Son of Perdition (Chronicles of Brothers) Read Online Free Page A

. . . whoever they wanted him to be.
    He finished his whisky. And his eye caught the headline on the business section of the New York Times . It read: ‘European Union’s 2021 GDP set to double the USA’s.’
    ‘My little brother . . . ’ Jason murmured, his eyes riveted to the screen. ‘The most powerful man in the Western World.’
    * * *
    Nick
December 2021, Soho, London
    Nick De Vere leaned back in the red crocodile-skin chair. He was handsome, almost pretty, with intelligent deep-set grey eyes, an aquiline nose and high cheekbones. His sunbleached hair grazed the collar of his leather jacket.
    He sipped his espresso, enjoying the clamour of A&R executives, record producers, artists and rock star wannabees that milled around the bar.
    Soho. London at night.
    Back in full swing after the end of the Third World War.
    London had been living under threat of nuclear annihilation from Iran and Russia for eight nail-biting months. The atomic-weapons site in Aldermaston, twenty-four miles out of the city, and the Faslane nuclear submarine base in Scotland had both been razed to the ground by the Russian equivalent of the mini-nuke B61-11. As for Manchester and Glasgow . . . Nick sighed.
    Everyone was on tenterhooks waiting for the Ishtar Accord to be ratified. But the theatres had reopened to the public last week and scores of creative agencies, post-production houses and recording studios were back in full swing.
    It was business as usual in Soho.
    Nick pushed the ever-straying fringe out of his eyes and surveyed the restaurant, his innate archaeologist’s sensibilities in gear. The boutique hotel had been carved from a pair of Soho townhouses once occupied by MI5. Private cinema. Roof garden. Vintage-style leather banquettes. He scanned the faces at the entrance for Klaus von Hausen. Still no sign of the lean antiquities expert although Von Hausen, true to his Germanic heritage, was a stickler for promptness, and for detail. He was the youngest senior curator of the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum’s existence, overseeing the most comprehensive collection of Assyrian, Babylonian and Sumerian antiquities in the world. Klaus had been uncharacteristically guarded on the phone earlier. Nick would find out why over drinks.
    He closed his eyes, a rare tranquillity on his features.
    There was no sign of the invasive British paparazzi who dogged his every move. Today he had given them the slip. Nine years ago, at twenty-four, Nick De Vere, brilliant archaeologist, heir to the De Vere banking and oil dynasties and London pop culture icon, had been sex symbol of the year, feted by every gossip magazine in the Western hemisphere. He stared up at the bank of televisions that hung above the crimson leather bar, each broadcasting the familiar VOX branding in the top right-hand corner.
    VOX. His eldest brother’s monolithic communications company.
    He sighed.
    Jason had never forgiven him for the accident.
    Nick put down his coffee cup, exchanging it for the John Smith’s bitter on his left.
    For that matter, he had never forgiven himself.
    Lily De Vere, Jason’s seven-year-old daughter, had been permanently disabled. Julia, like the older sister he never had, had forgiven him instantly. But Jason hadn’t talked to him from that day to this. So the rich young playboy had drowned his sorrows and a large portion of his trust fund in a score of exclusive private clubs strung from London to Monte Carlo to Rome.
    His antics had been splashed across the front pages of the News of the World and The Sun , much to his father’s chagrin and his mother’s despair, and to his elder brother’s outright horror.
    His father, James De Vere, a strict traditionalist, had found out about his affair with Klaus von Hausen and had frozen Nick’s trust fund the week before collapsing with a fatal heart attack.
    And now Nick had AIDS. One evening too many – the sex, the heroin.
    Nick De Vere had been given six months