Princess: A Private Novel Read online

But there was no reply from the American. None in words, at least, but Morgan’s eyes told Knight all he needed to know.

  Now would be payback.

  Chapter 64

  MORGAN WATCHED ALMOST in a daze as their car slid through the rain-slicked streets of London. Traffic became a blur. Faces were meaningless. It was a procession of life—hundreds, maybe thousands of people—but all Morgan could think about was death.

  Jane.

  Gone.

  He blinked hard to try to clear the image from his eyes. It was the picture of Jane, her face pleading and terrified as Flex held the gun to her head. Then Morgan had seen that most beautiful face turn to ruin as Flex had pulled the trigger.

  “Pull over,” he instructed the driver. “Pull over!”

  The man did so, drivers honking angrily as Morgan pushed opened the door and threw up onto the curb.

  “Are you all right?” Knight asked as Morgan stepped back inside the car.

  Morgan ignored him. Instead he closed the door and waved for the driver to go on.

  “Jack, are you all right?” Knight insisted.

  Of course he wasn’t all right. He had fallen for Cook, hard, and then he had watched helplessly as her brains were blown out onto the floor. Who could be all right after that? But he was Jack Morgan, after all. He almost laughed to himself, thinking of how Private’s agents saw him as both the unstoppable force and the immovable object.

  Hadn’t he seen enough death? He could still remember the helicopter crash in the Afghan mountains. He could still remember the screams and the smell of burning flesh. He could still remember the nightmares and bed sheets soaked in sweat. He could still feel the guilt that hung from his shoulders like the heaviest rucksack he had ever carried as a Marine. And now this? Now Jane’s death, too?

  “Why are we doing this?” Morgan asked himself, but the words came out loud enough for Knight to hear. The Englishman frowned in confusion, as if the answer were so simple.

  “For justice.”

  “For justice.” Morgan smiled. What justice could there be for Jane Cook? Her life was worth a million Flex Gibbons. How could her soul and presence ever be replaced? How could there be real justice when the world was an emptier place without her?

  “I miss her already,” he confessed to Knight. “And it hasn’t even hit me yet. Not really.”

  “We’re here for you, Jack,” Knight promised. “All of Private London. We’re here for each other, as a family.”

  Private London. So caught up was he in his own loss that Morgan had yet to consider the wider ripples of Jane’s tragedy. Cook was beloved of every member of the London office, he knew. She had family there, and family in the wider world. What of her comrades from the army? People who had fought and lived beside her in the hardest of circumstances. Flex’s actions would cause distress and grief to hundreds of people. His attack had been not just on Cook and Lewis, but on hundreds, maybe thousands of people. He was a monster, and he had to be stopped.

  No matter the consequences.

  “Peter, are you ready to step up? If the time comes, are you ready to step up, for Private?”

  It took Knight a moment to grasp the implications of what Morgan was saying. “I am, Jack,” he promised. “But I won’t need to.”

  We’ll see, Morgan thought.

  Because he knew this was only going to end one of two ways—with the death of Michael “Flex” Gibbon, or with the death of Jack Morgan.

  Chapter 65

  MORGAN FELT THE shrouded looks and pity-filled smiles as he walked into Private London’s HQ alongside Peter Knight.

  “My children are upstairs,” Knight sighed, shoulders slumping in relief.

  “You should stay with them,” said Morgan. “I can handle this alone.”

  Knight didn’t reply, but there was no chance he would leave this for Morgan to handle alone. “How are we doing on the headcount?” he asked his watch manager.

  “Almost everyone is accounted for,” she advised Knight. “We’ve got them either coming into here or safe houses if they’re in other parts of the UK.”

  “How is it affecting ongoing ops?” he asked.

  “Minimally. Sir Tony and Sophie Edwards were our main investigations. We have a fraud case in Scotland, and a widow in Sheffield has asked that we look over her husband’s death, but other than that, the decks are clear.”

  “Those cases can wait,” Morgan said evenly. “Right now, Private only has one case.”

