Eagle Strike

listen to this?” Alex asked.
    “If you interrupt me again, I‟ll ask Yassen to get the scissors,” Cray replied. He went on. “I had my first serious row with my parents when I was thirteen. You see, they‟d sent me to the Royal Academy in London. I was an extremely talented singer. But the trouble was, I hated it there.
    Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and Verdi. I was a teenager, for heaven‟s sake! I wanted to be Elvis Presley; I wanted to be in a pop group; I wanted to be famous!

    “My father got very upset when I told him. He turned up his nose at anything popular. He really thought I‟d failed him, and I‟m afraid my mother agreed. They both had this idea that one day I‟d be singing opera at Covent Garden or something ghastly like that. They didn‟t want me to leave.
    In fact, they wouldn‟t let me—and I don‟t know what would have happened if they hadn‟t had that extraordinary accident with the car. It fell on them, you know. I can‟t say I was terribly upset, although of course I had to pretend. But you know what I thought? I thought that God must be on my side. He wanted me to be a success and so He had decided to help me.”
    Alex glanced at Sabina to see how she was taking this. She was sitting rigidly in her chair, her cup of tea ignored. There was absolutely no colour in her face. But she was still in control. She wasn‟t giving anything away.
    “Anyway,” Cray continued, “the best thing was that my parents were out of the way and, even better, I had inherited all their money. When I was twenty-one, I bought myself a flat in London—actually it was more of a penthouse—and I set up my own band. We called ourselves Slam! As I‟m sure you know, the rest is history. Five years later I went solo, and soon I was the greatest singer in the world. And that was when I started to think about the world I was in.
    “I wanted to help people. All my life I‟ve wanted to help people. The way you‟re looking at me, Alex, you‟d think I‟m some kind of monster. But I‟m not. I‟ve raised millions of pounds for charity. Millions and millions. And I should remind you, in case you‟ve forgotten, that I have been knighted by the Queen. I am actually Sir Damian Cray, although I don‟t use the title because I‟m no snob. A lovely lady, by the way, the Queen. Do you know how much money my Christmas single, „Something for the Children‟, raised all on its own? Enough to feed a whole country!

    “But the trouble is, sometimes being famous and being rich isn‟t enough. I so wanted to make a difference—but what was I to do when people wouldn‟t listen? I mean, take the case of the Milburn Institute in Bristol. This was a laboratory working for a number of cosmetics companies, and I discovered that they were testing many of their products on animals. Now, I‟m sure you and I would be on the same side about this, Alex. I tried to stop them. I campaigned for over a year. We had a petition with twenty thousand signatures and still they wouldn‟t listen. So in the end—I‟d met people and of course I had plenty of money—I suddenly realized that the best thing to do would be to have Professor Milburn killed. And that‟s what I did. And six months later the institute closed down and that was that. No more animals harmed.”
    Cray rotated a hand over the biscuit plate and picked one out. He was obviously pleased with himself.
    “I had quite a lot of people killed in the years that followed,” he said. “For example, there were some extremely unpleasant people cutting down the rainforest in Brazil. They‟re still in the rainforest … six feet underneath it. Then there was a whole boatload of Japanese fishermen who wouldn‟t listen to me. I had them deep-frozen in their own freezer. That will teach them not to hunt rare whales! And there was a company in Yorkshire that was selling landmines. I didn‟t like them at all. So I arranged for the entire board of directors to disappear on an Outward Bound course in the Lake District and that put a stop to that!
    “I‟ve had to do some terrible things in my time. Really, I have.” He turned to Sabina. “I did hate having to blow up your father. If he hadn‟t spied on me, it wouldn‟t have been necessary. But you must see that I couldn‟t let him spoil my plans.”

    Every cell in Sabina‟s body had gone rigid and Alex knew she was having to force herself not to attack Cray. But Yassen was sitting right next to her and she