The Reluctant Assassin: The Covid Chronicles

By Peter Moore

James Bond is dead!

Unwittingly caught up in the glamorous, dangerous world of international espionage, Delphine, a former high-class escort, kills a foreign 'diplomat' after he tries to rape her.

The Reluctant Assassin follows the mother of twin five-year-old girls in her global pursuit of a psychotic despot

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Moore
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781802274813

Peter Moore

Peter Moore is an English writer, historian and lecturer. He is the author of Endeavour (2018) and The Weather Experiment (2015), which were both Sunday Times bestsellers in the United Kingdom. The Weather Experiment was also chosen as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2015. He teaches at the University of Oxford, has lectured internationally on eighteenth century history, and hosts a history podcast called Travels Through Time.

Book preview

Chapter One

Serene, silent glimmering stars bore the only witness to the frantic faraway thrashings of her dance with death on this cold, black October night.

Far below, Delphine was dangling precariously between the upper floors of the Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo, the principality’s famous romantic harbour to her left and a sheer drop to her certain destruction on cold rocks beneath. She was terrified of heights. She was panicking.

And she was sick to her stomach. Appalled. Barely hanging on to her senses. She pleaded up into the darkness and tightened her thin, desperate, double-handed grip on the fingers of the shadow above, ignoring as best she could the searing agony in her arms.

‘Wilksy, for chrissake, pull me up, you pouf!’ she hissed.

‘Behave yourself, trollop, or I’ll drop you on your head,’ he snarled. ‘And stop all your bloody wriggling.’

‘Hurry up, for God’s sake… I’m losing my dress!’

He grunted and heaved and over the heavy iron balustrade, a blonde beauty rose like a Greek goddess from the Underworld until she could gratefully scramble herself over the ornate black Victorian metal. Quickly, she scooped her heaving, naked breasts back inside the strapless, deep purple Agent Provocateur cocktail dress, and pulled on her argent Louboutin sandals with the five-inch heels that she’d looped over her left arm along with her trusty antique solid silver mesh clutch bag.

Silently, they tiptoed across the balcony and through the open door into the suite’s luxurious salon in darkness while its elderly occupants in the adjacent bedroom snored off their night’s bibulous excesses, oblivious to the desperate trespass.

Outside in the discreetly lit hallway, she rested her back against the wall. She was shaking, her knees were buckling, and she could taste the waves of bile swilling between her teeth and the back of her throat. Wilksy held her firmly by the shoulders and fixed on her wide eyes set in a marble-white, bloodless, face, with his. Gently, he pulled her into an embrace and held her head under his chin. She sagged into his strength. He felt every one of the deep, silent, convulsing sobs and felt her tears on his white shirt underneath his white tuxedo.

In the corridor directly beneath her feet, two dinner-suited bodyguards stood silent vigil, their backs to the door to the suite where Delphine had just killed their boss, blood still oozing from a single, deep stab wound to his heart.

‘I’ve killed him, John… Murdered him… Just like that… Oh, my god… Oh, my god…’ The split second the steel tip of her stiletto flick knife punctured his skin and gouged and scraped between ribs and pierced his heart muscles seared through her consciousness. ‘He didn’t say a word. Just stared at me in disbelief.’ She shuddered and heaved another mighty sob onto his chest.

He pulled away from her and held her shoulders again. ‘Look at me.’ He searched deep in her eyes. ‘No, look at me. That scuzzbag had it coming to him. He deserved it. Now, pull yourself together, girl, you must get through this for the moment. You’ve got to. Analyse it later, feel sorry for yourself later. We have a job to finish. And we’ve also got to get out of here. Tout suite!’

Delphine focused on the man in front of her, saw the steel in his cold, grey eyes. She took a strangling deep breath. ‘I couldn’t help myself, John. I just couldn’t. It all came rushing back to me. The rape. The terror. I couldn’t let that happen again, I just couldn’t. I panicked and just lunged. I’m sorry. So sorry.’

‘I know, I know… We expected too much of you.’

Easily supporting her weight with an arm around her waist, her head on his shoulder, he encouraged her along the corridor.

