Midnight Runner - Jack Higgins [1]
MIDNIGHT RUNNER
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright (c) 2002 by Harry Patterson.
Cover design and photo illustration copyright (c) 2002 by Rob Wood/Wood Ronsaville Harlin, Inc.
All rights reserved.
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ISBN: 1-4295-0535-4
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Death is the Midnight Runner.
ARAB PROVERB
Contents
IN THE BEGINNING
Chapter 1
WASHINGTON LONDON
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
LONDON OXFORD HAZAR
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
HAZAR
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
OXFORD LONDON
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
LONDON BOSTON WASHINGTON LONDON
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
HAZAR
Chapter 15
LONDON DAUNCEY PLACE
Chapter 16
MIDNIGHT RUNNER
IN THE BEGINNING
1
D ANIEL QUINN WAS A GOOD ULSTER NAME. IRISH Catholic, as a young man, his grandfather had fought with Michael Collins during the Irish War of Independence, and then, a price on his head, he'd fled to America in 1920.
He'd become a construction worker in New York and Boston, but it was as a member of that most secret of Irish societies, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, that he'd begun to gain real power. Employers learned to fear him. Within a year, he was an employer himself and on his way to becoming a millionaire.
His son, Paul, was born in 1921. From an early age, Paul was obsessed with flying, and in 1940, while a student at Harvard, he'd traveled to England on impulse and, using his father's name, joined the RAF as a fighter pilot, an American volunteer.
His father, anti-Brit, was horrified and then proud of him. Paul earned a DFC in the Battle of Britain, and then moved on to the American Army Air Force in 1943 and earned another one there. In 1944, however, Paul Quinn was badly shot up in a Mustang fighter over Germany. Luftwaffe surgeons did what they could, but he would never be the same again.
Released from prison camp in 1945, he went home. His father had made millions out of the war, and Paul Quinn married and had a son, Daniel, born in 1948, though his mother died in childbirth. Paul Quinn never completely regained his health, however, and contented himself as an attorney in the legal department of the family business in Boston, a sinecure, really.
Daniel, a brilliant scholar, also went to Harvard, to study economics and business administration, and by the time he was twenty-one, he had his master's degree. The logical next step would have been to go into the family business, which now numbered hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of property, hotels, and leisure, but his grandfather had other ideas: a doctorate, and then a glittering future in politics, was what he had in mind.
Strange how life often swings on small things. Watching TV one evening, seeing the death and carnage in Vietnam on the news, the old man expressed his disapproval.
"Hell, we shouldn't even be there."
"But that isn't the point," Daniel replied. "We are there."
"Well, thank God you're not."
"So we leave it to the black kids who never stood a chance, to the working-class kids, to Hispanics? They're getting slaughtered by the thousands."
"It's not our business."
"Well, maybe I should make it mine."
"Damn fool," the old man said, a little