Julie Hamstead

Prologue

Evie sat alone in the apartment, staring out of the window. Silent tears streamed down her face as she looked out onto the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the towers of Notre-Dame visible in the distance. She looked down at the letter in her hands, the ink smudged by her tears. At least she now knew the truth. She began to read it once again….

Chapter 1

Two months previously

Jackson groaned as he reached across the monitor for his pen.

“You alright mate?” Harry asked, “You don’t look so good this morning.”

“Bad Chinese last night I reckon,” Jackson grimaced, “just got terrible gut pain. I need some water.”

He rose slowly out of his chair and moved painfully across the office to the water cooler. Reaching for a cup he winced as the pain once again seared through his right side. This really was not great; he could feel sweat trickling down his back despite the air conditioning keeping the office cool. He shuffled back to his desk and slumped back into his chair. This day couldn’t end soon enough as far as he was concerned. Chewing down hard on his pen every time another bolt of pain gripped him, he studied the jumbled words in front of him for what felt like the millionth time.

Turning back to Harry he pulled a face. “Stanners is not going to be impressed with our progress.”

“I think you mean lack of progress,” Harry replied.

Right on cue the two men heard the booming voice of Stanners, “Update now, my office.”

Jackson swallowed hard; the pain was getting worse, and he was starting to feel nauseous. The short walk across the room to Stanners’ office felt like a mini-marathon; by the time they got there his dark curly hair was stuck to his forehead and neck as more and more beads of sweat broke out over his whole body.

Entering the office, Stanners greeted them with, “Don’t sit down gentlemen, this won’t take long.”

Looking Jackson up and down he did not even attempt to hide the disgust on his face. Clearly the lad was hungover, and it infuriated him. “You look like shit Jackson; turn up like this tomorrow and I’ll have your balls for dinner.”

Compared to the pain that was beginning to consume him, Jackson found the thought of losing bits of his anatomy quite mild in comparison. With a bit of luck his boss would choke on them.

“Sorry Sir, not feeling so good today, food poisoning I think.”

Stanners raised his eyebrows in a quizzical fashion but decided against commenting further. Turning to the report he was holding in his hands he glanced at it and then fixed the two men with his steely gaze. “So, these messages are coming from a burner phone, but you still can’t trace the sender. Have you at least managed to locate the intended recipient?” he demanded to know.

“Yes Sir,” replied Jackson trying to hide the sigh that accompanied his words. How many times did he have to tell him this?

Stanners was due to retire at the end of the year and it could not come soon enough for Jackson. He respected him for all that he had achieved over the years but, in his opinion, Stanners’ time was over. He was fast becoming a relic from a time when MI5’s intelligence was gathered only from sources in the field, not via computers operated by, as Stanners called them, virtual youths. Unlike some who spurned modern advances in favour of the old methods, Stanners was a peculiar mix of someone who viewed advancing technology with suspicion and contempt whilst simultaneously expecting it to be capable of rivalling only God for its capabilities.

“Our friends at GCHQ picked them up first, then asked us to get involved. The messages are all in a code with no discernible pattern, we can’t break it,” Jackson continued.

“For pity’s sake boy,” Stanners exploded, “if we could break Enigma and beat the bloody Nazis more than half a century ago how the hell can we not break this one?”

Jackson took a deep breath. “Because it uses a mixture of letters and numbers that defies analysis. There are no vowels, only consonants and every so often they are broken up by a number. With codes like Enigma, once we had understood the method, we could break it. It followed the same rules, day in and day out. These messages don’t, every time we think we have a breakthrough it falters.”

“Well, find the person who is supposed to be receiving them and damn well bring them in,” Stanners demanded.

Harry looked across at Jackson who seemed to be struggling to speak. “We could Sir, but we don’t know who or what we are dealing with yet. If we do that we may play right into the hands of a hitherto unknown group and arouse their suspicions. We reckon we need to start tracking this person first, see who they might lead us to.”

“Fine,” said Stanners, “but move quickly. Who is this person? Are they already known to us?”

“No Sir,” Harry replied, “it’s not making much sense at the moment. The messages were all sent to a young woman with no known connections to any groups, political or otherwise. We have a name as of yesterday – it’s a young doctor in London, a Dr Evangeline Longshaw.”

“Right, she’s already under surveillance I take it?” Stanners looked from one to the other of them. “How far have you got with background checks and such like?”