  The watch manager nodded. No one needed telling what that case was. “There is just one person we haven’t yet been able to contact,” she said.

  “Who is it?” Knight asked, instantly fearful.

  “Jeremy Crawford,” she replied. “Hooligan.”

  Chapter 66

  MORGAN AND KNIGHT sprinted for the Audi. Knight relieved the driver and jumped in behind the wheel. Within a moment they were tearing out into traffic.

  It had been less than ninety seconds since the watch manager had informed them that Hooligan was the only Private employee who hadn’t been contacted. She put this down to his being at the West Ham game, where phone coverage was always pitiful due to the number of users in one place, but Knight and Morgan had darker thoughts.

  “Flex won’t have had time to get him before the game started,” Morgan worked out. “But he could be waiting for him. Hooligan was one of the team that worked on the case to rescue Abbie Winchester, so if that’s his list, we have to find him before Flex does.”

  “How much do we know about the man Hooligan’s with?” Morgan asked.

  “Perkins? He was sent from De Villiers to coordinate with them on the tech side of things. No one’s been able to get hold of him either. You think he could be working with Flex?”

  “He’s not one of ours, so I’m ruling nothing out.”

  I’m not losing anybody else, Morgan promised himself as he picked up his phone, the call going straight to Hooligan’s voicemail for the tenth time. “Come on, dammit! Connect!” He hit his fist against the car’s dashboard.

  Chapter 67

  JEREMY “HOOLIGAN” CRAWFORD streamed out of London Stadium with thousands of other downcast West Ham fans, having been drubbed 2–0 by the visitors in a pre-season friendly.

  “I can’t believe you pay for a season ticket to watch that dross,” said Perkins, the Millwall fan.

  “Been paying for the past seventeen years.” Hooligan shook his head. “I must be a sucker for punishment.”

  “If you’re into paying to be miserable, there’s ladies that will do that for you in Soho.”

  “Black leather doesn’t suit my complexion,” Hooligan laughed. “And I’ve got too much important stuff to say to have a ball-gag in my mouth.”

  For a moment, Hooligan thought that the grimace on his new friend’s face was an indication that he had taken the joke too far, but he quickly realized something was seriously wrong as Perkins crashed to the ground. “Crap! Perkins! Help!” he shouted to the crowd around him.

  He felt a rush of relief as he saw a police officer only steps away.

  “Help! Officer! Help!” Hooligan gestured frantically. “My mate’s collapsed!”

  Only then did he see the taser in the officer’s hand.

  Chapter 68

  HOOLIGAN’S EYES WENT wide in horror as he saw the mouth of the taser flicker to life. Crouched to help Perkins, he knew there was no way he could spring clear before the man disguised as a police officer struck. The crowd had allowed the “policeman” to close on them unseen, and now it hemmed Hooligan in like a trapped fish.

  Killed by my fellow fans, he thought as the taser jabbed toward his throat and he closed his eyes.

  But the expected pain of the electric shock did not come. Hooligan realized he was somehow untouched and opened his eyes. In front of him he saw a beautiful sight.

  A ruptured pie slipped lazily from the side of the man’s head, gravy spilling down his neck as all about him laughed and cheered.

  “O
n your head, pig!” a voice in the crowd shouted.

  The hard-core football fans had no love for the police, and seeing a fan tasered, they had lashed out. The thrown food and shoves into the man’s back had bought Hooligan seconds, and now he used them, scrambling to his feet and pushing his way through the scrum of bodies. A flash of guilt struck him for abandoning Perkins, but a quick look behind was enough to tell him what his gut already knew—that the “officer” was there for Hooligan. Sure enough, the big man was now pushing his way through the crowd like a barracuda through a shoal of fish.

  Hooligan knew damn well that the man was no police officer. It wasn’t so much that he had attacked without reason, but because Hooligan had seen into his eyes—that was not the face you sent to reassure a grieving family, or to talk to local shopkeepers after a theft. It was the face of a killer, plain and simple.

  Hooligan ran and shoved as if his life depended on it, because he knew that it probably did.

