Private Games-Jack Morgan 4 jm-4 Read online

  ‘I catch her, mon!’ the driver promised. ‘Dat crazy one tried to kill you!’

  Lancer was looking back and forth between the road ahead and Knight. ‘You sure you’re okay?’

  ‘Banged and bruised,’ Knight grunted. ‘And she wasn’t trying to run me down, Mike. She was trying to run you down.’

  The driver power-drifted into Pont Street, heading west. The black cab was closer now, its brake lights flashing red before it lurched in a hard right turn into Sloane Street.

  The Rasta mashed the accelerator hard. They reached the intersection with Sloane Street so fast that Knight felt sure they’d actually catch up with the woman who’d just tried to kill him.

  But then two more black cabs flashed past them, both heading north on Sloane Street, and the Rasta was forced to slam on his brakes and wrench the wheel so as not to hit them. Their cab went into a screeching skid and almost hit another car: a Metropolitan Police vehicle.

  Its siren went on. So did its flashing lights.

  ‘No!’ Lancer yelled.

  ‘Every time, mon!’ the driver shouted in equal frustration as he slowed his vehicle to a stop.

  Knight nodded, dazed and angry, staring through the windscreen as the taxi that had almost killed him melted into the traffic heading towards Hyde Park.

  Chapter 8

  BRIGHTLY FLETCHED ARROWS whizzed and cut through the hot mid-morning air. They struck in and around yellow bullseyes painted on large red and blue targets set up in a long line that stretched across the lime-green pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground near Regent’s Park in central London.

  Archers from six or seven countries were completing their final appointed practice rounds. Archery would be one of the first sports to be decided after the 2012 London Olympic Games opened, with competition scheduled to start mid-morning on Saturday, two days hence, with the medal ceremony to be held that very afternoon.

  Which was why Karen Pope was up in the stands, watching through binoculars, boredom slackening her face.

  Pope was a sports reporter for the Sun, a London tabloid newspaper with six million readers thanks to a tradition of aggressive bare-knuckle journalism and publishing photographs of young bare-breasted women on page three.

  Pope was in her early thirties, attractive in the way that Renée Zellweger was in the film Bridget Jones’s Diary but too flat-chested ever to be considered for the Sun’s page three. Pope was also a dogged reporter, and ambitious in the extreme.

  Around her neck that morning hung one of only fourteen full-access media passes granted to the Sun for the Olympics. Such passes had been severely limited for the British press because more than twenty thousand members of the global media would also be in London to cover the sixteen-day mega-event. The full-access passes had become almost as valuable as Olympic medals, at least to British journalists.

  Pope kept thinking that she should be happy to have the pass and to be here covering the Games at all, but her efforts this morning had so far failed to yield anything truly newsworthy about archery.

  She’d been looking for the South Koreans, the gold-medal favourites, but had learned that they had already finished their practice session before she arrived.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she said in disgust. ‘Finch is going to kill me.’

  Pope decided her best hope was to research a feature that with lively writing might somehow make the paper. But what sort? What was the angle?

  Archery: Darts for the Posh?

  No – there was absolutely nothing posh about archery.

  Indeed, what in God’s name did she know about archery? She’d grown up in a football family. Earlier that very morning Pope had tried to explain to Finch that she’d be better off assigned to athletics or gymnastics. But her editor had reminded her in no uncertain terms that she’d only joined the paper from Manchester six weeks before and was therefore low-person on the sports desk.

  ‘Get me a big story and you’ll get better assignments,’ Finch had said.

  Pope prodded her attention back to the archers. It struck her that they seemed so calm. It was almost as though they were in a trance over there. Not like a cricket batsman or a tennis player at all. Should she write about that? Find out how the bowmen got themselves into that state?

  C’mon, she thought in annoyance, who wants to read about Zen in sports when you can look at bare boobs on page three?

