Vicious Circle (7 page)

‘Smart as new paint and twice as beautiful!’ His mood lightened for a moment as he thought of her, but almost immediately the dark clouds closed over him again.

Paddy O’Quinn had been Hector’s second in command at Cross Bow. He had helped Hector build up the company from the earliest days. There was no man Hector trusted more. He was solid as a mountain, he was savvy and quick, but over all his other virtues he had the fighting man’s instinct for danger almost as strongly as did Hector himself. Hector took comfort in the fact that Paddy was only a phone call away.

His reverie was interrupted by a hospital nurse who entered the waiting room and called out his name. He jumped to his feet.

‘I am Hector Cross.’

‘Please come with me, Mr Cross.’ As he hurried after her, Hector glanced at his wristwatch. He had been waiting a little over an hour and a half. He caught up with the nurse in the passage.

‘Is everything all right?’ he demanded to know.

‘Yes indeed.’ She smiled at him.

‘My wife?’

‘She is in theatre. Mr Irving is still operating on her. But I have somebody else for you to meet.’ She led him through a labyrinth of passages to a door marked Maternity Observation Room.

When they entered, Hector found that there were chairs arranged along one wall facing a large glass panel that looked into a room beyond. The nurse spoke into a microphone on the table below the window.

‘Hi there, Bonnie! Mr Cross is here.’

To which a disembodied voice replied, ‘Be with you in a sec.’

Hector stood close to the window and minutes later another nurse, in the uniform of a ward sister, entered the observation room on the far side of the glass. She was possibly thirty years of age; young to carry such high rank, Hector thought. She was plump and pretty with a round, jovial face. She carried in her arms a small bundle wrapped in a blue blanket which was embroidered with the initials RHCH in red, Royal Hampshire County Hospital. She came to the opposite side of the window and gave Hector a beaming pink smile. It was contagious and Hector smiled back at her, although it was not indicative of his true feelings.

‘Hello, Mr Cross. My name is Bonnie. May I have the pleasure of introducing you to somebody?’ She opened the blankets to reveal a ruddy and wrinkled little face with tightly closed slits for eyes. ‘Say hello to your daughter.’

‘Good God! She’s got no hair.’ Hector came out with the first thing that sprang to mind, and immediately realized how inane it sounded, even to him.

‘She’s very beautiful!’ said the nurse sternly.

‘In a funny sort of way, I suppose she is.’

‘In every possible way she is,’ she corrected him. ‘She weighs exactly six pounds. Isn’t she a clever girl? What are you going to call her?’

‘Catherine Cayla. Her mother chose those names.’ Surely he should feel more than this when he looked at his firstborn child, but instead he thought of Hazel lying somewhere nearby with a bullet in her brain. He was on the verge of tears and he coughed and blinked them back. The last time he had cried openly was at the age of six when his pony had thrown him and he had broken his arm in three places on landing.

Catherine Cayla opened her mouth in a wide yawn which exposed her toothless gums. Hector smiled and this time the smile was genuine. He felt a small flame flare in his heart.

‘She is beautiful,’ he said softly. ‘She’s bloody gorgeous. Just like her mother.’

‘Oh! Look at the little darling,’ said Bonnie. ‘She’s already hungry. I am going to take her for her first feed. Say bye-bye, Daddy.’

‘Bye-bye,’ said Hector dutifully. No one had ever called him Daddy before. He watched the nurse carry his daughter away. For a short while that tiny soul had shone for him like a candle in the darkness of a winter’s night. Now she was gone the arctic cold of despair descended upon him once more. He turned away from the window and went back to the main waiting room.

He sat hunched in a corner chair. The darkness broke over him in waves. He searched his soul for the courage to endure it, and found instead anger.

Anger is a better cure than resignation.
He squared his shoulders, and stood up straight. He left the waiting room and went out into the passage. He found the men’s toilet and locked himself in a cubicle and sat on the seat. He took his mobile phone from the leather pouch on his belt. Paddy O’Quinn’s number was in his contact list.

The phone rang three times and then Paddy said, ‘O’Quinn.’

‘Paddy. Where are you?’ Hector spoke into the mouthpiece. His tone was crisp and sharp again.

‘Sweet Jesus! I thought you had dropped off the end of the world, Hector.’ They had not spoken to each other in months.

‘They got Hazel.’

