Private Royals: BookShots (A Private Thriller) Read online

  He expected the revelation to hit home, hard. Instead, De Villiers merely shrugged.

  ‘Then perhaps she finally pissed off the wrong drug dealer or fucked the wrong brain-dead rock star,’ said the Colonel. ‘I don’t pretend to know what goes on inside that girl’s head, Mr Morgan, but I do know that it is no concern of mine – the security of the inner circle of the royal family is, and my focus is on tomorrow’s parade. Good evening, Mr Morgan. I have a final planning meeting to attend.’

  ‘You may want to revisit those plans, Colonel,’ Morgan told him, his patience at an end and his tone hardening.

  ‘Oh really, Mr Morgan? And why is that?’

  Morgan thought of holding back the information, but the life of Abbie Winchester had to come before his dislike of De Villiers, and so he told the officer the reason why. ‘Because the man whose blood it is was from your own ranks.’

  CHAPTER 12

  REJOINING COOK IN the Range Rover, Morgan instructed the soldier to follow the Thames along its northern bank. ‘Head towards the Tower of London.’

  On the way, Cook asked, ‘You think this is all a smokescreen for a heist?’ referring to the precious Crown jewels held within the Tower’s walls.

  Morgan shook his head. ‘No, but I like your lateral thinking. We’re going to see an acquaintance of mine. An ex-SAS guy known as Flex. Falklands and Desert Storm vet. You know him?’

  ‘Those guys stick to themselves.’

  As they neared the Tower of London, Morgan told her, ‘Flex runs a private security firm now.’ He pointed Cook in the direction she should drive.

  ‘So he’s your business rival?’

  ‘Not really. Cases like Abbie, people come to Private. If someone wants mercenaries for Africa, or an escort into Syria, they go to Flex.’

  ‘And it’s all above board?’

  ‘You tell me.’ Morgan smiled, eyeing the half-dozen Bentleys and Aston Martins in the security firm’s underground garage.

  ‘He buys British, at least,’ Cook offered as they walked towards reception. ‘Won’t he be back at home at this time?’ she asked, glancing at her watch. It was coming up to midnight.

  ‘He lives here. Hates to commute, and he has people in every time zone.’

  ‘Why would someone want to live in their office?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  And after a thorough security check, and a twenty-storey ride in a lift, Cook did. The office’s view was breathtaking: the building looked out over the iconic features of Tower Bridge, HMS Belfast and the Shard on the opposite side of the Thames.

  The sight of Michael ‘Flex’ Gibbon was almost as impressive. Standing at five foot eight, Flex was a fifty-year-old muscle-bound mass who looked as if he’d been carved from granite.

  ‘Jack!’ he said, taking Morgan’s hand in his vice-like grip. ‘Who’s this?’ he asked, looking at Cook.

  ‘Good to see you, Flex,’ said Morgan. ‘This is Major Jane Cook.’

  ‘Major?’ Flex asked, surprised. ‘You look more like a cop,’ he told her, taking in the trouser suit and causing Morgan to break into an ‘I told you so’ smile.

  ‘So, I imagine it’s business at this hour?’ the big man said.

  ‘It is.’ Morgan nodded. ‘Hope we didn’t wake you up.’

  ‘Not at all, mate. Just got off the phone to Nairobi. All going to shit down there – again. I took the kids on holiday there once. Can you believe that? Now look at it. Bloody savages, all of them, but they keep a man in business.’

  ‘Business is good?’

  Flex shrugged his mountainous shoulders. ‘The glory days have gone, mate. Too many companies now, and too many ex-soldiers with war in their heads who can’t settle into working a civvie job. Everyone’s undercutting everyone. Times are tight, so I hope you’re not here for a loan.’

  Morgan laughed. ‘It’s a personnel matter, actually.’

  ‘Oh? I’d be happy to subcontract guys to you, Jack. You know I only take on the best.’

  Morgan shook his head. ‘I’m working a kidnapping,’ he explained, ‘and something the kidnapper said has me thinking he may have crossed your path at some point.’

  ‘Go on?’

  ‘He used the word “operator” in the ransom call to describe the bodyguard. That’s a term only someone in our circles would use.’

