Private Games Read Online Free PDF

remembered how his mother had seemed to look at life and business as one long protracted brawl. Her pugnacious style succeeded. By the time Knight was fifteen, his mother had built Amanda Designs into a robust and respected company by never being happy, by constantly goading everyone around her to do better. Shortly after Knight graduated from Christ’s Church college, Oxford she’d sold the concern for tens of millions of pounds and used the cash to fund the launch of four even more successful clothing lines.
    In all that time, however, Knight’s mother had never allowed herself to fall in love again. She’d had friends and consorts and, Knight suspected, several short-term lovers. But from the day his father had died, Amanda had erected a solid shield around her heart that no one, except for her son, ever managed to breach.
    Until Denton Marshall had come into her life.
    They’d met at a cancer fund-raiser and, as his mother liked to say, ‘It was everything at first sight.’ In that one evening, Amanda transformed from a cold, remote bitch to a schoolgirl giddy with her first crush. From that point forward, Marshall had been her soulmate, her best friend, and the source of the deepest happiness of her life.
    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.
    ‘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