the room in disgust. Amateurs, all of them. Well, maybe the American had some smarts. Newton Dempsey acted like a man with experience. Wasn’t there something in his background about some big con he’d played? But it was still a mystery to Quincy why Dempsey was even involved. Most of the time, it seemed as if London was the last place in the world he wanted to be.
It was 2 a.m. The deadline was already here. This was the day.
Four men sat in a living room, lights low, shades drawn. Four stuffed chairs, one for each man and one for each corner of the room. The men sat equidistant from each other, ten feet apart, a round coffee table between them. Waiting. Quincy was the only one holding a gun, a Glock he’d recently come into possession of. A nice one, too.
Newton Dempsey sat in a chair nursing a drink, frequently checking his laptop. But Buckingham Palace was not responding.
John Holland, who had kept insisting that he be called nothing else, was idly flipping through a glamour magazine, not the choice of magazine he would have necessarily made under other circumstances, but his daughter’s coffee table didn’t offer much of a selection.
Across from Holland sat the man himself. Quincy was not impressed. Frankly, he’d been nothing but a pain in the ass, the old sod, requiring special food, forcing Quincy to go back to the manor to retrieve clothing, even demanding bottles of Foragers Clogau Reserve gin. One hundred and sixty quid a bottle! Good God, no wonder the man was in so much debt. As if Gordon’s wasn’t good enough.
Quincy was sick of all of them. And what a daft idea in the first place. No real surprise that Quincy was the one chosen to see it through. He seemed to get all the dirty work. How many years had he been working now for the boss? “You’re the only one I trust with this,” he’d told Quincy. Well, that was nice to hear, but what he really wanted to hear was that he was being promoted to a position where he wouldn’t have to worry about sitting in a living room at two in the morning with a bunch of charlies like these blokes. When was that day going to come?
Maybe never. Quincy was too good at what he did. Maybe that was the problem. He was too good to be promoted. What did they call that? Ironic? Besides, he wasn’t a Turner. He was a Quincy, just a ham-and-egger from Southwark. And a Quincy could never be a Turner. All he could do was put his head down and keep going, taking the assignments he was given, no matter how distasteful or daft, and hoping against hope that his loyalty would be rewarded.
Of course, the boss was going to reward him for this job, that was a certainty. Victor Graham had been Quincy’s contact, after all. They’d known each other from primary school back in Southwark, but you’d never get Graham to admit he was from the streets just like Quincy. One went one way, one went the other. It was nice having a contact on the police force, especially one as high up as Graham. And one as willing to take bribes. Well, you know what they say; you can take the man out of Southwark, but you can’t take Southwark out of the man. Damn shame that Quincy had to kill him, but he’d outlived his usefulness. He was doing fine bolloxing up MI5’s investigation, but he was letting those two American birds get way too close. Who were they anyway? Who sent them? Good thing that he’d had Graham followed or he might never have known about them. They were elusive, whoever they were. But he’d find them.
He didn’t especially like having to burn Spenser Burke, but Burke had outlived his usefulness, too. The boss thought he’d be more valuable as a statement showing how serious the kidnappers were and Quincy had agreed. Apparently, it was all for naught, though. Buckingham Palace didn’t seem to care. What was with the old woman anyway? Was she really just going to let them whack her own son? How cold can you be?
John Holland looked up from his magazine. “What time is it now?” he asked.
“Ten minutes after the last time you asked,” Quincy replied. “You’d think a nob like you would have a watch.”
Holland ignored him. “Dempsey?” he said. “Still nothing? Email them again. Tell ’em we’re serious this time.”
“What do you think I’ve been telling them?” Dempsey said, raising his voice.
“Maybe they’re all asleep.”
Dempsey sighed. “For the hundredth time, it’s the address of the Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household. It’s monitored twenty-four hours a day. Nobody’s asleep. They’re just choosing not to answer us. And who can blame them? I told you—I told all of you—this was the stupidest idea of all time. You think they’re really going to hand over one hundred million dollars?”
Newton Dempsey looked around the room in disgust. Ten years in Rikers Island only to end up here? With these losers? He had the beginnings of a good life going back in Boston. Selling cars wasn’t the most exciting thing in the world, but he still got a thrill out of talking someone into a car they didn’t really need. Sure, it wasn’t like conning people out of millions of dollars, but then again, it wasn’t illegal, either. He’d be damned if he was ever going back to prison. He vowed that those days were behind him.
And then that damn Spenser Burke had shown up. Out of the blue. Over fish and chips at O’Shaughnessy’s, he introduced himself. Turns out, his boss was John Holland. And John Holland was still pissed off. Ten years had come and gone, but guys like Holland don’t forget it when you take twenty million dollars of their money.