  Pope sighed, set down her binoculars, and shifted her position in one of the blue grandstand seats. She noticed, stuffed down into her handbag, a bundle of mail that she’d grabbed leaving the office and started going through the stack, finding various press releases and other items of zero interest.

  Then she came to a thick Manila envelope with her name and title printed oddly in black and blue block letters on the front.

  Pope twitched her nose as if she’d sniffed something foul. She hadn’t written anything recently to warrant a nutcase letter, most definitely not since she’d arrived in London. Every reporter worth a damn got nutcase letters. You learned to recognise them quickly. They usually came after you’d published something controversial or hinting at diabolical conspiracy.

  She slit the envelope open anyway, and drew out a sheaf of ten pages attached by paper clip to a folded plain paper greeting card. She flipped the card open. There was no writing inside. But a computer chip in the card was activated by the movement and flute music began to play, weird sounds that got under her skin and made her think that someone had died.

  Pope shut the card and then scanned the first page of the sheaf. She saw that it was a letter addressed to her, and that it had been typed in a dozen different fonts, which made it hard to read. But then she began to get the gist of it. She read the letter three times, her heart beating faster with every line until it felt like it was throbbing high in her throat.

  She scanned the rest of the documents attached to the letter and the greeting card, and felt almost faint. She dug wildly in her bag for her phone, and called her editor.

  ‘Finch, it’s Pope,’ she said breathlessly when he answered. ‘Can you tell me whether Denton Marshall has been murdered?’

  In a thick Cockney accent, Finch said, ‘What? Sir Denton Marshall?’

  ‘Yes, yes, the big hedge-fund guy, philanthropist, member of the organising committee,’ Pope confirmed, gathering her things and looking for the nearest exit from the cricket ground. ‘Please, Finchy, this could be huge.’

  ‘Hold on,’ her editor growled.

  Pope had made it outside and was trying to hail a cab across from Regent’s Park when her editor finally came back on the line.

  ‘They’ve got the yellow tape up around Marshall’s place in Lyall Mews and the coroner’s wagon just arrived.’

  Pope punched the air with her free hand and cried: ‘Finch, you’re going to have to get someone else to cover archery and dressage. The story I just caught is going to hit London like an earthquake.’

  Chapter 9

  ‘LANCER SAYS YOU saved his life,’ Elaine Pottersfield said.

  A paramedic prodded and poked at a wincing Knight, who was sitting on the bumper of an ambulance on the east side of Sloane Street, a few feet from the Rasta’s parked red cab.

  ‘I just reacted,’ Knight insisted, aching everywhere and feeling baked by the heat radiating off the pavement.

  ‘You put yourself in harm’s way,’ the inspector said coldly.

  Knight got annoyed. ‘You said yourself I saved his life.’

  ‘And almost lost your own,’ she shot back. ‘Where would that have left …’ She paused. ‘The children?’

  He said, ‘Let’s keep them out of this, Elaine. I’m fine. There should be footage of that cab on CCTV.’

  London had 10,000 closed-circuit security cameras that rolled twenty-four hours a day, spread out across the city. A lot of them had been there since the 2005 terrorist bombings in the Tube left fifty-six people dead and seven hundred wounded.

  ‘We’ll check them,’ Pottersfield promised. �
��But finding a particular black cab in London? Since none of you got the licence number plate that’s going to be near-impossible.’

  ‘Not if you narrow the search to this road, heading north, and the approximate time she got away. And call all the taxi companies. I had to have done some damage to her bonnet or radiator grille.’

  ‘You’re sure it was a woman?’ Pottersfield asked sceptically.

  ‘It was a woman,’ Knight insisted. ‘Scarf. Sunglasses. Very pissed-off.’

  The Scotland Yard inspector glanced over at Lancer who was being interviewed by another officer, before saying, ‘Him and Marshall. Both LOCOG members.’

  Knight nodded. ‘I’d start looking for people who have a beef with the organising committee.’

  Pottersfield did not reply because Lancer was approaching them. He’d wrenched his tie loose around his neck and was patting at his sweating brow with a handkerchief.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to Knight. ‘I am beyond simply being in your debt.’

