Sidney Sheldon's Mistress of the Game (12 page)

“Just make the call!” Agent Edwards shouted over his shoulder. A third explosion swallowed his words whole. Agent Jones dived for cover again.

By the time he opened his eyes, his boss was gone.

Lexi had just finished eating when she heard the first gunshot. She knew instantly what it was.

They’re here! They’ve come for me! I knew they would.

Thirty seconds later, the door to her room swung open. It was the leader, the foreigner. He must have had no time to grab a mask. A hastily tied scarf covered only the bottom half of his face.

“Get over here. Now!”

Curly brown hair. Brown eyes. Not many lines: he’s young, younger than the pig. Pinkie ring. Small scar above the left eyebrow.

“NOW!”

Lexi stayed where she was. She pretended to be too terrified to move, but inside she felt elated. She watched the leader hesitate. The third man, the corpse who hit her in the face the day they brought her here, appeared in the doorway behind him.

“Leave her, man! I set the traps. Let’s get out of here.”

“Jeez, Bill, we can’t just leave her. The place is gonna blow.”

Bill. The corpse’s name is Bill.

“You want her, you take her. I’m outta here.”

Lexi saw him run away.
Good-bye, Bill.

The leader hovered helplessly for a moment, then took a step toward her. Lexi stepped back.

He doesn’t seem like much of a leader now. I can see the fear in his eyes.

“Fine. Have it your way. Stay here and burn.”

He turned and ran after his friend.

Lexi waited until the sound of their footsteps faded. Then she stepped out of the room.

It was the first time she had ventured beyond her cell door since they brought her here, whenever that was. Days ago, weeks, months? She found herself standing in a narrow corridor that opened out after about ten feet into a vast, derelict space, like an airplane hangar. But she had no curiosity about her surroundings. She wasn’t even looking for her rescuers.

She was looking for the pig.

Where is he? Has he gotten away already? Please don’t let him escape.

Another brief volley of gunfire on the other side of the building caught her attention. Lexi turned toward it and froze. A giant fireball was hurtling toward her.

Like a comet in a bowling alley. And I’m the pin.

She was so surprised, she forgot to be afraid. After that it was all a blur.

Flames, everywhere. Glass and brick and wood falling from the ceiling. Walls folding, melting in the searing heat. Then a single, deafening
BOOM
, so loud not even the earth could contain it.

It was the last sound Lexi Templeton heard.

N
INE

HE WAS THE MOST FAMOUS BARRISTER IN LONDON.

As he strode down the Strand toward the Old Bailey, the city’s venerable criminal court, immaculate in his Savile Row suit and polished, handmade brogues, people stared.

You know who that is, don’t you? That’s Gabriel McGregor. Hasn’t lost a case in six years at the bar. He’s a genius.

A blond-haired, gray-eyed beauty, Gabe McGregor was built like a rugby prop-forward, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested and with legs as long and strong and straight as oak trees. There was a solidity about him, a strength, in his body, his jaw, his steady, direct gaze that made juries think:
I believe this man.
Underlying his physical strength was a powerful intellect. Gabriel McGregor could judge a case’s nuances in a matter of moments. He knew instinctively when to push a witness and when to hold back. When to bully, to flatter, to cajole, to frighten, to befriend. Every judge at the Bailey knew and respected him. Gabriel McGregor was a class act.

Glancing at his watch, he quickened his pace. It wouldn’t do to be late to court. His long stride seemed to swallow up the yards of sidewalk effortlessly, like a whale gulping down krill. He was a colossus, a giant among men.

“Gabe, thank God. I thought you’d done a runner.”

Michael Wilmott was a solicitor. Every time Gabe saw him, the same three words popped into his head.
Weak. Pathetic. Disappointed.
Michael Wilmott was overweight, overworked and overwhelmed. He wore a cheap, shiny suit with sweat patches under the arms and a permanently harassed expression. If there were such a thing as a legal A-team, Michael Wilmott was not on it, had never been on it,
could
never be on it.

“I wouldn’t do that, Michael.” Gabe spoke in a soft Scottish brogue. “I told you I’d be here. I never break my word.”

“No. You just break innocent householders’ skulls in six different places.”

