Break Point: BookShots

by James Patterson

  Keller sat back in the dark booth, nestled between the two men. She felt exposed, still wearing her tennis whites. Still salty from the exertion. Still knowing that her stalker was out there somewhere, lurking.

  ‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘there’s no way Basilia hired that guy to scare me, or to kill Maria. I saw his eyes in the crowd. Just for a second. He was staring at me like he hated every bone in my body. I couldn’t breathe when I saw that hatred burning. He’s the guy. It’s all about him and me. Nobody hired him. Not Basilia or anyone else. I just wish I knew why.’

  Abbot swilled his beer in his glass and took a sideways glance at Foster to see if he could get a steer on his thoughts. But Foster sat impassive and inscrutable.

  ‘He’s not a player, either,’ Abbot said. ‘You smashed through him yesterday like he was made of paper. He’s no kind of athlete at all.’

  ‘Okay,’ Foster said, nursing his pint. ‘So we know who he’s not. But who the hell is he? And what does he want?’

  ‘Some of those Chinese betting syndicates can get pretty nasty,’ Abbot said. ‘Any of them offered you money to throw a game?’

  Keller shook her head.

  ‘They wouldn’t approach Kirsten,’ Foster said.

  Abbot raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You sure?’

  Foster turned to Keller.

  ‘How much sponsorship did you earn last year?’

  Keller looked at him for a moment.

  ‘I didn’t earn any,’ Foster said, ‘if it makes you feel better about disclosing.’

  She smiled and said, ‘Eighteen million dollars, give or take.’

  Abbot gave a low whistle.

  ‘Next round’s on you,’ he said.

  ‘There’s five point eight million prize money on top of that,’ Foster said. ‘Any gambling syndicate would know there’s no point trying to bribe Kirsten. It would cost too much.’

  He rolled his pint glass between his fingers, feeling it scuff across a century of beer-soaked varnish on the table beneath.

  ‘Or they could murder my coach,’ Keller said, voicing Foster’s unspoken thought. ‘And send me half crazy in the meantime.’

  Foster nodded.

  ‘It’s possible. But there are much easier ways of getting the job done. Whatever is happening, we need to react. Today.’

  Suddenly Keller looked overwhelmed.

  ‘What are we supposed to do, if we don’t even know what this guy wants?’

  Foster sighed.

  ‘You want my professional opinion?’

  She said that she did.

  ‘Go home.’

  The intimacy of the past few days made the brevity of his answer sting. For a moment Keller sat in stunned silence.

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because, like you say, we don’t know what this is,’ he said. ‘Tom’s right. The guy’s not a player, but somehow he’s got unusual access to you. He threatened you, but killed Maria. We don’t know why, but the trouble hasn’t stopped since she died, which means the guy is still fixated on you. He’s dangerous, and he’s coming. The safest thing to do is to get out of the way.’

  Abbot turned to Keller and backed up his friend.

  ‘Chris is right,’ he said. ‘This guy’s getting closer and it looks as though he’s focusing on the final.’

  Keller twisted in her seat and faced Foster full on, her eyes burning into his.

  ‘I can’t control what happens when you’re out on the court,’ Foster told her, his voice a low admission.

  ‘I can’t promise to keep you safe. So you need to go home.’

  Keller took a breath and composed herself. As Foster watched, she found her nerve. Her skin flushed, suddenly glowing healthily under the dim yellow lights. Her shoulders broadened as her lungs filled and her whole frame set in a stronger, more perfect poise. Slowly, the cold-steel gaze that Foster had seen in her eyes during matches replaced the burning anger.

  ‘I am twenty-three years old,’ she said. ‘This is my time. And it doesn’t come around twice. It’s my time to win matches, to win tournaments and to become world champion. You know who says so? Maria Rosario. Except that she’s dead. But I’ll tell you something: if I run now, I will never find out who killed her, and I’ll never know why. And we’ll never catch this guy, and I’ll live the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.’

  Foster nodded.