  ‘Nothing that you wouldn’t have done for me,’ Knight replied.

  ‘I’m calling Jack,’ Lancer said. ‘I’m telling him what you did.’

  ‘It’s not necessary,’ Knight said.

  ‘It is,’ Lancer insisted. He hesitated. ‘I’d like to repay you somehow.’

  Knight shook his head. ‘LOCOG is Private’s client, which means you are Private’s client, Mike. It’s all in a day’s work.’

  ‘No, you …’ Lancer hesitated and then completed his thought. ‘You shall be my guest tomorrow night at the opening ceremonies.’

  Knight was caught flat-footed by the offer. Tickets to the opening ceremony were almost as prized as invitations to the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton had been the year before.

  ‘If I can get the nanny to cover for me, I’ll accept.’

  Lancer beamed. ‘I’ll have my secretary send you a pass and tickets in the morning.’ He patted Knight on his good shoulder, smiled at Pottersfield, and then walked off towards the Jamaican taxi driver who was still getting a hard time from the patrol officers who’d pulled them over.

  ‘I’ll need you to make a formal statement,’ Pottersfield said.

  ‘I’m not doing anything until I’ve spoken with my mother.’

  Chapter 10

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, a Metropolitan Police patrol car dropped Knight in front of his mother’s home on Milner Street in Knightsbridge. He’d been offered opiate painkillers by the paramedics, but had refused them. Getting out of the police car was agonising and an image of a beautiful pregnant woman standing on a moor at sunset kept flashing into his mind.

  Thankfully, he was able to put her out of his thoughts by the time he rang the doorbell, suddenly aware of how dirty and torn his clothes were.

  Amanda would not approve. Neither would—

  The door swung open to reveal Gary Boss, his mother’s long-time personal assistant: thirties, thin, well groomed and impeccably attired.

  Boss blinked at Knight from behind round tortoiseshell glasses, and sniffed. ‘I didn’t know you had an appointment, Peter.’

  ‘Her son and only child doesn’t need one,’ Knight said. ‘Not today.’

  ‘She’s very, very busy,’ Boss insisted. ‘I suggest—’

  ‘Denton’s dead, Gary,’ Knight said softly.

  ‘What?’ Boss said and then tittered derisively. ‘That’s impossible. She was with him just last—’

  ‘He was murdered,’ Knight said, stepping inside. ‘I just came from the crime scene. I need to tell her.’

  ‘Murdered?’ Boss said, and then his mouth sloughed open, and he closed his eyes as if in anticipation of some personal agony in the near future. ‘Dear God. She’ll be …’

  ‘I know,’ Knight said, and moved past him. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘In the library,’ Boss said. ‘Choosing fabric.’

  Knight winced. His mother despised being interrupted when she was looking at samples. ‘Can’t be helped,’ he said, and walked down the hall towards the doors of the library, readying himself to tell his mother that she was now, in effect, twice a widow.

  When Knight was three, his father Harry had died in a freak industrial accident, leaving his young widow and son a meagre insurance payout. His mother had turned bitter about her loss, but then turned that bitterness into energy. She’d always liked fashion and sewing, so she took the insurance money and started a clothing company that she named after herself.

  Amanda Designs had started in their kitchen. Knight remembered how his mother had seemed to look at life and business as one long protracted brawl. Her pugnacious style succeeded. By the time Knight was fifteen, his mother had built Amanda Designs into a robust and respected company by never being happy, by constantly goading everyone around her to do better. Shortly after Knight graduated from Christ’s Church college, Oxford she’d sold the concern for tens of millions of pounds and used the cash to fund the launch of four even more successful clothing lines.

  In all that time, however, Knight’s mother had never allowed herself to fall in love again. She’d had friends and consorts and, Knight suspected, several short-term lovers. But from the day his father had died, Amanda had erected a solid shield around her heart that no one, except for her son, ever managed to breach.

