I stared at her. “You can’t be serious,” I said. “Two armed men break in here in the middle of the night and you’re asking me if we really need the police? Get real, Simone! I should insist we pack up right now and get you both on the first flight out of here.”
“I’m not leaving, Charlie,” she said. Her voice had deepened the way some people’s do when they’re losing their balance on the edge of breaking down. I’d pushed her about as far as I could tonight and I hadn’t the heart, or the energy, to make a stand over it now.
I sighed. “Look, let’s talk about this later, OK?” I said. “Let me just do a quick checkup here. You and Ella ought to go back to bed for a few hours, see if you can get some sleep.”
She nodded and reached for Ella, but the little girl clung all the harder to my thigh. I had a sudden flashback to the hallway of the house in London, when the paparazzi had struck.
“It’s OK, Ella,” I said. “You go with your mummy. I won’t be far away-I promise.”
She looked up at me with those luminous eyes. ‘Are you going downstairs again?”
I thought of the shadows, and of the fear that would build in a child’s mind from such a night.
“Yes,” I said gently, trying to slay the monsters I could see forming. “I’ll be going downstairs again.”
“We-ell, if you are … can I please have a cookie?”
I heard Simone’s quiet gasp of disbelief.
“YOU are the cheekiest little madam I’ve ever come across,” she said, but her voice was choked. “You can wait for breakfast like everybody else.”
Ella allowed herself to be parted from me, still arguing the case for premeal cookies with her mother. My leg felt surprisingly cold without Ella around it.
I checked their room first, particularly the window locks, but it was clear. I did the master suite next, the first time I’d been in there, but it was also secure. I ducked my head into my own room expecting it to be the same, but as soon as I opened the door I knew there was something wrong, something in the air.
I flicked the light on. Hannibal the giant teddy bear was still lying under the bedclothes where I’d left him, but in the short space of time between separating from his friend on the landing, and reappearing after I’d tackled Aquarium man outside Simone’s door, I found that the slim man with the glasses had definitely been into my room.
Oh, not all the way in, perhaps. He probably hadn’t taken much more than a couple of steps over the threshold, sliding the door quietly closed behind him. I’d certainly never heard a thing, but now, when I peeled back the blankets, I discovered that poor old Hannibal had proved a convincing substitute for me.
Convincing enough for the slim man to have put three bullets into him, at any rate.
I couldn’t feel any particular anger about that. It was line i, page i, for just about any kind of rules of engagement against a protected principal.
First job-kill the bodyguard.
Twelve
By ten thirty that morning, I’d moved Simone and Ella into the Presidential Suite on the top floor of the elegant White Mountain Hotel on West Side Road. The suite was spacious and had a connecting door to the room next to it, which I’d taken.
I’d called Sean and brought him up to speed on the night’s events, keeping my report cool and impersonal, particularly the part about the shooting of the teddy bear. Sean had responded in kind. There would be a time for emotional reaction, but we both knew this wasn’t it.
At Sean’s suggestion, I’d also called the private investigator Frances Neagley in Boston and given her as much information as I could about Aquarium man. She’d listened gravely, superhumanly restrained herself from saying, “I told you so,” and promised to find out what she could. She asked if I was bringing in additional security and, when I said Sean was arranging it, she offered me the temporary loan of her guy from the New York agency, Armstrong’s, until they arrived.
“Well, I could certainly do with some backup, but what about you?” “Right now,” she’d said, “I think your need is greater than mine.” I’d removed the suppressor from the Beretta to make it easier to conceal, and was carrying it in the right-hand outside pocket of my jacket. I knew I’d be in deep trouble if I was caught with it, but if it was a choice between that and facing another attempt on Simone and Ella unarmed, I thought it was worth the risk. Just the weight of it there was a comfort.
The only thing I hadn’t done-at Simone’s absolute insistence-was call in the police. Instinct told me it was a bad idea to try to keep them out of it but, at the end of the day, no harm had been done beyond a broken window and the loss of some stuffing from an oversize bear. I could appreciate Simone’s viewpoint that explanations would have been long and, bearing in mind the Lucases’ ignorance of her financial situation, possibly embarrassing.
Not only that, but she swore she wasn’t going to risk putting Ella through the same kind of press uproar she’d experienced at home. I tried to convince Simone otherwise, but it ended in a clenched-teeth argument with her telling me in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t like it I could go home and leave her to it. I gave in at that point. How could I abandon them now? Besides, it wasn’t the first time people had tried to kill me.
And it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
Nevertheless, when there was a knock on my door shortly before eleven I answered it with caution. I took great care when I looked through the Judas glass to ensure whoever was out in the hallway would not be able to tell when my eye was in line with the peephole.
Outside was Greg Lucas. He was rocking a little on his feet, obviously uneasy, the distortion of the fish-eye lens making the movement more apparent. The dressing taped to his forehead seemed much bigger than I remembered the size of the injury demanding.
I waited a beat. I deliberately hadn’t told him our room number. Had Simone called him? I glanced back at the connecting door to Simone’s room. She was trying to settle Ella down for a nap after her disturbed night and the door was closed. I transferred the Beretta from my jacket to the back of my jeans, under the tails of my shirt, and slipped the security chain.
“Hi, Charlie,” Lucas said. “Can we talk?” He gave me a weary smile, one that attempted to bond us through a shared struggle, one soldier to another at the end of a bloody engagement.
I didn’t want that kind of connection with him. I jerked my head and said, “You’d better come in.”
As soon as he was through the door I shouldered his face up against the wall to the bathroom, regardless of his recent injury, and patted him down. He seemed neither surprised by my action nor offended by it.
“Right-hand side,” he said mildly.
“Good job you pointed that out. I might never have thought to look there.”
“Just trying not to make you nervous,” he said. “We all had a difficult night.”
He was carrying a short-barrel Smith amp; Wesson.38 revolver in a belt rig on his right hip. I tugged the gun free and stepped back, not taking my eyes off him as I dropped the cylinder and emptied the chambered rounds out onto the coverlet of the bed.
“Simone’s with Ella,” I said. “I’d rather she wasn’t disturbed.”
“That’s OK,” he said. “It’s you I’ve come to see.”
“In that case, make yourself at home,” I said. “Coffee?”
He nodded again. I left the partially dismembered gun on the bed and went to pour two cups from the little coffeemaker on the desk. It was surprisingly drinkable coffee and I was on my third lot since we’d checked in.
When I came back the gun was still where I’d left it and Lucas was over by the window, staring out at the picturesque view of the Echo Lake forest and the mountains beyond.