Not Single Spies , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Robin Duval

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

219 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

A world where privacy is a thing of the past... Bryn Williams lives quietly in Ealing, West London, writing popular history articles for magazines. Things have not been going well for him - his computer has been hacked and his bank account emptied. He is increasingly aware that his actions - on the street and online - are being monitored. The woman he loves stops returning his phone calls and emails, and he becomes concerned for her safety. Then on a research trip to an English Civil War battlefield, he stumbles on a dead body in a car and his life changes forever...Bryn finds himself in the middle of a very different conflict. Drawn up on one side are the forces of government and good order. On the other, a network of cyber-hackers committed to halting global warming. Climate change is now at a tipping point - the polar ice caps are melting, fertile land is turning to desert and populations are on the move. By destroying digital systems worldwide, the hackers hope to make all modern means of communication unusable, reverse economic progress, and save what's left of a fragile earth.Not Single Spies is a political thriller which draws on themes of considerable relevance to the 21st century. It is set in a society dominated by the Internet, where communication systems are an open book to government and big business... and the only people for whom that book remains closed are the shadowy figures who pull the strings of power.

Sujets

Political

Gran Londres

Politics

Greater London

Grand Londres

London

Informations

Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	02 octobre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781784629069
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2015 Robin Duval
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Matador
9 Priory Business Park
Kibworth Beauchamp
Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK
Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299
Email: books@troubador.co.uk
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
ISBN 978 1784629 069
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
To Polly, Sophie, Daisy and Matty
When sorrows come, they come not single spies But in battalions.
Hamlet, 1602
CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
PART TWO
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
PART THREE
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
Five tables lined up in a row, like some ghostly convoy of death. No flood of shadowless white light. Just a wan procession of perforated steel surfaces, scrubbed and stainless, faintly gleaming in the blue radiance of a watching sensor on the wall.
Furthest from the door and detached from the rest, a sixth table. Upon it a white plastic body bag, zipped up the middle, unmistakably corpse-shaped.
Somewhere, far away, a voice talking into a telephone.
The room itself: silent.
Silent as the grave.
The Land Rover driving along the coast road had seen better days. Its khaki wings were battered and mud-spattered, its canvas roof patched and discoloured. Temporary red trade plates hung from the front and rear. It was travelling – in the half light of the dawn – without headlights or even sidelights.
Far away on the horizon, the sun was beginning to splinter the surface of the sea. For a few minutes the scene was a Rothko canvas: a slab of burnt orange, imperceptibly brightening, with the inky purple darkness of the English Channel below. The only movement was the inaudible lapping of tiny waves against the shoreline.
The Land Rover turned inland down a minor road. Buildings began to appear on either side. Shortly after it passed a thirty mile per hour speed restriction sign, a traffic camera flashed at it and it slowed sharply. A mile or so further on, as it approached a dark complex of low buildings, it slowed further to barely walking pace, crossed a wide concourse, eased up a side alley and parked in the deepest shadows.
Five people climbed out. They were young-looking and slimly built, dressed as if for a demonstration in balaclavas and anoraks. The driver was the last to pull her woollen mask down and a whisper of blonde hair escaped across her eyes. She scrambled up onto the cab of the vehicle and threw a black bin bag over a CCTV camera bolted to the wall. Then she led the group down the alley to an open space near the rear of the largest building. She stopped at a green Hospital Fire Assembly Point sign with a double metal door beside it which – with no apparent effort at all – she prised open with the tips of her fingers. Three young men followed her through while the fourth stayed on watch in the alley.
As soon as she was inside she pulled an iPad mini from her pocket and a map of the layout of the building instantaneously appeared on it. She nodded towards a corridor to the left. The group broke into a brisk jog. They crossed an empty reception area – dimly lit by the same faint blue universal glow as the rest of the building – and down another corridor to another set of double doors. The woman pushed them open and walked in.
They had arrived at the mortuary.
