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Another presence at her side, another voice, and this time she heard the deep tones.
“Is she winded?” Those sharply-hewn features, more familiar than they ought to be from a mere ten minutes of sly gawking and tracing, appeared in her line of sight. Her vision was starting to leak into haze at the edges as if a filter had been applied in Photoshop. “Miss?” He sounded roughly impatient. “Are you all right? I’m sorry; I didn’t have time to dodge around you.”
“Jesus,” said the younger guard suddenly, his grip tightening on her shoulder. “Her fingers are turning blue.”
The man in the leather coat glanced at her hands and let loose with a creative stream of profanity that would have quite impressed her at any other time.
“Ambulance,” he snapped over his shoulder. “Now.”
Sophy could have cried with frustration and annoyance at herself, if imminent unconsciousness didn’t seem a more likely outcome. She never left the house without an inhaler, but it was securely tucked into her shoulder bag, currently in the care of the hotel receptionists. It hadn’t occurred to her that she would need it on her person. Her asthma attacks were intermittent, usually severe when they struck, and were almost always brought on by exercise. She hadn’t planned to jog from exhibit to exhibit or do push-ups as she admired the William Morris prints. Strangely, she hadn’t anticipated that a conservatively dressed lunatic would let loose with a smoke grenade.
Unable to reach her bag or pull enough breath to instruct on its whereabouts, her inhaler took on the dual importance of a floatation device to a drowning man and a security blanket to a frightened child. She didn’t have it and her growing panic exacerbated her struggle for air. Her grasping fingers seized on to firm flesh and muscle and squeezed tight. She was shaking his thick wrist from side to side in her distress. After a brief hesitation, his free hand came down against the side of her neck, and his head ducked to meet her flickering, unfocused stare.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, the words a blend of discomfort, concern and calm reassurance. “The ambulance is on its way and will be here in a few minutes. You’re going to be all right.”
Considering that she couldn’t pull in enough air to inflate the lungs of a mouse, that type of comment usually made her want to kick the perpetrator in the balls, but for once she was surprisingly comforted by another’s presence. Her panic eased the merest fraction, enough that she was able to hold his gaze for another six minutes and regulate her breaths to tiny, even gasps until the cavalry arrived with a distant clash of sirens. His eyes were the darkest grey. She was teetering into semi-consciousness when black leather was replaced with the reflective safety gear of the paramedics. A recurring thought circled through her mind and then faded out like a banner news headline scrolling across a TV screen.
Tell him. She had to tell him…
Too late. He was gone after a last squeeze of her hand. The appalled faces of Don and her classmate Lisa were hovering above the stretcher. She had the vague impression of police officers, the flash of light from a digital camera.
“The woman…” she tried, but the words disappeared into the vacuum of the nebuliser mask.
***
The girl had the reflexes of a suicidal tortoise and some serious art chops. She had captured his ugly mug with a stick of charcoal and the worst attempt at covert surveillance he had witnessed since his days of pubescent Army training. Mick grimaced and gently closed the sketchbook, his careful handling entirely out of respect for her work. He didn’t think much of her choice of subject.
It seemed almost inevitable that his gaze would snag on Jennifer at that moment, standing near the doorway with Anya for a debrief with Robert Calhoun, the head of hotel security. Both women intercepted his look. Anya had the decency to blush and find considerable interest in the buttons of Calhoun’s jacket, but Jennifer merely tossed her blonde ponytail and continued to rattle on.
Mick shrugged off the residual anger with an effort and returned his attention to the task at hand. He tucked the sketchbook under his arm, intending to leave it at reception for the little sneak with the smudged fingers and terrified eyes. Her name was scrawled on the cover in an appealing, loopy script: Sophy James.
He suspected it would be some time before he lost the memory of those eyes fastened on his with an intensity of need that rivalled her grip on his wrist, of watching her fight for each breath during ten of the longest goddamn minutes of his life.
“Sir. Hollister.”
Antony Gale was walking briskly toward him, his taser back in his holster and a surveillance monitor clutched in one fist. He was a recent recruit from the Australian Air Force and couldn’t yet be persuaded to drop the “Sirs” when addressing the senior consultants. Mick thought it was only a matter of time before he forgot himself so far as to salute.
“The police have identified the assailant as a William Darvie, New Zealand citizen, usually resides in Auckland. No clear motivation yet, but no weapon was found on his person. He was carrying nothing but the smoke grenade. We’ve made a sweep of the rooms and all of the items are accounted for. None shows any obvious signs of interference.” Gale dropped the military formality long enough to shrug. “What do you think? Heavy-handed attempt at theft?”
“Pretty woeful one, if so.” Mick shoved back his jacket and propped his fists against his hips as he surveyed the room again. The police had taken statements from all witnesses – all the ones who didn’t scare the shit out of people by threatening to expire in a heap of disturbingly soft skin – and they had emptied the space of all but Ryland Curry personnel. More of the security team had arrived from the peripheral business interests, but Ryland himself had decided to obey sensible orders for once and remain out of the fray until they’d decoded the nature of the threat. An assassination attempt ten weeks earlier outside a London theatre had at last installed a bit of common sense in the man. “He wasn’t carrying, pulled the grenade in full view of five security consultants and made no attempt to move toward any particular item.”
“What was the point, then? Just to dick about and cause trouble?”
“Been known to happen.” Mick’s arm clenched tighter against Sophy’s sketchbook. “Point scored, in that respect, and the outcome could have been even worse.”
“That reminds me,” said Gale. “I asked Wilson to put through a call to the hospital and make sure the girl is okay. You took her down harder than a rugby scrum.” He managed a grin, before his short-lived amusement faded. “Jesus, I thought she was going to croak right in front of me.”
Mick ironed a slight flinch into professional distance.
“The man with her, the lecturer, said that she’s a brittle asthmatic. The smoke obviously brought on an attack.”
Seriously compounded by having the wind knocked out of her when you smashed her against the ground like an eggshell, you clumsy bastard.
“There’s something not quite right here.” Calhoun joined them, his mouth set firmly beneath the iron-grey wisps of moustache. “It doesn’t smell like theft or petty vandalism to me. What the hell was the point?”
Mick silently agreed. Instinct and experience were firing off needles of adrenalin and caution through his body.
“And he was competent enough to override our cameras and the electrics in the hall for a good four minutes before detonating the device.”
