Royal Slaughter

Book summary

In "Royal Slaughter," Jack Slaughter, a formidable agent, returns to London for a high-stakes mission. Five years ago, he guarded Queen Sophia from harm, despite their forbidden love. Now, he's back to save her from her unhinged brother, Prince Laurence, who wields the might of the British Army. Jack is prepared to face insurmountable odds in this heart-pounding thriller.

Excerpt from Royal Slaughter

My first trip to England hadn’t been anything so nice as getting to shoot royalty. I was assigned to protect the queen. She was new to the crown and politically astute, but her enemies were deadly and her security team inexperienced. She supported more U.S. policies than her rivals did, so our representatives convinced Sophia that without me she was in grave danger.

She asked to meet me the day I arrived. I was driven not to Buckingham Palace but to something I supposed was small for a castle, with a pair of armed guards on the outside of tall electric gates. They confirmed my fingerprints and the gates opened.

At the end of a mile-long driveway the limousine stopped. The driver got out first. I waited with one hand on the pistol inside my coat. I’d gotten this far without trusting anyone, no sense starting now. But I’d been told to let him open my door.

He opened it. Under my coat I angled the pistol so it aimed at his head, nothing he could see. I turned slightly so I faced him as I got out of the car. I stood behind him as he shut the door.

“After you,” I said, pistol in one hand, small suitcase in the other. The case carried my clothes, among other things.

He led me to the castle’s front door, where we were greeted by the butler, a bald man in a well-pressed suit that smacked of servitude. Mine was rumpled, from the flight and the drive, but I served who I chose, and I always chose myself first. I watched the chauffeur return to the limousine then I followed the butler into the front hall.

It was long and wide, with soft carpet on the floor and gold-framed paintings of long-dead royal relatives on either wall. We were probably up to distant cousins by the end of the hallway.

We entered a circular room with carpeted steps that should have led down, without carpet, into a pool, but instead led to more thick, red-and-gold carpet, a pattern I was sick of just from walking this far. Across the room, at least twenty yards away, were steps going back up, and above them a couple of chairs that I supposed would be called thrones. The queen sat in one of them.

I reached the bottom of those steps and Queen Sophia stood. I walked up toward her. She met me at the top of the steps.

“At last, Mister Slaughter,” she said.

“Your Majesty,” I nodded.

Her pale complexion was lightly freckled, her eyes bright green and her hair black. She might have been thirty years old or fifty. I knew she was thirty-five, but there was a businesslike severity to her face that intimated nothing of youth, now or ever. I liked that. She conveyed strength, but there was beauty behind it. I liked that too, both that it was there and that she tried to hide it.

She offered her hand. I hesitated, shook it, and let go.

“Your journey was suitably comfortable, I trust.”

“It got me here.”

“Good. To business then.”

I expected something less direct and was relieved. The English I’d worked with before had hemmed and hawed for hours before they’d say a word that mattered. Of course, this was my first conversation with a queen, and she believed someone wanted to kill her.

“Business,” I agreed, but her next question came almost before I’d finished the word.

“Your team,” Queen Sophia said, “they have experience stopping assassins?”

“My experience with assassins is unparalleled.”

“And your team?”

“They’re as good as me.” I left out that they didn’t exist, that our budget had been slashed—since the Great Economic Collapse, our budget always got slashed—and this was a solo operation. “I’ll be the only one of my team allowed access to you. I am inside security.”

“Well…that’s hardly what I expected.”

“I’m not here to do what’s expected. I’m here to save your life. I know where you’re going to be and when, and that’s how we’ll set up your defenses. The important thing is for you to stick to your schedule.”

“I’m the queen,” she said. “My whole life is a schedule.”

***

“It’s incredibly stuffy in here,” Queen Sophia said. “It can’t be that large a security risk to open a window.”

I looked up from my comfortable chair and shook my head. “Every window is an unmanned entry point. You’re safe because they can’t be opened.”

“Can’t? What’s been done to them?”

“Explosives.”

The queen shut up about the climate. “If I’d opened a window?”

“You were told not to. It wouldn’t have happened. But you should’ve been told about the explosives.”

“I wasn’t.”

I shook my head. “Another reason from this point on I’ll be your only contact. I’m relieved they told you not to open the windows.”

“But if I’d forgotten…”

“The explosives are directional.” I shook my head, gave a small grin. “You wouldn’t lose more than your hands.”

“You’d have blown up these hands?” She held them out before her and narrowed her eyes at me.

“Not,” I said, “if they didn’t open any windows.”

Sophia stepped away from me. Her glare was something I’d rarely had to take. I was keeping her alive and she looked insulted.

I stood and stepped toward her, lowered my head. “Your Majesty.”

I looked up again and our eyes caught. I raised my head and held her stare until at last she nodded.

