Midnight Runner

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2002

Copyright © Harry Patterson 2002

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Harry Patterson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008124915

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780007381586

Version: 2015-07-20

Death is the Midnight Runner.

Arab proverb

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

IN THE BEGINNING

Chapter 1

WASHINGTON LONDON

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

LONDON OXFORD HAZAR

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

HAZAR

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

OXFORD LONDON

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

LONDON BOSTON WASHINGTON LONDON

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

HAZAR

Chapter 15

LONDON DAUNCEY PLACE

Chapter 16

About the Author

ALSO BY JACK HIGGINS

Further Reading

About the Publisher

Daniel Quinn was a good Ulster name. Belfast Irish Catholic, as a young man, his grandfather had fought with Michael Collins during the Irish War of Independence, and then, a price on his head, he’d fled to America in 1920.

He’d become a construction worker in New York and Boston, but it was as a member of that most secret of Irish societies, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, that he’d begun to gain real power. Employers learned to fear him. Within a year, he was an employer himself and on his way to becoming a millionaire.

His son, Paul, was born in 1921. From an early age, Paul was obsessed with flying, and in 1940, while a student at Harvard, he’d travelled to England on impulse and, using his father’s name, joined the RAF as a fighter pilot, an American volunteer.

His father, anti-Brit, was horrified and then proud of him. Paul earned a DFC in the Battle of Britain, and then moved on to the American Army Air Force in 1943 and earned another one there. In 1944, however, Paul Quinn was badly shot up in a Mustang fighter over Germany. Luftwaffe surgeons did what they could, but he would never be the same again.

Released from prison camp in 1945, he went home. His father had made millions out of the war, and Paul Quinn married and had a son, Daniel, born in 1948, though his mother died in childbirth. Paul Quinn never completely regained his health, however, and contented himself as an attorney in the legal department of the family business in Boston, a sinecure, really.

Daniel, a brilliant scholar, also went to Harvard, to study economics and business administration, and by the time he was twenty-one, he had his master’s degree. The logical next step would have been to go into the family business, which now numbered hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of property, hotels and leisure, but his grandfather had other ideas: a doctorate, and then a glittering future in politics were what he had in mind.

Strange how life often swings on small things. Watching TV one evening, seeing the death and carnage in Vietnam on the news, the old man expressed his disapproval.

‘Hell, we shouldn’t even be there.’

‘But that isn’t the point,’ Daniel replied. ‘We are there.’

‘Well, thank God you’re not.’

‘So we leave it to the black kids who never stood a chance, to the working-class kids, to Hispanics? They’re getting slaughtered by the thousands.’

‘It’s not our business.’

‘Well, maybe I should make it mine.’

‘Damn fool,’ the old man said, a little fearful. ‘Don’t you do anything stupid, you hear me?’

The following morning, Daniel Quinn presented himself at the downtown Army recruiting office. He began with the infantry, and then joined Airborne as a paratrooper. His first tour brought him a Purple Heart for a bullet in the left shoulder and a Vietnamese Cross of Valour. Home on leave, his grandfather saw the uniform, the medals, and cried a little, but Irish pride won the day.

‘I still say we shouldn’t be there,’ he said, looking at his grandson’s tanned face, the skin taut over the cheekbones. There was something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.

‘And I say again, we are, so we have to do it right.’

‘What about a commission?’

‘No, Granddad. Sergeant is fine.’