Third Strike

door.

We’d already detoured via a roadside rest stop for Sean and I to change into our disguises. My father had decided to bluff it out in the role he played best—arrogant surgeon. He would walk my mother in through the front entrance and we’d meet up inside. Entirely from memory, he gave us precise directions to the elevators and the stairwell.

“They’re highly unlikely to have removed Jeremy’s records from the system yet,” he said. “All I need is an empty office with a computer terminal.” His eyes flicked over the pair of us. “You won’t be able to take your guns.”

Sean’s silence spoke louder than any verbal disagreement would have done but eventually he sighed and shoved the Glock, still in its holster, into the Navigator’s glove box. I added my SIG and, when I glanced at him, caught my father’s satisfied little smile, like he’d just won a point of principle rather than necessity.

I knew Sean was as unhappy about this as he was about relying on my father’s intel, but he bore it without comment. He’d always been able to listen to orders and evaluate them in a detached manner, even when they were given by officers he despised.

The plan we loosely devised was that Sean and I would go in via the underground ambulance entrance in the guise of nicotine junkies. To this end, Sean had even picked up a discarded cigarette packet and straightened it out, to add a layer of verisimilitude. The empty packet sat on top of the dash and the strange pervasive smell of unburned tobacco leached into the atmosphere inside the Navigator.

“What about me?” my mother asked. She had no surgical wear. “I can play some useful part, surely? If you recall, darling, I was awfully good at amateur dramatics when I was younger.”

“You were.” My father smiled at her fondly if somewhat patronizingly, I thought, and patted her hand. “In that case, we’ll hold you in reserve as our secret weapon.”

She sat up a little straighter and smiled back, hearing only praise.

“Look, can we go and get this over with before I go old and gray?” I said, a little tartly, earning a reproachful look from both of them. When was I going to outgrow that?

We parked up as far away from the security cameras as we could manage and parted company, walking quickly. As my father had predicted, nobody paid us the slightest attention as we ambled inside the building, discussing a nonexistent cop show we were supposed to have watched on TV the night before.

The unflattering skullcap was uncomfortable to someone whose only regular headgear was a bike helmet. I tugged the cap down over my forehead, rubbing the skin carefully as I did so. The lump from when I’d head-butted Vondie in my mother’s drawing room seemed to be taking a long time to disappear. I wondered how her nose was feeling.

The four of us rendezvoused in the ER, where we were swallowed up in the usual bustle. My mother was sitting in the waiting area, close to the stairs, leafing through a magazine. My father, I noticed, had already managed to purloin a white coat and a stethoscope from somewhere, together with what looked suspiciously like an official ID card on a lanyard around his neck. No doubt he knew the layout of the place well enough to know where such things were kept, and the overwhelming self-confidence to simply help himself. I’d no idea his criminal tendencies were so well developed.

“Why couldn’t we just do that?” I grouched quietly, gesturing to my shapeless garb.

Sean’s brow quirked. He was also wearing the delightful little skullcap, but on him it looked good. That wasn’t a stretch. On him, just about anything looked good.

“Because there would be too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” my father said.

“These days,” Sean said, “I think you’ll find that’s Native Americans.”

“If you’ve quite finished,” my father muttered, “perhaps we could concentrate on the matter at hand? There are a couple of security people loitering near the lift and I’d rather not push my luck too far, if I can help it.” He gave a small, almost embarrassed smile. “They may have been briefed to keep an eye out for me.”

“So, we need a diversion,” Sean said, eyes narrowed. He turned to me and opened his mouth but my father held up his hand.

“Leave this to me.” He strode away, looking very much at home in this environment.

Along one side of the emergency room was a row of three glass-walled rooms where patients could be treated more fully. There were Venetian blinds for when more privacy was required. Like watching a movie with the sound turned off, we saw my father enter the middle room where an unattended patient appeared to be either unconscious or asleep, wired up to various monitors. After a quick flick through the chart, he moved alongside the bed and did something that we hardly caught, before leaving quickly. For a few moments nothing happened. Then an alarm began to sound and the nearest medical staff rushed past him to deal with it.

My father calmly walked back to us.

“Shall we go?” he suggested quietly, not breaking stride as he reached us and swept past, heading for the stairs. “It won’t take them more than a few moments to work out what I’ve done.”

“What the hell did you do?” I demanded in a whisper. “Kill him?”

“Hardly.” He shot me a pained little glance as we sidestepped the security personnel whose eyes, naturally enough, were on the drama in front of them and not on us. “I merely loosened his blood-oxygen sensor. Even a very junior intern,” he added with a slightly scathing note in his voice, “would know enough to check that before attempting to resuscitate him.”

“Oh well,” I said under my breath as we took the stairs two at a time and the clamor dropped away behind us, “that’s all right, then.”

He led us without hesitation to the elevator, then up another two floors and through a maze of corridors, finally halting outside an unmarked door that looked no different from any of the others. He tried the handle. It wouldn’t turn. My father’s face took on a piqued look, as if the locked door was a personal affront.

“This one, I think you can leave to me,” Sean murmured, producing a pick set from his pocket and moving my father aside. The lock was clearly intended to keep out casual trespassers rather than those with more serious intent, and it yielded to Sean’s nimble fingers in less than a minute.

He straightened and pushed the door open, meeting my father’s sharp gaze with a bland expression on his face. I could see that my father really wanted to snipe at Sean further for his obviously illegal abilities, but even he recognized it would be hypocritical to do so under the circumstances.

Inside, the room turned out to be a cramped office, its floor space three-quarters occupied by two chairs and a desk, which was empty apart from a double filing tray, a telephone, and a blank computer terminal. All the usual office detritus of books, photographs and paperwork was missing, leaving shadows in the dust and faded patches on the walls.

My father crossed to the desk and sat behind it, hitting the power button on the computer as he reached for his glasses.

“How did you know this would be empty?” I asked.

His eyes flicked over me briefly. “This was Jeremy’s office,” he said shortly, and turned his attention back to the screen. “His was a particular specialty. Recruiting his replacement will take some time.”

“Are you sure you can access his records from here?” Sean asked.

“I’ll answer that in just a moment,” my father said, attacking the keyboard once the computer had booted itself up. I tried not to hang over his shoulder as he tapped his name and password into the required boxes.

The computer thought for a moment, then came up with the message: ACCESS DENIED.

“Damn,” I muttered. “What now?”

“Hm, they have been thorough, haven’t they?” my father murmured, not sounding at all surprised. “But not that thorough, I think.”

This time, he typed Jeremy Lee into the name field, and a seven-character password. I caught only the first couple of letters—M and I— but I could guess the rest. His wife’s name. I remembered the photograph Miranda had showed us of the pair of them on the yacht, happy, carefree, and my throat constricted.

My father hit ENTER. The computer clicked and whirred again, thought about being awkward while we held our collective breath, and then gave up its secrets.

It didn’t take more than a few seconds for my father to navigate his way to the appropriate section of the