Warlord: An Alex Hawke Novel Read online

  “Indeed he would be, sir. And he would certainly be honored to help in any way possible.”

  “Splendid. Come up to Highgrove for a long weekend, why don’t you? Like the good old days. I’ll ring up Sir David Trulove first thing tomorrow. Tell him you two are coming. MI6 and MI5 are already involved, of course. But, Alex, you and I will be working closely together. I’ll make one thing very clear to Sir David: this is my show.”

  “Charles, stay safe, you and the boys. Everyone. Sorry I can’t be there sooner.”

  “God only knows this may all be part of some elaborate ruse, I suppose. But I can’t afford to take the chance. Not after those two British Army soldiers and a Northern Ireland police officer were murdered by a resurgent IRA paramilitary group in the last month alone. Sinn Fein denies any IRA responsibility, of course.”

  “No matter who it is, we need to get to the bottom of it at once.”

  “You’re coming. That’s what matters now.”

  “Good-bye, Charles.”

  “Good-bye, Alex. And God bless you.”

  Hawke thoughtfully replaced the receiver and looked over at Pelham, who was still pretending to be minding his own business, rearranging the bar glassware, polishing a small silver platter, adjusting a very old picture of a Teakettle houseguest, Howard Hughes, seated tipsily atop a stool at this very bar, hanging askew on the wall.

  “Pelham?”

  “Sir?” he said, looking up.

  “What time is it? I mean right now?”

  “Just past four in the morning.”

  “Set an alarm, will you? Six sharp.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pelham said, unable to keep the smile out of his voice. “Will you be wanting breakfast?”

  “Breakfast can wait. I’m swimming up to Bloody Bay and back first thing. Six miles. If I survive that without drowning, I’ll have some papaya juice and dry toast. Get it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good.”

  THIRTY-FIVE HUNDRED MILES AWAY, the heir to the throne of England quietly replaced the receiver, laying his head back against the deep, worn leather of his favorite chair. He had been bone weary with worry these last weeks, but at last he felt something akin to relief. There was very real danger out there somewhere. But at least he would now have Alex Hawke at his side when he confronted it.

  The Hawke family had been close to the Windsor family for generations. Charles had known young Hawke since Alex’s schoolboy days, taking pity on him after the tragic loss of his beloved parents at age seven. Young Alex had spent many weekends at Sandringham and Windsor and had always joined the Royal Family at Balmoral Castle in Scotland for the summer holidays in August.

  Hawke had always seemed to him a rather strange boy, Charles thought, remote, with no obvious need of other companionship beyond his faithful dog, Scoundrel. He lived in a world apart, wholly self-contained, his nose constantly in some book or newspaper or other.

  He was reading at four and read insatiably ever afterward. He had an early fascination with medieval history, castles, architecture, and knights of the realm. He had, too, an abiding affection for the pirates of old, fierce, swashbuckling rogues like his own pirate ancestor, Sir John Black Hawke, or Blackhawke as that old rogue was known along the coast, hell-bent on terrorizing the Spanish Main.

  One morning, Alex, about age ten, had appeared in the doorway of Charles’s library at Balmoral with the Financial Times stock market pages in his hand. He said, “Sir, may I ask you what ‘unch’ means?” Charles had looked up, waved him in, and said, “Unchanged, I believe. Meaning the price of that specific equity remained the same at opening and closing of the market on the trading day.”

  “I thought that might be it. Thank you, sir.”

  He had his mother’s startling blue eyes, raven black hair, and long thick lashes. His cheekbones were high and wide and he was the sort of beautiful boy who, quite unconscious of his beauty, was much discussed and courted when he arrived at Fettes, his boarding school in Edinburgh.

  Pretty boys at school tended to be self-conscious. But Alex seemed wholly unconcerned with appearances, and it lent him a certain charm and distance that made him all the more alluring.

  From the first, Charles had noticed, Alex had resisted convention. He had refused, for example, to acquiesce in the inflexible custom of school games: the very notion of winners and losers was anathema to him. Lose? Him? No. The love of play, which had never left him, continually bubbled up, but his joy at winning was far too individual for any organized sport or game, where the notions of “team” and “losing” came to the fore.

