
bastard
Morton
.
I knew he’d been too far away to overhear naturally, but maybe not if he’d been using some kind of electronic amplifier. Morton always had liked his gadgets.

“It was a judgement call,” I said with as much calm as I could manage.

He scoffed. “It was an emotional call, certainly.”

I flinched, hit by a sudden flashback to the last time I’d tried that argument on him. An argument to explain away why I hadn’t acted with more aggression against a perceived threat.

His response had been the same.

Exactly
the same.

Jesus . . .

The argument hadn’t worked for me back then, either. In fact, Sean had actually pulled a knife to goad me into what he’d considered was a proper reflex reaction to danger. Of my own volition, my eyes flicked to his hands.

They were empty.

I let my breath out nice and slow, tried to roll some of the tension out of my shoulders before they cracked. “Sean, you went over the top last night—way over the top. You’re not a soldier any more, and if you need extra time—extra training time—to get yourself back into the right mindset for this job, then you
need
to take it. It’s Parker’s name above the door of the agency as much if not more than yours, so he had a right to know. You have to realise that it only takes one mistake in this business to get a reputation you just can’t shake.”

“Oh, and you’d know all about
getting a reputation
for yourself, wouldn’t you?”

My core temperature dropped so suddenly I had to suppress a shiver. Even then, I couldn’t resist the urge to wrap my arms around my upper body. An utterly stupid defensive gesture. I brought my chin up to counter it.

“Get it out, Sean,” I said, my voice hollow now. “Say what you have to.”

“The way you’ve been behaving with Dyer since we got here—half the time I’m not sure if you’re trying to be or a bloody hooker.”

It was the “trying” that stung hardest.

“So, what was I last night, Sean, while you were playing Rambo? I got the client down into cover and put my body in front of his. What—you think I somehow got off on it?”

He took a deep breath in, let it out through his nose like a bull faced with a platoon of Household Cavalry in full ceremonial scarlet dress.

“Dyer’s a flirt—always has been,” I said. “Last time I worked for him he was exactly the same even when his wife was there. It’s just a—a mannerism. There’s nothing
meant
about it. He’s like a dog chasing cars. If he caught one he wouldn’t know what to do with it—it would scare him half to death.”

I stepped in, tried a smile, reached for his arm as if actual physical contact might help convince him. Instead, he jerked away.

“So it’s just flirting, is it? That what you’ve been doing with Parker, too, eh?” His eyes flicked over me again and there was nothing flattering in the look. “Is that how you got your job with the agency?”

I felt my face close up. “I’m not going to dignify that one with an answer,” I said, turning. “We’ll talk again when you’ve calmed down enough to see reason.”

But he only let me get half a stride away.

“Tell me the truth, Charlie—I wasn’t the only one you were fucking back in the army, was I?”

It came out fast and vicious, but under his anger I thought I detected shades of pain.

As if what we’d shared really had meant something to him.

As if facing the idea he’d been just another notch on my bedpost—that he’d risked everything he’d made of himself for somebody so unworthy—hurt him more than he could bear.

That, more than the slur, almost undid me. I turned back.

“I bet I know who filled your ear with that delightful little titbit of information. Wouldn’t have been Vic Morton who couldn’t wait to drip that bit of poison would it, by any chance?”

I could hear the brittle quality in my voice now, my accent smoothing out to reveal my parents’ upper-middle-class origins. I’d done so much to blunt down and hide my background from Sean in the beginning, fearing he might despise me for it. If only it had been that simple.

He didn’t answer, but I looked him in the eye and didn’t need him to.

So, it seemed we were neither of us prepared to lie to the other.

Well that was progress of a sort.

“As a matter of fact you weren’t the only one, Sean,” I said, cold and clear. “Did Vic happen to mention he was also a lucky recipient of my oh-so-indiscriminate sexual favours?”

He didn’t answer that one either.

Nearby, the lift pinged as it reached our floor and the doors opened. Despite everything, we both altered our stance, turned a fraction to meet the new arrivals. I ID’d them instantly as two guys from another team. They nodded to us, acknowledging rather than friendly, but didn’t stop to check in.

It was a worrying omission, as if they were making a point of not getting too close, just in case. Or maybe they simply picked up on the atmosphere between us.

Not so much intense as frozen solid.

We watched in silence as they retreated along the corridor. Even so, I moved in closer again and lowered my voice.