Holland was the perfect example of someone too rich for his own good. Holland believed himself brilliant, thought of himself as the world’s smartest businessman. But of course, that’s what had made him such an easy mark. All you have to do with guys like Holland is play to their enormous egos. Holland had swallowed the “Next Great Thing” scam hook, line, and sinker. It was almost laughable the way that he couldn’t bring himself to admit that he didn’t understand the technology. Well, of course, he didn’t. Nobody did. There wasn’t anything to understand. It was all bullshit, but Holland’s eyes lit up when he heard catch-phrases like, “Will revolutionize the internet,” and, “The next generation of information technology.” “We’re going to make Google look like buggy whip manufacturers,” Dempsey had promised. Holland didn’t want to be left out.
Dempsey had told all the potential investors the same thing. “We’re at a crossroads. Some will be a part of the future, feasting on the fruits of technology’s next quantum leap; some will be left behind to scrounge for scraps through the decaying remnants of the past. Which do you want to be?” When he said this to John Holland, Holland had wired the twenty million the next day.
So anyway, there was Spenser Burke sipping on a Guinness at O’Shaughnessy’s and explaining to Dempsey what would happen to him if he didn’t fly back to London with him and help Holland execute this simple plan of his. Holland had been waiting cold and patiently for Dempsey to be released from Rikers. Dempsey might have paid his debt to society, but he hadn’t paid his debt to Holland. And, as it turned out, Holland knew some bad guys. Very bad guys. He’d given Burke a message to pass along: “You’re at a crossroads, Newton. You can either play ball and have a future, or you can be dead.” None too subtle, but clever in its own way.
Executing the plan would square the debt. The problem was that the simple plan wasn’t so simple. It involved kidnapping a damn prince, for God’s sake! Who does that? Who even thinks of doing that? “It’ll go smoothly,” Holland had promised. “The royal family will pay, you and I will be even, and I’ll give you enough to get yourself back to Costa Rica with a new identity.” It was either that or he’d be dead. And he knew that Holland and the bad guys who Holland knew were serious. This guy Quincy, for instance. Talk about playing hardball. Look at what happened to that MI5 detective. And Burke himself! Just to make a statement? Wow.
Truth be told, Dempsey couldn’t figure out why Holland would let him live regardless of the outcome. Grayson’s deadline might as well be his own. But maybe, just maybe, Holland would appreciate the way Dempsey had handled everything. He could only hope. What choice did he have? Of course, none of it would matter if Buckingham Palace didn’t return his damn emails. “Today is the day,” he had emailed at midnight. “If I don’t see the money appear in the account, your prince will die.”
Then, per the boss’s instructions, he’d put a more specific deadline in place. “You have until 3 a.m.” Surely that would force them to act. And now it was 2:30.
“Dempsey,” Holland said through the silence that had enveloped them all, “when was the last time you checked the bank account?”
“Last Thursday,” Dempsey replied, rolling his eyes. “When do you think? I’m checking it all the time! Every other minute!”
“I’m just asking.”
“And I’m just telling. The goddamn account is just as empty now as it was the last time I checked.”
The silence continued.
John Holland looked around the room in disgust. Dempsey was a sarcastic, two-bit hustler, but he might well have been right about one thing: This was the stupidest idea of all time. How did he allow himself to get talked into it? To team up with this roomful of snakes? For what? Friendship? Screw friendship. He’d spent his entire life trying to break away from his family, and his friendship with the prince had allowed them to drag him right back.
Holland hated his family. He hated the way they made their living. All through grade school, everyone knew who he was. It seems they sometimes knew more than he did. It started in first grade when a kid went up to him on the playground at recess and said, “I heard your father kills people.” And it didn’t get better from there.
Everyone in London knew the Turner name. It was so liberating to go away to university, the first time he’d ever been away from home. Nobody at Cambridge had any idea who he was and how his family had made their money. He felt normal for the first time in his life. He liked the feeling so much that he made it permanent, getting a false ID and changing his name at the school. Nobody could ever trace his new name to his old one unless they rummaged through the student records, and who would ever do that?
When he graduated, he returned to London with a beard and a nose job and lived as far away from his family as he could. The split hadn’t exactly been welcomed by his father, but he had no choice other than to go along with it. Then Holland set about making his fortune. Over time, he shed the beard, leaving just a light mustache. Now, nobody knew where he’d come from. He made up a story about growing up in Canterbury and no one seemed especially interested in digging too deep; everyone wanted to know how he’d made his fortune and he was always happy to talk about his business acumen. The best part of the separation from the family was that he was judged on his own achievements, which were formidable.
Of course, every day he lived in fear that someone would make the connection, but at least he knew they wouldn’t find out anything from the Turners themselves. The last thing they wanted was publicity. It was the only thing he shared with his natural family—a strong desire to keep a low profile.
Naturally, when Felicity was old enough, he felt obliged to tell her about her grandfather and uncle and the family. She had a right to know. But he’d made it clear that she also had an obligation to keep the secret. And she had. Her first husband never found out. But then came Grayson. How in God’s name did he get it out of her? Pillow talk, he reckoned. Holland cursed the day that he’d invited Grayson to dinner and Felicity happened to drop by. Of course, he had to ask her to stick around. She and Grayson somehow hit it off that evening. It was exceedingly awkward to have his daughter dating his best friend, but what could he do? They were both adults, after all. But what did she see in him? He was thirty years older! Holland tried not to contemplate the obvious—that she was looking for a father figure. What did that say about him?