The words were like a glass of ice-cold water in Gabe’s face. Reluctantly he stepped out of his fantasy world and back into reality.

This wasn’t the Old Bailey. It was Waltham Forest Magistrates’ Court.

He wasn’t a hotshot lawyer. He was a nineteen-year-old drug addict, accused of burglary, assault and grievous bodily harm with intent to kill.

Michael Wilmott was all that stood between him and twenty-five years in Wormwood Scrubs Prison.

“The magistrates don’t want to hear your heroic speeches, and nor do I. Keep your head down, let me do the talking and try to look like you’re sorry. All right?”

Gabe nodded meekly. “Yes, sir.”

Gabriel McGregor was born in the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary in Scotland in 1973. The only son of Stuart McGregor, an impoverished dockworker, and Anne, Stuart’s childhood sweetheart, Gabe was a strong, handsome baby who grew into a strong, handsome boy.

Gabe couldn’t remember the first time he’d heard the name Jamie McGregor. All he knew was that he had only ever heard it uttered with venom and hatred. He heard the name so often, it seemed as much a part of his childhood as the smell of ship oil, the scratchy feeling of cheap polyester clothes against his skin, and the ominous thud of the bailiff’s fist on the front door of the family’s run-down, tenement flat.

Jamie McGregor was the source of all their troubles.

It was Jamie McGregor’s fault that they lived their lives hand-to-mouth, in crushing, soul-destroying poverty.

Jamie McGregor made Gabe’s father drink and hit his mother.

Jamie McGregor made his mother cry as she tried to cover the bruises with cheap foundation from Boots.

Jamie McGregor…

Not until he was a teenager did Gabe piece together the truth. Jamie McGregor, the famous entrepreneur who had founded Kruger-Brent and become one of the richest men in the world, was his great-great-uncle. Jamie McGregor had had two brothers, Ian and Jed, and a sister, Mary. Ian McGregor, the eldest brother, was Gabe’s great-grandfather. Ian’s son, Hamish, was Gabe’s grandfather. Hamish’s son, Stuart, was Gabe’s dad.

The rot had started with Jamie’s brother, Ian, back in the early 1900s. Ian McGregor never forgave his younger brother for running off to South Africa and making a fortune.

“Who does he think he is, disappearing halfway ’round the world, leaving us to take care of Mam and Da and the farm? Sending nae money home to those as raised him?”

Ian had conveniently forgotten that he had laughed in Jamie’s face when he announced his intention to sail for the diamond fields of Africa. That growing up he had beaten the boy mercilessly, frequently cheating him out of his scant share of food and giving him the toughest, most arduous jobs on the family’s meager, rocky, little farm north of Aberdeen. By the time Jamie founded Kruger-Brent and made his millions, both his parents were dead, condemned to early graves by the relentless poverty of lives spent tilling the land. Jamie did send money home, to Mary, the only one of his siblings who had loved and supported him. But when she, too, died, of tuberculosis, aged only thirty, the payments dried up. Jamie had not seen or spoken to either of his brothers in over a decade. He did not feel he owed them anything.

Ian McGregor saw things differently. If he’d been tough on Jamie, it was only for his own good. He had loved the boy like a father, worked hard to provide for him, and what had been his reward? Abandonment. Betrayal. Destitution.

Ian began to drink heavily. As Jamie’s fortune and reputation grew, so, too, did his brother’s bitterness and envy. The years passed, and Ian passed this loathing on to his own son, Hamish, who in turn bequeathed it to Gabe’s father, Stuart, like some sort of terrible genetic disease.

When Gabe was growing up, just to speak the name Jamie McGregor was to invoke the devil. Over the years, other names were added to the family’s roll call of hatred.
Kate Blackwell. Tony Blackwell. Eve Blackwell. Robert Templeton.
Gabe’s grandfather, Hamish, devoted his retirement years and every penny of his meager savings to a doomed lawsuit against the mighty Kruger-Brent corporation. Time after time the case was
thrown out of courts from Glasgow to London to New York. Each time the judges were more scathing.

Frivolous.

Greedy.

Entirely without foundation.

Hamish McGregor died a bankrupt, bitter man. Twenty years later, the same fate befell his son, Gabe’s father. Gabe was sixteen when his dad died, his mind corroded with drink and hatred, his body broken from the long, backbreaking years on the docks.