  Flex nodded in agreement. ‘Private military contractors are usually known as operators, yeah, but still, I don’t see how that can really help you, Jack. There’s hundreds of thousands of guys working this kind of gig now, from all over the world.’

  ‘But how many of them crossed paths with our victim’s bodyguard?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ Flex said, puzzled.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Oh.’ Flex was no stranger to death. ‘He won’t be much use then.’

  ‘His name was Aaron Shaw, and it looks as if the killer was able to get close to him. There were no signs of forced entry at the site, so we’re working on the theory that he was probably a friend, or at least trusted. We need to know more about Shaw. Did he have a clique? Regular work partners?’

  ‘One moment,’ Flex told them and left the room.

  Cook joined Morgan at the window in silence, the pair enjoying the tranquillity of the city’s glittering lights.

  ‘Aaron Shaw,’ Flex announced on his way back in, tossing the file in his hand onto the spacious desk. ‘He applied to work for me two years ago, but you’re shit out of luck I’m afraid, Jack.’

  ‘And why’s that?’

  ‘Shaw was in the Household Cavalry Regiment, and I only take on ex-infantry or special forces. I don’t trust a soldier who doesn’t want to look his enemy in the eye when he kills him.’

  ‘I was a helicopter pilot.’

  ‘I know.’ The big man grinned. ‘But I like you anyway, Jack, so I’ll make some calls.’

  CHAPTER 13

  ABBIE OPENED HER eyes. She looked around her, and she wanted to cry.

  The plate was empty. The powder was gone.

  She ran her finger across the metal, hoping a few remaining grains might stick to her skin. She rubbed what little there was into her gums. They numbed, slightly, but it did little to take the edge off her anxiety – the fear of the inevitable crash after the highs, and the crushing realisation that she was not in her home.

  Nor in anyone’s home, as far as she could tell.

  Abbie looked at the four walls around her, hating the way the swirling patterns made her vision swim. She looked at the bed, and for the first time noted that it was bolted to the floor. Then she saw the lonely bucket in the corner of the small room, and the black object above her on the ceiling.

  It was a camera, she realised.

  Why the hell was there a camera on the ceiling?

  Her heart beat faster, the pounding of blood in her temples at first obscuring the sounds from beyond the walls, but then she was sure of it. It reminded her of the mice in the family’s country manor house, scratching and scuffling out of sight – but this was too big to be any rodent.

  And then Abbie heard the voices. Not words. Only voices. They were commanding. They were angry. Someone was arguing, and amongst that chaos there was the plaintive pleading of a person struck by the most terrible fear.

  She stumbled to her feet, putting her ear to the cold metal wall.

  ‘Who’s out there?’ she shouted.

  ‘Abbie?’ someone sobbed. And then came a scream.

  The kind of scream that marks the end of a life.

  CHAPTER 14

  WITH THE SECURITY-CLEARED Major Cook acting as his chaperone, Morgan decided it was time to take a look at where the kidnapper had threatened to play his endgame.

  ‘Security’s impressive,’ he assessed as they cleared their second checkpoint, this one taking them from Birdcage Walk to Horse Guards Road and along the eastern edge of St James’s Park, now cloaked in darkness.

  ‘They’ll start ramping it up in the morning,’ Cook ass
ured him. ‘By the time the crowds begin to turn up, there’ll be police and military all over the streets.’

  ‘And in the buildings,’ Morgan was certain. ‘There’ll be a few bored snipers eyeballing us right now.’

  The pair walked on in silence, both searching for vulnerable points around the parade ground.

  There were many.

  ‘What’s to stop someone coming in from the War Rooms on the southern side?’ Morgan asked. ‘The public have access to that. Could someone hide out in there?’

  ‘It’s closed the day of the Trooping,’ Cook explained, ‘and it was searched with dogs last night. The same will happen again this morning.’

  ‘What about this park? That’s a long border to cover.’

  ‘Foot patrols, static guards, CCTV and drones.’

  ‘That should do it.’

  ‘It should,’ Cook agreed.