‘Too much champagne, I’m afraid. You know how it is,’ he smiled with a shrug at a middle-aged couple who passed. He pushed the key card into the sturdy panelled door to their two-bed luxury suite. Inside, he guided her to a sumptuous tan-coloured art-deco settee that oversaw the shimmering sea and the luxury yachts bobbing at their moorings in the harbour. Swiftly, he retrieved two wraps of cocaine from his inside jacket pocket and laid out a double line in front of her on top of a large circular glass-topped coffee table.

He handed her the door key. She looked up at him in hurt, innocent, disbelief. ‘Oh, come on, sister, who’d you think you’re kidding?! You thought I didn’t know? Get that up your nose and be quick about it. We’ve got to get you back downstairs to the boss.’

Deftly, she snorted the two lines of white powder off the coffee table and wiped the residue from the side of the plastic door key across her gums with her index finger. The world began to be more bearable. Minutes later, having deftly re-adjusted her décolletage, quickly refreshed her lipstick, and dragged a brush through her tousled locks, she made a grand, fussy, entrance back into the ground floor Louis XV restaurant and bustled a beeline for the man at the table she had left barely an hour ago.

‘Oh, Robin, I’m so, so sorry. Please, please forgive me. I acted like a fool,’ she said falteringly and theatrically for the benefit of the room. She cupped her shaking hands round the cheeks of the elegant, older man who had risen from his chair at the dinner table to meet her and kissed him deeply. Embarrassed fellow diners averted their eyes as His Excellency Robin Marston-Moore, Her Majesty’s Foreign Secretary, and certainly fifteen years her senior, seated her beside him. A white-gloved wine waiter appeared from nowhere to pour two glasses of the finest French champagne.

Delphine took a mighty gulp and then fiercely clasped both his hands. ‘Oh Robin, I’ve killed him,’ she said quietly… ‘Stabbed him through the heart… He was going to rape me… Can’t we get out of here?… Please? Please?… I’m losing it… I’m feeling ill,’ she whispered more earnestly. ‘Please let’s go! Please, please?!

He squeezed all her fingers gently and peered over the top of the gold pince-nez he used to read top secret UK government reports and fine wine lists. ‘All in good time. First, I want you to relax. It’s important. Sip your champagne. Kiss me again and look like you mean it. We’ll leave in ten minutes, and when we do I want you to cling to me like I was the love of your life. Just follow my lead.’

Delphine drained her champagne flute and gratefully accepted the waiter’s offer of a refill. She watched as her VIP partner briefly moved from table to table, a quiet word here, a polite smile, a kiss on the cheek for a glamourous woman there before he returned. ‘Come on, we’re going,’ he demanded. ‘Don’t forget, cling to me like your life depends on it –because it does.’

Her senses were reeling. Cocaine and champagne were losing the fight to suppress the shock and horror of what she had done. Gratefully, she took his arm with both hands and nuzzled his neck as they headed out of the restaurant, her legs threatening to collapse underneath her. In a whirl, the couple were outside of the hotel. Delphine could contain it no longer. What seemed like a never-ending spume of vomit vacated her body and fled down a gutter. Wilksy opened the rear door of the black Rolls Royce Phantom and Delphine slid across the white leather seat. Marston-Moore rapidly joined her, thrusting his large linen handkerchief into her grateful hands.

Wilksy drove them off at speed. ‘Home? Airport, boss? Thirty clicks – twenty minutes?’ he said, without waiting for a reply.

In the silence, the night’s events played through Delphine’s brain. It had seemed like a dream come true: a few days in the sun as the plus-one of a very VIP, her dearest friend and mentor Robin Marston-Moore. They were so close the rumour was that they were lovers, that she was his floozy. It wasn’t true. Both were widows still clinging to their grief in their own way, but it amused them to feed the fantasy.

He had called it a favour. There was a spy somewhere in his department and would she act as his personal secretary at the important climate change conference? Lots of heads of state from around the world. Lots of gossip. She was the only woman he trusted. Please? And when he threw in the government credit card for a new wardrobe, the deal was done. It also gave her a chance to get away for a few days from the demanding attentions of her identical twin daughters for the first time since they had been born nearly five years ago. And she’d never felt so important, so spoilt. Well, not often perhaps, and certainly not lately.

