“My God,” I said. “What did you say to that?”
“I told him, only if he was likely to find it entertaining to be disemboweled slowly through his navel.”
“I bet you didn’t.”
“You’re right, I didn’t,” he admitted. “I smiled as though he’d said something witty and informed him with excruciating politeness that you were one of our top operatives and that, if he valued certain parts of his anatomy, perhaps he shouldn’t repeat that kind of speculation within Parker’s earshot—or yours, for that matter.”
The amusement subsided and, just when I thought I’d got away with it, Sean asked quietly, “So, are you going to tell me what happened between you and Nick today?”
My turn to sigh. I rolled onto my back and stared up into the gloom while I recounted the news report I’d seen on TV, and the subsequent encounter with my father. I debated on editing the content slightly, but in the end it all came spilling out practically verbatim, until finally I talked myself to silence.
Somewhere in the grid of streets below us, a car cranked up and accelerated away. I listened to its blowing exhaust through two gear-changes before the noise was swallowed up by the background chatter of the city.
Sean still hadn’t spoken. I listened to the tenor of his breathing and smiled at the ceiling
“Stop it,” I said.
“What?”
“Gloating.”
“I never said a word.” He did injured innocence rather well. “Did I say a word?”
I rolled partway back so I could prop onto an elbow and look down at him. “You didn’t have to. I can hear you cackling from here. It’s very juvenile.”
He grinned outright then, wholly unrepentant. “Well come on, Charlie,” he said, not trying to hide the amusement that glistened in his voice. “Even you have to admit—after all that rampant disapproval—it’s bloody funny to find out your old man’s finally fallen off his high horse.”
“No,” I said slowly. “That’s the trouble—it isn’t funny. Even if I discounted half the things he said afterwards—”
“Which you can’t.”
I let my breath out fast, an annoyed gush. “Yeah, right, that’s easy for you to say. You haven’t spent half your life trying to get his attention and the other half wishing you hadn’t succeeded.”
“That’s just it,” he said, and he’d matched my tone. “I can view him as an outsider—God knows, he’s always done his damnedest to make me feel that way. He’s a coldhearted bastard at times, but he doesn’t have the emotional capacity to be vindictive. And he’s not a drunk.”
He tilted his head so I knew he was looking directly at me. I felt the prickle of it across my skin even though I couldn’t see his eyes.
“Reasons?”
He crooked one arm behind his neck to support it. “You’re physically fit. We both know that and, hell, he probably knew before we did. Calling you a cripple is gross exaggeration and he’s not a man prone to flights of fancy. So why did he say it? What did he hope to achieve?”
“O-kay,” I said, reluctantly absorbing his words. “But what about the drinking problem? How can you be so sure about that?”
He gave a soft, bitter laugh. “My father was a drinker, remember?”
I’d never met Sean’s father. Long before Sean and I first met, the man had been killed in an inebriated car crash, which wrecked his ambition to die of liver failure at the earliest age possible. By all accounts, he had not been a happy drunk. I squeezed Sean’s arm.
“I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.” I felt him shrug. “All I meant was, I know the signs and your old man doesn’t have them. Besides, how long do you think he could keep the shakes quiet when he spends every day holding a scalpel?”
I sank back onto the sheets, frowning.
“But I heard him admit to it, completely unequivocally, on camera, and it’s the kind of admission that will totally ruin his career—if it hasn’t done already. Why the hell would he say that, if it’s not true?”
“Seems like he said a lot of things today that weren’t true,” Sean said. “You either accept he’s flipped his lid and we book him a nice padded room at Bellevue, or you go and bully the truth out of him.”
He paused and, though I couldn’t see his face clearly I could hear by his voice that the smile was back full strength. “After what you did to Nick today, I’d say you’ll have no trouble on that score.”
CHAPTER 4
One of the things I quickly learned to love about New York was Central Park early in the mornings. I ran there, and whenever I could find an excuse, I detoured through it using one of the numerous sunken roads.
It was extravagance on a grand scale to have such an expanse of carefully created countryside tumbling down the spine of one of the most expensive areas of real estate in the world. Early on, I’d been staggered to discover that the park covered more than eight hundred tranquil acres. Not just the lungs of Manhattan, but the heart of it, too. New York is never entirely still. There’s always some part that twitches, shrieks or quivers. But Central Park is the closest thing to stillness that it has.
The leaves were just beginning to turn—losing their lushness and not yet fully ablaze—building up tension towards what I’d been promised would be a stunning autumn display.
I left behind the dog walkers and the power walkers and rode south down wide streets made narrower by the sheer height of the buildings on either flank. Brief flashes of sunlight splashed down between them as I wove through the spray of the sidewalk sweepers and the steam rising from the subway vents.
The Buell cantered lazily beneath me, all that bunched muscle constrained by no more than the slight rotation of my right wrist, bouncing gleefully over the generically appalling road surface. I eased back to let a stoplight drop from red straight to green at an intersection in front of me, then cranked on the power, feeling the shove in the small of my back as the rear tire bit deep. And it came to me, quite suddenly, that I was happy here. Content, even.
And I was not going to let my father’s bitter spill of lies spoil it for me.
Because Sean was right—it was out of character. My father might well carry over the clinical detachment from his work into his family life, but he’d never been mean-spirited with it.
Until now.
By the time I reached midtown, traffic was starting to herd towards the morning crush, jostling to the usual accompaniment of Morse code horns. I ignored the halfhearted bleat from a yellow cab I caught napping in the inside lane—if I didn’t cause him to slam on the brakes, it didn’t count as obstruction—and pulled up on the opposite side of the street from my father’s hotel.
I let the bike idle by the curb for a moment, unzipping my sleeve to check with the Tag Heuer wristwatch Sean had bought me as a ‘Welcome to America’ present.
By it, I worked out I had roughly an hour before politics dictated I show my face in the office, even after a late-night assignment. Plenty of time for what I had to say.
I’d aimed to arrive at the hotel late enough not to rouse my father from his breakfast, but early enough to catch him before the most convenient and obvious of the morning flights to the UK, just in case he was planning to cut and run.
I eyed the same regal-looking doorman standing outside the front entrance and wondered if he’d still let me walk in unchallenged today, when I was in my motorcycle leathers.
Hm, probably not.
And just as I was debating my options, the mirrored glass doors to the hotel swung open and my father stepped out.
My first instinct was to abandon the bike and go to confront him right there. I’d got as far as reaching for the engine killswitch when another man stepped out of the hotel alongside him, keeping close to his elbow. The second man was dressed like a cheap businessman—but a cheap businessman who has his hair cut by a military barber. My hand stilled.