Despite everything, Gabe had loved his dad. He tried to remember the good times they’d had together. Playing on the beach at Elgin when he was three or four. Watching Celtic play at Parkhead, screaming their heads off in the terraces. Dancing around the tree at Christmas, all three of them in the front room, Mam, too, before Dad had started to hit her, before the bitterness got too much.

Two weeks after his father died, Gabe left home.

His mother was worried.

“Where will you go, son? You’ve nae qualifications. You’ll nae find work in Aberdeen, nae now the shipyards are gone.”

“I’m not staying in Scotland, Mam. There’s work down south. Plenty.”

“You mean
London?”

Anne McGregor couldn’t have sounded more horrified if Gabe had said he was moving to Beirut.

“I’ll phone you as soon as I’m settled. Do not worry, Mam. I can take care of myself.”

T
EN

PETER TEMPLETON SAT IN THE PRIVATE WAITING ROOM AT Mount Sinai Medical Center, staring at the wall. This was where he’d lost his beloved Alex. Even the smell of the place, a mixture of disinfectant and cheap vanilla candles, was gruesomely familiar.

How much more tragedy did the gods have planned for him?

When would it end?

Mindlessly, he picked up a frayed copy of
New Woman
magazine.

I don’t want a new woman. I want my old woman back.

A few doors down the hall, Agent Andrew Edwards was still in surgery. The man had been a hero, according to his partner. Astonishingly brave. After the second bomb, he’d run into the blazing building, looking for Lexi. He never gave up.

It should have been me in that mill, not him. If he lives, I will reward him for his courage. He can have anything he wants.

If he lives.

Something had gone terribly wrong. The FBI believed they were taking on a small group of armed kidnappers. They’d expected a shoot-out. Instead they stumbled into a series of sophisticated booby traps, triggering bombs powerful enough to wipe out entire villages. Captain Barclay and
his men never stood a chance. The first explosion killed three of them outright. By the time FBI reinforcements arrived, all five were dead, entombed in what would soon be the charred wreckage of a fire so catastrophic it could be seen from fifty miles away.

Early indications were that the kidnappers themselves had escaped. In the confusion, and desperate attempts to find Lexi, valuable time had been lost. If they had gotten out, they could be anywhere by now, scattered to the wind.

If
they’d gotten out. The fire was so intense, it would be weeks before a final determination was made on all the human remains. It didn’t help that nobody knew exactly how many bodies they were looking for.

Peter overheard the fire chief talking to one of the surgeons.

“It’s a miracle anyone made it out of there alive. Agent Edwards is a lucky guy.”

Second-degree burns to eighty percent of his body, two shattered legs and severe internal bleeding?
thought Peter.
I’d love to meet an unlucky guy.

“Dr. Templeton?”

Peter looked up. A pretty woman doctor was talking to him.

“You can come in now. Your daughter is awake.”

Lexi blinked, taking in her surroundings.

She was in a hospital. Even if the nurse hadn’t been standing at the foot of her bed, she’d have known it instantly from the smell. She remembered it from the time she’d had her tonsils out last year. That and the fact that they let her have ice cream for breakfast.
I wonder if I’ll get that this time?

The room had been designed for children. A cheerily colorful Winnie the Pooh frieze circled the whitewashed walls, and the visitors’ armchair was smothered with teddy bears. It was a comforting room, bright and pleasant. But something wasn’t right.

The nurse was smiling at her. Lexi could see her lips moving.

That’s strange. Why isn’t she talking out loud?

Dimly, memories of her kidnap and rescue floated back to her. Nothing coherent. Fragments of fragments. The sound of gunfire. Doors opening. Blinding light. She remembered the face of the man who had scooped her into his arms. He had pale skin and kind eyes. His lips had moved, too, like the nurse’s.

I wonder where he is now?

The next moment the door swung open and Peter walked in. Lexi’s
heart leaped for joy. He rushed to her side, wrapping his arms around her and smothering her in kisses. She could feel the warmth and strength of his body, taste the salty wetness of his tears. It was wonderful, a dream come true. And yet something was still not quite right. She felt distant. Detached. As though a part of her wasn’t really there. But which part?