Princess: A Private Novel(13)

“Tell me something good,” the American asked of her, pulling out into the light traffic.

“Sophie’s a ghost here,” she told him, confirming Morgan’s own experience at the parents’ house.

Morgan nodded. “If she ran away from London, she didn’t come here. We’ll head back to…”

“Llwynywermod,” Lewis finished, pronouncing the name of the royal residence for the American.

“We’ll have the helicopter meet us there, and take us back to London.”

“London?” Cook asked.

“She’s not here. Next step is to see if she’s hiding, or being hidden, under everyone’s noses.”

“I’m going through her social media to see if there are any clues on there,” Cook informed him.

“HQ have already done that. There was nothing. No movements. No recent updates.”

“I know,” she replied, “but there could be something else. A pattern, maybe. Something.”

“OK,” Morgan allowed. “Follow your nose—”

He was about to add more when he saw Lewis looking anxiously behind them. “What is it?”

“Black BMW. I’ve seen it three times today.”

“Can you make out the plates?”

“No. Too far back.”

“I’ll pull over. See if you can get the plates as they go past.”

Lewis nodded. Morgan noticed that her hand was on her pistol.

He pulled the car onto the side of the road.

“Shit,” Lewis growled. “They went up a side street.”

“That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

The police officer nodded. “He was following us.”

Morgan pulled back onto the road. “At least we shook him.”

He called in to Private London’s headquarters. “What’s the ETA on our security team?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Morgan,” the operative in the personnel department replied, “but all our agents are in the field.”

“What about freelance contractors?” Morgan asked, confused. There were dozens of personal security companies that could be hired in these situations.

“I’m afraid none of them are bidding on the contract,” the operative explained. “It’s really quite unusual, Mr. Morgan. I’ve never come across this before. I have no idea why no one is taking the job.”

But Morgan had.

The reason’s name was Michael Gibbon.





Chapter 21


MORGAN HUNG UP the call. He looked into the mirror, and Jane Cook’s eyes meet his.

“It’s Flex, isn’t it?”

Morgan nodded. Michael “Flex” Gibbon was a former SAS soldier who owned and operated one of the biggest private security companies in the country.

He had also taken an embarrassing beating two years earlier at the hands of Morgan and Cook as they’d searched for Abbie Winchester. Flex had broken no laws when he’d facilitated the hiring of the men that carried out the kidnapping, but he had broken Morgan’s code. For that, he had suffered a ruptured knee, and now Morgan could see that Flex was enacting his revenge.

“He’s blacklisted us with the other companies.”

“Can he do that?” Cook asked.

“Enough of the bigger companies are run by former SAS that he only needs to bring a few onside. The others will fall in line because they don’t want to piss off the big boys.”

“We can do this without their help,” Cook assured him.

“We can,” Morgan agreed, no trace of doubt in his voice as he pushed the subject from his mind and addressed Lewis. “You have anything more to tell me about Sophie?”

Lewis did not.

“So tell me about the Princess. Tell me who would want to hurt her.”

“The Princess?”

“Right now, we have no reason to suggest why someone would want to hurt Sophie. My guess is that there are plenty of people who want to hurt the Princess.”

Lewis nodded. There was a pistol in her shoulder holster for a reason. “Terrorists are the biggest and most obvious threat. They’d love to take out a politician or a royal.”

“But they’ve stopped going after hard targets,” Cook put in.

“That’s true,” Lewis agreed. “Recent terrorist attacks have been more focused on soft targets—driving into crowds of defenseless civilians and so on. They know their chance of success is small if they come after high-profile targets. We’re bloody good at what we do.”

“The best,” Cook acknowledged, deeply proud of her country’s security services.

“Then who else?” Morgan asked.

“There are anti-royalists, but they don’t tend to be violent,” Lewis explained. “Of course, there are always lone wolves. Weird little bastards who just get obsessed with the Princess, try to sneak into places to see her, or steal her laundry.”

“You’ve seen that?” Cook asked.

“I’ve seen bloody everything. There are some very strange people on this planet.”

“It’s the dangerous ones I’m concerned about,” Morgan told her.

“As you well know, there are plenty of those too. So where do we start?”