James Patterson - Private London

It had been the caress of a lover.

Fifteen minutes later and we were back in front of Adrian Tuttle’s computer screen.

Adrian ran the kidnappers’ phone message to me through an audio sequencer and displayed a section in a waveform graphic.

Below the first graphic he ran a second piece of recorded audio and displayed it. This was the time Hannah had called me without benefit of voice distortion. The exact same phrase. Adrian aligned the two and they matched perfectly.

If I was enough of a contortionist I would have kicked myself. I had been puzzling over what had changed between Saturday night and Sunday morning and realised what it was. Harlan Shapiro was making the trip over. They hadn’t thought he would, given his past form. When he did, the goalposts were moved. The only person I had told that he was coming, outside of our own people, had been Professor Annabelle Weston.

I drummed my fingers on the table. Thinking. She had said she was going away on a conference. That was a lie. She was obviously moving Harlan Shapiro somewhere. And where was Laura Skelton?

I punched Del Rio’s number into the phone and told him to put Hannah on. Her voice was querulous, subdued.

‘I know what’s been happening, Hannah,’ I said. ‘And I know you had your reasons.’

‘You don’t know the half of it!’

‘I know I don’t. What happened to you was awful.’

‘Awful?’ She laughed, but it was a far from happy sound. ‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’

‘I know about you and Professor Weston, Hannah. I know she took advantage of you.’

She laughed again. It was a brittle sound.

‘She didn’t take advantage of me. I love her, Mister Carter.’

‘She was your tutor.’

‘She was my tutor and my counsellor and my lover and my friend! And I don’t expect you to ever understand.’

‘We need to know where she is. We need to get your father home safe.’

‘That’s exactly what we don’t need. That was what the million pounds was for. I was never going home.’

‘So what changed?’

Hannah hesitated. Not quite so strident now. ‘We figured it wasn’t enough. We figured five million was more like it.’

I doubted that she had done any of the figuring at all. She was just a pawn in somebody else’s game. I felt sympathy for her, for that much at least.

‘So where are they now, Hannah?’ I asked pointedly. ‘And why aren’t you with them?’

‘Plans change.’

I pictured her on the other end of the line, cradling the phone on her shoulder, rubbing her abraded wrist. Remembering how things had changed suddenly for her.

‘They hurt you, Hannah,’ I said softly. ‘They can’t be allowed to get away with that. They can’t be allowed to hurt your father.’

‘My father hurt me.’ The voice was almost a whisper. Under all the make-up and the clothes and the womanliness she presented to the world, she was still a small frightened girl at heart. A girl I had promised – and failed – to look after.

‘I know he did,’ I said. ‘And he’s sorry – he put his life on the line today for you. If he could go back to that other time he would do everything differently.’

‘I’m not talking about him not paying the ransom, Mister Carter. I’m not talking about him letting my mother be raped and butchered.’

Hannah’s voice had gone hard again and I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.

‘He used to come to my room, Mister Carter,’ she said. ‘At night. We had to comfort each other, he said. There were just the two of us now… And he hurt me.’

I gripped the phone tight in my hand.

Seemed I had been wrong about pretty much everything.

I got Adrian to hack into the personnel records for Chancellors.

It seemed that Annabelle Weston had done her original degree at Cambridge University but had studied for her Master’s at Harvard.

I phoned Jack again. He was still holed up in a hotel and being babysat by the FBI. But he had his phone and he had his people standing by round the clock. I filled him in and ten minutes later he phoned me back. I hadn’t thought that the case had anything to do with America. But I was wrong. It had everything to do with it.

‘I got my contact in Homeland Security to run Annabelle Weston’s name through their system,’ he said. ‘And he got a hit. She’s on their watch list.’

‘Why?’

‘She had a relationship with a guy called Jesus Ferdinand. His mother is Kareema Ferdinand, an exiled Palestinian poet and political activist. Kareema was visiting relatives in the Gaza Strip in 1987 when the First Intifada kicked off. She stayed behind to protest against armed action. Urging the Palestinians to protest peacefully. On Christmas Eve 1987 she was murdered for her pains. The masked gunmen who shot her down as she walked home were never identified.’

‘Israelis?’

‘That’s what the Palestinians claimed. But most people think she was murdered by her own people for collaborating with the Israeli forces.’

‘Ironic.’

‘Isn’t it? But her son Jesus back in America puts the blame squarely on the Israelis. He converts to Islam, becomes highly radicalised. Over the years he has been the prime suspect in a number of incidents. Never been proven.’

‘And Professor Weston kept up her relationship with him?’

‘Yes. He was killed last year when Israeli marines boarded a ship trying to break the blockade and run humanitarian aid into Gaza.’

‘So she’s out for revenge?’

‘She found out who Hannah was, who her father was and, yeah… it looks like payback time.’

‘She operating on her own?’

‘Our intel says Jesus Ferdinand had links with Hamas and other paramilitary organisations.’

‘Shit.’

‘You need to get Harlan Shapiro back, Dan.’

Professor Annabelle Weston lived in an expensive mews-style two-bedroomed house not far from Marylebone High Street – and she hadn’t paid for it with her earnings from Chancellors.

She’d inherited a fortune when her father, an oil and steel billionaire, had died. So she certainly didn’t want for money. Which was what baffled me most about the whole thing. Until Jack Morgan told me what Harlan Shapiro had been working on before he was taken.

I leaned on the doorbell again. No response.

I hadn’t expected any.

I stood with Del Rio at the professor’s door and looked at Hannah Shapiro who was sitting with Sam Riddel in the back of my car. She was gazing at me through the window with an expression on her face that I couldn’t read.

Somewhere in there was the girl I knew. Somewhere was the woman she had become.

I thought of the consequences of these sequences of events. I thought of my lovely god-daughter Chloe. I remembered the tubes attached to her. I remembered the bandaging around her head. I remembered the beeping noises the monitors made as they checked her vital signs. I remembered her closed eyelids, the eyes flicking behind them as though she were trying to find her way home from the darkness.

I remembered the promise to her dad that I had made as he lay dying in my arms in a dust-blown wreck of a town in Iraq.

Then I picked up the police-issue battering ram and smashed Professor Annabelle Weston’s front door in.

Del Rio went in first.

He held his gun in a two-handed grip, sweeping the room for hostile targets.

I dropped the ‘enforcer’, as it was known, to one side. It landed with a heavy thud on the polished wooden floor, taking large chips out of it. I didn’t feel guilty.

Luckily, no alarm bells had gone off. Score one for the good guys.