Private Royals

Chapter 28

Despite his moniker — given to him as a rowdy teenager by his siblings — Jeremy ‘Hooligan’ Crawford, a few speeding tickets notwithstanding, rarely broke the law.

‘I’m a bloody model citizen,’ he said firmly, as if trying to convince himself.

He had grounds to believe the statement. After all, Jeremy Crawford had shown that, no matter what circumstances a person was born into, they could rise high with a dash of natural talent and a bucketful of hard work.

Hooligan had earned degrees in both mathematics and biology from Cambridge University by the age of nineteen. By twenty, he’d added a masters in criminal and forensic science from Staffordshire University. There he’d been headhunted by MI5. Hooligan had worked in the government’s domestic intelligence agency for eight years before Private had lured him away with a staggering pay rise. In those eight years the East Ender had played a key role in building the systems that monitored London’s surveillance grid for signs of terrorism, and as one of its architects, he knew of the system’s weak points, its windows and its doors.

‘I must be bloody mad,’ he giggled nervously under his breath.

Because he was about to break into one of those weak points.