Private London - James Patterson [74]
‘I know he did,’ I said. ‘And he’s sorry – he put his life on the line today for you. If he could go back to that other time he would do everything differently.’
‘I’m not talking about him not paying the ransom, Mister Carter. I’m not talking about him letting my mother be raped and butchered.’
Hannah’s voice had gone hard again and I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.
‘He used to come to my room, Mister Carter,’ she said. ‘At night. We had to comfort each other, he said. There were just the two of us now … And he hurt me.’
I gripped the phone tight in my hand.
Seemed I had been wrong about pretty much everything.
Chapter 94
I GOT ADRIAN to hack into the personnel records for Chancellors.
It seemed that Annabelle Weston had done her original degree at Cambridge University but had studied for her Master’s at Harvard.
I phoned Jack again. He was still holed up in a hotel and being babysat by the FBI. But he had his phone and he had his people standing by round the clock. I filled him in and ten minutes later he phoned me back. I hadn’t thought that the case had anything to do with America. But I was wrong. It had everything to do with it.
‘I got my contact in Homeland Security to run Annabelle Weston’s name through their system,’ he said. ‘And he got a hit. She’s on their watch list.’
‘Why?’
‘She had a relationship with a guy called Jesus Ferdinand. His mother is Kareema Ferdinand, an exiled Palestinian poet and political activist. Kareema was visiting relatives in the Gaza Strip in 1987 when the First Intifada kicked off. She stayed behind to protest against armed action. Urging the Palestinians to protest peacefully. On Christmas Eve 1987 she was murdered for her pains. The masked gunmen who shot her down as she walked home were never identified.’
‘Israelis?’
‘That’s what the Palestinians claimed. But most people think she was murdered by her own people for collaborating with the Israeli forces.’
‘Ironic.’
‘Isn’t it? But her son Jesus back in America puts the blame squarely on the Israelis. He converts to Islam, becomes highly radicalised. Over the years he has been the prime suspect in a number of incidents. Never been proven.’
‘And Professor Weston kept up her relationship with him?’
‘Yes. He was killed last year when Israeli marines boarded a ship trying to break the blockade and run humanitarian aid into Gaza.’
‘So she’s out for revenge?’
‘She found out who Hannah was, who her father was and, yeah … it looks like payback time.’
‘She operating on her own?’
‘Our intel says Jesus Ferdinand had links with Hamas and other paramilitary organisations.’
‘Shit.’
‘You need to get Harlan Shapiro back, Dan.’
Chapter 95
PROFESSOR ANNABELLE WESTON lived in an expensive mews-style two-bedroomed house not far from Marylebone High Street – and she hadn’t paid for it with her earnings from Chancellors.
She’d inherited a fortune when her father, an oil and steel billionaire, had died. So she certainly didn’t want for money. Which was what baffled me most about the whole thing. Until Jack Morgan told me what Harlan Shapiro had been working on before he was taken.
I leaned on the doorbell again. No response.
I hadn’t expected any.
I stood with Del Rio at the professor’s door and looked at Hannah Shapiro who was sitting with Sam Riddel in the back of my car. She was gazing at me through the window with an expression on her face that I couldn’t read.
Somewhere in there was the girl I knew. Somewhere was the woman she had become.
I thought of the consequences of these sequences of events. I thought of my lovely god-daughter Chloe. I remembered the tubes attached to her. I remembered the bandaging around her head. I remembered the beeping noises the monitors made as they checked her vital signs. I remembered her closed eyelids, the eyes flicking behind them as though she were trying to find her way home from the darkness.
I remembered the promise to her dad that I had made as he lay dying in my arms