  ‘You know what, Chris?’ Keller continued. ‘Maria told me once that she quit coaching Marta Basilia because she couldn’t stay objective after they slept together. And I can see that in your eyes, right now. So you need to forget everything that’s happened between us and do your job. You’re going to keep me safe, and we’re going to nail this guy. We’re going to do both of those things for Maria. Now drink up, I’ll wait in the car.’

  She swiped Foster’s keys off the table and headed for the door. Foster swallowed his beer, avoiding eye contact with Tom Abbot. He stood up and followed Keller, lengthening his stride to keep her in sight. The words everything that’s happened between us were still hanging in the air and, at Foster’s side, Tom Abbot was suppressing a smile.

  ‘Whatever you’re about to say,’ Foster told him as they walked, ‘don’t.’

  CHAPTER 22

  FOSTER ENJOYED THE drive back to the hotel. Abbot was riding shotgun and Keller had strapped herself into the back. The skies had cleared and the summer rain was starting to steam off the tarmac. Keller’s new-found strength was invigorating and his mood had lifted.

  ‘One of us can stay with you at all times over the next couple of days,’ he told her. ‘Once you’re on the court you’ll be exposed, obviously, but I can reach you in seven seconds if I’m sitting in the front few rows.’

  ‘Don’t you take me off the court,’ Keller warned him as they thundered under the railway bridges at Vauxhall. ‘Not in the final. I’m going to win this for Maria.’

  Foster locked eyes on Keller in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘If you’re in danger, I couldn’t give a damn about Maria Rosario’s legacy, or your prize money, or anything else. I’ll drag you off that court, if it’s the right thing to do.’

  At Foster’s request, Abbot kept his eyes on Keller all afternoon. She spent most of the time in her suite, calling her family and arranging her travel plans for after the final. Then she dedicated some time to a few more episodes of Better Call Saul. She educated Abbot as they went along, explaining Breaking Bad back-stories about Walter White and people cooking meth in their underpants.

  Foster needed some space to think, so he drove over to the quiet solitude of Highgate Cemetery. The skies stayed blue and the warm sunlight threw sharp, contrasting shadows over the white-marble carvings. Angels looked down on him and the breeze carried the sounds of songbirds and tousled the creeping ivy, as unchecked nature slowly claimed the stone back for itself. If there was a definition of peace, this was it.

  The gravestone stood testament to his royal client’s gratitude for saving his life three years ago. But it didn’t change the fact that Elaina was gone. He rested his back against the cold stone and closed his eyes, talking to her about the list of things that had happened since he last visited. He didn’t bring flowers, because he couldn’t bear the thought of them slowly decaying, the way every beautiful thing in nature eventually did. Besides, he had given Elaina flowers so rarely when she was alive that any overblown gesture now would make her spirit suspicious. With good reason, he thought, as his mind turned to Kirsten Keller.

  In the calm oasis he slowly unravelled Keller’s story. He described his frustration at not being able to keep her safe, and his sense of foreboding. Elaina listened as she always did, never in any rush as she lay quietly between the humming dragonflies and the gentle rustling leaves. And she told him what he already knew: that he was good at his job, but he cared too much. And she told him that no matter how much he risked to keep Keller safe, none of it would convince her to rise from the dead and come back to him.

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nbsp; ‘You’re on your own, kiddo,’ she said, and Foster smiled.

  He returned to the Shard in the early evening and took Keller to dinner in Oblix, a New York grill on the thirty-second floor. Choosing from the menu proved a challenge. Keller ordered carefully, according to her diet, but she still pushed most of what the kitchen had prepared around her plate, just as she had at The Ivy.

  Foster ate well, feeling unburdened after his conversation with Elaina. Time moved on, just as Keller had told him, in the bedroom in the Shangri-La. He couldn’t bring Elaina back, and he couldn’t be all things to all people. But finally he felt ready to move forward. He savoured the feeling of good food in his belly and, once Kirsten was safely in bed, took up his position on the sofa in the outer room and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE WOODBRIDGE HOTEL was a four-storey red-brick building less than a mile from the All England Lawn Tennis Club. Each of the rounded burgundy blinds hovering above the metal-framed windows was covered in pigeon-shit and greyed by the fumes of the traffic below. Behind the palm-smeared glass of the aluminium doors, a shabby reception area greeted guests with the smell of wet dog and cheap air freshener.