  The pair came to the parade ground itself. Tiers of seating and bleachers were arranged for the spectators that would flank the royal dais. On the gravel stood the small markers that signified the placement of each of the parading company’s troops.

  Morgan turned to Cook, planning to ask her about the bleachers, but he held his tongue. Her eyes were on a memorial across the road that was bathed in light, the stone column lined with the figures of pensive soldiers in the uniform of the trenches.

  ‘The Guards Division Memorial,’ she told him, sombre.

  ‘Someone you knew?’ Morgan guessed.

  ‘John. A good friend of mine. He was killed in Babaji, Afghanistan.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he offered.

  ‘I know you are.’ She smiled weakly. ‘Your background is no secret, Jack. I know you get it.’

  There was no reply Morgan could give. Like all veterans of combat, he did get it. ‘It’ was an unspoken shared experience, good and bad.

  ‘I have a question,’ she said suddenly.

  Morgan wondered whether it would be one about the past or the present. He prayed it would be the latter.

  ‘Why are we here, Jack?’ she asked with genuine confusion.

  Morgan could see there was more, and a look let her know that it was OK to say it.

  ‘Our job is to save Abbie, yes? If the kidnapper comes as far as the parade, then Abbie’s head’s already in a bag.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Morgan said simply.

  ‘Then why are we here?’

  ‘Because we’re working backward. They can’t kill her here, that’s obvious, so they have to do it somewhere else. Clearing security takes time. We’ve been held up twice for fifteen minutes, and that’s with no line and no crowds.’

  ‘I see where you’re going.’ Cook nodded her head.

  ‘Then run with it,’ Morgan challenged softly.

  ‘Everything about the parade’s timing is precise, and made public. Our kidnapper wanted the head rolling in front of the cameras, and there’s only one point in the parade where they can guarantee that – the march past the Queen.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘and they’re going to need to be in position far ahead of time so that they don’t draw attention. When you have a parade full of soldiers standing frozen, any movement catches your eye. If they have the background we think they do, they’ll know that, and so they’ll be in position far enough ahead of time to avoid drawing attention. They’re going to need an escape route too. A way they can get out when everyone’s eyes are the other way.’

  ‘The march past is at noon,’ Cook told him from memory.

  ‘And the deadline for the ransom is at eleven. We figure out how long it will take to kill her and get in position here, then we have a radius for how close they must be.’

  ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘Sometimes you have to work these things from the tail end,’ said Morgan.

  Cook smiled. ‘Sure.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know that even a small radius in central London is going to include literally thousands of properties, vehicles and boats, let alone people, don’t you?’

  This time it was Morgan’s turn to grin. ‘You didn’t want to work for me because you thought it would be easy, did you?’

  CHAPTER 15

  THE SENTRY SALUTED Major Jane Cook as she led Morgan clear of the security perimeter and towards Whitehall. Even at the late hour, gaggles of tourists mixed with the civil servants who emerged bleary-eyed from the magnificently appointed buildings that had once been the heart of the world’s most powerful empire.

  Cook caught Morgan’s appraising eye on the many poppy wreaths and memorials that lined the route to the Ministry of Defence.

  ‘Miss it?’ she asked. Morgan didn’t need to be told that she was asking after his own service.

  ‘Every day,’ he answered honestly. ‘I loved my job, and I loved my people. I do now …’

  ‘But it’s different?’

  ‘It is different.’

  ‘Now you’re the general,’ Cook observed with a smile.

  ‘A general is nothing without his troops.’ Morgan brushed the compliment aside. ‘And I have great troops. The best.’

  ‘You were never tempted to re-enlist?’

  He smiled. ‘Getting cold feet about leaving?’ he asked, not unkindly.

  ‘Of course.’ Cook shrugged. ‘It’s the only job I’ve ever known. I was sponsored through university, and at Sandhurst at twenty-one. The whole of my adult life I’ve worn the uniform, but times are changing. We can’t afford more wars, and the public wouldn’t back them even if we could.’

  ‘You think you’ll be bored if you stay on?’

  ‘I know I would be. War is a terrible thing, of course, but it’s what you train for. I had that off the bat, and I don’t want to spend the next ten years overseeing exercises on tighter and tighter budgets while the real action goes on without us.’

