Chameleon - A City of London Thriller (49 page)

You know what
happened after that. Katie explained it well, and I have nothing to
add.”

Steve looked
at Dan Peterson, who nodded in confirmation that he had everything
recorded.

“
OK, you two.
Wait here. I’ll bring you news of Dee as soon as I get
it.”

“
Mr Post?”
Katie attracted Steve’s attention. “Can you check to see if Deanna
from Vastrick is OK, too? If those bastards have hurt her I’ll
strangle them myself in their hospital beds.”

“
I wish you
would,” Steve muttered under his breath. “Tom Vastrick himself is
on his way down from Vermont. He’ll probably be better informed
than my guys.”

Chapter
7
4

DaVita
Richmond
Community
Hospital
,
Virginia. USA. Wednesday 2pm.

Josh Hammond
and Christine Post sat chatting across Dee’s bed. Josh had landed
just that morning, having been unable to find an earlier flight.
Dee was elsewhere in the hospital, undergoing further tests.
Christine had been a constant by Dee’s bedside since Steve left to
try to sort out the legal quagmire that five Brits had left behind
them in a junk yard in Richmond.

The room was
filled with flowers and cards, and a balloon was floating just
below the ceiling, secured by a red tape tied to the bed frame. Tom
Vastrick had taken a break to eat and would be back soon. He had
arrived within hours and had tried to persuade Katie and Gil to go
to a hotel and rest, but they were going nowhere.

Eventually, in
the early hours of Tuesday morning, Dee had awoken, albeit briefly,
from an anaesthetic induced sleep and had convinced them that she
would be fine. Gil and Katie were escorted to Dee’s hotel room,
where Katie fell dead asleep on the bed, whilst Gillian Davis slept
fitfully on the sofa. Gil’s and Dee’s cars had been recovered by
the police and were parked in the hotel lot by the time they awoke.
After a further visit to Dee’s bedside, the two reluctantly
departed, leaving her to rest and Tom Vastrick to stand guard.
Later that day Gillian went back to Lynchburg, and Katie was driven
back to see Deanna, her minder, who was back at home nursing a lump
on her head and a pounding headache.

That was
yesterday, and today things were beginning to return to normality.
The community hospital had been overwhelmed by three patients with
serious and life threatening injuries arriving within minutes of
each other. They had also been told very clearly that Dee had
priority as the victim. As it turned out, all three needed the care
of different specialist doctors.

A heavily
bandaged Dee was wheeled back into her room and lifted into bed.
She groaned, and the orderlies apologised for the discomfort. The
gurney left the room moments before a lady doctor appeared. Dressed
in her green scrubs, with her hair scraped back in a pony tail, she
looked like every female doctor on TV.

“
Hello, Josh,
and Dee. We have just completed the tests and the results are very
positive. It appears you have been shot before, is that
right?”

Dee nodded.
The doctor raised her eyebrows in surprise.

“
Well, I
don’t need to tell you that so far you have been unbelievably
lucky.” Josh took his wife’s hand as she continued. “You have lost
your twelfth rib. It was shattered, and so we’ve tidied it up. It
will ache for a while, but it will be fine. The kidney seems to
have been unaffected by the damage it received, but we need to keep
an eye on that. Otherwise the internal damage was limited to some
intestinal bleeding, and the bullet holes will take time to heal.
But you probably know more about that than I do. You must take a
break and rest. That isn’t advice, that’s an
instruction.”

“
She will be
resting, you can be certain about that,” a voice boomed from the
doorway. Tom Vastrick, owner of Vastrick Security, left no room for
discussion. The doctor spoke a little more quietly.

“
There is one
more test result that I would prefer to share in
private.”

“
No,” Dee
protested. “Christine and Tom can stay. They can hear whatever it
is. They’re family as far as we’re concerned.” Dee smiled at
Christine, whom she had only known for a few hours but who had done
so much since the shooting.

The doctor was
hesitant.

“
OK, whatever
you say. I have to tell you that another reason you will want to
rest up is that you’re pregnant.”

Josh went
white and Dee’s eyes opened wide in astonishment.

“
Yes. I
wondered if you knew. I guess I have my answer now,” the doctor
blushed.

***

The pretty
dark haired nurse pushed her stainless steel trolley past the
trooper on guard outside Barry Mitchinson’s room. The trooper was
deep into an old Reader’s Digest.

“
Would you
like me to bring you a drink when I finish my rounds, honey?” The
deep languorous southern drawl was as sexy as it was out of
place.

“
Yes please,
ma’am,” the trooper answered, remembering his manners.

“
Sure thing,
hon. Give me five minutes.” The nurse pushed her trolley into
Mitchinson’s room.

“
Mr
Mitchinson, you seem to have slipped right down the bed. Let me sit
you up and plump those pillows.” The casual banter was loud enough
to carry to the trooper, as it was meant to do.

The nurse sat
Barry up and plumped his pillows as she said she would. Then, quite
unexpectedly, she withdrew what looked like a perfume atomiser and
squirted it liberally in his face. He was paralysed. When the nurse
looked right into his frozen features, he knew he was about to
die.

“
You are
going straight to hell, Guv,” Gillian Davis whispered, still
smiling like the southern belle she was playing.

Gillian’s
paralysing spray did its work, but this time the mix was a little
stronger than usual. Barry tried to move. He couldn’t. He tried to
breathe. He couldn’t. He tried to panic. He could do that. It took
an agonising three minutes for him to black out, and five minutes
for his heart to stop. By the time the monitor alarm sounded and
the crash team arrived, it was too late. Barry was dead, his face
frozen. His eyes, dead as they were, still expressed
terror.