Paddy was stunned into silence. Hector could hear him breathing hoarsely. Then he said, ‘Who? How?’ His voice rang like a sabre being drawn from its scabbard.

‘Four hours ago we ran into an ambush. It’s bad. Hazel took a .22 calibre bullet in her brain. She’s in theatre now. The medico is going for the bullet. We don’t know yet if she’s going to make it.’

‘She’s a great lady, Heck. You know how I feel.’

‘I know, Paddy.’ They were warriors, they didn’t wail and bleat.

‘She was pregnant, wasn’t she? What about her baby?’ Paddy growled.

‘They saved her. We have a girl. She seems to be doing well.’

‘Thank God for that, at least.’ Paddy paused and then he asked, ‘Do you have any leads?’

‘I cancelled two of the bastards. They were Somalis, I think.’

‘It has to be the Beast again!’ Paddy said. ‘I thought we had got all of them.’

‘That’s what I thought. We were wrong.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ Paddy asked.

‘Find them for me, Paddy. Some of the Tippoo Tip brood must have survived. Find them.’

Hector had built up Cross Bow Security into a formidable operation on the principle that offence was more effective than defence and that good intelligence was the most powerful offensive asset. When Paddy took over from him he had built on those precepts. As one of the directors of Bannock Oil, Hector still had access to the accounts of Cross Bow. He knew just how much Paddy was spending on his intelligence arm. If it had been good before, now it had to be that much better. Hector went on speaking.

‘Is Tariq Hakam still with you?’

‘He is one of my main men.’

‘Send him back into Puntland to search for any survivors of the family of Hadji Sheikh Mohammed Khan Tippoo Tip. Nobody knows that terrain better than Tariq. He was born there.’

‘After what we did to them in Puntland, any of them that got away are almost certainly dispersed across the Middle East.’

‘Wherever they are, just find them. Tariq must draw up a list of every male descendant of Khan Tippoo Tip over the age of fifteen years. Then we will hunt them down; every last one of them.’

‘I hear you, Heck. In the meantime I’ll be pulling for Hazel. If anybody can make it, she is the one. All my money is on her.’

‘Thanks, Paddy.’ Hector broke the contact and went back to the waiting room.

*

An hour dragged by like a cripple, and then another passed even more painfully before a theatre sister came for him. She wore a plastic cap over her hair. A surgical mask dangled around her neck and she had theatre slippers on her feet.

‘How is my wife?’ Hector demanded as he sprang to his feet.

‘Mr Irving will answer all your questions,’ she told him. ‘Please, follow me.’

She led him to one of the post-operative recovery rooms adjoining the operating theatres. The sister opened the door and stood aside for him to enter. Hector found himself in a room with green painted walls. Against the far wall was a single hospital bed. Beside it a heart-monitoring machine stood on its trolley and peeped softly. Across its electronic screen bounced the glowing green electronic point of light keeping time to the heartbeats of the patient on the bed below. It left a vivid green sawtooth trail across the screen. In the few seconds that Hector stood in the doorway he realized the trail was not regular. A rapid series of heartbeats was followed by a distinct pause, then an almost hesitant beat, another pause and then three or four rapid beats.

Irving was leaning over the patient on the bed, screening the supine body. He stood aside as he sensed Hector behind him, enabling Hector to see Hazel’s face.

Her head was bound up in a tight turban of white bandages, which extended under her chin and covered her ears. The lower half of her body was covered with a sheet. She still wore the green theatre gown. There were IV needles in the veins of her arms and the backs of both her hands. Plastic tubes dangled down from the sacs of liquid that were suspended above her on a moveable stand.

Irving came to meet Hector.

‘How is she?’ Hector managed to keep his voice level. Irving hesitated. The heart monitor beeped twice before he replied.

‘I have removed the bullet. But there was more soft tissue damage than we anticipated. It did not show up on the X-ray plates.’

Hector walked slowly to the side of the bed and looked down at her. Her face was white as pastry. Her eyes were slightly open. Only the whites showed between her long curling lashes. There was a tube up her left nostril connected to the oxygen machine standing on the floor. Her breathing was so light that he had to bring his face down an inch from hers to catch it. He kissed her lips with a butterfly touch. He straightened up and looked at Irving.

‘What are her chances?’ he asked. ‘Don’t lie to me.’