Well, at least the tabloids wouldn’t report the romance. The guy that ran the Star Globe sold out for cheap. Holland offered him fifty thousand pounds and he took it, even though Holland had been prepared to go as high as one hundred thousand. But Holland knew it was only a matter of time. There were other tabloids. He couldn’t buy them all off.
Anyway, Grayson knew who Holland really was and, in the face of his mounting debts, he’d threatened to let the secret out. Some best friend. Holland had been willing to kiss the six hundred thousand pounds goodbye. He’d only started writing the promissory notes because Grayson had insisted. “I want to make right my debts,” Grayson had said at the beginning, like a good friend and a good man. Those were the days. They now seemed like a very long time ago. Since then, the addiction only got worse.
At first, Holland only knew about their card game debts. But then Grayson approached him one night at White’s. “I know who your family is,” he said. “Felicity told me. And you have to help me.” And then he told Holland about the other debts. The three million pounds he’d lost gambling on everything under the sun. Horses, numbers, sporting events, everything. And who was the bookmaker? Who else? They practically owned the gaming industry in London and most of the UK. The Turner crime family. “You have to talk to them for me,” Grayson had said that night at White’s. He was scared. He was pale and shaky. “They’re threatening me, John. They want their money. And I can’t pay. I can’t!” Then he’d started to cry. Holland had tried to explain that he never communicated with the Turners, but Grayson was desperate. In a fit of rage, he screamed, “If you don’t talk to them, I’ll tell everyone who you really are!”
Of course, that was more or less the end of their friendship. Holland had no choice but to contact his brother. Lennox Turner was the head honcho now. Their father had stepped aside, though he’d remained in a sort of advisory role. John and Lennox hadn’t spoken for years, and the phone call was strained, to say the least. And not terribly long. “No dice, brother,” Lennox had said before hanging up. Holland reported back to Grayson the next night at White’s and that’s when Grayson had proposed his preposterous idea. “Can’t you just ask your mother for the money?” Holland had said. Well, apparently this wasn’t the first time Grayson had been upside down with creditors. Buckingham Palace had bailed him out before, and the last time they’d done so, the queen had made it very clear that they would never do so again. Grayson was stuck.
Of course, Holland could square the debt himself, but that meant paying money out of his own funds to the family from whom he had sworn to remain apart. Damned if he was going to do that. Plus, how to explain the withdrawal? In the end, he decided to go along with the plan but insisted on informing his brother of what was happening. If they weren’t going to forgive or restructure Grayson’s debts, could they at least help in some way with his scheme? Wouldn’t they want to protect their investment? And that’s when Lennox had sent Andrew Quincy to oversee the project. “He’s a good man,” Lennox had said. “Just do what he says.” Quincy seemed like a thug, but what could Holland do?
It was Quincy who suggested that the ransom note come from a third party, someone in no way connected with Grayson or Holland or the Turner family. Someone they could ultimately pin the kidnapping on if it all went south. Holland had to admit that it wasn’t a bad idea. But who? And that’s when he remembered the pledge he’d made to himself to exact his revenge on one Newton Dempsey. What an opportunity! Nobody makes John Holland look stupid and gets away with it. He had contacts in the States and it had come to his attention that Dempsey had recently been released from prison. Perfect timing. So Quincy sent Spenser Burke, a mobster wannabe, to Boston to get Dempsey. Burke’s downfall was that he was not an officially sanctioned member of the Turner mob, and thus expendable. Once his job was done, well, so was he.
Lennox had determined that if they were going to do it, they needed to do it right. It was a prince, for God’s sake, with access to the royal fortune. Lennox decided that the going rate for a prince was one hundred million dollars. It had to be dollars because that’s what Dempsey would naturally ask for. But the amount was beyond audacious. It was absurd. Nobody agreed with Lennox Turner on the amount, but nobody disagreed either. You don’t disagree with the head of the mob. You tell him, “Good idea,” even if you think the idea is insane, which this plan most certainly was.
The kidnapping part had gone off without a hitch. Quincy was a bona fide sociopath, but he was clearly competent. Still, it was unnerving having to meet with him for updates. And he always insisted on meeting in the worst parts of town, like that hideous dive by the river in Rothton. Holland felt as if he needed a shower after those meetings.
Actually, there was one little hitch in the kidnapping. The fact that Buckingham Palace was not going to pay! Nobody had anticipated that. But here it was, approaching the 3 a.m. deadline that Lennox had now insisted upon and there was no sign of the money. Buckingham Palace hadn’t even tried to negotiate.
Holland glanced over at Quincy holding that damn gun and felt a chill run up his spine. His instincts had always been accurate and, try as he might, he couldn’t ignore those instincts now: this was not going to end well.