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.”
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
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.
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.
As I watched, my father slowed to glance across at the man with the buzz-cut, frowning. Uncertainty oozed from every pore of his skin like a sickness.
Buzz-cut moved like someone bigger than his size, with an utter physical self-assurance that almost bordered on brash. He never broke stride, simply drew level and hooked his hand under my father’s arm. Even from twenty meters away, I saw Buzz-cut’s fingers pinch deep into the delicate pressure points on either side of the elbow joint.
My father stiffened, first with outrage, then with pain. The shock of it knocked the fight out of him and he allowed himself to be swept forwards.
My first thought, when I saw the way the guy carried himself, was that Buzz-cut must be a cop. He had a tense alertness, a slightly hunched stance, like he was constantly expecting someone to throw the first punch.
But I didn’t think that even hardened NYPD detectives, would hustle someone of my father’s standing out of his hotel in such a way. If they’d wanted to break him down before questioning, then marching him through the lobby in handcuffs would have done it nicely. For some people, humiliation works better than a beating, any day.
Just as Buzz-cut succeeded in propelling my father to the edge of the curb, a black Lincoln Town Car drew up smartly alongside them. It was identical to the vehicle my father had climbed into after his abrasive encounter with the news reporter only the day before, but they were too common in New York for me to read much into that.
The driver pulled in fast, braking hard so my father’s companion had the rear door open almost before the car had come to a complete stop. It was smooth and precise and way too slick to be any kind of lucky coincidence. Buzz-cut must have called him in before they left the hotel lobby.
Their timing impressed me. I’d spent too much time micromanaging exactly this kind of rapid inconspicuous exfil not to recognize expert work when I saw it.
After that one brief show of resistance, my father allowed himself to be ducked into the backseat without further demur. I read the tension in his neck and upper body only because I knew to look. The doorman gave them a bored salute, oblivious.
Buzz-cut took a moment to scan the street before he climbed in, and there was nothing casual about that highly proficient survey. I felt his gaze land on me and linger. Even though I knew the iridium coating on my visor meant he couldn’t see my eyes, I had to fight the instinctive desire to break the contact too quickly.
Instead, I let my head turn away, nice and slow, and concentrated on my breathing, on relaxing my shoulders, letting my mind empty.
I was confident enough to know, as Parker had pointed out, that I was very good at blending into the scenery. The fact that this man took an extra second to check me out meant either I was losing my touch, or he was a real pro.
And—if he wasn’t the police—what did that mean?
I let the Lincoln get to the end of the street and make a left before I toed the bike into gear and followed. If
