Game Ten_A gripping conspiracy thriller by James Long

Author:James Long [Long, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2018-04-13T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Claire had seen plenty of automatics just like this one over the years, discreetly holstered on the belts of British and NATO forces, or waved in the air by the excitable denizens of Beirut or Sarajevo. There, they were part of the landscape of male confrontation. Here, among her tapes of Mahler and Led Zeppelin, next to her A to Z of London and a packet of extra strong mints, the weapon was brutally out of place.

Along the side of the casing it said ‘Browning’. She touched it cautiously, then picked it up, not by the grip as if to shoot – that would involve her too much in whatever dangerous masculine game it represented – but by the snub, squared barrel. She pulled the magazine out of the butt and knew by the weight, even before she saw the sheen of the bullets inside, that it was loaded. Cars were going past on their mundane way continuously. Her one urgent thought was to get rid of it. She got out and looked around. A five-barred gate between trees blocked a field entrance. She opened it, walked through, away from the view of the cars, and looked for inspiration. The field was empty, but a scatter of cow pats told of its recent occupants. Fifty yards away was a galvanized iron water trough, and round it a deep lake of mud had formed where the pipe had been leaking and the cows’ feet had churned the sodden earth into soup.

It occurred to her that perhaps her mysterious and misleading informant had put the gun there – in case he needed to scare her more when he hijacked her – and then forgotten to take it away. She looked carefully round to see she was not being observed, then plunged it as deeply as she could into the middle of the pool of mud. Her arm went in up to her elbow and she let it go, feeling safety returning as her fingers lost the memory of the cold metal. If it had been put there to be found, let them find it now.

But who was ‘them’, and above all, why?

She washed the mud off her arm in the trough and walked back to the car, wiping her shoes on the grass before she got in. She still had the piece of cloth, and she left it lying on the passenger seat, mulling it all over as she drove in an abstracted haze, but coming up with nothing. It was nine fifteen when she pulled in to a parking space outside the house in Stockwell.

*

Nine fifteen in the evening was two fifteen in the afternoon mountain time, where the Producer sat looking at his screen. It was ten fifteen in Frankfurt, where business had taken Hacker. The production team in London, monitoring the developing action, fed their little slugs of observation down the modems into the avid electronic web of screens, and Freedom’s Friends, on the edges of their seats across the time zones, watched with bated breath as their trap developed.

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