Fit For Purpose by Julian Parrott (novels for students .TXT) 📕

to pull out of the lane to follow her as she sped past. Her heart raced, she was convinced that her location, and therefore her very safety, had been compromised.

Daria turned the bike around. She pulled a phone from one of her jacket’s numerous zipped pockets. She dialled a number and waited for the innocuous automated response that would convince most members of the public that they had misdialled. Daria, however, spoke loudly and quickly. “I need to talk to Patel and quickly,” she said. She replaced the phone, gunned the Honda’s motor and accelerated out of the lane and onto the adjoining B road.

 

Thames House

The deputy director sat at her desk digesting the morning’s worth of heavy work. Something she couldn’t quite put a finger on continued to niggle her. She sat up as if mildly shocked. She went to her door, opened it and called across the hive of cubicles for Patel. The DD liked to preserve a sense of the personal contact rather than summoning one of her team by email, text, or IM. Patel entered quickly.

“Do you have notes from the Price conversation?” asked the DD.

Patel retrieved her laptop, “Yes, ma’am.”

“How did Price describe the assassin at Gagnon’s hotel?”

Patel scrolled quickly cross her laptop. “As a small red-haired woman,” Patel answered.

“I’ve come across that description before. Can you pull up the reports on the suspicious death of that Russian journalist in Tel Aviv Rabinovich, Viktor Rabinovich?”

Patel searched through her laptop. She looked up, “Petite, pretty, red-headed woman, possibly Irish.”

“And Gagnon also described the hotel shooter as…?”

A click-clack of laptop keys. “Err, pretty, red-headed, and Scottish,” Patel responded.

The DD leant forward. “Patel this keeps getting better and better. We have a bloody Russian hit squad operating in London again. Those brazen bastards. Get me all the intel on suspected Russian assassinations of their exiles and a list of their potential targets in the UK. And be quick about it. This is top priority.”

“Errr, ma’am, I just got a call from one of our Russian exiles, Daria Kirov, the journalist.”

“Go on,” the DD said.

“She thinks she was followed. She’s been super savvy, ma’am, more so after Skripal. Basically, took herself off the grid and went underground. If she thinks she was followed, she probably was.”

The DD thought for a moment. “The redhead in Tel Aviv purported to be a journalist, yeah? Let’s get a team over to wherever the hell Ms Kirov is; quietly,” the DD ordered. “And, Patel, let’s make sure it’s an A1 team.”

“Yes, ma’am, on it,” Patel replied as she moved towards the door.

The DD didn’t notice Patel leaving the office as, reaching for her desk phone, she contacted her assistant asking him to schedule a meeting with the director general.

Chapter Eighteen

Brecon Beacons, Mid Wales, January 14th

 

 

The inn was an old coach house on a road that ran through the middle of moorland. The inn owed its placement to the fact that it was at the way point of a coach horses’ fatigue between the nearest towns of any size. It was a low, heavy stone building with small windows designed to fight off the violent winds that whipped over the moors. It had survived two hundred and fifty years of vicious winds and harsh winters. It was currently surviving a bunch of pretentious actors and a self-important TV film crew. The landlord was grateful for the business. All his rooms were booked, and he was even earning extra money from the crew parking their caravans, lorries and other equipment on his property. And then there was the money he was making from the food and drink. These TV types liked a drink or two. The poor weather, what did they expect from mid January, had delayed the shoot, so he was making almost as much money as he normally did for the entire high tourist season. He stood behind the small bar drying glasses when the first patron came in, ordered a white wine, and settled into a comfortably worn leather high back on the right-hand side of the roaring fireplace. He continued to dry pint glasses while watching her from the corner of his eye. She sipped her wine while she read a book, feet tucked under her body on the chair.

He wasn’t a TV or film buff, but he knew that she was Nia Williams, the Welsh Spitfire. He always liked her as she was Welsh and, he remembered, she used to get her kit off in her younger days. Looked like she still had a decent body, he thought. Ten years and two stone ago, he may have tried to work some charm on her, but he knew, now, that it was not an option. He liked her never-the-less. She was polite and respectful and didn’t treat him as if he was the hired help. She kept to herself and was quiet, liked her books and a glass of wine, so unlike the Nia he used to read about in the News of the World. She looked up from her book and caught the landlord’s eye. She knew he was embarrassed to be caught staring, so she smiled and nodded her head slightly. He smiled back. Yes, he thought, a nice lady.

The landlord had served in the army as a younger man but his postings overseas had only made him long for the cold damp hillsides of home. Since returning to his homeland, he had tended bar and managed pubs across south and mid-Wales for most of his working life. His experiences had made him, he felt, a fine judge of people. He looked over towards Nia and guessed by the way she would check her phone that there was a boyfriend a text away. Mobile reception this high up on the moor was spotty but when Nia received some communication through the ether,