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
‘It’ll still be there when this is over,’ said the man. ‘You can go and fetch it then.’ This? What exactly was ‘this’? Luke hoped he was about to find out because all this had better be worth it.
The man took out a fob as they walked and the lights flashed once on a parked black Toyota Prius. They got in and buckled up. Then he spoke quietly into his mobile. ‘POB.’ Passenger on board. There it was again, that unsettling confluence of the harmless and familiar with something altogether far more sinister.
They drove off in silence. Clearly this was not the time for small talk. The road followed the edge of a large wood. They passed a Toby Carvery restaurant, a roundabout with streetlamps that lit up the fine drizzle still falling, and then they were turning down a tiny country lane marked ‘Pod’s Brook Road’. The man had made no attempt to conceal where they were going. No ‘Put this on over your head’, no ‘Stay low in the back and keep your head down.’ This could mean only one of two things. Either these people were so sure of ‘Steve’s’ loyalty to the movement that it wasn’t in question or, more ominously, they had plans for him for when it was all over.
A sign appeared, looming up ahead in the Prius’s headlights. ‘Springwood Industrial Estate’. On the periphery of the headlights, in the darkened space on either side of the road, Luke snatched glimpses of blank, high-sided metal walls on row after row of windowless warehouses. They were alone on the road, the estate appeared to be deserted, yet Luke was making a mental note of everything he saw: the speedbumps, the number of streetlamps, the CCTV cameras.
With no warning, the man beside him braked hard and turned down a deserted road that ran alongside a chain-link fence, lit by more sodium lights. In silence he pulled up at a set of gates where a hooded figure emerged from the dark and shone a torch into his face before walking round to the passenger side and doing the same to Luke.
‘It’s him,’ the driver told him and the hooded figure moved off to unlock the gates.