Second Shot Read online

  SECOND SHOT

  ZOË SHARP

  For my fellow LadyKillers:

  Carla Banks (Danuta Reah), Lesley Horton and Priscilla Masters for their continuing support and encouragement – safety in numbers!

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the Author

  By Zoë Sharp

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  Take it from me, getting yourself shot hurts like hell.

  Not like absorbing a punch, or breaking a bone, but that fullblown, relentless, ripped inside kind of pain. The kind where I prayed for oblivion and yet feared the darkness more than anything I’d ever known.

  I’d taken one 9mm round through the fleshy part of my left thigh and another through the back of my right shoulder. The first shot was nasty, but it was a through-and-through, passing clean in and out of the muscle without apparently hitting anything vital. Yes, I was bleeding and it burnt like a bastard. But under normal circumstances – like reasonably prompt medical assistance – it was not liable to be a life threatener.

  The second shot was the one that worried me. The bullet had ploughed into my scapula, twelve grams of lead and copper travelling at roughly 280 metres a second. It had hit plenty hard enough to put me on the ground and deflected off to God knows where inside my body.

  The whole of my torso was screaming. When I coughed I tasted blood in my mouth and knew that, whatever other damage it had done, the round had penetrated my lung. I had a vivid mental picture of it still slowly progressing, maybe in a slowmotion tumble, contaminating whatever soft tissue it passed through, like a cancer.

  The good news was that I was still conscious, my heart still pumping, my brain still functioning, more or less. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t still going to kill me, given time.

  And, one way or another, time was not on my side.

  Right now I was lying on my belly in the bottom of a snow-crusted shallow ditch, bleeding into the dirty trickle of icy water that had collected there, and trying to decide if I really was prepared to die here or not.

  ‘I know you’re out there!’ shouted a distant voice in the trees further up the mountain. ‘I know you can hear me!’

  I recognised the voice, but more than that I recognised the tone. Hatred and lust. Not a good combination.

  Simone’s voice. My principal. Seven days ago I’d been sent to New England with the express purpose of protecting her against possible threat. Now she was out there somewhere in the woods with a SIG semiautomatic, while I lay here incapable of protecting anyone, least of all myself.

  What a difference a week makes.

  I lay quite still. Not moving was the easy part. I felt horribly vulnerable in that position, but turning over didn’t seem like a good plan. Even the thought of attempting it made me break out into a cold sweat.

  ‘Cold’ was the word. The temperature was four degrees below and the wet blood round the entry wounds in my shoulder blade and leg had already started to crystallise on my clothing. My face was turned to the side so one cheek was scorched by the freezing earth and the other by the freezing air. All I could smell was blood and pine needles and ice. I think I might have been crying.

  But, I decided sluggishly, cold was good. It would slow my system down, delay my bleedout – right up to the point where hypothermia got me. I tried not to shiver. Shivering hurt. I tried not to breathe too deeply. That hurt, too.

  The pain was extraordinary. A biting, seething, swirling mass of it that sheathed my entire body but had pooled in my chest. My leg was pulsing like I was being rhythmically and repeatedly stabbed by a redhot blade. I didn’t seem able to feel my right arm at all.

  A scatter of small stones cascaded down the side of the ditch and rolled towards my face. I opened one eye and watched them approaching in the light from a clear hunter’s moon reflected on the stark ground.

  There was a shadow above me, I realised. Someone was standing a little way up from the ditch and staring down at me sprawled below them. They were too far back among the trees for me to see a face, but instinct told me it wasn’t Simone. This observer was too quiet and too controlled. Friend or foe?

  Better to assume foe.

  I closed my eye again and played dead. It wasn’t a stretch.

  In the near distance, higher up the slope, I could hear Simone crashing through the trees, sobbing out little grunting cries as the thin branches whipped back at her. It was like listening to an animal that had been frightened beyond reason and would kill anything within reach just through that fear. And she was heading my way.

  I risked another look. The shadow had gone, making the light over me seem brighter now. Or maybe that was just my own shifting perception. Even the pain had receded slightly, dropping back to a leaden throb. But I was achingly aware of every sodden breath, of the urge to just let go of it all and sleep. I fought it with everything I’d got left. Something told me that if I succumbed to this bonenumbing weariness, the game was going to be over.

  I’m sorry.

  I formed the apology soundlessly, quickly, like I needed to go through this final absolution while I still had the chance. I pictured my parents and wondered if they’d be as disappointed by my death as they had been by my life.

  And Sean, who had once been my life and had become so again. Sean, who’d sent me out here not expecting me to be careless enough to die on the job. Suddenly I wished I’d told him that I loved him on the day I’d left.

  The light gleamed stronger all the time and had begun to flicker. It took a moment for me to realise it wasn’t my vision starting to fail, but flashlights being carried up the icy incline at a jerky run. There were voices, too. Loud, and so harsh I failed to make out the words.

  A thumping rumble swooped down low over the tips of the trees, making the ground quiver under me, spinning up the loose powder snow. The beam of a highwatt searchlight stabbed downwards, intense and blinding. I knew I should make some signal, offer some sign of life, but I couldn’t summon the energy.

