Third Strike

mother had been discussing so earnestly while we’d been gone.

Now, I recognized, was not the time to ask.

Miranda took awhile to answer her phone, and sounded distracted when she finally did so.

“It’s Charlie Fox,” I said. “Um, Richard and Elizabeth’s daughter,” I added when she didn’t immediately respond.

“Oh yes, of course! I’m sorry, Charlie. I’m a little out of it right now, but I’m glad you’ve called,” she said and gave a nervous laugh. “In fact, if you hadn’t, I’d probably have tried to call you.”

“Why?” I said, and it was the tone as much as the question that had Sean’s attention snap in my direction. “What’s happened?”

“You know how I mentioned about Terry O’Loughlin—in Storax’s legal department? Well, I had another e-mail just in—but it’s kind of weird.”

“Weird how?” I said. Now, my father was leaning in close from the rear seat.

“Well, it’s really brief—a warning. Just tells me to be careful and not to trust anyone.” Another short laugh. Definitely nerves. “I mean, after yesterday—discovering the house was broken into and everything, it’s freaked me out, you know?”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “It sounds like Storax is playing mind games with you. Trying to scare you.”

“Yeah, well, it’s working.” She let out a shaky breath. “But what should I do?”

“Have you made any plans to go to your friend’s place—Vermont, wasn’t it?”

“I’m already packed,” she admitted. “I checked into a motel last night and only came back to the house this morning to get a few things. I was going to leave again right after lunch.”

I checked my watch, calculated the journey time. “Hang on till we get there, can you? We’re just getting onto the interstate. Unless we hit traffic, we should be with you inside an hour.”

“Okay, yes,” she said, in a rush. “I didn’t want to ask, but … thank you.”

I ended the call and relayed the gist of it to the others. “It sounds like Storax have got her rattled,” I finished. “Which is probably the point of the exercise.”

“Yeah,” Sean said, pulling out to overtake a line of Kenworth trucks, “and at the risk of scaring her even more, what do we tell her about what we found—or more to the point, what we didn’t find—at the hospital?”

My father took a moment to reply, but whether this was because he was considering his answer, or trying to bring himself to have a normal conversation with Sean, I wasn’t sure.

Eventually, he said, “We still don’t really know what Storax hopes to achieve by all this.”

“They’re covering their backs, surely?” I said, twisting so I could carry on a conversation with him in the rear seat more easily. He was sitting directly behind me, which made it more difficult. “They have to know there’s a chance that some of the patients being treated will suffer the same kind of side effects that Jeremy Lee did. And if they didn’t know that before his death, then they sure as hell did afterwards. It makes no sense that they haven’t completely withdrawn it and stopped the trials. By continuing, aren’t they opening themselves up to another thalidomide fiasco?”

“Withdrawing it could potentially cost them a great deal of money,” my father said. “And might allow a competitor to steal a march on them. Better for Storax if they can work on the problems quickly, without anyone finding out about them.”

“But if the rate Miranda said her husband deteriorated is anything to go by, surely the side effects would have shown up pretty quickly?” I pointed out.

My father shrugged. “Not necessarily. Jeremy was of Korean descent. Korea has one of the lowest instances of osteoporosis in the world. Of course, there’s considerable research to suggest this is largely due to environmental factors rather than genetics, but it’s an interesting point.”

“None of it’s enough to go to all this trouble over, though, is it?” Sean demanded. “Overdosing Lee, falsifying his records, setting up an elaborate operation to ruin your career? Never mind what they were prepared to do to your wife.” He tilted his head slightly to smile reassuringly at my mother in the rearview mirror—a gesture that had my father’s frown deepening into a scowl.

“How much does Storax stand to make out of this—if it goes ahead?” I asked, as much to distract him as anything else.

“Osteoporosis is becoming a major problem,” my father said, mentally shaking himself like a dog coming out of water. “When you take the worldwide licensing, a treatment as successful as Storax’s seemed to be, would be worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, in annual revenue.”

“Even so,” I said. “I feel we’re missing something. There’s got to be more to it than that.”

“I agree,” Sean said. “One thing that’s been bothering me is how Storax managed to get their hands on someone like Vonda Blaylock at such short notice. Kaminski was already contracted to them for security—that much we know—but Blaylock is a government agent. How did they recruit her? And why?”

“Perhaps they knew that something like Jeremy Lee’s death would happen, sooner or later,” I said. “And, it never does any harm to have a backup plan.”

For once, the gods of congestion smiled on us. We made better than average time and left the main freeway at the exit we’d taken only the day before, following what I would classify as a fast A road that began to twist and turn. Then off again onto a minor road that sliced, curving, through a thickly wooded area.

There was very little other traffic now. Sean drove with easy precision, to the point where I could leave him to it and stay sitting mostly sideways to chat face-to-face with my parents.

So, I wasn’t in the best position to brace myself when Sean jumped on the brakes hard enough for the antilock system to activate. There was a whump, and the Navigator lurched sideways abruptly, wallowing, the quiet hum of its tires on the asphalt transformed into a harsh metallic grinding.

“What the—?” I began.

“Stinger,” Sean managed, fighting to control the abruptly unwieldy vehicle.

“A missile?” my father demanded, more outrage than alarm. “Someone just fired a Stinger missile at us?”

“Wrong Stinger. Spikes on a chain across the road,” I said shortly. “We just lost all four tires.”

The SIG was out in my hand, but I didn’t remember drawing it. I was twisting constantly in my seat, scanning the road all around us, searching for the ambush that could only be moments away. “Will it drive?”

“I’m doing my best,” Sean said. “But if it comes to a chase, it may well be quicker to walk.”

A flash of movement to the driver’s side caught my eye. The front end of a bloodred Ford pickup truck, big as a fire engine, shiny bull bars reinforcing the grille like a battering ram. It was heading straight for us out of a narrow side road that disappeared up into the trees. The truck covered the ground rapidly, with a roar of its massive V-8 engine that I heard even over the racket made by the Navigator’s stripped and battered wheels.

“Incoming!” I shouted.

Sean let go of the steering wheel and got his hands out of the way. Good job, too, or the vicious kick when the pickup hit us would have broken both his thumbs. Both doors and the B-pillar buckled, the side-impact air bags exploded and the windows shattered, raining down glass onto both Sean and my mother, who was sitting directly behind him.

The force of the crash whipped the Navigator into a graunching broadside across the road and onto the grass. The bare rims of the alloy wheels dug in and nearly flipped us, thrashing the cabin around like we were being shaken in the jaws of a monster. I clung to the door grip, peripherally aware of my mother’s terrified screaming in the backseat.

“Down!” I yelled at Sean. He instantly threw himself sideways, flat across the center console. I reached over the top of him with the SIG and put three rounds into the front screen of the pickup where I judged the driver’s head would be, the empty brass pinging off the inside of the Navigator’s dash. “Clear!”

“Out—now!” Sean said, rearing up to launch himself over to my side of the vehicle.

As soon as we’d come to a stop I’d punched my seat belt release and piled out backwards, keeping the SIG up to cover Sean as I checked our escape route.

Sean wrenched open the rear door and bodily dragged my father out. He landed heavily on his knees on the grass, dazed, shaking his head as if to clear the ringing from the cumulative concussion of explosive air-bag charges