  Even back then, there was a hint of an almost sinister side to his innate sense of his own power, his singular athletic prowess and mental toughness, a self-reliant feeling that negated any sense of team. Perhaps it was because, in any competitive team sport, he would feel obliged to play at humbly accepting defeat now and then. And that would have seemed false to him. Defeat? No. That would never do.

  Hawke simply could not accept the concept of defeat; he would never give in to it. As he grew into young manhood, it was soon apparent that this was not necessarily a bad thing.

  Alex Hawke, as it turned out, was naturally good at war. He’d been a decorated Royal Navy airman, flying Harrier jump jets over Baghdad in the first Gulf War, where he was shot down, imprisoned, and brutally tortured before he escaped and carried another gravely wounded man on his shoulders through the burning desert for days before being rescued.

  His service record, however, was not unblemished.

  Elated upon his escape and safely returned to his old squadron, he’d soon been reprimanded by his commander for “reprehensible conduct ill-befitting an officer.” His first official “black mark.”

  Hawke, overcome with ennui while waiting to return to combat missions, had taken to staging afternoon martini parties with a few close comrades. Of course, there was absolutely no ice in the desert, so Hawke had conceived the notion of flying pitchers of martinis up to extremely high altitudes. The idea was to chill them before putting the aircraft into a nearly vertical dive to the airstrip and deliver them up to the lads before they’d “lost their chill.”

  Out of natural inclination, the young Hawke had made a deep study of warfare, modern as well as ancient. “C,” Sir David Trulove, had said that one of Hawke’s more important assets at MI6 was his lifetime of wide reading in military strategy, most recently in counterinsurgency operations and counterterror tactics.

  Resourcefulness, knowledge, quick intuition, and an indomitable will, all these coupled with an intense fighting spirit—that was Alex Hawke. And that’s what Charles needed most now. He found the thought most comforting, running his hand through his thinning hair and closing his weary eyes.

  Under attack from within and without, England needed all the help she could get, and he was grateful there were still men the caliber of his friend Hawke within the realm.

  “Thank God for Alex Hawke,” the Prince of Wales whispered, mostly in an effort to console himself.

  Charles knew Hawke was feeling deeply wounded by the awful event in the skies above Sweden when he lost Anastasia. Perhaps Alex needed Charles’s help as badly as Charles needed his. If only he could really help him, somehow get him beyond this great sadness and make him whole again. Maybe this call to action would help. And, God willing, perhaps the two of them could stop the madman who had perhaps murdered his beloved uncle Dickie thirty years ago.

  And who now seemed hell-bent on the destruction of the Royal Family.

  FOUR

  GLOUCESTERSHIRE, ENGLAND

  PERHAPS THERE WAS A HAPPIER MAN in all of England that brilliant June morning. There may well have been one or two. But you would be hard-pressed to find someone more joyously alive than one Ambrose Congreve. Bouncing along a sun-dappled country lane, behind the wheel of his Morgan motorcar, a sprightly tartan plaid driving cap on his head, pipe jauntily clenched in his teeth, the sun shining through shimmering spring green leaves, God in h
is heaven, and, once more, all was right with the world.

  His tiny little corner of it at any rate.

  Ambrose Congreve, the retired head of Scotland Yard and a brilliant detective, had long been Alex Hawke’s best friend in all the world. Ambrose went about life in a fairly straightforward fashion, with few eccentricities or idiosyncrasies, but he was absolutely fanatical about four things. In order of importance, they were: his beloved fiancée, Lady Diana Mars, one. The incandescent Mr. Sherlock Holmes, two. His weekly golf foursome at Sunningdale, three. And his fastidiously acquired wardrobe, four.

  Catholic in his tastes, he was basically a tweed man, sometimes given to green velvet smoking jackets from Turnbull’s. Or “siren suits” like the ones Churchill had worn during the war. Or bright yellow cable-stitched socks on certain very special occasions. Today, for instance.

  A pair of twinkling blue eyes, the eyes of an innocent baby, belied Congreve’s gruff voice. This gruff manner, all this cock-of-the-walk huffing and puffing, well, it was all a pose, anyway, and deceived no one. Congreve was brainy, tough, shrewd, and relentless, but he was the kindest hearted of men, a fellow who gazed at the world from behind a remarkable moustache fully six inches long and waxed into magnificent points.