  ‘So you’re a war junky?’ Morgan teased.

  ‘I’m a soldier, Jack, and I live for a challenge.’ Cook smiled back, and Morgan’s pulse quickened with the knowledge that he was a part of that thrill-seeking.

  He opened his mouth to reply, Cook’s pace slowing, expectantly, but Morgan’s chance to speak was lost as his and Cook’s mobile phones began to ring simultaneously.

  ‘Go,’ Morgan answered, having seen the number of Private London’s HQ on his screen.

  ‘It’s another call coming into the Duke’s line,’ Hooligan informed them.

  ‘Trace?’

  ‘Blocked. Great encryption.’

  ‘OK. Patch us in.’

  Seconds later, the phone’s speaker emitted the metallic rasp of the kidnapper’s altered voice. ‘How are you sleeping, Duke?’ he seemed to cackle.

  ‘How’s my daughter?’ Morgan heard the Duke plead.

  ‘Well enough, but just to show you I’m not playing games, you’ll find a present in the old furniture warehouse on Kingsmill Road.’

  ‘Kingsmill Road?’ the Duke repeated.

  ‘Battersea,’ the kidnapper said. ‘And don’t bother calling the filth. You can send your friends from Private along to collect it and clean this one up. You hear that, Mr Private Investigators? I’m sure you’re listening. Looks like you’ve branched out into sanitation now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ The Duke stumbled over his words. ‘Private? I don’t—’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ snapped the kidnapper’s harsh voice. ‘Next call will be the last, tomorrow at ten to arrange the drop. Out.’

  The line clicked dead.

  ‘We’re clear from the Duke,’ Hooligan informed the investigators.

  ‘He said “out”, ’ Cook observed. ‘That’s ingrained voice procedure. He has to be long-term military.’

  ‘What did he mean by “don’t bother calling the filth”?’ Morgan asked the group, the American not recognising the slang.

  ‘It means the police,’ Knight answered. ‘So what now?’

  ‘Everyone meet at Kingsmill Road, but wait three hundred yards to the south. We go in together in case t
here are any surprises. Hooligan, bring your full set of forensics gear.’

  ‘Will do, boss. What are you expecting to find?’

  Morgan thought back to the pool of blood in Abbie’s penthouse apartment.

  ‘Our donor.’

  CHAPTER 16

  HAVING MET HOOLIGAN and Knight’s van on a quiet street in Battersea, Morgan’s Range Rover led the Private convoy to the front of a fire-damaged furniture store.

  ‘Riots,’ Cook guessed, seeing Morgan inspecting the destruction. ‘They’re probably still waiting on the plans to redevelop it.’ Cook stopped short of her next words.

  ‘Go on,’ Morgan encouraged.

  ‘You think pulling up like this is the best idea?’ she asked, as neutrally as she could.

  ‘Don’t ever be afraid to disagree with me, Jane.’ He smiled. ‘But I think we’re good. Our guys could be ex-military, but I don’t think they’ll have RPGs.’

  ‘True.’ Cook nodded. ‘But they probably do have a good knowledge of how to make use of IEDs. There’s all kinds of rubbish and litter around here where they could hide one.’

  ‘And what would they gain from that?’ Morgan asked, interested.

  ‘Time. They take out the people who’re getting close to them, or why else do they put something out here for us as a distraction? It’s either desperation or a trap. If we’re all dead, it doesn’t matter to the kidnapper. The Duke’s not with us, and he’s the one paying the ransom.’

  Morgan thought it over.

  ‘Keep thinking like that,’ he told her, pleased, then spoke into a small button radio affixed to the neck of his hoody. ‘Knight, hold back here for now. I’m going to give the place a once-over. Take the van a hundred yards back.’

  Knight’s reply betrayed his unease with the order, but Morgan was his leader. ‘If that’s what you want,’ the Brit answered, and the van reversed back along the street.

  Scanning for wires that could lead to a firing point for any explosives, Morgan made his way cautiously to the front of the building. It had at one point been boarded up, but the chipboard was now ripped and torn, the graffiti dull.