  Chapter 69

  NATHAN RIDER WAS not a happy man. In fact, he was furious. When the pie had hit his head, his first instinct had been to find the man who threw it and to shove his thumbs into that man’s eyes. It was with some internal struggle that he had fought off the urge, and in those few seconds the ginger bastard had escaped.

  Not escaped, Rider corrected himself, but made life difficult. The ginger was pushing through the crowd, but Rider could see how the man was already breathing like a beached whale. He was unfit, and he was panicked—his lack of fitness would drop him into Rider’s hands as easily as the taser would have done, and then it was simply a case of dragging him away into the “police car.” From there it would be a short drive to a garage full of power tools, and the beginning of the ginger’s real nightmare. Flex planned a show—“something that would make even the Mexican cartels look like pussies,” he had said—and Rider was the kind of man who enjoyed such work.

  Rider was not what anybody could consider a nice person. Those who had known him in his childhood would politely describe him as “difficult,” while those who knew him as an adult would describe him as a “total bastard.” Those who truly knew him would use the words “dangerous” and “killer.”

  He had been twenty years old when he left Britain to join the French Foreign Legion. For a man with Rider’s violent disposition, fighting had always seemed like a good way to earn a living, and so, when the British Army couldn’t take him due to his long criminal record, he had set sail across the English Channel. To him, one army was as good as the next.

  Tough men join the French Foreign Legion, and the Legion makes them tougher still. By the time Rider had completed twenty years’ service, he was fluent not only in several languages but in killing. He left the service with a reputation, and was headhunted by Flex Gibbon, who had once worked with Rider on a shady operation in West Africa. Flex knew from those bloody days that Rider was a man who would carry out a mission first and ask questions later, so he had been the perfect candidate to run Flex’s operations in Africa. Over the past ten years the two men had built a firm friendship, and so when Flex told Rider that he had a score to settle, Rider had not needed reasons—only instructions. That was how he had come to be hunting down the Private tech guru.

  He knew now there was nothing that would come between him and the ginger. He simply walked on, confident that his size and face would clear a path for him like the parting of the Red Sea. For those too slow to move, there was always a shunt in the back, or a shove to the shoulder.

  Rider was blocked by one of those oblivious idiots now. “Out of my way, you cock,” he growled, taking hold of the West Ham supporter’s shirt and shoving him aside. He hadn’t spent weeks tracking Hooligan’s habits to lose him now.

  Chapter 70

  HOOLIGAN COULD HEAR shouting behind him and turned to see the “policeman” only meters away, the huge man violently shoving a West Ham supporter out of the way. Then he saw a knife pulled free of its hiding place. He saw it drive forward and plunge into flesh.

  His pursuer’s flesh.

  “Arghhh!” the man screamed as the blade pierced his stomach. “You bastard!” he growled at the football fan who had stabbed him.

  No—Private’s tech guru corrected himself. Not a football fan. A football hooligan. A real one. And here came his friends, scarves pulled up over their faces as they hurried to form a barrier between him and who they assumed was an officer of the law.

  “Run, you wanker!” they shouted at their friend and Hooligan’s unwitting savior, who took off quickly. “Run!” they urged.

  Hooligan also decided to take their advice, as the stabbed man was getting to his feet. Hooligan cursed that he appeared mostly undamaged—his stab vest had taken most of the blow, and only a small amount of blood was leaking into his hand.

  “Out of my way!” the man raged. “Out of my way or I’ll arrest you all!”

  And as Hooligan pressed through the crowd, he saw the football fans slowly obey. In the near distance there was now the sound of shouts and whistles: above the heads of the West Ham supporters, Hooligan could see two mounted officers entering the horde on horseback. A quick calculation told him they would never get to him before the fake officer. Hooligan’s only chance was to keep running and to find his own safety. So he shoved, swore and sprinted his way between his fellow fans, ignoring the constant insults and occasional fists that came his way.

  “I’m sorry!” he pleaded as he staggered on. The crowd began to thin as Hooligan reached the head of the exodus from London Stadium.

