What I wanted to say is the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but the truth is, it’s probably just me.
If it’s possible, and seeing it’s the only time we can go away, as we live in the southern hemisphere, it seems logical to go north.
OK, that’s probably not as rational as it sounded in my head a few seconds ago, because where we’re planning to go it’s about minus 16 degrees.
Where on earth could it be that cold, other than the north pole? Lake Louise. Canada. Somewhere up in those snow-peaked mountains.
Why do we want to go there?
Because it’s there. Because we have been there before and it literally took our breath away (notwithstanding the severe cold). And, no doubt after we’ve been there in the dead of winter, we might have decided we won’t want to go back? Who knows.
But…
Oh, yes, there’s a but…
I need some good background for a story I’m writing, and if you’re going to do the winter thing, or the white Christmas thing, when your Christmases are usually 40 degrees Celsius in the shade, then Canada is the place to do it.
Aside from the fact, we might run into Detective Murdoch (from Murdoch Mysteries) in Toronto, and, definitely, the Maple Leafs, yes, I can see myself saying ‘go leafs go’, whilst sipping on a large glass of Molsen beer.
Then, perhaps we’ll go to New York for a week. Perhaps everything will be still shut down, but maybe not. Hopefully, there will be snow in Central Park, or, if not, the squirrels, and if not them, perhaps a movie star or two walking their dog.
I’m back home and this story has been sitting on a back burner for a few months, waiting for some more to be written.
The trouble is, there are also other stories to write, and I’m not very good at prioritizing.
But, here we are, a few minutes opened up and it didn’t take long to get back into the groove.
Chasing leads, maybe
She gave me a minute to think about the situation, and then said what I was thinking, “So he could be anywhere?”
“He was dead. I felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one.”
I could interpret that expression on her face, ‘you’re not a doctor’.
She turned another page, read a few lines, then made a note at the bottom.
It read, if my deciphering was up to scratch, ‘doesn’t know if subject dead or not’.
She looked up again. “It appears these documents are out there,” she waved her hand in the air, “somewhere. Fortunately, they have not turned up, not has someone tried to sell them back or to the newspapers, so we’re lucky. So far. That isn’t going to last for much longer. Every extra day out there is another chance for the government to be embarrassed.”
“You know what the contents are?”
“Don’t be silly. That’s above my pay grade, and besides, you and I are better off not knowing. So, what you need to do is find O’Connell and/or find the documents on this USB drive.”
She slid a card across the table. It had a name and a telephone number. Monica Sherive. A mobile number, a burner no doubt that couldn’t be traced back to her.
“You find either, you tell me first.”
“Nobbin?”
“Second, and when I tell you.”
“So you don’t trust him either?”
“At the moment, for both you and I have to be careful who we trust.”
I added her to the list of people I couldn’t trust, not that she had told me I could trust her. Yet.
“And if I get contacted by Severin again?”
“Have you?”
I had thought about not telling her about that brief meeting where he told me about the USB drive, but it couldn’t do any harm. At least she hadn’t asked me if I knew about the USB, which was something, I suppose.
“Yes. Once. Told me to keep my head down. And asked me if O’Connell had time to talk to me. It was the same answer I gave him back in the alley. No. I’d just managed to corner him when he was shot.”
“By Severin, or this other fellow,” she shuffled back several pages, then said, “Maury?”
“No. That was what was odd about it. The shot came from somewhere else. A sniper I would have thought.”
And, my brain suddenly moving into overdrive, piecing together what might be a coincidence, but in our business, they were rarely coincidences. A sniper shot him., say Nobbin or one of his people, he looks dead, waits for a call to the cleaners, intercepts it, and collects the so-called dead O’Connell. It was a good conspiracy theory.
And as far-fetched as one.
Severin had to have the body somewhere, trying to figure out how to bring O’Connell back to life so he could torture the USB location out of him.
Hell, that was as twisted as the conspiracy theory.
Time to change the subject. “Do you have any idea who Severin and Maury are?”
She went to the back of the file and pulled out some photographs, mug shots perhaps of staff members. She put five faces in front of me and asked me if the two were there.
They were. The first, with the name of David Westcott, and the fourth with the name of Bernie Salvin.
“Who are they?”
