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.”
Chapter 66
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.
Chapter 67
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.
Chapter 68
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.
Chapter 69
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.
Rider was not what anybody could consider a nice person. Those who had known him in his childhood would politely describe him as “difficult,” while those who knew him as an adult would describe him as a “total bastard.” Those who truly knew him would use the words “dangerous” and “killer.”
He had been twenty years old when he left Britain to join the French Foreign Legion. For a man with Rider’s violent disposition, fighting had always seemed like a good way to earn a living, and so, when the British Army couldn’t take him due to his long criminal record, he had set sail across the English Channel. To him, one army was as good as the next.
Tough men join the French Foreign Legion, and the Legion makes them tougher still. By the time Rider had completed twenty years’ service, he was fluent not only in several languages but in killing. He left the service with a reputation, and was headhunted by Flex Gibbon, who had once worked with Rider on a shady operation in West Africa. Flex knew from those bloody days that Rider was a man who would carry out a mission first and ask questions later, so he had been the perfect candidate to run Flex’s operations in Africa. Over the past ten years the two men had built a firm friendship, and so when Flex told Rider that he had a score to settle, Rider had not needed reasons—only instructions. That was how he had come to be hunting down the Private tech guru.