The Shadow Project by Herbie Brennan

Author:Herbie Brennan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

35

Opal, the Shadow Project

“Who’d want to kill me?” Opal asked, bewildered. She still couldn’t understand what was happening, but part of her wondered if this could have anything to do with Fran’s murder.

“Épée de la Colère—Sword of Wrath—apparently,” George Hanover said. “According to MI5.”

“Sword of Wrath doesn’t even know I exist!” Opal exclaimed, looking from face to face. But even as she spoke, she realized it was nonsense. Sword of Wrath was run by the Skull. And the Skull—or rather, the Skull’s adviser—had caught her spying. The old man, Farrakhan, hadn’t believed her story for a moment, and she’d stupidly given him both her name and her location. Admittedly it was only her first name, but that would make little difference. It might not be possible to track down a particular girl named Opal in a city the size of London if you were starting from scratch, but all you had to do was start with the premise that Opal worked for MI6—which would make sense if she was a British spy—and your job got a whole lot easier. Any good espionage service would quickly find out that the senior MI6 executive, Sir Roland Harrington, had a daughter named Opal who matched the age and description of the girl they were looking for. After that, it was only a matter of time before their agents caught up with her. “Oh my God,” she breathed.

“You’re in no danger here, of course,” her father said, “but they are looking for you. The question is why?” He knuckled one eye tiredly. “I think it may have been a mistake not to debrief you straightaway.”

She caught the awkward looks on the faces of the others. It was a strict rule that agents must be fully debriefed at the earliest possible moment after their return, and her father had broken it. She’d told him what happened, of course, told him about the Skull and the two men who’d visited him, told him about the old man who somehow managed to imprison her second body, but that didn’t amount to a full debriefing. That would have involved days, perhaps weeks, of questioning by Carradine and his staff, the sifting through every nuance of her conversations, relentless examination of whole computer libraries of photographs in an attempt to identify the people she’d seen. There might even have been hypnosis to help her fill any blanks in her memory. But she’d been so shaky when she returned that her father had cut through all of that, sent her directly to the clinic for her tests.

Carradine cut through the silence. “Maybe we shouldn’t waste any more time…?”

Sir Roland stared at him for a moment, then said abruptly, “You’re right. We must start this at once. It will take precedence over Fran’s murder.” The living came before the dead. It was an MI6 maxim.

Carradine said, “I have my people on Fran’s case. They’re studying the surveillance tapes and will get back to us.”

“Can Michael sit in?” Opal asked suddenly. Despite his earlier behavior, she found his presence comforting.

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