Jackson opened his mouth to answer but as he did so, he felt a twisting knot of pain tear through his abdomen dragging him down into an abyss of unconsciousness. He dropped unceremoniously at his boss’s feet, but not before managing to vomit all over them as he fell.

~~~~~

Dr Evangeline Longshaw ran down the Underground steps and flung herself into the tube train. The train was quiet; that was one advantage of doing the night shifts if nothing else. Alighting at the Westminster stop she came out into a beautiful summer’s evening and walked across the bridge towards St Thomas’ Hospital. Unable to pronounce her own name as a child she was Evie to all who knew her; even her hospital lanyard said, “Dr Evie Longshaw”.

She was hoping for a quiet shift but knew that was a forlorn hope for a London teaching hospital. Training in anaesthetics, she often joked she was drawn to it because it was as difficult to spell and pronounce as her own name. Arriving at the hospital entrance she disappeared inside, unaware that her every move was being tracked via the CCTV cameras dotted throughout the roads, stations and buildings of the capital city.

Evie caught her breath as she climbed the stairs up to the fourth floor of the hospital. She tried to always use the stairs, seeing them as her equivalent of going to the gym. She found it ironic that now she could finally afford a gym membership, she had neither the time nor the energy to go. She walked down to the changing rooms and changed quickly into her theatre scrubs before heading off down the corridor to her department’s coffee room to see what delights awaited her in the long night ahead.

Jeremy, Evie’s junior colleague, looked up and grinned as she entered the room. He was watching an old episode of ER on the television. “Here they are again saving the world at Chicago County General,” he told her. “Do you know that in just 30 minutes they have performed two successful lots of CPR, tackled a fire on level three and defused a bomb in one of their ambulances?”

“Why do you watch it Jem?” Evie smiled, “every night shift I do with you, you give yourself borderline hypertension watching it!”

“It’s how I stay up to date Evie, I view it as contributing to my continuing professional development. Might start logging it in my CPD diary.”

“Yeah, right,” Evie laughed, “that will go down well at your appraisal.”

“Right my bright young underlings, how are we all doing tonight?” Noel Carter, their consultant and boss, breezed into the coffee room. “Ah Jem, buffing up your knowledge courtesy of our transatlantic friends again I see. Well, in the real world we’ve got a couple of emergency ops already lined up. The orthopods need to pin an ankle; the ENT crew have got a fishbone to extract from some poor beggar’s throat and I’ve just had a call from the general surgeons. They’ve a suspected burst appendix who they need to get to theatre ASAP, he’s the priority case. Jem, go and see the ankle and the fishbone. Evie – your chance to go solo again if you’re happy? Go and prep Mr. Appendix and let’s get him sorted first.”

As Evie scanned her staff pass through the acute surgical unit’s entry system and went in, she did not need to ask which patient was Jackson Bridges. In the bed in the far corner was a young man groaning in pain who was clearly ‘Mr. Appendix.’

“Hello Mr Bridges, I’m Dr Evie Longshaw. I’m the anaesthetist on call this evening and will be popping you off to sleep for your operation.”

Jackson moaned as more pain held him in its grip. Why did her name sound familiar? Deep inside his tunnel of pain he grappled to remember but couldn’t dredge up anything from his memory. “I don’t care what you do, just make this pain stop.”

Evie ran her eyes quickly through his charts and wrote him up for a pre-med and pain relief. “Let’s give him this and then get him straight up to theatre,” she said, handing the drug chart to the nurse. “I’ll let theatre and the surgeons know we are good to go.”

Back in the changing room Evie pushed her long auburn hair under her theatre cap, pulled on a face mask, swapped her shoes for theatre clogs, and walked down the corridor to anaesthetic room three.

Jackson was being wheeled in and the pre-med was clearly taking its affect.

“Hi, how are you doing?” Evie asked him.

Flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling, all Jackson could see was a bright light and a face looking down at him that, to him at least, appeared to be shrouded in some kind of veil.

“Shit, are you an angel? I must be dead. Am I dead?” he questioned Evie.

“No, you’re not dead,” Evie replied, “you do however have appendicitis and need it taking out.”

“No,” groaned Jackson, “please, don’t do that. My boss is already having my balls for dinner.”

“Okay.” Evie was used to her patients rambling although this was slightly outside the norm. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you,” she promised him, “I’m just going to send you to sleep now.”

Evie slowly administered the intravenous drug that would send Jackson off into a dreamless sleep. His last thought as his eyes closed was, she has such pretty eyes. He thought he said this to her as he drifted off but his actual words, somewhat slurred and to Evie’s amusement, were, “Don’t let them take my balls, he’ll eat them.”

Chapter 2

“Good to have you back,” Harry greeted Jackson as he walked into the office.

“Ah, did you miss me then?” Jackson replied. “I would say thank you for the grapes and the flowers and the chocolates…but wait, you didn’t bring me any!”

“But I did smuggle that can of lager in for you mate!”

“Which you drank because I was still nil by mouth remember?” said Jackson in exasperation.

“Oh yeah, sorry about that,” a totally unrepentant Harry grinned.

