Private Princess

Chapter 1 One day earlier

Jack Morgan was alive.

For a former U.S. Marine turned leader of the world’s foremost investigation agency, Private, that could mean a lot of things. It could mean that he had survived knife wounds, kidnap and helicopter crashes. It could mean that he had survived foiling a plot to unleash a virus on Rio, or that he had lived through halting a rampaging killer in London.

Right now, it meant that he was twenty thousand feet in the air, and flying.

Morgan sat in the co-pilot’s position of a Gulfstream G650 the private jet cruising at altitude as it crossed the English Channel from Europe, the white cliffs of Dover a smudged line on the horizon. To the east, the sun was slowly climbing its way to prominence, the sky matching the color of Morgan’s tired, red eyes.

He was exhausted, and it was only for this reason that he was a content passenger on the flight and not at the controls.

The pilot felt Morgan’s hunger: “You can take her in, if you’d like, sir,” the British man offered.

“All you, Phillip,” Morgan replied. “Choppers were always more my thing.” He thought with fondness of the Blackhawks he had flown during combat missions as a Marine. Then, as it always did, the fondness soon slipped away, replaced by the gut-gripping sadness of loss — Morgan had walked away from the worst day of his life, but others hadn’t.

What is it the British say on their Remembrance Day? “At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.” Morgan liked that. Of course, he remembered those he had lost every minute between the rising and the setting as well. Every comrade of war, every agent of Private fallen in their mission. Morgan remembered them all.

He rubbed at his eyes. He was really tired.

But he was alive.

And so Morgan looked again at the printed email in his hand. The friendly message that he had read multiple times, trying to draw out a deeper meaning, for surely the simple words were the tip of a blade. As the sprawl of London appeared before him, he was trying to figure out if Private were intended to be the ones to shield against that weapon, or if it would instead be driven into the organization’s back.

He was trying to figure this out because the email had not come from a friend. It had come from Colonel Marcus De Villiers, a Coldstream Guards officer in the British Army. Though no enemy of Morgan’s, he was certainly no ally, and when in doubt, Morgan looked for traps. That was why he was alive.

But De Villiers was more than just an aristocratic gentleman in an impressive uniform. He was the head of security for a very important family. Perhaps the greatest and most important family on earth.

And that was why Morgan was flying at full speed to London.

Because Jack Morgan had been invited to meet the powerful people under De Villiers’ care.

He had been invited to meet the royal family.