One member of the group unzipped the cadaver on the table. Another – a small man in glasses – examined the face in the beam of a pen-light and nodded. The zip was pulled back up and the three men started to lift the body – but its rigor mortis took them by surprise and they struggled to get it past the corridor of tables. They re-formed in pairs on either side, falling into step like military pall-bearers, and retraced their course back through the building and out to the alleyway.
The waiting fourth man hurried to close up behind them. The fire doors crashed together with a sudden , shocking clangour. Immediately , an alarm began to whoop and then another further away and a third.
The body bearers had broken into a shuffling run and were halfway up the alley to the waiting Land Rover. The rear flaps of the vehicle were still tied together and, when one of the team let go of the bag to unloosen them, the cadaver tumbled to the ground, and its head rebounded on the tarmac like a leather basketball. In a few moments of panic, they grappled the body bag into the well of the Land Rover and clambered in after it… and accelerated away in a shower of flying gravel just as three uniformed men came dashing across the concourse towards them.
Other people began to arrive. A man in a white coat sprinted up the alley waving his arms and shouting. A woman raced down a flight of steps from the main entrance and began to issue instructions. Someone found a red trade plate lying in the road near the concourse exit. Calls were made on mobiles.
As the Land Rover crashed through the gears towards the east, a second smaller vehicle quietly emerged from the car park behind the complex. It waited a few seconds. Then slipped away unnoticed in the opposite direction.
CHAPTER 2
Bryn’s mind, as he drove up the M1 this misty morning, was on Oliver Cromwell.
He suspected his hero’s career might be a useful demonstration of his proposition that history – for the most part – was little better than an arbitrary series of accidents.
For example, eight years before the English Civil War broke out, Cromwell planned to emigrate to Connecticut but was not allowed to do so. He was still thinking about it in 1640 and would probably have sailed, had Parliament not sided with him against the King. Instead it rebelled and Cromwell rose to become Lord Protector. When he died in 1658 he was the mightiest man in England.
So… what if Cromwell had taken ship to New England?
After all, there was nothing inevitable about a rebellion at precisely that time. In a different set of circumstances, Parliament could well have backed down – and postponed the day of reckoning. But would its cause have prevailed without its most effective field general and leader? Might the English have had to sort the whole problem out generations later with a revolution bloodier than the French?
And what about Cromwell himself? Might seventeenth - century America – led by the charismatic and revolutionary Oliver – might it have risen against its distant King a hundred years earlier ? And would the capital of the most powerful country in the world now be called Cromwell, DC?
No… that was going too far.
Bryn was a popular historian. By which he meant he’d put conventional academic life behind him and opened up instead a promising vein of newspaper and magazine articles. His speciality was “alternative history”: what might have happened if chance had played a different hand or other choices had been made. Indeed, in the early days, his approach had been quite lucrative. There’d even been a possibility of a series on television. Most likely tucked away with the great unwatched – the New Discovery Channel, H2, BBC Five – but with who knows what possibilities for spin-offs and syndication?
And then things started going wrong. Old colleagues characterised his method as populist and unprofessional. There had been an unbylined “editorial” attack in – of all papers – the liberal Guardian branding him a “postmodern fantasist” and his method a “parlour game”; calling for the restoration of traditional academic values. The flow of commissions dried to a trickle.
On top of that, since troubles never come singly, there’d been that major setback with his computer. A few weeks before, all his work had been deleted and his online bank account somehow stripped of every last penny. Of course , it could have happened to anybody. Why should anyone have a reason for targeting him personally? Some jealous professor with a sideline in cybercrime, punishing him for his academic sins… ?
At all events it became obvious, beneath the courtesies, that the bank’s fraud department actually suspected him of being complicit – that he had passed on his security details recklessly or else, though they never suggested it in terms, as a deliberate act. They declined “at this moment in time” to restore the missing income and he was out of funds as well as out of work. His agent, Jean, was signally unhelpful (“perhaps we should let the dust settle a little, darling”).
In all these circumstances, the offer from America had been a lifesaver.
He’d found it difficult initially to take seriously. He’d even suspected it of being a scam. It came into his computer about a week after the hacking disaster, bypassing Jean, and was from a magazine he’d never heard of and an editor w