Джеймс Паттерсон - Private Princess

The big man took the bait, and went diving for the weapon like a linebacker onto a quarterback. Morgan had pulled himself up short and stayed on his feet, and now he delivered a crushing kick into the side of Flex’s thick skull.

Flex roared in agony, but still he reached for the pistol. Morgan stamped quickly on his fingers, feeling something crack and give way. He was about to deliver another kick when Flex forgot about the pistol, and instead rolled toward Morgan’s leg like a hungry gator, enough of his fingers unbroken to grab a boot in a vise-like grip, and his free hand moving to a knife on his belt.

Morgan threw himself forward. Flex lost his grip as Morgan bounced off his broad back, his hands going for the knife that was now free in Flex’s left hand. Like a drunken rodeo rider, Morgan hooked his legs around Flex’s own, attempting to keep the man’s bucking body pressed down to the floor as he wrestled the blade from Flex’s meaty hand.

“I’ll kill you!” Flex screamed. “I’ll kill you!”

Morgan had no doubt of it, so he resorted to the most basic of human instincts when life is in danger. A tactic taught to him by Flex’s own comrade.

He bit, his teeth pressing down into the flesh of Flex’s knife hand. The pinned man roared, and Morgan felt the knife twitch. A moment later, Morgan’s vision began to blur from blood running into his eyes. Lots of blood.

He sank his teeth in deeper.

Flex howled and bucked, finally shaking Morgan loose. The American rolled clear with blood in his mouth and eyes.

And a knife in his hand.

Flex charged forward, taking Morgan in a bull-rush.

Morgan drove the knife forward at him, but the police stab vest absorbed the blow and the blade buckled from Morgan’s hand. He was slammed backward by Flex’s mad charge, and the lower guard rail hit across his kidneys, all air being driven from him.

Flex threw a headbutt into Morgan’s face, opening a deep cut above his eye and adding to the blood already covering his face. Morgan tried to look at the man, but all he could see was a red haze through the blood in his eyes. As he saw the bulk of Flex’s upper body pull back for another headbutt, Morgan realized this was the final chance for him to bring justice to Jane’s killer.

As Flex made to drive his head into Morgan’s face, Morgan gripped hold of his enemy, pushed up from his legs, and used the momentum of the muscleman’s headbutt to bend himself backward over the guard rail, and to the thousand-foot drop below.

As Jack Morgan’s body hit the narrow ledge ten feet below the Shard’s upper deck, he was almost grateful that blood clouded his sight and saved him from seeing clearly the terrible truth that he was three hundred meters above London, with nothing between himself and the earth but the meter-wide shelf that he and Flex had crashed onto. Only a snagging of Flex’s equipment belt had stopped them from bouncing from the ledge and into oblivion, and now Morgan was quickest to get to his feet as the big man sought to free himself of the entanglement.

Morgan scrambled free of Flex’s hold, and now he used the bottom of his shirt to clear the blood from his eyes. As the red liquid was wiped away, Morgan’s heart raced into his mouth — London was laid out below him like a three-dimensional Monopoly board. As a gust of wind shook the tower’s top, Morgan wasn’t sure if he’d ever been more scared in his life.

But he was alive.

He was alive and in the sky, and that was a place where Morgan knew comfort, as well as fear. The same could not be said of Flex, who now gripped for finger holds with terror in his eyes.

“Long way down,” Morgan taunted, enjoying the man’s panic.

“Help me up!” Flex begged, all grudges forgotten as he found himself inches from death.

Morgan smiled darkly, then jumped upward, his hands grabbing a hold of the metal fixtures that the tower’s audacious work crew would use to clip in their belts as they descended to clean and maintain the glass leviathan. Morgan shut out any thought of the terrible possibility of what a mistimed jump or poor handgrip could mean. Instead, he focused all his strength and courage on leaping from handhold to handhold. Moving his feet closer to the tower’s summit and safety in strides, Morgan pushed Flex from his mind, concentrating solely on his movement, trying to predict the wind, and to jump between its vicious gusts.

It was on his final leap — barely two feet from the top — that his luck ran out, and a savage thrust of air hit Morgan as he was free of his handholds. The gust blew him to his left, and his right hand snatched at the fixture that had been meant for his left. He caught it, but the movement spun his body, and he found himself facing outward, his back to the building, and nothing ahead of him but sky.

Below him, on the ledge, Flex saw his moment for victory and grabbed at Morgan’s legs like a cat after a bird. Morgan was saved by Flex’s inability to let go of his own handhold, and so only one hand reached up to grasp Morgan. He tucked his legs up to avoid Flex’s grabs, but the movement left him even more vulnerable to the wind, his outstretched knees catching every gust. As Morgan moved his left hand to join his right and double his grip, he looked up and realized there was only one choice left to him — a movement that would either save his life, or take it. Without waiting a second more before the next gust could hit, he drew his knees up toward his chin and, like a gymnast, curled his body upward so that his feet went above his head, pushing through the movement until he felt his shins scrape against the metal of the floor above. Pushing with his hands, Morgan shoved his body up and back, and slid himself onto the upper deck. His chest heaving from exertion and the endorphins of near death, he looked down at Flex, helpless on the ledge below.

Then he turned his eyes to the revolver that lay beside him.

Michael “Flex” Gibbon looked up at the revolver that was pointing down at his face.

“Put one in my head,” he asked Morgan, knowing the game was over. “I don’t want to fall, Jack! For God’s sake, put one in my head!”

Morgan said nothing. He wasn’t seeing Flex, and not because the blood was trickling into his eyes and blocking his vision — it was the picture of Jane Cook, seconds from death, that he could see in front of him. Then it was the image of her violent execution carried out by the man who now waited helpless below Morgan, begging for mercy.

“Put one in my head!” Flex pleaded.

Morgan did not. Instead, he used the pistol to trace out the other parts of Flex’s body below him.

“No!” Flex begged, knowing that any wound that didn’t kill him would certainly brush him from his narrow perch. “Please!”

Morgan’s pistol hand shook with rage, adrenaline and grief. It shook as another gust of wind hit the building’s top. Flex dug his fingernails into the building’s side as if he thought he could claw his way to safety.

“For God’s sake, Jack!” he cried. “Shoot me before I get blown off here! Shoot me! Shoot me!”

Morgan felt the cold metal of the trigger beneath his finger. He had the bullets and he had the shot. Since Jane’s murder, he had dreamed of this moment, the fate of the killer in his hands, his face filling the sights of Morgan’s pistol.

Do it for Jane , Jack Morgan thought savagely to himself. Do it for Sharon Lewis. Do it for Peter Knight. Do it for all those other people that Flex has left dead, ruined or scarred in his wake.

Do it , Morgan told himself.

DO IT! his mind screamed.

And so he did.