bullet in his back before he reached the road. For days afterward he would aimlessly wander the streets of Lahore, scrounging for food, trying to make sense of what had become of his once charmed life. He went to the homes of relatives and found them charred ruins, found sticklike corpses inside. Nowhere left to turn, hungry and afraid, he lived the hand-to-mouth life of a street urchin.
One day, a withered old crone took pity on him. The streets were too dangerous for a boy so young and pretty, she said. She would take him to a wonderful orphanage. A place of safety, a refuge where poor boys would find hot food and shelter. When Tabu saw the man who ran the orphanage put five filthy rupees into the hand of the old woman, Tabu knew he'd just been sold into a life of slavery.
They took you in, all right, and put food in your belly and a roof over your head. After a while, though, when they thought you were ready, they'd come in the night, steal you sleeping from your bed, and ferret you down to the cellar. There, under harsh lights, they would bind you to a blood-soaked butcher's block. Then, as you stared up in horror, they would do one of two things, sometimes both if you had been a trouble.
They would either lop off one of your hands with a filthy cleaver, and then plunge your bloody stump into hot pitch. Or someone would carefully pour a tablespoon full of boiling acid into one of your eyes. He would then scoop the jelly out of the socket with the same hot spoon as you screamed until you were hoarse.
It was, of course, simply a matter of good business. Out in the streets, the one-handed, or the one-eyed, beggar boy was far more productive, these savages, these saviors, these 'defenders of the poor' had learned. They had studied the charitable habits of the influx of European grandees and grand dames to a fare-thee-well. And they knew what worked.
And these roaming saints of the streets, always in search of hopeless orphans, were nothing if not good businessmen. They had soon realized there was money to make off the downtrodden. You just needed to keep trodding them down at a steady clip, and clip one wing. So simple.
A one-eyed Tabu would now join the swarming floodtide of thousands of India's half-blinded children surging through the narrow confines of every city, holding out his or her remaining hand for a rupee, please, sir, one rupee, sir, only one, sir. Please.
How terribly swift had been his fall from grace, from a life of knowledge, privilege, and comfort.
It had taken less than a month.
Tabu Babar, only yesterday a brilliant boy who'd foreseen a brilliant future for himself, perhaps as a successful banker in the 'City' of London, or a famous barrister, now occupied life's lowest rung.
Untouchable.
Until, that is, in a squalid back street of Lahore, he'd managed to catch the attention of, and been touched lovingly by, an enormously wealthy Englishwoman named Lady Braeburn Thorne.
He was no longer untouchable. Oh, no.
He was touched again and again and again…
HE MUST HAVE DOZED OFF for he awoke with a start. Sir David Trulove was squeezing his upper arm tightly enough to hurt. He cracked an eye, saw Sir David leaning in toward him with a crooked grin on his deeply lined face. 'Have a look,' C said.
'What on earth?'
'Down there. At your feet.'
He looked down and saw one of the young terrorists crumpled on his back, a great red gash in his neck still pumping great gouts of dark blood.
'How did-?'
Sir David held up a long blade he must have hidden somewhere upon his person. It was dripping blood. He casually swiped it across his trousers and stuck it back in a sheath round his ankle. Old bugger had no end of tricks up his trousers.
'He fell asleep right in front of me. Drugs must have worn off,' C whispered. 'These guards are all buzzing with methamphetamines, but not a few are bloody dozing off as time goes by. Except for our esteemed colonel over there. Look at him, drugged to the gills, having a go at one of the young belles of the ball. Probably promised her the earth and moon by the looks of things.'
Zazi was positioned squarely behind a naked blonde, the girl bent forward over the cushioned back of a chair with her broad and gleaming white rump high in the air. All you could see was the colonel's muscular back, glistening with sweat even in the murky light as he labored over her, thrusting himself ever more rapidly into this gullible girl whose voice could be heard, moaning her appreciation for her captor's deepest expressions of affection.
Trulove reached down and snatched the AK from the dead terrorist on the floor and stood up in a single, athletic motion. He aimed at the jihadi colonel's back, his finger tightening on the trigger-suddenly a hand pressing down on his forearm and-
'No! Don't!'
'What?' C said, oblivious, opening fire, his lethal burst cutting Zazi nearly in half at this range, before he swung his head around to confront this bloody naysayer.
Trulove, astonished, was looking into the ugly snout of the Markov 9mm pistol, not two feet away, as it spat two rounds into his chest, his blood spattering the face of his assailant before he went down.
'OH, MY GOD,' CHARLES SAID, looking across the room at his old and trusted friend, now revealed as a traitor and a madman. A monster, now revealed for what he was, standing in a haze of gun smoke, a ghostly blue figure beneath the misty bulbs above. The Prince of Wales had just watched one of his oldest friends murder the director of MI6 in cold blood. So had the boys. It defied all belief. But he'd seen it. Everyone had.
Montague Thorne, gun in hand, walked slowly toward the Prince of Wales, weaving his way through the maze of furniture and terrified hostages, his free hand swiping the blood spatter from his eyes until he stood before the Prince of Wales flanked by his two sons, standing there silently, with his aristocratic nose and his vulgar heart.
'Monty. Oh my God, Monty, why? Who are you? What are you?'
Montague Thorne smiled, red blood on his white teeth as he spoke.
'I am what I have always been, Charles. You've seen my signature. A pawn. Just a little black pawn in the game. The Great Game as you people call it. The human chess game you and your family have played for years in my part of the world. Our blood is on your hands, just as yours is on mine. I've been playing my own little game all these years, you see, devoted my whole life to it. Moves and countermoves on the great board. The time draws nigh for the pawn's final move.'
'What in God's name do you intend, Monty?'
'Pawn takes Queen, Charles. However else did you think this game could end?'
SIXTY-FOUR
THE GOOD NEWS, STOKE THOUGHT, WAS they'd gotten very lucky with the weather: a storm had rolled in. Heavy fog with intermittent rain. That meant it would be a lot harder for any enemy shooters on the ground to hit them once they'd deployed their chutes. There was also a lot of booming thunder around them that would mask the thwump-thwump of the rotor blades when they descended from their current altitude.
The bad news, Stoke realized, was with the heavy ground fog at night, it might be a hell of a lot harder to spot the LZ, or, if you missed the landing zone, find another good spot to land on the rooftops of Balmoral Castle without breaking your damn leg or worse. Stoke had never seen so many damn chimneys on one house in his whole damn life.
'How are you feeling, big man?' Hawke, who was seated next to him, asked, just loud enough to be heard over the noise of the twin rotors.
'My pucker factor is rising a little.'
'Really? Why?'
'What you said to me back there in the hangar at Stornoway.'
'Which part, Stoke?'
'The part where you said, and I quote, 'This is the big one, Stoke, the counterterrorist Lifetime Achievement Award, so get ready. It won't look good on either of our resumes if we come back from this mission with a dead
