Private Games (Private 3)

Knight flashed on that image of the pregnant woman again, knocked on the library door, and entered.

An elegant woman by any standards – late fifties, with the posture of a dancer, the beauty of an ageing movie star, and the bearing of a benevolent ruler – Amanda Knight was standing at her work table, dozens of fabric swatches arrayed in front of her.

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‘Gary,’ she scolded without looking up. ‘I told you that I was not to be—’

‘It’s me, Mother,’ Knight said.

Amanda turned to look at him with her slate-coloured eyes, and frowned. ‘Peter, didn’t Gary tell you I was choosing …’ She stopped, seeing something in his expression. Her own face twisted in disapproval. ‘Don’t tell me: your heathen children have driven off another nanny.’

‘No,’ Knight said. ‘I wish it were something as simple as that.’

Then he proceeded to shatter his mother’s happiness into a thousand jagged pieces.

Chapter 11

IF YOU ARE to kill monsters, you must learn to think like a monster.

I did not begin to appreciate that perspective until the night after the explosion that cracked my head a second time, nineteen years after the stoning.

I was long gone from London in the wake of the thwarting of my first plan to prove to the world that I was beyond different, that I was infinitely superior to any other human.

The monsters had won that war against me by subterfuge and sabotage, and as a result, when I landed in the Balkans assigned to a NATO peacekeeping mission in the late spring of 1995, the hatred I felt had no limits to its depth or to its dimensions.

After what had been done to me I did not want peace.

I wanted violence. I wanted sacrifice. I wanted blood.

So perhaps you could say that fate intervened on my behalf within five weeks of my deployment within the fractured, shifting and highly combustible killing fields of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

It was July, a late afternoon on a dusty road eighteen miles from the Drina Valley and the besieged city of Srebrenica. I was riding in the passenger seat of a camouflaged Toyota Land Cruiser, looking out the window, wearing a helmet and a flak vest.

I’d been reading about Greek mythology from a book I’d picked up, and was thinking that the war-torn Balkan landscape through which we travelled could have been the setting of some dark and twisted myth; wild roses were blooming everywhere around the mutilated corpses we’d been spotting in the area, victims of one side’s or the other’s atrocity.

The bomb went off without warning.

I can’t recall the sound of the blast that destroyed the driver, the truck and the two other passengers. But I can still smell the explosive and the burning fuel. And I can still feel the aftershock of the invisible fist that struck me full force, hurling me through the windscreen, and setting off an electrical storm of epic proportions inside my skull.

Dusk had blanketed the land by the time I regained consciousness, ears ringing, disorientated, nauseated and thinking at first that I was ten years old and had just been stoned unconscious. But then the tilting and whirling in my mind slowed enough for me to make out the charred skeleton of the Land Cruiser and the corpses of my companions, burned beyond recognition. Beside me lay a sub-machine gun and an automatic pistol, a Sterling and a Beretta that had been thrown from the truck.

It was dark by the time I could stand, pick up the weapons and walk.

I staggered, falling frequently, for several miles across fields and through forests before I came to a village somewhere south-west of Srebrenica. Walking in, carrying the guns, I heard something above and beyond the ringing in my ears. Men were shouting somewhere in the darkness ahead of me.

Those angry voices drew me, and as I went towards them I felt my old friend hatred building in my head, irrational, urging me to slay somebody.

Anybody.

Chapter 12

THE MEN WERE Bosnians. There were seven of them armed with old single-barrel shotguns and corroded rifles that they were using to goad three handcuffed teenaged girls ahead of them as if they were driving livestock to a pen.

One of them saw me, shouted, and they turned their feeble weapons my way. For reasons I could not explain to myself until much later I did not open fire and kill them all right there, the men and the girls.

Instead, I told them the truth: that I was part of the NATO mission and that I’d been in an explosion and needed to call back to my base. That seemed to calm them somewhat and they lowered their guns and let me keep mine.

One of them spoke broken English and said I could call from the village’s police station, where they were heading.