Sophia spoke. “I didn’t think your agency was good at killing monarchs.”

“Mistakes make the papers. I don’t.”

“And if I’d blown off my hands before you arrived?”

“You wouldn’t have.”

“But it was a possibility.”

I shook my head, lowered my voice. “A lot of things are possible. It was far more likely that an assassin would try to break in. Why would you open a window after you’d been told not to? Who tells a queen what to do? Only someone protecting her.”

Her voice got lower, more insistent. “But if I had…”

“Then your enemies would have been blamed. There’s always a contingency plan.”

“You know who my enemies are?”

I grinned, tipped my head to the side. “Hell, Your Majesty, you know who your enemies are. I’m in charge of security. Damn right I know.”

“And what will you do?”

“We wait. If you had enough to arrest them, would you?”

Sophia shook her head. “I would ask them to resign.”

“There’s only three ringleaders. They could be eliminated in a night.”

“They are senior members of Parliament. Their resignations will be scandal enough.”

“Make them resign. They’re just old criminals. Set them up with hookers.”

“They’re not like that.”

“Then set them up with male hookers.”

Sophia smiled but only a moment. “That’s not what I meant. We can’t entrap them now. They think they are close to succeeding. They will be cautious.”

“Except for the part where they send someone to kill you. If they’re any good, they know about this place. Their killer has to get in somewhere, and he knows someone’s guarding you. They won’t wait until you leave. They’re already here.”

“Already here? But they didn’t know we were coming.”

“A servant. Maybe more than one. But one you let near you.”

“That’s nonsense. They’ve all been with me for years.”

“Someone’s less loyal than you think.”

I was invited into the queen’s bedroom for security reasons, a rarely issued invitation that was really a command. I understood the urgency, but I also knew this command was a compliment, an assurance of trust.

Sophia’s husband, the duke, was out of the country promoting one of his numerous semi-liberal causes. It was just me and her alone in the safe castle. Alone with a couple dozen of her most tenured servants, at least one of whom was a traitor.

Two of those servants were in her bedroom. I ushered them out and shut the door behind them.

“I’m not leaving your side,” I said. “I can’t interview them except with you in the room. And I don’t think you’d approve my interviewing techniques.”

Sophia nodded. “I am the Crown. And the Crown has high ethical standards.”

Theoretically, I thought, not historically. But she hadn’t been queen long, we were stuck in the fantasy land of theory. “I don’t know how the assassins plan to strike, but if they can get onto the grounds and know where you’ll be, a long rifle shot is easiest.”

Sophia gulped before her nod this time. With that I laid my suitcase on her floor, opened it, and began to assemble my rifle.

“What are you doing?”

I closed the suitcase.

“Saving your life. It won’t be saved diplomatically. Now, you say your life is a schedule. The servants who know it need to be lied to.” I handed her a sheet of paper. “The first column shows which servants need to know your schedule and when. The second column is where you tell them you’re going to be.”

Queen Sophia nodded, ran her eyes down the page. “And what happens?”

Time to tell her what our allies had paid for, what I’d insisted on, without telling her who had paid. Couldn’t give away our lack of funding.

“Well, for one thing, you don’t go into any of those rooms. Stay in your bedroom. I’ll stay with you. Each room is rigged so at the times on the schedule, a hologram of you will appear in the room and sit near the window, an easy shot. When the assassin’s bullet hits the window, it will blow.”

“Then we know who betrayed me.”

“And where the shot came from. And that asshole’s mine.”

Sophia nodded in acquiescence, not agreement. It was rare for a monarch to grant autonomy to her security chief. She didn’t want to believe me, but she was scared. If she thought I was paranoid, she also thought paranoia was an appropriate response to her circumstances.

The queen waited on the edge of the bed. I faced her from a chair ten feet away, perched. I was poised to strike, in opposition to the chair’s elegance, which to appreciate I’d have to lean back and relax. I was sure the queen wasn’t used to sitting in a room with a man holding a rifle, no more than I was used to sitting comfortably.

“We could be here awhile,” I said. “It could be anyone who knows your schedule.”

The queen nodded. “I am sure we will wait through the day. None will betray me.”

I’d looked at her a moment, turned away now that she was done talking. I looked out the window and spoke softly. “You’ve already been betrayed. You just don’t want it to be someone you know. But that’s the only way it works.”

I’d removed the plastic explosives from her bedroom windows while she was with me in the room. I might need them to shoot through. When I got back to Oakland, I’d have to deal with the buffoon who’d neglected to tell her about the explosives. In the meantime, here I was, London, and where the queen sat on the bed, she could not be shot by anyone shooting through a window. They would have to kill me first, then enter the room. And if they had someone good enough to kill me, the queen was dead regardless.