  ‘Charlie!’

  Close now.

  Simone was gasping for air and weeping like her heart was broken. I heard her before I saw her, lunging across the final few metres that separated us, and offered a silent curse that the helicopter should have drawn her to me in this way. I tried to form words but could barely whisper.

  My gaze swivelled upwards as she staggered over the rim of the ditch, bleeding from a dozen scratches, wild-eyed, her hair a disordered mass around her face. Her left arm was rigidly outstretched. The barrel of the gun seemed to be pointing nowhere but towards me.

  She lurched to a stop. I looked into her eyes and saw the pure intensity of her grief and anger and shock. Any one of those emotions in such quantity and weight would have been good enough to kill for. A mix of all three made it a certainty.

  She never got the chance.

  In the instant before Simone could act, the shots slammed into he
r. I didn’t hear the shouted warning from the police officers who fired them. My senses were winding down by this time, fading to black.

  I vaguely remember seeing her fall, sliding down to come to a crumpled rest only a metre or so away from me. The gun dropped and landed between us, like an offering.

  Simone’s face was turned towards mine so that our eyes met and held as her blood pulsed out to mingle with my own in the bottom of the ditch. The police were using hollowpoint Hydra Shok rounds and she’d taken four to the neck and upper body. She never stood a chance. I watched her die feeling only a kind of petty determination not to be the one who gave in first.

  And I knew then that I’d just broken the cardinal rule of close protection work – never outlive your principal.

  But it was a close run-thing.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘A bodyguard?’ Simone Kerse said blankly to the man sitting next to me. ‘Rupert, have you gone totally crazy? I absolutely do not need a bodyguard.’ She raked me with a fierce gaze. ‘Of any description.’

  My first meeting with Simone, just ten days before I was shot, over a wickedly expensive lunch at a very upmarket restaurant just off Grosvenor Square in the embassy district of London. Not exactly an auspicious start.

  Simone had a very slight American accent, more an inflection than anything stronger. She was also young and strikingly good-looking, and nothing at all like my preconception of an engineer.

  Just as, it seemed, I was nothing like her preconception of a bodyguard.

  Rupert Harrington, on the other hand, could only have been a banker. In his early fifties, tall and thin and bespectacled, he had very little hair and a permanently anxious expression. It crossed my mind after meeting him for the first time that those two facts could easily have been connected.

  ‘I can assure you, my dear,’ he said to Simone now, with a touch of asperity, ‘that a number of the bank’s clients have had cause to require the services of Mr Meyer’s people and he comes with the highest recommendations. And even you must admit that this has all gone rather beyond a joke, hm?’

  He sat back in his chair, careful not to spoil the impeccable line of his conservative dark blue pinstripe suit, and flicked a pained glance in my boss’s direction as if to say, Help me out here, would you?

  ‘I agree,’ Sean Meyer said obligingly, his voice bland but with an almost imperceptible underlying thread of amusement. Not at the situation but at the banker’s discomfort because of it. ‘The threats have been escalating. If you won’t go to the police, you’re going to have to take your own measures.’

  He leant forwards slightly, resting his forearms on the starched white tablecloth and looking directly into Simone’s eyes. There was something utterly compelling about Sean when he pinned you down with that dark gaze, and Simone was no more immune than anyone else.

  ‘I’m not suggesting we surround you with a bunch of heavies,’ he went on, ‘but if you won’t accept a full team then you should at least consider the kind of discreet, low-profile security we can offer. That’s why I brought Charlie along for you to meet.’

  He nodded in my direction as he spoke, and both Simone and Harrington swung sceptical eyes towards me.

  In between them, although somewhat closer to tabletop height, another pair of eyes regarded me unwaveringly. And, I don’t mind admitting, that was the gaze I found the most unnerving.

  Simone’s young daughter, Ella, sat on a booster cushion alongside her mother and carefully speared a dessert fork into the pieces of yellow smoked haddock that had been cut up into childfriendly pieces on her plate. It wasn’t the kind of food I would have expected a four-year-old to enjoy, but she was shovelling it in with apparent enthusiasm and chewing largely with her mouth open. I tried not to watch.

  Simone’s gaze drifted to her daughter and lingered there for a moment with no apparent sign of displeasure. I suppose, if you were maternally minded, Ella was the sort of child who would induce instant broodiness. She was petite, with a miniature version of her mother’s dark ringletted curls framing a heart-shaped face. Couple that to big violet-coloured eyes and she had spoilt little brat written all over her. I wasn’t too disappointed that her mother seemed so set against my being assigned to protect the pair of them.

  Suddenly, Simone let out an annoyed breath through her nose, as though gathering her internal resources.

  ‘OK, so Matt’s having a hard time accepting our break-up – and lately I suppose he has gotten to be something of a pain in the butt,’ she allowed, her eyes still fixed on Ella. She smiled at the little girl, wiped a rogue piece of fish from her chin, and turned away with clear reluctance. Her focus landed squarely on me. ‘But that doesn’t mean I need some kind of nanny.’

