Third Strike

father who came in. On the outside, he looked as together as always, even his tie was perfectly knotted. But inside was a different story. He saw Collingwood stirring limply on the floor, then caught sight of Vondie’s body and froze. It was the sight of him, more than of Sean, that snapped me back to reality.

I struggled for my feet, had to claw my way up the wall to make it. “How the hell did you both get in?”

“Terry,” Sean said shortly, but his eyes were on my father. “Turns out there was a back way, after all.”

Terry had found my clothes. They must have been stashed somewhere close but I hadn’t seen them. She handed them over, flushed, looking miserable. I needed help to get into them again. My father had seen me naked more times than either of us could count, but he still kept his back turned while Terry and I struggled.

Going to need practice dressing someone else—someone helpless—aren’t you, Fox?

I shut it out, yanked on my shirt with enough force to split a seam at the back of the arm, then let Terry nudge my fat fingers aside to button it.

“Did you get hold of Parker?” I asked Sean.

“We tried—believe me,” he said with feeling. “It went to voice mail every time. I’ve left him half a dozen messages.”

“Voice mail?”

“Yeah. I’m hoping that means he’s in flight.” He had moved up alongside my father and there was something strangely similar about the way both of them stood and gazed down at Collingwood while he got himself back together.

“Where’s Elizabeth?” my father demanded, in a quiet arctic tone I didn’t quite recognize, even from him.

Collingwood looked up, eyed the pair of them. “My guys’ll have taken her somewhere nice and, ah, safe,” he said. “How long she stays that way depends on you. You let me go and maybe she might come out of this in one piece.”

Sean stepped forwards and hit him in the face, a casual downward left that nevertheless had all his weight and muscle behind it, delivered so fast it seemed no more than a trick of the light. One moment the government man was half-sitting, propped on an elbow. The next, his head jerked back and bounced off the wall behind him. He rode it as best he could, brought a hand up and tested the inside of his lip.

He smiled for the first time, a full-blown grin.

“Is that the best you’ve got, Meyer?” he said, spitting out a bubble of blood. He reached up and tugged at his hair, and a section of it covering his crown came loose and dropped into his lap. Underneath the toupee, the top of his head was completely bald. The ugly scar tissue shone in reddened blotches like a crude patchwork quilt.

“I was an intel man working with the Afghanis,” he said. “Got ambushed by a group still loyal to the Taliban. They had me three days—three days—and I didn’t tell them a thing, Meyer. Think you’ve got three days to work on me now?”

CHAPTER 33

“I don’t need three days.”

My father’s voice was utterly calm. Even the underlying tension that normally characterized his speech, gave it its distinctive clip, was gone. His face was a mask. I recognized the sight and sound of him, but not the man beneath.

“Richard—”

“I know more about the human body, its strengths and weaknesses, than you will learn in a lifetime,” he said, cutting Sean off with a faint little half smile.

“And you think you can hurt me more than a tribe of Afghanis with bayonets and a fire pit?” Collingwood threw at him.

“Hurting you would be barbaric and pointless. The body’s memory for pain is generally poor,” my father said disdainfully. “No doubt you can recall the emotions attached to the pain you experienced when you were tortured, Mr. Collingwood, rather than the actual pain itself.” He let his gaze settle softly onto the government man. “I have no intention of causing you any more pain than is absolutely necessary.”

He walked across to the fallen trolley, ignoring Vondie’s body as though she’d never existed. He picked up one of the pairs of latex gloves and pulled them on with practiced ease, turning back to his “patient” with something approaching a smooth bedside manner.

“No pain, huh?” Collingwood said, almost with a snort. “You haven’t grasped this whole interrogation idea, have you, Doc?”

“It is a new experience for me, I admit,” my father murmured. “Of course, if you continue to refuse to release my wife, unharmed, I do intend to cause you irreversible physical damage.”

Beside me, Terry took in a gasp of air.

“You might prefer not to see this, Ms. O’Loughlin,” my father said politely, glancing in her direction. “Your colleague was injured just outside. He was unconscious and I placed him into the recovery position, but it might be as well to check on him, if you wouldn’t mind?”

Terry nodded, a little dazed, and stumbled out. Without her support, I had to lean heavily on the nearest wall for balance. It was just the aftereffects of the TASER hit and the drug they’d given me, I told myself, but I had to forcefully bring to mind what had been done to me in this room, on Collingwood’s orders. What they’d been prepared to do to me, regardless of the consequences. And what they might also have been doing, out of sight, to my mother.

My torso felt shaky, my gut churning. I had a vision of my internal organs already parting and shifting like a giant puzzle, repositioning themselves to accommodate the growth of a child.

It’s a lie! It has to be a lie.

My father turned to Sean. “I’m going to need his shirt off,” he said. “And a very sharp knife.”

Sean holstered the Glock and dragged Collingwood upright. The government man tried to resist, but Sean danced him face first into the block work and held him there with unforgiving fingers digging in to the pressure points at the back of his scrawny neck.

He bent close to Collingwood’s ear. “I’ll rip it off you if I have to. Your choice.”

Collingwood’s struggles continued and Sean roughly loosened the cheap tie, then grabbed the back of the collar and yanked. The buttons popped and scattered. I could only watch, the way Vondie must have watched while Buzz-cut and the pickup driver stripped the clothes off me.

Collingwood had a lot of body hair. It covered his chest and back like a thick black pelt, showing glimpses of skinny white flesh beneath. I could see his ribs flexing as his breathing quickened, but his nerve still held. There were more scars there, the crisscross of old lash marks where he’d been beaten till he bled. My father froze at the sight of them. Even Sean paused, sucked in a quiet breath.

“Think you can, ah, match that?” Collingwood asked over his shoulder, pride hot and strong. “You’re a civilized man. That was done to me by savages.”

“All men are savages under the skin, Mr. Collingwood,” my father said, icy in his control now. “Your agent, and her associate, terrorized my wife in her own home. They threatened to beat and rape her—on, I have no doubt, your orders. Did they also stand over Miranda Lee while she slipped into unconsciousness? That tends to take the shine off one’s sense of decency and fair play.”

Sean caught sight of the restraints hanging from the ceiling and, just for a second, a stillness came over him that I recognized as rage.

He rammed his elbow into Collingwood’s kidneys, hard enough to blind him, and swung him away from the wall. By the time the older man had got his breath back, Sean had cuffed his hands over his head and had stepped back, leaving him to sway there. Collingwood’s back was towards me and, cowardly, I was glad I couldn’t see his face.

Sean reached into his own trouser pocket and pulled out a folding lock knife with a wicked four-inch blade, snapped it open and presented it, handle first, to my father.

My father’s face showed nothing other than concentration as he moved round so he could meet Collingwood’s eyes, holding the knife up so it was in plain sight as he examined the blade.