They had been enjoying their first dinner in the luxurious multi-Michelin-starred restaurant since arriving early that morning. Main course of turbot, her favourite, with lots of Mediterranean spices. Over brandy, Wilksy, general factotum and bodyguard, had approached the table to whisper into Marston-Moore’s ear. She’d followed their gaze to a thin, gaunt man drinking alone at the bar. She’d felt their tension.

‘What is it? Who is he? He looks like a spy!’

‘That’s because he is, my dear,’ Marston-Moore had replied, smiling coldly. ‘He’s supposedly here to arrange a very hush-hush meeting with the person who’s been leaking some of our country’s most top secrets. If only I could get close to him.’

Whether it had been the 2010 vintage Pol Roger champagne, her eagerness to please, or just the heady, heavy atmosphere of intrigue, Delphine had announced suddenly, ‘I’ll do it. Leave it to me, Robin. I’ll go and break the ice.’ She was up on her feet before he could stop her. He had grabbed her left arm. She’d slapped him as hard across his left cheek as she could with her right hand. ‘How DARE you,’ she’d screamed and stomped off to the bar where she’d slumped onto a tall stool.

‘Brandy,’ she’d demanded of the barman, placing her clutch bag beside on the marble bar top. Secreted inside was her self-protection, remnants from her former life; her can of mace and Needle Dick, her antique flick knife – a seven-inch slim handle engraved like a penis embossed with erotic figures that released an immensely strong and sharp triangular blade when the glans at its head was depressed.

‘Ze gentleman at ze end of ze bar would like to pay for zat,’ he informed her, placing the large crystal balloon in front of her. Blimey, he doesn’t waste much time! ‘Please tell him thank you but no thank you.’

The words had been barely out of her mouth than he had slithered up beside her. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t resist a damsel in distress,’ he’d hissed through impossibly perfect white teeth set in a face frozen in time by Botox and plastic surgery. Expensive men’s perfumery hung over him the way the smell of death always seems to stalk undertakers.

‘Whatever gave you the slightest indication that I was in distress? Do I look as though I needed rescuing? And what in any astral dimension makes you believe you are anywhere near man enough to fulfil that role of my knight in shining armour? Go away… PLEASE!’

‘Oh, forgive me.’ He’d raised his hands in mock supplication. She couldn’t place the accent; mid-European probably. His words were clipped and spoken in short staccato phrases. ‘I should have known better than to cross swords with anyone who could treat my great friend Robin Marston-Moore in such a summary fashion. Let me introduce myself. Count Igor von Helsink. From the old Transylvania. Drrraacula country!’

‘Oh, I can well believe that,’ she’d mocked him.

He’d ignored her reply. ‘Lover’s tiff, was it?’

‘Mind your own business.’

He’d placed skeletal fingers on the bare flesh of her left thigh just below the frontier of her dress and squeezed it gently. Memories of her past life as one of the nation’s most successful high-class escorts flooded back. This is too easy. Why are men so driven by their dicks? Silly question. She’d left it there and a few tears had moistened her eyes.

‘There, there,’ he’d cooed. ‘Don’t let him see he’s upset you. Let’s teach him a lesson! Come on, let’s get out of here. I have the most excellent etchings in my room. And some fine brandy.’

God, so subtle! ‘I prefer Cristal.’

‘Your wish is my heart’s desire.’

She’d stood opposite him in the lift, hands behind her back, breasts testing the material in her dress and his eyesight every time she breathed, dissecting the man before her: scrawny to the point of looking malnourished, eyes sunken in pale skin, long face below greasy, black, thinning hair flattened to his scalp, Hitler style. But it was the underlying feeling of menace that seeped out of him that had made her skin crawl. Things were done his way or not at all, as far as he was concerned.

‘Call me Jacob.’ His two muscle men had pushed between them out of the lift to lead them along the lobby way to his room. He’d led her gently by the elbow, a perfect gentleman. Until the door closed behind them. She’d stood confronted by his bed, a four-poster, the mattress covered in a golden satin duvet. She’d held her trusty silver clutch in front of her as some sort of modesty gesture.

He’d put his phone and his room key on a nearby table and had taken off his jacket and sat at the foot of the bed. He’d pulled off his gun’s shoulder holster and laid it beside his coat.