The Chameleon
was back in her street clothes by the time the trooper suspected
foul play. Her dark wig had been discarded, and her soft brown eyes
were back to their usual blue. In minutes she was walking back
towards her car, parked a block away.

“
They can
never see past the uniform,” she chuckled to herself.

As Gillian had
predicted, when Steve Post interviewed the trooper later, all he
could extract from him, by way of description, was she was a tall
dark haired nurse with soft brown eyes. ‘She looked like half the
nurses in the hospital,’ he said apologetically. Despite his best
efforts, the hospital could not confirm for Steve that Barry
Mitchinson’s death was anything but the result of his injuries and
a failing heart.

***

Perhaps it was
the pressurisation or the poor administration of drugs during the
transfer, but in the sleek Lear Jet, thirty thousand feet above the
Atlantic, Rob Donkin woke up. His eyes flew open, but the attending
male nurse had dozed off in the comfortable leather seat next to
the white leather covered bed.

The lighting
was subdued. Rob had no idea what was going on. He couldn’t
remember anything. Where was he? Who was he? His heart began to
race as he realised that he could not move. He could not feel his
limbs at all. He knew that he was not breathing, but somehow he
didn’t need to. It was as if his lungs were filling automatically.
He could see and hear engine noise, but there was something in his
mouth that would have prevented him from speaking. In fact, he
could feel it in his throat. He tried to gag but his gag reflect
didn’t work. Later he would hear that his voice box no longer
worked anyway. He lay unblinking for minutes. He was scared. No, he
was terrified. He was confused. He tried to close his eyes. He
couldn’t.

The travelling
nurse woke up with a start as his chin hit his chest. He blinked
himself awake and looked down at his charge. Donkin’s eyes were
open. The nurse dropped in a few tiny droplets of liquid and closed
the paralysed man’s eyes. Then, looking more closely, he could see
that the man seemed to be crying. It wasn’t possible, he thought;
comatose patients don’t cry. He persuaded himself that he had
overdone the eye drops.

Rob Donkin
could feel the tears on his face but nothing else. The strain of
trying to remember something, anything, drained him. His mind
closed down. It could take no more; he would try to make sense of
what was happening later, maybe.

Chapter
7
5

Josh Hammond
laughed at his own joke as Dee frowned. She was beginning to show
now, and she had that glow of health that men often overlook in
their pregnant women.

“
I’m just
your comedy sidekick,” she scowled as she took another bite of her
sandwich.

They were
lunching in the conference room at Vastrick’s London HQ; Tom
Vastrick had joined them for this new daily routine.

“
There’s no
need to come for lunch every day, Josh,” Tom said. “We have her
tied to a desk for the foreseeable future. We won’t let her out of
our sight. I promise.” The two men smiled, and Dee frowned. She
felt pretty good for a woman with several healed bullet holes and a
missing rib, and couldn’t understand why she needed
coddling.

Tom left the
room.

Josh leaned
over and kissed his wife tenderly. She kissed him back, and for a
moment it all got heated and passionate.

“
Sex in the
overnight cot?” he suggested playfully. “After all, you’re already
pregnant.”

“
Too busy,
Josh. I need to finish early tonight. We have seats for the
match.”

Josh groaned.
It looked to him as if the Hammers, his beloved West Ham United,
were destined to be relegated to a lower division, and he had a
season ticket so he could witness the final death throe. Dee saw
the despair in his face and tried to take his mind off the
subject.

“
The Posts
emailed this morning. They’re coming over to London in the summer
to visit.” She looked out of the window at the torrential rain and
hoped that the weather would behave itself for their
visit.

Josh left.
There was still concern in his eyes, although he had trained
himself not to show it. He had work to do at his own office less
than half a mile away. In this weather he would be soaked covering
half that distance. Nonetheless, he shrugged as he stepped out onto
Queen Victoria Street, and quickened his pace.

***

Dee returned
to her office and tenderly touched the photograph of her husband.
Despite the fact that she loved her career, she loved her husband
more. Sometime soon she would leave all of this behind and find
some other career, preferably one which didn’t involve being shot
regularly.

As she spun
her chair around to look out of the window, her eyes caught sight
of the beautiful leather bound set of books on her shelf. She
lifted the first in the series and opened it. On the title page of
Clara Campbell and the Spectral Schoolboy she read the
dedication;

“
To Dee
Hammond, with all of my affection, and thanks, for keeping Katie
safe. J Jackson Bentley.”

For a few
moments she was lost in thoughts and immersed in memories. She was
oblivious to her surroundings when she heard a familiar voice
behind her.

“
The book is
OK, but that girl who plays her in the films is
brilliant.”

Dee spun
around, then leapt from her chair as Katie Norman ran to her and
hugged her wildly. Katie stepped back and rested her hand on Dee’s
stomach.

“
If I’m not
the godmother I’ll want a damn good reason why not.”

They both
laughed and hugged again.

Epilogue:

Presidential
Rally, Capital Square, Richmond, Virginia
.
USA.

One year
later.

The first
black President of the USA was in Democrat territory. Despite the
Democrats having lost one of its key Senator positions to the
Republicans, in the form of Senator Denton Miles III, the President
was convinced that the state would be his, come the election.
Nevertheless, he felt that there could be no harm in telling the
folks that he appreciated their support, and so he was due to
appear on the podium in Capital Square in less than an
hour.

Harvey Quince
addressed his armour clad Special Agents in the foyer of an office
block overlooking the square. Quince had taken over as SAIC,
special agent in charge of the field office, after Steve Post had
transferred to Florida to become SAIC in Tampa.

“
OK people.
We know what we have to do. The Secret Service is in charge, and
we’re here to do their bidding.”