“They used to work in the training department for ten or so years ago. Westcott was also a handler for several years. They both requested a transfer to operations, and we give a mission. Six agents were assigned, and all six were killed, an investigation after the fact found that their identities had been leaked to the enemy before they reached the target.”
“They gave them up?”
“Nobody knows for sure. There were others in that group, but in the end, the department retired them all. All their years in training served them well. We found the place where you were trained.”
Another photograph of the main building. I nodded.
“It was an old training facility closed down five years ago. It was just sitting there waiting for an enterprising crew. It won’t happen again. Needless to say, we haven’t been able to find either of them, only the people they employed, who believed it was in good faith. A mess in other words. Now, go. Find me answers.”
“Sunday in New York” is ultimately a story about trust, and what happens when a marriage is stretched to its limits.
When Harry Steele attends a lunch with his manager, Barclay, to discuss a promotion that any junior executive would accept in a heartbeat, it is the fact his wife, Alison, who previously professed her reservations about Barclay, also agreed to attend, that casts a small element of doubt in his mind.
From that moment, his life, in the company, in deciding what to do, his marriage, his very life, spirals out of control.
There is no one big factor that can prove Harry’s worst fears, that his marriage is over, just a number of small, interconnecting events, when piled on top of each other, points to a cataclysmic end to everything he had believed in.
Trust is lost firstly in his best friend and mentor, Andy, who only hints of impending disaster, Sasha, a woman whom he saved, and who appears to have motives of her own, and then in his wife, Alison, as he discovered piece by piece damning evidence she is about to leave him for another man.
Can we trust what we see with our eyes or trust what we hear?
Haven’t we all jumped to conclusions at least once in our lives?
Can Alison, a woman whose self-belief and confidence is about to be put to the ultimate test, find a way of proving their relationship is as strong as it has ever been?
In 1974 a 26-year-old farmer, Yang Jide, was drilling a well and found fragments of the terracotta soldiers and bronze weapons.
What was discovered later was one of the biggest attended burial pits of China’s first feudal Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. In the following years remains had been found in 3 pits, yielding at least 8,000 soldiers and horses, and over 100 chariots. The soldiers were infantry, cavalry, and others.
Emperor Qin was born in 259 BC and died in 210 BC. He began building a mausoleum for himself at the foot of Mount Li when he was 13. Construction took 38 years, from 247 BC to 208 BC. It was divided into 3 stages and involved 720,000 conscripts.
The pits of pottery figures are 1.5 km east of Emperor Qin’s mausoleum. Pit 1 has about 6,000 terracotta armored warriors and horses and 40 wooden chariots. Pit 2 is estimated to have over 900 terracotta warriors and 350 terracotta horses with about 90 wooden chariots. Pit 3 had so far yielded only 66 pottery figures and one chariot drawn by four horses.
Official records say it was discovered later that it was likely Xiang Yu, a rebel, intentionally damaged the Mausoleum and the soldiers in the pits, by setting fire to the wooden roof rafters, and these fell on and broke the warriors into pieces.
However, we were told that after the terracotta warriors were completed, the Emperor ordered the builders to be killed so that they would not tell anyone about the warriors, and then of those that remained alive deliberately smashed all of the artifacts.
The thing is, all of the terracotta figures that have been found are in pieces, and they need computers to piece them back together again.
The visit: The first impression is the size of the car park and the number of buses parked in the lot, and a hell of a lot more outside up the road an off on side streets. Obviously, it costs money to park in the parking lot.
The other first impressions; the numbers waiting to get in were not as many as yesterday outside the forbidden city, in fact, a lot less.
Be warned there’s a long walk from the entrance gate where your bags are scanned and a body scan as well, before admittance. This walk is through a landscaped area which it is expect might sometime in the future reveal more soldiers, or other artifacts.
At the end of the walk that takes about ten minutes, you can get a one-way ride to the second checkpoint, but we opted not to as no one else in our group did.
That walk is the warm-up exercise to an organized viewing of the exhibits after going through a second ticket checkpoint. On the other side, we had to hand our tickets back to the tour guide which was disappointing not to end up with a memento of actually having been there.
So, on the other side in the courtyard, the guide told us the most important parts of the exhibition, that we should spend most of the time looking at pit 1, and then spent a little time in 2 which is only there in the first stages of excavation. Then move onto the museum if only to see the replica chariots.