  The Woodbridge was not the kind of place that employed especially attentive lobby staff, which was good, as far as the man crossing the worn blue carpet was concerned. He walked briskly with a faint limp. A livid purple bruise was still maturing on the side of his neck. He had considered turning up his collar to conceal the injury, but he decided against it, figuring he would only draw more attention to himself. Anyway, the receptionist had little interest in passing guests. He had barely looked up from his Racing Post when the bruised man left the hotel, and he had not looked up at all when the man returned, crossed the lobby and disappeared into the rickety lift that ascended swiftly to the floor where he was staying.

  The man had only left the hotel for a matter of minutes. He walked the short journey along the main road and into a side street, where he found Green’s Hardware Store. The place was a cornucopia of screws and nails and duct tape, and replacement parts for lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners. The man found what he was looking for towards the back of the shop: a studded hardboard display of polished metal blades. There were bushcraft and woodcarving knives, machetes and axes. The way they were displayed together, hidden in a dark corner of this unassuming shop, it was hard to believe that anyone bought them for their original and stated purpose.

  He chose a matt-black hunting knife that glinted silver along its razor-sharp edge and curved to a vicious point. It looked sturdy enough to do the job, and stealthy enough that he could fold it away and carry it without being noticed. Perfect. An old guy with an impressive grey moustache had been only too happy to remove and box the display model, asking no questions and avoiding all eye contact. His gaze lingered for a moment on the man’s bruised neck, before he dropped the goods into a brown paper bag, which the man tucked under his arm before paying cash and leaving the shop.

  Back in his room in the Woodbridge, he unwrapped the box and took the knife in his hand, feeling the weight of it. He liked it almost as much as his old one, which he had lost when the bodyguard had smashed it from his hand inside the tennis club. That had been a close call. And yet he had survived it and here he was, so close to completing the job. He looked at himself in the dull mirror that had been screwed to the wall for at least twenty years. He held the black knife up in front of his face, so that his cold eyes were scowling back at him from either side of the blade.

  Until yesterday the mirror had been decorated by the silver chain that he had stolen from Maria Rosario’s neck after he killed her, and he had smiled every time he looked at it, because he had imagined the look of terror he would see in Keller’s face when he put the chain in her hands. Reality had not disappointed.

  He had expected to feel guilty about Rosario. In all honesty, she was not to blame for what had happened, but in the end he had not found it hard to kill her. It was all part of the plan. And tomorrow he would do the job for which he had been preparing for the past twelve months.

  He looked at the blade again and ran the tip of his finger across the gleaming edge. He thought about his brother. Remembered how they played together as kids. Remembered his father telling him that nothing in life mattered more than looking out for his kid brother. Remembered watching as the sheriff’s department cut Jake down from the motel ceiling, when they found him blue and lifeless. Remembered Kirsten Keller smiling on the TV in the motel room as she won Wimbledon. The last thing Jake ever saw. She hadn’t even bothered to come home for the funeral.

  The man smiled as he realised the blade had scoured his skin, and a thin ribbon of blood was trickling down his finger and across his palm. People say revenge only hollows you out. That’s bullshit. Killing Rosario had given him a buzz, and killing Keller would be a million times better. He might not live beyond tomorrow, but that was okay. Either way, by tomorrow he would be free.

  CHAPTER 24

  DESPITE ALL THE planning, when Kirsten Keller walked out onto Centre Court for the final, Foster felt on edge. The court was wide open, and she was too far from his reach. He sat two rows back from the turf, close to the chairs where Keller herself would rest between games. He knew he was getting too emotionally attached, and he knew it was a weakness. But this was the end of it. Tomorrow she’d be gone.

