Terminal Black (A Harry Tate Thriller) by Adrian Magson

Author:Adrian Magson [Magson, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448303571
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2019-12-01T06:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SEVEN

Clare Jardine felt sick. Her stomach was tight with nerves and she was nursing a strong desire to be anywhere but here. It was an unwelcome reminder of the job she used to do and the regular flutters that would invade her system every time she had to go on a mission. She’d never confessed it to anybody else but she knew others, more open than her, who’d suffered the same way.

She was standing once again within sight of the arrivals door from the planes, watching passengers, workers and security personnel merge and part like schools of fish, the first group on their own individual journeys and, for the most part eager to be through immigration and out of here. Outside it was dark save for the security lights flooding the aircraft parking spots.

She shivered in spite of the warm air from the ventilation ducts overhead, and wished she could turn around and go home. Three hours ago she had received a text message that had turned her day upside down.

Passenger Tate H arriving 18.00 BEL 852. Sorry, no pic. K. x.

She hadn’t wanted to believe it, not after all this time – and especially after seeing Ferris here, too. Was it already five years ago since they had last met? Seeing the message had been enough to get her into her car and heading for the airport as fast as possible, grabbing her security pass on the way. One eye on her rear-view mirror and a map unreeling in her head showing exit routes and places where she could disappear if she had to, was a measure of how time had not diminished the ingrained training that followed her everywhere like a bad dream to which she was forever chained.

She caught sight of her reflection in a polished metal screen. She looked pale and drawn after a late night ferrying two visiting Ukrainian army officers and their minder around the city, neither of them troublesome save for an insistence on getting mortally drunk. But at least she looked very different to what former MI5 officer Harry Tate – if it was him – would remember.

She tried to conjure up Tate’s face and found it unclear; a shifting mirage. But she’d know him if she saw him. If it wasn’t him on the plane it would doubtlessly be some engineering salesman from Sheffield touting for business in the brave new world that included large swathes of Eastern Europe.

Using her security position, Katya had put in place a daily scan of passenger lists not long after Clare had arrived here, largely so that she could rest easy in knowing that her past wasn’t about to come back to haunt her. The murder of her MI6 boss, Sir Anthony Bellingham, had been a just retribution in her view. Bellingham had been one of the architects of her eventual dismissal from SIS and the cause of more than one death. Unfortunately not everyone shared that opinion, and she had lived under a cloud for the past few years expecting to find herself the subject of a snatch squad or worse.

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