“I don’t suppose Vic Morton also happened to mention that—to get me to lie still enough for long enough to allow him to fuck me—he had to beat the shit out of me first and then had three of his mates holding me down waiting their turn?”

Sean’s head reared back as if I’d slapped him. Just for a second I thought the shock tactics had worked, had finally penetrated, but when he spoke again his voice held only a cynical detachment, and any trace of sympathy had vanished from his features.

“Yeah,” he said coldly. “He told me you’d probably say something like that.”

My turn to reel as if from a sudden blow. I clamped my jaw shut, fought not to let the emotion cloud my voice for one last superhuman effort.

“Did he really?” I asked. “Well you might want to keep it in mind, Sean, that the last time you said that—the last time you believed someone else’s word over mine—you ended up getting shot in the head and left to die . . .”

The helicopter Tom O’Day had hired for the sightseeing tours of New Orleans was a six-seat Bell 429 corporate model, dressed in the discreet livery of a local oil company. I say “hired” but in fact he probably talked them into lending it for nothing. All in aid of a good cause.

The flights were taking around thirty minutes, taking off from the open top floor of the parking structure next to the hotel, beating north over the city towards Lake Pontchartrain and then circling back over the network of canals and levees that protected the city’s eastern side.

I’d heard the rapid thrum of the rotor blades as the helo came and went all morning, starting around nine-thirty and running straight through like continuous flight ops from a carrier deck. The only break was a short one to refuel, then it was back on station.

The pilot was laid-back about the whole thing. Sean and I had already met him. The guy was a former US Army captain called Andrew Neal, who spoke little and missed less. Although he never mentioned it, we knew from the standard background checks that Capt Neal had actually been at the controls of a Sikorsky Black Hawk that fateful day in 1993 over the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

I assumed his reluctance to discuss his experiences was very much like the members of the SAS assault team who stormed the Iranian Embassy in London many years previously. There are a thousand pretenders to that particular crown. Those who really
were
there rarely talk about it.

Blake Dyer was booked for the last flight before lunch. We took the elevator up to the roof where O’Day’s Foundation people had set up white marquees to keep potential donors from letting the sun go to their heads. Uniformed wait-staff circulated with trays of canapés and yet more champagne. I wondered if O’Day had bought up an entire vintage to give away over the course of the weekend.

News teams and reporters were among the guests, mingling and interviewing. Must have been one of the few times everybody was happy to see them.

Dyer had a few words with the front man from the local news channel, a bouffanted guy whose expanding waistline was mostly concealed by careful tailoring. He was in full make-up that was wilting slightly even out of direct sunlight. Despite the electric fans blowing from every corner, the marquee was coming up to a midday high temp.

Sean and I stayed out of the way and let Blake Dyer circulate unmolested. He seemed to be enjoying himself, chatting to Tom O’Day himself like the old friend he professed to be, as well as taking Jimmy aside in a godfatherly kind of way. I don’t know what he said to his godson, but Jimmy didn’t look any happier afterwards.

Not that he looked happy before. Maybe he’d finally got wise to that snake Vic Morton, who was constantly by his elbow. I wondered if the bodyguard had been told to stick close and make sure the kid didn’t screw anything up.

Or it might have had more to do with the state of Jimmy’s hangover battling against the smell of jet fuel and the constant noise of the Bell cycling through its turnaround routine. Land, unload, reload, take off again. Efficient and neat. No fuss.

It was apparently left to Jimmy to keep things running to schedule on the ground. He swung by to collect Blake Dyer about ten minutes before our designated flight-time, took him over to gather with Ysabeau van Zant as if unaware of the tension between them. Mrs van Zant was coldly immaculate in a pale blue dress suit that reminded me vaguely of the former UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Mrs van Zant was alone, apparently confident that her status would protect her. She and Dyer studiously ignored each other. I stayed nominally between them, just in case.

Behind Jimmy O’Day’s shoulder, Vic Morton’s eyes volleyed back and forth between me and Sean as if trying to spot the cracks he’d undoubtedly caused. I reckoned I had them pretty well plastered over by that point.

You know exactly what you’re trying to do, don’t you, you little bastard?

Sean and I were filling two of the available seats on the Bell. The remaining pair had been earmarked for an old-money banking couple from Boston, but when I looked round I couldn’t see them on the roof.

“Where are the others?” I asked Jimmy O’Day. “They’re cutting it fine.”

Jimmy kept throwing me little sideways glances without turning his head to look at me directly, as if afraid I’d turn him instantly to stone if he did so.