Revenge (David Shelley #1) - James Patterson Page 0,2
wrinkle: they wanted a quieter life, which in turn meant avoiding “the Circuit,” the international commercial security pool where ex-soldiers like Shelley and Lucy usually wound up plying their trade. While the activities of any private security company—a PSC—on the Circuit could involve asset tracing, employee screening, security audits, and risk analysis, overwhelmingly the most common service was close protection in hostile environments, which Shelley had had more than enough of during his time in the military.
Shelley had given the SAS a quarter-century of service. But for the last twenty of those years, he’d been teamed with another SAS officer, Cookie, and Lucy—who was in the Special Reconnaissance Regiment—to form a three-blade Special Projects patrol. Operating under the banner of the 22 but otherwise unaffiliated, they were a patrol without portfolio, specialists in deep-cover, covert operations usually carried out under a cloak of plausible deniability: hostage rescue, target acquisition, disruptive incursion, assassination. They were so clandestine that even within the 22 and the SRR, two of the most secretive military organizations in the world, they were thought to be a myth.
The silver lining of all that secrecy? It had made keeping the secret of his relationship with Lucy and their subsequent marriage a lot less difficult.
The bad news? They’d spent twenty years in hostile environments. Two decades of eating ration packs and using baby wipes to wash; twenty years of considering a night in a military cot to be the height of luxury.
Yes, there was the buzz. They’d spent many hours talking about that elusive 5 percent of the time when they weren’t freezing cold, boiling hot, or bored out of their minds, when the adrenaline kicking in made the job worthwhile. But that was eventually outweighed by a desire not to get killed, not to see another kid with his foot blown off by an IED, another rape victim left for dead, her genitals deliberately mutilated.
Of the two, Shelley was keener to turn his back on that world. He never wanted to step in another Chinook as long as he lived. Lucy was ambivalent. “It’s what we do,” she was fond of saying. But Shelley had persuaded her to try it his way first. See if they could go it alone and set up a PSC with no Circuit connections. Maybe it could be the route to a quiet, comfortable life.
Sure enough, a quiet life was exactly what he had. On their books so far was precisely one job, which fell under the category of “information security.” Shelley had to ferry a TV script from a producer to an actor, wait while it was read, and then ferry it back. Literally, that’s all he had to do.
Otherwise? Nada. The problem he had was getting the word out. After all, you couldn’t exactly advertise yourself, not in the accepted sense, because the kind of clients you wanted to attract (i.e., the rich ones) required a discreet, anonymous service. They weren’t going to google “kickass bodyguard” and hope for the best.
Shelley tidied away the dishes from breakfast, lit a scented candle, and sat himself opposite his wife, who wanted to have what she called “a brainstorming session” in order to come up with ideas for generating work.
“A what?” he said.
“You heard.”
“I heard what sounded like a load of trendy management-speak.”
She rolled her eyes. “‘Trendy management-speak’ twenty years ago, maybe. Nowadays, just a way of getting ideas out of our heads and into the fresh air, so that, oh, I don’t know, we can maybe get this PSC off the ground and start earning some actual money?”
He sighed but went along with it. However, their brains remained unstormed. After a while of getting nowhere, Lucy picked up her phone. She was a fan of the Mail Online website, a “guilty pleasure” that she part justified by claiming that if you dived past the trashy Kardashian-and-sensationalist-headlines stuff at the top, then there were some interesting tidbits in the uncharted depths beneath.
“Hey,” she said, “didn’t you once do some work for a bloke named Guy Drake?”
The name took Shelley by surprise. “Uh, yeah. Before we were married, well over ten years ago. More like fourteen. I had extended leave and . . .” He trailed off, feeling his cheeks warm.
“You were saving up for our secret wedding.” Her smile was fond but it was tinged with sadness and he could sense that whatever she’d seen on her phone wasn’t good news.