Private Princess

Chapter 69

Nathan Rider was not a happy man. In fact, he was furious. When the pie had hit his head, his first instinct had been to find the man who threw it and to shove his thumbs into that man’s eyes. It was with some internal struggle that he had fought off the urge, and in those few seconds the ginger bastard had escaped.

Not escaped, Rider corrected himself, but made life difficult. The ginger was pushing through the crowd, but Rider could see how the man was already breathing like a beached whale. He was unfit, and he was panicked — his lack of fitness would drop him into Rider’s hands as easily as the taser would have done, and then it was simply a case of dragging him away into the “police car.” From there it would be a short drive to a garage full of power tools, and the beginning of the ginger’s real nightmare. Flex planned a show — “something that would make even the Mexican cartels look like pussies,” he had said — and Rider was the kind of man who enjoyed such work.

Rider was not what anybody could consider a nice person. Those who had known him in his childhood would politely describe him as “difficult,” while those who knew him as an adult would describe him as a “total bastard.” Those who truly knew him would use the words “dangerous” and “killer.”

He had been twenty years old when he left Britain to join the French Foreign Legion. For a man with Rider’s violent disposition, fighting had always seemed like a good way to earn a living, and so, when the British Army couldn’t take him due to his long criminal record, he had set sail across the English Channel. To him, one army was as good as the next.

Tough men join the French Foreign Legion, and the Legion makes them tougher still. By the time Rider had completed twenty years’ service, he was fluent not only in several languages but in killing. He left the service with a reputation, and was headhunted by Flex Gibbon, who had once worked with Rider on a shady operation in West Africa. Flex knew from those bloody days that Rider was a man who would carry out a mission first and ask questions later, so he had been the perfect candidate to run Flex’s operations in Africa. Over the past ten years the two men had built a firm friendship, and so when Flex told Rider that he had a score to settle, Rider had not needed reasons — only instructions. That was how he had come to be hunting down the Private tech guru.

He knew now there was nothing that would come between him and the ginger. He simply walked on, confident that his size and face would clear a path for him like the parting of the Red Sea. For those too slow to move, there was always a shunt in the back, or a shove to the shoulder.

Rider was blocked by one of those oblivious idiots now. “Out of my way, you cock,” he growled, taking hold of the West Ham supporter’s shirt and shoving him aside. He hadn’t spent weeks tracking Hooligan’s habits to lose him now.