I’m sorry.
I formed the apology soundlessly, quickly, like I needed to go through this final absolution while I still had the chance. I pictured my parents and wondered if they’d be as disappointed by my death as they had been by my life.
And Sean, who had once been my life and had become so again. Sean, who’d sent me out here not expecting me to be careless enough to die on the job. Suddenly I wished I’d told him that I loved him on the day I’d left.
The light gleamed stronger all the time and had begun to flicker. It took a moment for me to realize it wasn’t my vision starting to fail but flashlights being carried up the icy incline at a jerky run. There were voices, too. Loud, and so harsh I failed to make out the words.
A thumping rumble swooped down low over the tips of the trees, making the ground quiver under me, spinning up the loose powder snow. The beam of a high-watt searchlight stabbed downwards, intense and blinding. I knew I should make some signal, offer some sign of life, but I couldn’t summon the energy.
“Charlie!”
Close now.
Simone was gasping for air and weeping like her heart was broken. I heard her before I saw her, lunging across the final few meters that separated us, and offered a silent curse that the helicopter should have drawn her to me in this way I tried to form words but could barely whisper.
My gaze swiveled upwards as she staggered over the rim of the ditch, bleeding from a dozen scratches, wild-eyed, her hair a disordered mass around her face. Her left arm was rigidly outstretched. The barrel of the gun seemed to be pointing nowhere but towards me.
She lurched to a stop. I looked into her eyes and saw the pure intensity of her grief and anger and shock. Any one of those emotions in such quantity and weight would have been good enough to kill for. A mix of all three made it a certainty
She never got the chance.
In the instant before Simone could act, the shots slammed into her. I didn’t hear the shouted warning from the police officers who fired them. My senses were winding down by this time, fading to black.
I vaguely remember seeing her fall, sliding down to come to a crumpled rest only a meter or so away from me. The gun dropped and landed between us, like an offering.
Simone’s face was turned towards mine so that our eyes met and held as her blood pulsed out to mingle with my own in the bottom of the ditch. The police were using hollowpoint Hydra-Shok rounds and she’d taken four to the neck and upper body She never stood a chance. I watched her die feeling only a kind of petty determination not to be the one who gave in first.
And I knew then that I’d just broken the cardinal rule of close protection work-never outlive your principal.
But it was a close-run thing.
Two
A bodyguard?” Simone Kerse said blankly to the man sitting next to me. “Rupert, have you gone totally crazy? I absolutely do not need a bodyguard.” She raked me with a fierce gaze. “Of any description.”
My first meeting with Simone, just ten days before I was shot, over a wickedly expensive lunch at a very upmarket restaurant just off Grosvenor Square in the embassy district of London. Not exactly an auspicious start.
Simone had a very slight American accent, more an inflection than anything stronger. She was also young and strikingly good-looking, and nothing at all like my preconception of an engineer.
Just as, it seemed, I was nothing like her preconception of a bodyguard.
Rupert Harrington, on the other hand, could only have been a banker. In his early fifties, tall and thin and bespectacled, he had very little hair and a permanently anxious expression. It crossed my mind after meeting him for the first time that those two facts could easily have been connected.
“I can assure you, my dear,” he said to Simone now, with a touch of asperity, “that a number of the bank’s clients have had cause to require the services of Mr. Meyer’s people and he comes with the highest recommendations. And even you must admit that this has all gone rather beyond a joke, hm?”
He sat back in his chair, careful not to spoil the impeccable line of his conservative dark blue pinstripe suit, and flicked a pained glance in my boss’s direction as if to say, Help me out here, would you?
“I agree,” Sean Meyer said obligingly, his voice bland but with an almost imperceptible underlying thread of amusement. Not at the situation but at the banker’s discomfort because of it. “The threats have been escalating. If you won’t go to the police, you’re going to have to take your own measures.”
He leaned forwards slightly, resting his forearms on the starched white tablecloth and looking directly into Simone’s eyes. There was something utterly compelling about Sean when he pinned you down with that dark gaze, and Simone was no more immune than anyone else.
“I’m not suggesting we surround you with a bunch of heavies,” he went on, “but if you won’t accept a full team then you should at least consider the kind of discreet, low-profile security we can offer. That’s why I brought Charlie along for you to meet.”
He nodded in my direction as he spoke, and both Simone and Harrington swung skeptical eyes towards me.
In between them, although somewhat closer to tabletop height, another pair of eyes regarded me unwaveringly And, I don’t mind admitting, that was the gaze I found the most unnerving.
Simone’s young daughter, Ella, sat on a booster cushion alongside her mother and carefully speared a dessert fork into the pieces of yellow smoked haddock that had been cut up into child-friendly pieces on her plate. It wasn’t the kind of food I would have expected a four-year-old to enjoy, but she was shoveling it in with apparent enthusiasm and chewing largely with her mouth open. I tried not to watch.
Simone’s gaze drifted to her daughter and lingered there for a moment with no apparent sign of displeasure. I suppose, if you were maternally minded, Ella was the sort of child who would induce instant broodiness. She was petite, with a miniature version of her mother’s dark ringleted curls framing a heart-shaped face. Couple that to big violet-colored eyes and she had “spoiled little brat” written all over her. I wasn’t too disappointed that her mother seemed so set against my being assigned to protect the pair of them.
Suddenly, Simone let out an annoyed breath through her nose, as though gathering her internal resources.
“OK, so Matt’s having a hard time accepting our breakup-and lately I suppose he has gotten to be something of a pain in the butt,” she allowed, her eyes still fixed on Ella. She smiled at the little girl, wiped a rogue piece of fish from her chin and turned away with clear reluctance. Her focus landed squarely on me. “But that doesn’t mean I need some kind of nanny.”
Much as I didn’t particularly want the job, I thought the nanny gibe was a bit below the belt. I’d made an effort to look smart and businesslike for this meeting. Dark brown trouser suit, cream blouse. Under protest, I’d even gunked on some lipstick.
Sean was wearing a charcoal gray made-to-measure that subtly disguised the height and the breadth of him but, to my eyes, did little to hide the deadly grace that was an innate part of his makeup.
I’d caught a glimpse of our reflections in the mirror above the bar when we’d arrived at the restaurant and I reckoned, to the casual observer at least, we probably looked like accountants. That was certainly the effect we’d been aiming for.
Harrington opened his mouth to protest at his client’s comments, but before he could speak Sean cut in again. “As I understand it, you’ve had constant phone calls and you’ve been forced to change your mobile number-twice,” he said calmly “Your ex-boyfriend has been hanging around outside both your home and your daughter’s nursery school. You’ve had notes left on your car. Unwanted deliveries. I think you need a little more than some kind of nanny, don’t you?”