Princess: A Private Novel (Private #14)(21)

“We’ll keep them bottled up until the cavalry gets here,” Lewis said, accepting what could happen to them in that attempt.

“The next break in the track,” Morgan confirmed.

“They’re scrambling the police helicopter,” Cook told them from the back, the map in her hand. “Jack, the track breaks left in a hundred meters.”

Through the rain and the dirt kicked up by the speeding Defender’s tires, Morgan saw it. He let the shooters pull further ahead, waiting for them to choose their path. They stuck to the trail, so Morgan gunned the engine hard and turned up onto the parallel track. Within moments, they were pulling abreast, separated by nothing but trees and rain.

“Shoot across me!” Morgan commanded.

Lewis pushed the weapon out in front of the American, snapping a double tap, the empty cases hitting Morgan’s jaw. He had no idea what impact Lewis’s shooting was having, but the passenger in the Defender showed themself to be alive, rounds beating the Range Rover’s skin like a drum. Cook barely covered her eyes in time as shards of glass shattered inward.

“Get ahead, Jack, get ahead!” she shouted, and Morgan pushed the Range Rover harder, throwing a backward glance at the Land Rover, desperate to see the faces of the shooters—the faces of the people that wanted him dead.

“Jack!” Cook cried.

“Are you hit?” he called.

But his eyes saw the reason for her shout as his eyes turned back to the track, and the piled logs that lay across it.

“Jack!” Cook shouted again as Morgan hit the brakes hard. The Range Rover slid forward into the wood. Timber went bouncing and breaking into the air as Morgan and his team were slammed into the steering wheel, dashboard and seats.

Morgan’s first instinct was to bail out of the car, certain that at any second bullets would begin to rip into his flesh as the shooters stopped to finish the job.

But the danger passed by them—the shooters were not firing, and the Land Rover was gone.





Chapter 34


FURIOUS THAT THE shooters had escaped, Morgan thumped his fist against the Range Rover’s mud-splattered bonnet. “What’s the ETA on the police helicopter?”

“It will get to the point where the main road meets the forest track in ten minutes,” Cook told him.

Morgan shook his head. “Not fast enough. They’ll hit it in less than five, and that’s if they use the same point into the forest that we did. There could be others. They could even dump the vehicle and make it out on foot.”

“They could,” Cook agreed, downcast.

Rain pattered from Morgan’s shadowed face as he made his decision. “You two will go back in the Range Rover and secure the scene until the police arrive.”

“We can’t split up, Jack,” Cook pleaded. “They could still be out here, setting up a second ambush.”

“All the more reason for me to be on foot,” he replied. “I can stay off the tracks. It’s not thick forest. I’ll make quick time.”

“But—”

“Jane, thank you, but remember who we are and what the hierarchy is. This is my call.”

“Of course,” she managed, taking a half-step backward.

“She’s right though, Morgan,” Lewis added from the passenger seat. “No offence to the girl, but Sophie doesn’t know if she has company or not. Don’t risk the living for the dead.”

“The crime scene needs preserving,” Morgan insisted, pulling tight his laces.

Lewis put her hand out of the window and into the pouring rain. “The crime scene is bollocksed, and the local bobbies will be here in well under an hour.”

“We should stick together, Jack,” Cook ventured again.

It was her eyes more than her words that convinced Morgan. It had nothing to do with tactics, he admitted to himself, and everything to do with not wanting her to be out of his sight.

“OK,” he conceded. “Find us a new route out of here, Jane, just in case there’s another surprise on the route that we came in on.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“The Princess hired us to find Sophie,” Morgan said, grim-faced. “We need to be the ones to tell her what happened to her.”

Cook nodded solemnly. “And then what?”

It was a moment before Morgan answered. He was prying something out from the shattered windshield with his fingers. “And then,” he told Cook, holding up the dull shape of a flattened bullet, “then we find the connection to two bodies. We find Eliza Lightwood.”





Chapter 35


PETER KNIGHT STOOD in his office, hands on his head, his eyes burning into a map of the United Kingdom that he had taped to the office wall. Brightly colored pins had been jabbed into various towns and villages with Post-it notes attached. These were places with known connections to Eliza Lightwood—grandparents, cousins, ex-boyfriends, favorite getaway locations. Hooligan had laughed out loud at Knight’s low-tech methods, but Knight was a man who liked something tangible to work with, and in front of him was the map of what his Private employees had been able to piece together through Eliza’s records, social media and character profiling.

She could be anywhere, he thought, staring at the array of pins that stretched across the map.