Again Irving hesitated, and then he shrugged almost imperceptibly.

‘Fifty–fifty, or perhaps a little less.’

‘If she does recover, will she regain full brain function?’

Irving frowned before replying. Then he said, ‘That is unlikely.’

‘Thank you for your honesty,’ Hector said. ‘May I wait here with her?’

‘Of course. That chair is for you.’ He indicated a seat on the other side of the bed. ‘I have done all I can, now I must hand your wife over to Mr Daly, the hospital’s resident neurosurgical specialist. He has already seen her. His room is just down the corridor. He can be here in a few seconds if Sister Palmer here summons him.’ He nodded at the theatre sister who was adjusting the taps on Hazel’s IV drips.

‘Goodbye, Mr Cross. God bless you and your lovely wife.’

‘Goodbye and thank you, Mr Irving. I know that nobody could have done more for her.’

When he was gone, Hector spoke to Sister Palmer.

‘I am her husband.’

‘I know. Sit down, Mr Cross. We may have a long wait.’ Hector moved the chair closer to the bed and sat.

‘May I hold her hand?’ he asked.

‘Yes, but please be careful not to disturb any of the IV tubes.’ Hector reached out gingerly and took three of Hazel’s fingers. They were very cold, but not as cold as his heart. He studied her face. Her eyelids were almost closed. The eyes themselves were rolled back in their sockets. He could not see their pupils. Only a sliver of iris was visible. They had lost their sapphire-blue lustre. They were dull and lifeless. He moved his chair again so that when she opened her eyes he would be sitting directly in her line of sight. He would be the first thing she saw when she regained consciousness; he carefully prevented himself from even thinking the conjunction ‘If’.

He listened to the irregular peep of the heart monitor and every once in a while he glanced at the rise and fall of the bellows of the oxygen apparatus. The only other sounds were the tap of Sister Palmer’s heels on the floor tiles and the rustle of her skirts as she moved around the room. He glanced down at his wristwatch. It was his gift from Hazel on his last birthday. It was the platinum model with the Rolex signature blue dial. The time was twenty minutes to two in the morning. He had been awake since sunrise. His chin dropped onto his chest and, still holding her hand, he dozed just below the level of consciousness, but any change in the rhythm of the heart monitor brought him back again with a jerk.

He dreamed that he and Hazel were climbing the hill on the Colorado ranch. Hand in hand they were following the path through the forest that led to Henry Bannock’s mausoleum. Cayla was running ahead of them.

‘I want to see Daddy!’ She was laughing, looking back over her shoulder. The likeness of daughter to mother was astounding.

‘Wait for me!’ Hazel called after her. ‘I am going with you.’ Dread overwhelmed Hector. He hardened his grip on her hand.

‘No!’ he said. ‘Stay with me. You mustn’t leave me. You must never leave me.’ Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and heard another voice speaking.

‘Mr Cross, are you all right?’ He opened his eyes and Sister Palmer was standing over him. Her expression was concerned. ‘You were shouting in your sleep.’ It took a few moments for Hector to gather his wits. Then he knew where he was. He looked into Hazel’s face. She had not changed the position of her head, but her eyes were open. The lustre of cerulean blue glowed in them again. She was seeing him.

‘Hazel!’ he whispered urgently. ‘Squeeze my hand!’ There was no reaction. Her fingers were limp and cold. He passed his left hand across her face. Her eyes did not move. They stared out at him.

‘It’s Hector,’ he whispered. ‘I love you. I thought I had lost you.’ He stared into her eyes and thought that he saw her pupils contract minimally; or perhaps it was merely vain hope that engendered the thought. Then he heard the beat of the heart monitor. It was rapid and regular.

‘She can see me,’ he said. ‘She can hear me.’ His voice was rising.

‘Calm yourself, Mr Cross,’ Sister Palmer said. ‘We must not race ahead of ourselves. The cerebral damage…’ He did not want to hear her say it.

‘I tell you she can see me and hear me.’ He reached out and touched Hazel’s pale cold cheek. He felt his courage and determination rushing back.

‘Sister Palmer,’ he said crisply. ‘Please go down to Maternity and tell the duty nurse to bring my daughter here.’

‘We can’t do that, sir. Your wife is very ill and—’

‘Sister, do you have children of your own?’ He cut her short.

She hesitated, then her voice and tone changed. ‘I have a son of six.’