  Much as I didn’t particularly want the job, I thought the nanny gibe was a bit below the belt. I’d made an effort to look smart and businesslike for this meeting. Dark brown trouser suit, cream blouse. Under protest, I’d even gunked on some lipstick.

  Sean was wearing a charcoal grey made-to-measure that subtly disguised the height and the breadth of him but, to my eyes, did little to hide the deadly grace that was an innate part of his makeup.

  I’d caught a glimpse of our reflections in the mirror above the bar when we’d arrived at the restaurant and I reckoned, to the casual observer at least, we probably looked like accountants. That was certainly the effect we’d been aiming for.

  Harrington opened his mouth to protest at his client’s comments, but before he could speak Sean cut in again. ‘As I understand it, you’ve had constant phone calls and you’ve been forced to change your mobile number – twice,’ he said calmly. ‘Your ex-boyfriend has been hanging around outside both your home and your daughter’s nursery school. You’ve had notes left on your car. Unwanted deliveries. I think you need a little more than some kind of nanny, don’t you?’

  Simone switched her attention from me back to Sean. In contrast to the rest of us, she was wearing battleship grey cargo trousers and a dark red chenille sweater with sleeves that came down almost to her fingertips. Her curly dark hair was pulled loosely back into a ponytail. Harrington had told us she was twenty-eight, a year older than I was. She looked about eighteen.

  ‘You make it sound so much worse than it is, Mr Meyer,’ she said, folding her arms defensively. ‘Notes on my car? OK, they’re love letters. Unwanted deliveries? Sure, bouquets of flowers. Matt and I were together five years, for heaven’s sake! We share a child.’ She swallowed, lowered her voice. ‘You’re making him out to be some kind of stalker.’

  ‘Isn’t he?’ Sean asked, head tilted slightly on one side. His voice had taken on the same cool note and his face the same impassive watchfulness that had always unnerved me so badly, back when he had been one of my army training instructors, and had always seen entirely too much.

  Simone flushed and avoided his gaze. Instead, she spoke to Harrington directly. ‘I’ll talk to Matt again,’ she said, her tone placatory now. ‘He’ll see sense eventually.’ She smiled at the banker with a lot more affection than she’d shown to either Sean or me. ‘I’m sorry you felt you had to take such drastic action on my behalf, Rupert, but there wasn’t any need, really.’

  Harrington looked about to protest further, but he correctly read the stubborn expression on Simone’s face and raised both palms in an admission of defeat.

  ‘All right, my dear,’ he said ruefully. ‘If you’re quite sure.’

  ‘Yes,’ Simone said firmly. ‘I am.’

  ‘Mummy, I need to go wee-wee,’ Ella piped up in a loud whisper. The smartly dressed elderly couple at the next table clearly subscribed to the unseen-and-unheard school of child raising. They were too British to actually turn around and glare, but I saw their outraged spines stiffen nevertheless.

  If Simone noticed their disapproval, she ignored it and smiled at her daughter. ‘OK, sweetie,’ she said, sliding her own chair back so she could lift Ella down and take her by the hand as she got to her feet. ‘If you’ll excuse us
?’

  ‘Of course,’ Harrington said, good manners compelling him to stand also.

  Sean had already risen, I noted, and for a second I was struck by the air of urbane sophistication he presented. This from a man who had left behind his roots on a run-down housing estate in a small northern city, but who still knew how to slide right back into that rough-diamond skin when the occasion demanded. The banker would not recognise Sean on his home ground.

  My eyes followed mother and child as they weaved their way between the busy tables. Although Simone was not my principal – and at that stage I didn’t expect she would become so – watching people was beginning to become a habit, all part of the career I’d chosen. Or maybe the job had ultimately chosen me. I was never too sure about that.

  Sean didn’t need to learn to watch anyone. For him it was an instinct ingrained deep as an old tattoo, indelible and permanent. He was just too driven, too focused, to ever let himself begin to blur.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry about this,’ Harrington said as the men sat down again and rearranged their napkins across their knees. ‘She just won’t listen to reason and, quite frankly, her refusal to admit there might be any kind of danger, either to herself or to little Ella, terrifies us, as I’m sure you can appreciate.’

  ‘How much did she win?’ Sean asked, reaching for his glass of Perrier.

  ‘Thirteen million, four hundred thousand, and change,’ the banker said with the casual tone of someone used to working with those kind of figures on a daily basis, but I still heard the trace of a sneer in his voice as he added, ‘It was, if I understand it correctly, what they term a “double rollover”.’

  ‘Money’s still money,’ Sean said. ‘Just because her ancestors didn’t steal it doesn’t make her any less rich.’

  Harrington had the grace to colour. ‘Oh, quite so, old chap,’ he murmured. ‘But Simone is having some difficulty adjusting to the fact that, from the day she bought that winning ticket, her life was never going to be quite the same again. Do you know, she arrived at our office this morning having actually come into town, with the child, on the Tube? Didn’t want to have to try to park in the middle of London, she said.’ He shook his head, as though Simone had suggested walking naked through Trafalgar Square.