  “Watch where you’re going, you knob!” a fan spat, instinctively kicking Hooligan’s legs from beneath him as he barged by him and the woman with him. Hooligan hit the ground hard, the tarmac peeling back the skin on his hands and bringing with it a sensation Hooligan hadn’t felt since his childhood—scraped knees and gravel burn as he dreamed of one day taking the field for West Ham.

  No, he thought to himself. It can’t end here. I’m not ready.

  But no amount of adrenaline or dogged determination could rouse his spent muscles and heaving lungs. Hooligan had run to the limit of his endurance—he had nothing left to give.

  And then his phone began to ring.

  Chapter 71

  “IT’S GOING THROUGH!” Peter Knight shouted excitedly, as the sound of ringing came over the Audi’s speakers. “Come on, Jez, pick up! Pick up!”

  Beside Knight, in the passenger seat, Jack Morgan sat tight-faced and impassive, his emotions shoved deep inside his chest as he tried to think only of the safety of his people that still breathed, and not the ones who were beyond help.

  It was an impossible task. And as the phone continued to ring, Morgan could not help but think of Hooligan as Cook had been—forced onto his knees, with a pistol to his head.

  “Goddammit, Hooligan, pick up!” shouted Morgan, the veneer of his outward calm breaking.

  Through the windows, both men saw the beginnings of the football crowd seeping through the streets and away from the stadium that loomed in the middle distance. Around them, traffic began to calcify as car parks emptied.

  “Pick up!” Morgan roared again, knowing they would soon be deadlocked.

  The call connected.

  “Help me!” The East Ender breathed heavily through the car’s speakers. “Please!”

  “Where are you?” Morgan asked, holding up his hand to cut off the same question coming from Knight. “What do you see around you?”

  “The White Swan pub.” The tremor of terror was clear in Hooligan’s voice. “Please! I’ve lost sight of him!”

  “Get to the pub!” Morgan ordered. “Stay in a busy place!”

  “It won’t stop him!”

  “Just do it, Hooligan!” Morgan shouted. Knight was already turning the car in traffic to head back in the opposite direction.

  “I saw that place on the way in,” he explained. “It’s only a few hundred meters back.”

  But it may as well have been a few hundred miles back.
The road heading away from the stadium was a parking lot, West Ham supporters weaving their way through the cars and making it impossible for them to drive at faster than walking pace.

  “I’m going for him,” Morgan declared, opening the door.

  “Jack, wait! It could be a trap! They’re using him to draw you in!”

  Morgan heard the truth in Knight’s words, but he couldn’t care less—he would not sit idle as one of his own was in peril.

  Instead he ran toward that danger.

  Chapter 72

  HOOLIGAN SHUFFLED AS quickly as he could to the packed White Swan pub. He was so busy throwing terrified looks over his shoulders that he never saw the bouncer in front of him, and recoiled as his head bumped off the big man’s chest.

  “Watch where you’re going,” the bouncer warned.

  “Can I come in?” Hooligan asked. “I’ve got friends inside.”

  The bouncer shook his head at the disheveled man. “Not a chance, mate. You’re shit-faced.”

  “I’m not!” Hooligan pleaded. “I swear on me mum! I’m not drunk!”

  “Well, you’ve been scrapping then. Either way, you’re not coming in.”

  “Can I stand next to you?” Hooligan asked, swallowing. “Someone’s trying to get me.”

  “Get out of here, you smackhead,” the man growled, “before I stick my fist down your throat.”

  The red-hot anger in the man’s eyes told Hooligan that he would back up his threat. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Hooligan scuttled along the pub’s wall, trying to have at least one side of himself covered from the approach of his stabbed assailant.

  Hooligan scanned the crowd and saw no sign of his attacker. The closest uniforms were a hundred yards away—two mounted police who were craning their necks at something as they patrolled along the roadside, where vehicles sat bunched and lazy, awaiting their turn to slip away from the stadium’s neighborhood.