We do.
The chariots were small but interesting
The horses were better and intricately detailed
These are soldiers, perhaps complete examples of those types found in the end pit.
This is one of the archers. You can tell by the way he wears his hair.
Pit 2
The excavation of this pit has only just begun, so it is possible to see where they have carefully removed the top cover, and you can see the broken parts of the warriors lying in a heap.
Some parts of the warriors are more discernible closer up
These parts are carefully extracted and taken to the ‘hospital’ where they are digitised and the computer will match each part with the warrior it belongs to.
Pit 1
This has quite a number of standing soldiers that have been glued back together, but not necessarily complete and I notice a number if the statues were incomplete. And if they cannot find the missing pieces, then they are not added to or filled in.
The scale of the pit is enormous, and they have hardly scratched the surface in the restoration process.
What is there is a number of horses as well.
That’s at the front of the pit, a long line of statues, and what is clear is the location of the well where the first fragments were found by a farmer.
There are about eight lines of soldiers, and some lining the sides.
Midway down there is a large area currently under excavation
At the back is the hospital where the soldiers are reassembled. There’s nearly a hundred in the various stages of rebuilding. These days the soldiers are rebuilt using computer imaging.
The hospital area is where they are put back together
And these are some of the statues in various stages of reconstruction
Another two views of the size and scale of the reconstruction project
The coffee shop is also a sales centre, but there are too many people waiting for coffee and too few places to sit down.
There’s something to be said for a story that starts like a James Bond movie, throwing you straight in the deep end, a perfect way of getting to know the main character, David, or is that Alistair?
A retired spy, well not so much a spy as a retired errand boy, David’s rather wry description of his talents, and a woman that most men would give their left arm for, not exactly the ideal couple, but there is a spark in a meeting that may or may not have been a setup.
But as the story progressed, the question I kept asking myself was why he’d bother.
And, page after unrelenting page, you find out.
Susan is exactly the sort of woman to pique his interest. Then, inexplicably, she disappears. That might have been the end to it, but Prendergast, that shadowy enigma, David’s ex-boss who loves playing games with real people, gives him an ultimatum, find her or come back to work.
Nothing like an offer that’s a double-edged sword!
A dragon for a mother, a sister he didn’t know about, Susan’s BFF who is not what she seems or a friend indeed, and Susan’s father who, up till David meets her, couldn’t be less interested, his nemesis proves to be the impossible dream, and he’s always just that one step behind.
When the rollercoaster finally came to a halt, and I could start breathing again, it was an ending that was completely unexpected.
This book has been written for some time and the manuscript was sitting in a box with half a dozen others gathering dust and not quite as complete, so this month it is going to get the makeover, a first draft for the editor.
And so it begins…
…
Coping without technology
…
There are no more surprises at least for today.
We have no internet, the power company came along and removed an old pole and that was the end of it.
It’s amazing what you can’t do when there’s no internet and then all the things you said you would do one day if only you had the time.
This morning’s word count accumulates quickly without the distractions so I had the afternoon to finally clean up my workspace.
What happens when your past finally catches up with you?
…
Christmas is just around the corner, a time to be with family. For Will Mason, an orphan since he was fourteen, it is a time for reflection on what his life could have been, and what it could be.
Until a chance encounter brings back to life the reasons for his twenty years of self-imposed exile from a life only normal people could have. From that moment Will’s life slowly starts to unravel and it’s obvious to him it’s time to move on.
This time, however, there is more at stake.
Will has broken his number one rule, don’t get involved.
With his nemesis, Eddie Jamieson, suddenly within reach, and a blossoming relationship with an office colleague, Maria, about to change everything, Will has to make a choice. Quietly leave, or finally, make a stand.
But as Will soon discovers, when other people are involved there is going to be terrible consequences no matter what choice he makes.
Have you ever heard of someone rabbiting on, you know, endlessly rattling on about nothing?
That’s just one use of the word rabbit.
The most obvious is the animal, a rabbit. You know, that burrowing, plant-eating, long-eared, short-tailed animal that goes by the name of Bugs Bunny, maybe.
Nearly every child has a stuffed, cuddly one.
