Chapters (124)
- Cover
- About the Author
- Acclaim for Frank Gardner’s Luke Carlton thrillers
- Also by Frank Gardner
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
- 68
- 69
- 70
- 71
- 72
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79
- 80
- 81
- 82
- 83
- 84
- 85
- 86
- 87
- 88
- 89
- 90
- 91
- 92
- 93
- 94
- 95
- 96
- 97
- 98
- 99
- 100
- 101
- 102
- 103
- 104
- 105
- 106
- 107
- 108
- 109
- 110
- 111
- 112
- 113
- 114
- 115
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgements
- THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
Angela had never cared much for lunch in the Service canteen and today, she quickly decided, there was far too much at stake to waste time with something as trivial as eating. After making a couple of calls to Thames House she intercepted the senior liaison officer from MI5 just as he was heading out of his office for lunch and turned him around. By 2.45 p.m. they had pulled together the team, and an hour later, with the help of some of the data mining provided by Cheltenham, they had sketched out a rough outline of the alias Luke would adopt online. He would become ‘Steve Keane’, an imaginary former member of the SRR, the British Army’s secretive Special Reconnaissance Regiment, disgraced and court-martialled the year before for repeatedly racially abusing one of his subordinates. The case had supposedly been hushed up – it had never made it into the public domain – and the mythical ‘Steve Keane’ had disappeared quietly into anonymity in an Oxfordshire village.
Angela knew the next step would be extremely challenging, given the impossibly short time frame. Using the contact details and passwords supplied to Luke by Petrov’s prisoner in Moscow, they now had to get Luke inserted into WaffenKrieg90’s inner circle under his Steve Keane alias. Under normal circumstances this would need months of painstaking work, with no sudden moves that might spook the target. But time was a luxury they didn’t have. Every hour that ticked by brought closer the possibility of what they feared was coming: a deliberate and catastrophic release of Agent X into the general population.
85
Near Braintree, Essex
Thursday, 17 March, 1427hrs GMT
THE BOXES HAD arrived from Cambridge. Stacked in the corner of the room and labelled ‘Garden Supplies’, they contained the last remaining components for what was to come. The big man checked them over himself, taking out a box-cutter knife and carefully slicing open the seals. They were all there, exactly as ordered: the white chem-bio protective suits, the respirators, the masks. Everything needed for the final preparation before the release.
The plan wasn’t perfect, despite all the months of preparation, he’d be the first to admit that. In an ideal world none of them would ever need to be exposed to the agent. There was enough space for all of them up at the Farm in Derbyshire. But volunteers were still needed to drive to the target with what had to be delivered. Lots had been drawn, names had been chosen, Cambridge and Vilnius had been informed, and those who were assigned knew exactly what was expected of them when the day came.
He stood up, hitched up his trousers and breathed out heavily. He smiled to himself. That day, he knew, was coming soon. And the people who ran this country were not going to know what had hit them.