  The lane was flat and ran between towering hawthorn hedges. He saw a sharp turning ahead and quickly downshifted, using the heel-and-toe, double-clutch racing method Hawke had taught him when he’d first acquired the car. The lane had now turned upward, climbing the wooded hillside under overarching trees creating deep wells of shadow, shattered by dazzling blades of stark brightness.

  Just two weeks earlier, had anyone told you that the famous criminalist would be tootling down a shady Cotswolds lane en route to an early breakfast with Lord Alexander Hawke, you would have thought them mad as a hatter. And you’d have been quite right.

  The former chief inspector had sadly given up on Hawke, a sorrowful, lost soul, gone for good. When Congreve and his fiancée, Lady Diana Mars, had recently bade farewell to Bermuda, they hadn’t even stopped by Hawke’s Teakettle Cottage to say good-bye. Congreve sadly told Diana he simply couldn’t face it on the morning of their departure, tears threatening in his baby blue eyes. The sight of Alex in such a wretched state, he told her, the very idea of seeing his old friend for what might very well be—the last time—

  No—enough, he scolded himself. That was all behind them now that Alex Hawke was blessedly, miraculously back among the living. The chief inspector sat back and simply enjoyed whipping along the country road in the Yellow Peril, as he’d dubbed his old Morgan roadster. Painted in (what was to him) a most pleasing shade of buttery yellow, this was his dream machine.

  The fact that it was the only car he’d ever owned was beside the point. Every time he got behind the wooden steering wheel he cursed himself for a fool, having spent a lifetime oblivious to the joys of motoring, the smell of Castrol, the throaty rumble of the exhaust system. Well, he was making up for lost time now, he thought, grabbing second gear, downshifting for the tight right-hander coming up, accelerating into it, catching the apex perfectly.

  He was currently en route to Hawkesmoor, the ancient Hawke family pile in deepest, darkest Gloucestershire. It seemed that Alex Hawke, and here he would pinch himself were he not driving at high speed, had, astoundingly enough, returned home to England! And, the dear fellow was not only home, but he sounded very much his old self again. Full of that old piss and vinegar that made him such splendid company, even in dicey situations sometimes bordering on the extremely perilous.

  Hawke’s recovery was nothing short of astounding. He fully intended to call Dr. Nigel Prestwicke at Bermuda’s King Edward Hospital as soon as possible and offer his unbounded congratulations. The man was clearly one of the medical gods, a healer of the first magnitude. Small wonder that C, the chief of MI6, placed such enormous faith in him.

  Purring along, Ambrose relished the moment he’d gotten Hawke’s good news, on a Saturday morning just one week earlier.

  As his fiancée had other plans that evening, Congreve had been at home, dining alone at Heart’s Ease, the cozy Hampshire cottage he’d inherited from his aunt Agatha. His Scottish housekeeper, the positively angelic May Purvis, had just plucked her inimitable goose-berry sampler from the oven when the phone in the kitchen pantry had rung.

  “Probably Lady Mars, sir,” May said, serving him a generous, steaming portion. “Shall I get it?”

  “Hmm,” Congreve said, shoveling the stuff in while it was still piping hot. May was gone for a few moments and returned with a great sparkling smile on her pink face. She looked, what was the word, giddy. Giddy as a schoolgirl who’s just glimpsed her first film star.

  “It’s him, sir,” May said, beaming as if Sexy Rexy Harrison himself were on the line instead of up in heaven.

  “Him?”

  “His lordship.”

  “Which lordship, my dear Mrs. Purvis? As it happens, I know several.”

  “Lord Hawke, sir.”

  “Alex Hawke? On the telephone? You must be joking,” he said, leaping out of his chair and running for the pantry.

  “Hullo?” he said, out of breath. “Alex? Is it you? Are you quite all right? Don’t do anything foolish now because life is a precious gift that—”

  “Sorry to disturb your supper, Constable. It’s Alex, yes.”

  “Alex?”

  “I believe I mentioned that.”

  “How are you, dear boy?”

  “Quite well, thank you for asking. Back in the game, I might add.”