  Until Denton Marshall had come into her life.

  They’d met at a cancer fund-raiser and, as his mother liked to say, ‘It was everything at first sight.’ In that one evening, Amanda transformed from a cold, remote bitch to a schoolgirl giddy with her first crush. From that point forward, Marshall had been her soulmate, her best friend, and the source of the deepest happiness of her life.

  Knight flashed on that image of the pregnant woman again, knocked on the library door, and entered.

  An elegant woman by any standards – late fifties, with the posture of a dancer, the beauty of an ageing movie star, and the bearing of a benevolent ruler – Amanda Knight was standing at her work table, dozens of fabric swatches arrayed in front of her.

  ‘Gary,’ she scolded without looking up. ‘I told you that I was not to be—’

  ‘It’s me, Mother,’ Knight said.

  Amanda turned to look at him with her slate-coloured eyes, and frowned. ‘Peter, didn’t Gary tell you I was choosing …’ She stopped, seeing something in his expression. Her own face twisted in disapproval. ‘Don’t tell me: your heathen children have driven off another nanny.’

  ‘No,’ Knight said. ‘I wish it were something as simple as that.’

  Then he proceeded to shatter his mother’s happiness into a thousand jagged pieces.

  Chapter 11

  IF YOU ARE to kill monsters, you must learn to think like a monster.

  I did not begin to appreciate that perspective until the night after the explosion that cracked my head a second time, nineteen years after the stoning.

  I was long gone from London in the wake of the thwarting of my first plan to prove to the world that I was beyond different, that I was infinitely superior to any other human.

  The monsters had won that war against me by subterfuge and sabotage, and as a result, when I landed in the Balkans assigned to a NATO peacekeeping mission in the late spring of 1995, the hatred I felt had no limits to its depth or to its dimensions.

  After what had been done to me I did not want peace.

  I wanted violence. I wanted sacrifice. I wanted blood.

  So perhaps you could say that fate intervened on my behalf within five weeks of my deployment within the fractured, shifting and highly combustible killing fields of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

  It was July, a late afternoon on a dusty road eighteen miles from the Drina Valley and the besieged city of Srebrenica. I was riding in the passenger seat of a camouflaged Toyota Land Cruiser, looking out the window, wearing a helmet and a flak vest.

  I’d been reading about Greek mythology from a book I’d picked up, and was thinking that the war-torn Balkan landscape through which w
e travelled could have been the setting of some dark and twisted myth; wild roses were blooming everywhere around the mutilated corpses we’d been spotting in the area, victims of one side’s or the other’s atrocity.

  The bomb went off without warning.

  I can’t recall the sound of the blast that destroyed the driver, the truck and the two other passengers. But I can still smell the explosive and the burning fuel. And I can still feel the aftershock of the invisible fist that struck me full force, hurling me through the windscreen, and setting off an electrical storm of epic proportions inside my skull.

  Dusk had blanketed the land by the time I regained consciousness, ears ringing, disorientated, nauseated and thinking at first that I was ten years old and had just been stoned unconscious. But then the tilting and whirling in my mind slowed enough for me to make out the charred skeleton of the Land Cruiser and the corpses of my companions, burned beyond recognition. Beside me lay a sub-machine gun and an automatic pistol, a Sterling and a Beretta that had been thrown from the truck.

  It was dark by the time I could stand, pick up the weapons and walk.

  I staggered, falling frequently, for several miles across fields and through forests before I came to a village somewhere south-west of Srebrenica. Walking in, carrying the guns, I heard something above and beyond the ringing in my ears. Men were shouting somewhere in the darkness ahead of me.

  Those angry voices drew me, and as I went towards them I felt my old friend hatred building in my head, irrational, urging me to slay somebody.

  Anybody.

  Chapter 12

  THE MEN WERE Bosnians. There were seven of them armed with old single-barrel shotguns and corroded rifles that they were using to goad three handcuffed teenaged girls ahead of them as if they were driving livestock to a pen.