Джеймс Паттерсон - Private Princess

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

“On 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.

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.