  He watched the crowd, searching for anything suspicious. There was nothing. He watched excited fans take their seats and adjust their sunglasses and hats, preparing for a couple of hours in the afternoon heat; people smiling as they squeezed uncomfortably close to each other as they passed in the aisles. Foster turned in his seat and made one last sweep across the crowd behind him. As he did so, his eyes settled on a guy in his late twenties coming up late through the nearest olive-green entrance. He looked cagey, his dark eyes taking in the scene carefully. Every other person who had surfaced from the sunken entrance had instantly smiled. It was a natural reaction, Foster figured, when suddenly emerging into one of the world’s most famous sporting arenas. But this guy didn’t smile. He turned towards Foster as if he could sense his stare. For a moment their eyes connected, and time froze. Then, for no apparent reason, the guy turned on his heel and headed swiftly back down the tunnel.

  Foster rose on instinct and followed.

  ‘The match is about to begin, sir,’ a woman in a smart black jacket and a peaked cap told him as he pushed through the exit door. Foster kept walking, entering a walkway flecked by the last few excited stragglers heading towards their seats, and one man walking briskly away from them. He had a similar build to the guy who had followed him through the grounds after the quarter finals. He slipped out of the walkway and into the bright concourse, and skirted around the outside of Centre Court as Foster followed.

  ‘Hey!’ Foster called out.

  The guy didn’t turn round. Instead, he broke his stride and began to run, gently at first, but as he sensed Foster following, he increased his speed. The milling crowd began to thicken, until eventually the concourse spread out onto the wide-open grass that the fans had christened ‘Henman Hill’ back in the Noughties and had rechristened ‘Murray Mound’ a decade later. A huge screen loomed over the lawn, and fans were watching the opening game of the final. The crowd was broiling and churning in the sunshine, a mass of elegant strawberry-munchers and Pimm’s-swillers and picnickers and raucous hen-dos, wearing everything from tennis whites to garish fancy-dress outfits. But each of them was focused on the action on the screen, and none of them made way when the guy Foster was chasing ploughed into them. He got stuck in the crowd, snared by the tangle of their limbs.

  Foster was on him in seconds. He grabbed the man’s wrist and forced his arm behind his back. The guy yelled and a few onlookers backed off, the violence an unwelcome novelty inside the serenity of the All England Lawn Tennis Club.

  ‘Video this,’ the man yelled to anyone who would listen. His anger accentuated his east-London acc
ent. ‘Grab your phones, put this on YouTube – seriously. This is police brutality, man.’

  A few people turned to see what the commotion was all about, and the guy played up to them, yelling again as Foster forced his arm further up his back.

  ‘Who are you?’ Foster said, applying more pressure to the guy’s wrist. ‘Why did you run?’

  ‘I ran because you’re a cop,’ the guy said. ‘I’m not stupid. I could tell the way you looked at me that you’d rumbled me. So I legged it.’

  ‘Rumbled you doing what?’

  As Foster twisted the guy’s arm harder still, his palm sprang open on reflex. A cascade of grubby entrance tickets fluttered down to the ground, spilling onto the lawn between the two men. There were murmurs in the crowd.

  Shit!

  ‘You’re touting?’

  ‘Of course I’m fucking touting,’ the guy said, looking at the pile of spilled tickets. ‘I’m not going to deny it now, bro, am I?’

  Shit! Wrong guy. In the London sunshine, a frost crept across Foster’s skin. This was the wrong time to be in the wrong place.

  He let go of the guy’s wrist and watched him scrabble about on the lawn, gathering up his tickets. The crowd surrounding the two men suddenly gasped and then roared, as Keller won a point on the big screen in front of them. The commentary echoed across the lawn as the pundits filled the seconds between points.

  ‘That’s a great shot from Keller,’ an Australian voice said. ‘Incredible precision for the first game. Brave, too.’

  CHAPTER 25

  FOSTER HALF TURNED towards the screen. The camera zoomed in on Keller. She looked focused and calm. Foster wished he felt the same way.

  ‘Yes, I think we can see the umpire taking a second look at that, as it hits the line,’ said a second, English voice as a slow-mo played through on the screen. ‘But you can see chalk dust fly up as the ball lands, so it was a good call from the line judge.’