Chapters (45)
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Prologue
- 2046
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- About the Author
Over an hour passes before the update comes through the secure radio into her earpiece. He is on his way back now. She checks her watch. Just gone sixteen hundred hours, which means he will be downstairs for a while until early evening. A few more hours until it starts. The tension increases. In her mind she plays out the dream of going Mad Harry on him. She could physically destroy him in seconds just with her bare hands but that knowledge only makes it worse, that she could stop him but she can’t stop him.
She does not wear make-up now and never uses perfume. Even her deodorant is unscented. A sports bra keeps her chest as flat as possible, the cost of the discomfort weighing off against the reduction in attention. The trousers are good, they hide the shape of her curves, but the tight utility belt only serves to show the narrowness of her waist. Most of the other female officers look severe and imposing with their hair scraped back, but Safa only looks more alluring as it opens the shape of her face and those eyes. Shaped and hued like an Egyptian goddess. The kind of eyes technicians spend hours doctoring photos of models to achieve. All of that and her dusky skin tone and high cheekbones are what made the national press so frenzied on the one and only occasion she’d been posted on the front door.
They had seen female officers before but no one like Safa. Within a few hours she was removed from post as the Internet became inundated with her image. The attention was staggering and threatened to destroy her career within the Diplomatic Protection Squad. Close Protection Officers were faceless, expressionless, devoid-of-emotion sentinels posted to do a serious job. The top brass went into meltdown. They couldn’t remove her from the squad as that would render them liable to charges of discrimination, but under the mandates of national security, officer safety and the role profiles of discretion they could impose an order banning her from any forward-facing roles.
She accepted the order as everyone knew what the requirements of the posting were. Two other officers on the squad had already been removed from forward-facing roles. One due to a scar on his face and the other for having complete heterochromia, which was something else picked up by the ever-watchful vultures of the press pack outside. You couldn’t really blame them, they were bored and spent hours waiting in a deserted street for something to happen, so the arrival of an armed officer with one blue eye and one green eye gave them something to look at, and photograph, and film, and discuss on websites and rolling twenty-four-hour news channels.