  Clearheaded, Hawke had sounded on the telephone; and completely sound of mind, body, and spirits. Speaking of spirits, he said he’d not had a drop or a cigarette in three weeks, had shed twenty pounds, and was back to his very strict fitness regimen. “Why?” Ambrose had wondered aloud. The man had been so completely submerged in the depths of despair when Congreve had last seen him, there had seemed scant chance of recovery.

  It was then that Congreve heard his friend utter those four magic words: “Something has come up.” As the cherished phrase came zipping over the wire, the chief inspector had known that, as his idol Sherlock Holmes put it so well, the game, once again, was afoot.

  Alex had then invited him for early breakfast at Hawkesmoor. Not only that, he’d told him to pack a bag. Apparently, they would be off for a long country weekend, exactly with whom he would not say. All very mysterious, which suited him just fine. Aside from his rounds of golf at the lovely Mid-Ocean Club course, Congreve had suffered no end of boredom on Bermuda once he and Sir David Trulove had handily dispensed with a murderous gang of Rastafarian thugs on Nonsuch Island.

  EARLY NEXT MORNING, CONGREVE, HAVING parked the Yellow Peril safely in the bricked stable yard, rang the front bell of the Hawke family’s ancestral home. Hawkesmoor was a lovely old place, originally built in 1150, with additions dating from the fourteenth century to the reign of Elizabeth I. It had frequently been used as a setting in films, most recently in the latest production of Pride and Prejudice.

  It was set amid vast acres of beech woods, parklands, and gardens designed by Capability Brown, England’s most celebrated eighteenth-century gardener. Brown had also created the gardens at Blenheim Palace and Warwick Castle. His true given name was Lancelot, but he was called “Capability” because he nearly always told his landed clients that their estates had great “capability” for landscape improvement. “This particular Lancelot,” Hawke had once remarked at a dinner party, “having forsaken a seat at King Arthur’s Round Table, would have been an absolute smash in advertising.”

  When the ancient Pelham finally swung open the great oak door, the look on the old fellow’s face was so heartbreakingly happy that Congreve embraced him, the two men hugging each other, both overcome with sheer joy over Alex Hawke’s miraculous recovery.

  “Where is he, Pelham?” Congreve blurted out. “I’ve got to see this miracle for myself before I’ll truly believe it.”

  “He just returned
from his morning ‘run,’ sir. He also takes an afternoon ‘run.’ This morning he ran to the newsstand over at Upper Slaughter and back, just to pick up the morning Daily Telegraph. The fact that today’s copy was already waiting for him on the entrance hall table didn’t seem to matter a whit. You’ll find him up in the billiard room, sir. Alone. Shooting a game of what the Americans mysteriously call ‘pool.’”

  “How does he seem?”

  “Risen, sir.”

  “Risen? Well put, Pelham, I must say. One never knows when all those inimitable Wodehousian literary genes of yours are going to kick in.”

  Pelham Grenville was in fact a distant relative of the brilliant humorist and playwright P. G. Wodehouse.

  “Indeed, sir. One only waits in vain for all those royalty checks to start flooding the post.”

  CONGREVE BOUNDED UP HAWKESMOOR’S GRAND center staircase and turned right at the topmost landing. The billiard room was in the great West Wing, at the far end of this very lengthy corridor. He raced past endless portraits of Hawke ancestry long dead, including the infamous pirate, John Black Hawke, “Blackhawke,” who’d taken first crack at establishing the family fortune in the eighteenth century, looting Spanish galleons in the Florida Straits, loaded to the gunwales with gold.

  Entering the dark, heavily furnished billiard room, which reeked of centuries of cigar smoke and spilt brandy, he saw Hawke. A hazy silhouette in the brilliant light of the great window behind him, he was at the far end of the great mahogany table, stretched out over the green baize, lining up a difficult shot.

  “Alex!” Congreve cried, unable to contain himself at the sight of his friend.

  “Shh,” Hawke said, not looking up. “This will only take a moment.”

  He drew the cuestick back slowly, nestled betwixt thumb and forefinger, then tapped the ivory cue ball, which ever so gently grazed the thin edge of the green six ball, sending it neatly into the side pocket with a pleasant and satisfying plop.