‘Take off your dress,’ he’d demanded suddenly, in a tone full of dark menace.

‘Sorry?! Certainly not! NO!’

He’d leapt forward, and snatched at the top, pulling it down to her waist. ‘Oh, come on, we both know what you are.’ The terror of her rape crashed through her memories. Back then, she’d stabbed her rabid rapist in the buttocks several times, too late to save her from the brutal carnal horrors that had still haunted her every day and night since. It was never, ever going to happen again! This time, she’d gone into self-preservation automatic pilot. In an instant, the knife was in her hand…

At Nice airport, the overnight staff stood to attention as the VIP trio whisked through to the tarmac, where their private jet had been readied for departure. Once, safe in the air, Delphine ran her hand faltering down her mentor’s sore face. ‘Sorry about the mess, Robin.’

He leaned forward in his seat and grabbed her hand. ‘You ok?’

‘What, as murderers go, you mean?’ Then the tears came. ‘I’ll never be able to live with myself. What do I tell my girls?’ … She reached inside of her clutch. ‘Here, you better have this.’

‘What is it?’

‘Your spy’s phone.’

She stared down at her hands, Lady Macbeth-like. Then she was violently sick again.

Chapter Two

Delphine shuddered and gnawed at the quick of her nails. Someone had walked over her grave. Quite literally. It’s a little unnerving witnessing your own funeral; seeing the coffin being lowered reverentially into the grave. She watched the mourners’ tears. Good turn-out, given that I know about three of them. Nice day for it, though. She shivered

Involuntarily again and watched in morbid fascination as the tableau played out on the television above the plush bar in the riverside pub, on the banks of the Thames.

Nervously, she recrossed her legs, smoothed down the hem of her black and white, tiger tooth, Ted Baker mini-skirt and leaned back in her chair at a corner of the glass-fronted bar that stared out over the brown, flustered river. She was trying to look cool and relaxed; anonymous, invisible among the growing lunchtime clientele, while shrinking her chin and mouth into the folds of her favourite faun cable-stitch rollneck.

What the hell am I doing here?

She sat up abruptly and buried her hands deep in the pockets of her ankle-length, double-breasted, grey virgin wool Prada coat, starting at every new customer who entered, feeling like Bambi waiting for hunters to find her tethered to the heavy, round, wooden table… Or at least Scotland Yard’s finest to arrest her.

‘Mrs Godliman, 25, a young widow originally from Sussex, is the last to be buried of the victims of the air crash that also claimed the lives of Foreign Secretary, the Right Honourable Robin Marston-Moore, and his driver, former SAS soldier John Wilkes. The aircraft’s two pilots escaped with minor injuries,’ the world-weary BBC newsreader droned. ‘The Air Accident Investigations Branch is still sifting through the wreckage of their private executive jet that crashed and exploded shortly after performing an emergency landing in a far corner of Manston airport in East Kent.

‘She was interred in a small village churchyard near her home on the Surrey/West Sussex border. The plane diverted to Manston after getting into trouble as it crossed the White Cliffs of Dover on a flight from a climate conference in Monte Carlo to City Airport, East London. Investigators are still trying to discover what caused the jet to come down. A terrorist attack has not been ruled out.’

She gnawed again at her fingernails, each in turn, staring down at her black Russell and Bromley stomper boots impatiently. ‘Sorry for my tardiness, dearest.’ Startled, her eyes jumped to confront the smiling face of a ghost, his middle-aged features partly obscured by a grey trilby hiding thick curly grey hair. Immaculate as ever in a grey serge three-piece suit, the flying dagger insignia of the SAS on a blue silk tie set against a crisp white shirt, he welcomed her with open arms. She rose quickly and threw hers around the most important man in her life. She kissed him forcibly on his right cheek. ‘My god, where have you BEEN?! It’s been three weeks! Not a bloody word until last night. Why didn’t you come home? God, I could kill you.’

‘Too late, methinks,’ he replied, beaming, his low rich voice demanding attention. He pulled away, his outstretched hand suggesting she should sit. ‘Champagne? Cristal, your favourite?’ He raised the same hand and a prim waitress arrived promptly to take the order.

‘You hungry?’

‘Hardly… Aren’t you being a bit in-yer-face given your – our –