Third Strike

side of the Atlantic.

“We’ll improvise,” Sean said now, as the lift doors opened and we stepped out into the lobby.

Outside, Madeleine handed him the keys to the Shogun. “I’ll take care of checkout here and the hotel will drop me off for my shuttle flight back down to Heathrow.” She checked her slim-line Cartier wristwatch. “I have a couple of hours before I need to check in.”

“Thank you, Madeleine,” Sean said. He set down his bag and put his hands on her shoulders, turning her slightly to face him and giving her one of those simmering smiles that tend to make women sigh a great deal and want to strip and lie down. She resisted the urge, confirming my earlier suspicion that she was made of stronger stuff than she appeared to be.

“In the words of your adopted homeland, you’re welcome,” she said, hitting him with a pretty knockout smile of her own. “Leave the Shogun in the car park here when you’re all done and mail the keys from the airport,” she added. “There’s a stamped addressed Jiffy bag in the glove box. I’ll have one of the guys come up and collect it, but just be sure to let me know if it needs any special … cleaning of any description.”

Sean grinned at her. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he said, the picture of injured innocence.

“Well, call me if you need backup,” she said, keeping it brisk. “I can have some of my people up with you in about three hours, depending on the traffic, with thermal-imaging gear, night-vision equipment, the works. We’ve gone very high-tech these days. Just say the word.”

I saw Sean’s minuscule flinch as she said “my people,” where once they had been his, but he smiled.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” he said. “We thought we’d give this a whirl the old-fashioned way before we go for a full-scale assault from the roof.”

“‘The old-fashioned way’?” Madeleine queried.

“Hm,” I said. “I know it sounds radical, but we were going to try knocking on the front door … .”

CHAPTER 8

“Take the next lane coming up on the right,” I said. “The house is about a mile and a half further down, on the right.”

The instructions were probably unnecessary. Sean had been to my parents’ place on at least three occasions over the years, which meant he could have found it again blindfolded. He had that annoyingly uncanny sense of direction.

Now, I clutched for the center armrest as the Shogun swayed violently. “And can you please try and remember they still drive on the left over here? These roads are too narrow to go bowling down the middle at this speed.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Sean said mildly, not slackening his pace. “I’m just making best use of the visibility— hedging my bets.”

“Hedge will be the operative word if you meet one of the locals towing a trailer with half a ton of horse in it,” I snapped.

“Calm down, Charlie,” Sean said, sounding irritatingly placid. “We need to decide how we’re going to handle this. We don’t know what—if anything—we’re walking into.”

“Simple,” I said, aware of a tightness in my chest that made it difficult to breathe. “We knock on the front door and, if there’s anyone I don’t recognize in the house with my mother, we kick the shit out of them and go home. Next?”

He pursed his lips as he stuck the unwieldy 4?4 into a narrow, blind left-hander, his movements deceptively slow when things seemed to be happening around him so fast.

“In essence, I like it,” he said lightly. “What it lacks in style it makes up for in dumb simplicity.” His voice hardened. “What makes you think you’ll get further than the threshold before they cut her throat?”

His choice of words was deliberate, I knew. It jolted me out of my focused little bubble of anger, made my hand stray automatically towards my own throat, to the fading scar that lay hidden beneath the high neck of my sweater.

I thought suddenly of Madeleine. “Feminine wiles,” I said. I sat up straight in my seat and gave him my most brilliant vacuous smile. “Oh, Mummy, I’m awfully sorry to barge in on you like this, but I just had to bring my new boyfriend home to meet you.” I clapped my hands together a couple of times, a proper spoiled little princess, then clasped them together under my chin and put my head on one side like a particularly stupid spaniel. “Isn’t he just super?”

The utter disbelief on Sean’s face would have been more comical if he’d kept his eyes on the road. As it was, he only managed to jerk the nearside wheels out of the gutter at the last moment.

“Oh my good God,” he spluttered, hardly able to steer for laughing. “You do that terrifyingly well.”

“Super,” I said, and let the bimbo act drop. “You’re going to have to do it, too. You can be something in the City that doesn’t require a brain. You’ll just have to pretend you don’t have a chin, either.”

“Investment banker?” Sean suggested, lips twitching. “No, I know—I’ll be a political spin doctor.”

“No,” I said. “It needs to be something where they’re not going to suspect you’re capable of sticking a knife in their backs. Civil servant?”

He shook his head. “These days, all the bad guys know that’s doublespeak for MI5,” he said. “Are we really going to let things go far enough for me to need a cover story?”

“Probably not, but you were the one who taught me the value of good prep. You’ll need a different name, though. Sean makes you sound too tough.”

“Blame my mother,” he said carelessly. “She was very big on James Bond when I was born.”

I twisted in my seat. “You were named after Sean Connery?” I said in wonder. “Really?”

He frowned, as though he’d just realized that was one piece of family history he probably shouldn’t have shared. Then he nodded and gave a wry smile.

“My sister’s called Ursula and my younger brother’s Roger. You work it out,” he said. Ursula Andress and Roger Moore. Who would have thought it? “We even had a dog called No—it was a bugger trying to teach it anything.”

I laughed out loud and registered that we were nearly at the ivy-clad gateposts that marked the entrance to my parents’ driveway and he’d humored the nerves out of me, made the last mile or so that much more bearable.

“So, pick a suitable upper-class-twit name or I’ll pick one for you,” I said, ruthless nevertheless.

“How about—” that beatific smile—“Auric?”

“As in Goldfinger? Get real. Okay, you’ve had your chance, mate … .”

“Mummy darling!” I squeaked as soon as the front door opened to my knock. “I’m awfully sorry to arrive unannounced and all that, but I had to let you meet Dominic. Isn’t he just divine?”

Sean had time to glare at me before he shouldered his way through the narrow opening, looking for all the world as if I was the one thrusting him eagerly inside. My mother, without a chance of mounting a viable defense, backed up into the tiled hallway, nothing but bewilderment on her smooth features.

She looked normal. Normal for my mother, that is. Hair set and face perfect, she was wearing a high-neck cream silk blouse with a fine-knit wool cardigan over it, probably cashmere, and, yes, pearls at her throat and ears. She’d finished off the ensemble with a tweed skirt and sensible shoes. Every inch the countrified English lady.

And not the slightest sign that she was being held here under duress.

For an expanded moment, we stood there, the three of us. It felt to me that I saw everything in that austere space in the blink of an eye. The gleaming black-and-white diagonal set of the tiles underfoot, the old church pew that doubled as a repository for car keys and unopened mail, with a line of scrubbed Wellington boots beneath, the polished dark wood staircase stretching to the upper floor.

And the two unidentified jackets on the pegs below the antique mirror.

I glanced up at it, saw the crack of the slightly open door to the drawing room reflected there, and instinctively held out my arms wide.

“Mummy, it’s so lovely to see you,” I said, my voice still loud and as guileless as I could make it. “Now, I know it’s naughty of us to just pop up from London like this, but Nicky’s just so