Rules of Vengeance Read Free

you get in here?”
    He had barely finished the words when the trespasser, operational designation Alpha, brought the bottle of vodka and its ice sheath down on his skull. Russell collapsed to all fours, the keychain skittering across the floor. The blow left him stunned but not unconscious. Before he could call out, Alpha straddled him, grasped his jaw in one hand, his hair in the other, and wrenched his head violently to the left.
    Russell’s neck snapped like a rotted branch. He fell limp to the floor.
    It took all of Alpha’s strength to drag the body across the living room and onto the balcony. Alpha flung his arms over the railing, then grasped Russell’s legs, hefted the dead weight, and rolled the body over.
    She did not wait to see Lord Robert Henley Russell strike the granite stairs 35 meters below.
     
     
     

Chapter    2
     
     
       Kenya Airways Flight 99 inbound from Nairobi touched down at London Heathrow Airport at 0611 British Summer Time. The manifest listed 280 passengers and 16 crew aboard the Airbus A340. In fact, the number was well over 300, with a dozen infants piled on their mothers’ laps and a handful of standbys clambering into the fold-down seats meant for flight attendants.
    Seated in row 43, Jonathan Ransom checked his watch and shifted uneasily. Flight time had clocked in at exactly nine hours—thirty minutes faster than scheduled. Most passengers were delighted by the early arrival. It meant beating morning rush hour into the city or gaining a head start on the day’s sightseeing. Jonathan was not among them. All week departures out of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport had suffered lengthy delays because of an ongoing strike by local air traffic controllers. The previous day’s flight had arrived in London six hours late. The day before that, it had been canceled altogether. Yet his flight had arrived not only on time, but ahead of schedule. He wasn’t sure whether it was luck or something else. Something he didn’t want to put a name to.
    I shouldn’t have come
, he told himself.
I was safe where I was. I should have played it smart and stayed out of sight
.
    But Jonathan had never ducked a responsibility and he wasn’t about to start now. Besides, deep down he knew that if they wanted to find him, there was no place too far away, no spot on the globe too remote where he might hide.
    Jonathan Ransom stood a few inches over six feet. Dressed in jeans, chambray shirt, and desert boots, he looked lean and fit. His face was deeply tanned from months of working beneath the equatorial sun. The same sun had chapped his lips and left his nose freckled with pink. His hair was shorn to a soldier’s stubble and cut through with gray. His nose was strong and well shaped, and served to focus attention on his dark eyes. With his two-day beard, he could be Italian or Greek. A bolder guess might place him as a South American of European descent. He was none of these. He was American, born in Annapolis, Maryland, thirty-eight years earlier to a distinguished southern family. Even in the narrow seat, he appeared to control his space instead of allowing it to control him.
    To channel his nerves, Jonathan gathered up the varied journals, articles, and reviews he’d brought to prepare for the medical congress and tucked them into his satchel. Most had names like “Diagnosis and Prevention of Tropical Infection” or “Hepatitis C in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Clinical Study” and had been written by distinguished physicians at distinguished universities. The last was printed on simple copier paper and carried his own name beneath the title. “Treatment of Parasitic Diseases in Pediatric Patients,” by Dr. Jonathan Ransom, MD. FACS. Doctors Without Borders. Instead of a hospital, he listed his current place of work: United Nations Refugee Camp 18, Lake Turkana, Kenya.
    For eight years Jonathan had worked for Doctors Without Borders, the humanitarian relief organization dedicated to bringing