Jackson pulled out his chair and sat down, wincing slightly at the memory of how much pain he had been in when he last sat there. He had only been away from his desk for ten days, but it felt much longer. Harry had been covering for him during that time; out of office e-mail replies, or putting work projects on hold, were not an option in their line of work.

“So, bring me up to speed H; where are we at with our coded messages?”

“Not much further really, we’ve been keeping tabs on this Evangeline Longshaw but so far nothing much to note. She lives a pretty normal life as far as we can tell. We’ve found nothing to link her to the far right, the far left, Islamic extremists, home-grown terrorists, nothing. The most radical thing she ever appears to have done is sponsor a Snow Leopard through the World Wildlife Fund. She supports various animal charities so I’m guessing she’s a big animal lover.” Harry sighed and sat back in his chair, “Stanners wants to bring her in but, so far, he's been vetoed from above. We’re not supposed to even have the technology we’re using to intercept these messages, let alone be using it, so HQ want to tread very carefully on this one.”

“Maybe we are just missing something,” Jackson replied. “Her name sounds familiar, why do I already know it?”

“We’d just identified her the day before you collapsed on us?” Harry answered. “Don’t you remember?”

“Not really, that day is a complete blur to me.”

Harry grinned, “Well, Vivian was in seventh heaven looking after you.”

Vivian was Stanners’ secretary, or personal assistant to be more correct. As old school as Stanners, nothing happened in that office without her knowing about it instantly. Her calm demeanour hid nerves of steel that had seen her through many years of working in a job not even her closest friends knew about. The young men she had once worked with had mostly grown older alongside her, but she knew by heart the names of those who hadn’t. And not just their names, she remembered the anniversaries of their deaths too and always said a silent prayer and lit a candle for them in St Stephen’s church near Victoria station on her way home. Now the office was full of men young enough to be her sons, had she had any, and she affectionately thought of them as ‘her boys’. They spent their days wreaking havoc in the world from behind a computer screen and Vivian had spent many hours trying to understand all their terminology and acronyms. There had always been a rumour of a liaison between Vivian and Stanners sometime in the past, but Vivian had wisely kept her own counsel on the matter, choosing to ignore the gossip.

When Jackson had collapsed in an ungainly heap at Stanners’ feet, it was Vivian who had rushed to his side and cradled his head in her lap as they waited for the ambulance whilst uttering soothing reassurances to him. Harry had found this hilarious and wasted no time in relaying it all to Jackson.

“The older women mate, they lurve you. I reckon old Vivian has the hots for you.”

“Show some respect,” Jackson responded only half-jokingly. “I don’t remember you rushing to help me.”

“Yeah, well I don’t do vomit, you know that.”

Jackson was about to ask Harry why then he frequently drank enough beer to sink a small battleship, usually accompanied by a large doner kebab, only to throw it all up again if he ‘didn’t do vomit’ but was interrupted by Stanners, bellowing from his office that he didn’t have all day to hang around and wait for his latest update session.

As Jackson and Harry entered his office Stanners was fighting with an unruly bundle of papers that flowed across his desk and onto the floor.

“Vivian,” he shouted, “need some help in here.”

Vivian came into his office, a wry smile on her face, and began collecting and sorting the papers. Despite the fact e-mail was the preferred mode of communication in the office, everybody knew Stanners abhorred trying to read information from a computer screen. He needed proper paper he could scribble over and carry around with him, including into the toilet if necessary. Patience was not one of his virtues and he would repeatedly press the Print button in frustration at the seeming inability of his computer to respond instantaneously. This always ended with him having multiple copies of every document and it had become Vivian’s job to sort and sift it all on a daily basis until he finally had something usable.

“Right,” he began, “as Mr Bridges is gracing us with his presence again after his holiday on the Costa del NHS let’s go back to where we were two weeks ago and pick up from there.”

“Okay, a couple of weeks ago we began intercepting phone messages from an area within Syria, near the Turkish border,” Harry began excitedly. “Using the GSM Stingray System, we collected the IMSI and ESN of a mobile sending repeated messages to a number here in the UK. Thanks to the FISHHAWK software, plus a bit of PORPOISE analysis, we’ve been able to grab the messages out of the ether and hold them whilst we attempt –”

Stanners cut Harry off. “I don’t understand a bloody word of what you just said. What happened to just bugging a phone and listening in?”

“Which bit didn’t you get Sir?” Harry asked.

“You lost me after the word phone,” Stanners replied tersely.

Harry muttered something incoherent and, pretending the pencil in his hand was Stanners’ neck, broke it viciously into two behind the cover of his laptop.

“Anyway,” Jackson continued, “we have now intercepted three messages written in some sort of code and all sent to a phone registered here in the UK to a young woman. We were just beginning our surveillance on her when I got sick.”

“Don’t remind me,” Stanners grimaced, “cost me a small fortune getting my shoes professionally cleaned after you pebble dashed them."