“Looks that way.”
“Bloody hell.” I stood for a moment, then let my breath out. “What do we tell my parents?”
Sean erased the e-mails, dumped the cache and logged off. “The truth,” he said. “As much as they can stand of it.”
“It makes me keener than ever to talk to O’Loughlin,” I said bitterly. “Did he know what they were planning—is that why the cryptic warning? And, if so, why not tell her straight?”
“I’ll make a point of asking that when we meet him,” he said, getting to his feet. “But we must still be nearly six hundred miles from Houston. I suggest we make a start as soon as your parents are awake. We can grab breakfast on the way.”
“So, how do we approach this guy?” I wondered aloud as we walked to the elevators and punched the call button. “Phone? E-mail?”
“I think we might be better just turning up unannounced. Less chance of him setting us up if he doesn’t know we’re coming. We’ll get a more honest reaction face-to-face.”
“Okay, as long as you’re not planning that we go sneaking in there in the middle of the night,” I said.
Sean raised his eyebrows. “We’ve done plenty of sneaking, in our time,” he pointed out mildly.
“Yeah, but this is Texas, Sean,” I pointed out. The elevator doors opened and we stepped in. “This is the state where you practically have to explain to the licensing authority if your vehicle doesn’t have a gun rack. No way do I want to go sneaking into somebody’s house in the middle of the night when they’re likely to be armed and trigger-happy.”
“Come on, Charlie. He’s a lawyer.”
“So?” I muttered. “That just means he knows how to shoot you and get away with it.”
By 7:30 A.M. we’d raided the hotel breakfast buffet and hit the road. We left Little Rock and drove to Texarkana, which straddles the border between Arkansas and Texas. It was purely my imagination, but I could have sworn the sky seemed bigger here.
We dropped off I-30 at Texarkana and took the smaller roads, a mix of dual and single carriageways that meant progress was slower than before. The alternative was a long detour to stick to the interstate, going via Dallas.
We’d broken the news about Miranda to my parents as soon as we were on the road.
“Oh, Richard,” my mother had murmured with a chokedoff sob.
My father’s face had taken longer to react. “We should never have left her on her own,” he said, remote.
I braced myself for condemnation for not providing her with protection, even though she’d rejected our offer of help, but he lapsed into silent brooding after that, refusing to be drawn into conversation.
East Texas was more thickly wooded than I’d been expecting. We drove past lakes and forests, through small towns with curiously old-fashioned signs outside the local businesses, like they hadn’t been updated for the past forty years. Getting into the urban sprawl of Houston was a shock after the seemingly slower pace. The journey had taken forever and now, suddenly, we were here.
Traffic was starting to build, but we were all anxious to take a look at our enemy. Storax had their base of operations on a twenty-three-acre site in an area called Pearland, just outside Beltway 8. The site was on a high-tech industrial park, and surrounded by a good deal of chain-link fencing.
Even on a cursory drive-by, we saw patrols with dogs and CCTV that had been positioned by someone who knew what they were doing, backed up by more sophisticated and much less obvious security.
The grounds were not as attractively landscaped as those surrounding the hospital in Boston, but they were much more carefully thought out from a defensive point of view. The building itself was mirror glass and pale gray concrete, giving nothing away. Apart from the name in letters a meter high along the front wall, it could have housed anything. It wasn’t even easy to identify the main entrance.
“We’d need an army to break into this place,” Sean muttered, eyes still on the image of the pharmaceutical giant in the rearview mirror as we drove away.
“Well, Sergeant, considering we are all the troops you have,” I said, glancing across at him, “let’s just hope we don’t need to break in.”
The light was starting to drop and when it went, it went fast, the blue end of the spectrum fading to leave a soft lingering red and orange cast. In under half an hour it seemed to go from squint-inducing sunlight to dark enough for the Camry’s headlights to make a difference. Night didn’t so much fall in Texas, it plummeted.
We headed back towards Houston Hobby airport, where there were any number of hotels and motels to choose from, and picked one almost at random. My parents weren’t keen on being left there, but the lure of a real bed quickly overpowered their protests. Sean and I grabbed a couple of hours’ rest ourselves to let the rush hour die. Then we had a hot shower and a change of clothes, used the business center to print out route maps, and headed out again.
“You do realize,” Sean said quietly, as we pulled back out onto the freeway, “that they should have caught us by now, don’t you?”
“Yes, I’ve been wondering about that,” I said. “If Collingwood sounded the alarm after Vondie’s ambush failed to net us, we never should have made it out of Massachusetts.”
“Mm, so does that make us good?” he asked. “Or just lucky?”
I flashed him a tired smile. “Can’t we be both?”
CHAPTER 28
Terry O’Loughlin lived in a large house that showed both modern and Spanish influences, in the quiet, well-to-do suburb of West University Place. It was an area of wide leafy streets, triple-car garages and lawn sprinklers, just inside the 610 Loop, an inner ring road that circled the skyscraper heart of Houston.
We drove past slowly, while I made a bit of a show of holding up the map and pointing at signposts, just in case the neighbors were nosy. I had a sudden abrupt sense of déjà vu—of cruising past Miranda Lee’s house and of what had been lurking inside. The O’Loughlin house, too, was quiet and dark.
“Look’s like there’s nobody home yet,” Sean murmured. I heard the slightest catch in his voice and knew he, also, was thinking of Miranda.
“Hey, he has a Porsche lifestyle to support,” I pointed out. “That probably means long hours—even for a corporate lawyer.”
Sean considered this, nodding his acceptance. “Plus, he lives alone, so there’s nobody to rush home to.”
“So, do we broach him on the doorstep, or let him get inside?” I asked.
Sean shook his head. “Neither, I think,” he said. “A GT3 is a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of motorcar over here. There’s no way you’d leave it on the driveway.” He nodded at the attached garage. “There’ll be an electric opener on the garage door. He may never need to get out of the car outside the house. And once he’s inside there’s no guarantee he’ll open up to us. Particularly if he’s feeling jumpy after what’s happened.”
“So … are you suggesting we break in and wait for him to turn up?”
“That would be my choice,” Sean agreed.
“What about the alarm system? A house like that is bound to have one.”
He gave me an offended look. “Do I look like an amateur?” he said. “Besides, most people get lazy about setting the alarm. Particularly,” he added, leaning forwards and pointing towards a gray shadow that had suddenly appeared in one of the front windows, “when they have house cats.”
The gray shape solidified into a large white cat, who’d jumped onto the windowsill and sat up to wash its own chest with an exaggerated nodding motion, one forepaw dangling.