Of course, it’s of some significance at the moment because it’s Easter, and there are countless chocolate versions of the so-called Easter bunny.
Then there is that 6-foot-high invisible rabbit called Harvey, or not necessarily a rabbit, but a pookah.
We use the expression rabbit ears to describe those old interior television antennas.
There’s rabbit stew, rabbit pie, and white rabbit beer.
But my favorite is when the magician pulls the proverbial rabbit out of a hat. It’s an expression we also use for someone who pulls off an impossible task.
50 photographs, 50 stories, of which there is one of the 50 below.
They all start with –
A picture paints … well, as many words as you like. For instance:
And, the story:
Have you ever watched your hopes and dreams simply just fly away?
Everything I thought I wanted and needed had just left in an aeroplane, and although I said I was not going to, i came to the airport to see the plane leave. Not the person on it, that would have been far too difficult and emotional, but perhaps it was symbolic, the end of one life and the start of another.
But no matter what I thought or felt, we had both come to the right decision. She needed the opportunity to spread her wings. It was probably not the best idea for her to apply for the job without telling me, but I understood her reasons.
She was in a rut. Though her job was a very good one, it was not as demanding as she had expected, particularly after the last promotion, but with it came resentment from others on her level, that she, the youngest of the group would get the position.
It was something that had been weighing down of her for the last three months, and if noticed it, the late nights, the moodiness, sometimes a flash of temper. I knew she had one, no one could have such red hair and not, but she had always kept it in check.
And, then there was us, together, and after seven years, it felt like we were going nowhere. Perhaps that was down to my lack of ambition, and though she never said it, lack of sophistication. It hadn’t been an issue, well, not until her last promotion, and the fact she had to entertain more, and frankly I felt like an embarrassment to her.
So, there it was, three days ago, the beginning of the weekend, and we had planned to go away for a few days and take stock. We both acknowledged we needed to talk, but it never seemed the right time.
It was then she said she had quit her job and found a new one. Starting the following Monday.
Ok, that took me by surprise, not so much that it something I sort of guessed might happen, but that she would just blurt it out.
I think that right then, at that moment, I could feel her frustration with everything around her.
What surprised her was my reaction. None.
I simply asked where who, and when.
A world-class newspaper, in New York, and she had to be there in a week.
A week.
It was all the time I had left with her.
I remember I just shrugged and asked if the planned weekend away was off.
She stood on the other side of the kitchen counter, hands around a cup of coffee she had just poured, and that one thing I remembered was the lone tear that ran down her cheek.
Is that all you want to know?
I did, yes, but we had lost that intimacy we used to have when she would have told me what was happening, and we would have brainstormed solutions. I might be a cabinet maker but I still had a brain, was what I overheard her tell a friend once.
There’s not much to ask, I said. You’ve been desperately unhappy and haven’t been able to hide it all that well, you have been under a lot of pressure trying to deal with a group of troglodytes, and you’ve been leaning on Bentley’s shoulder instead of mine, and I get it, he’s got more experience in that place, and the politics that go with it, and is still an ally.
Her immediate superior and instrumental in her getting the position, but unlike some men in his position he had not taken advantage of a situation like some men would. And even if she had made a move, which I doubted, that was not the sort of woman she was, he would have politely declined.
One of the very few happily married men in that organisation, so I heard.
So, she said, you’re not just a pretty face.
Par for the course for a cabinet maker whose university degree is in psychology. It doesn’t take rocket science to see what was happening to you. I just didn’t think it was my place to jump in unless you asked me, and when you didn’t, well, that told me everything I needed to know.
Yes, our relationship had a use by date, and it was in the next few days.
I was thinking, she said, that you might come with me, you can make cabinets anywhere.
I could, but I think the real problem wasn’t just the job. It was everything around her and going with her, that would just be a constant reminder of what had been holding her back. I didn’t want that for her and said so.
Then the only question left was, what do we do now?
Go shopping for suitcases. Bags to pack, and places to go.
Getting on the roller coaster is easy. On the beginning, it’s a slow easy ride, followed by the slow climb to the top. It’s much like some relationships, they start out easy, they require a little work to get to the next level, follows by the adrenaline rush when it all comes together.
What most people forget is that what comes down must go back up, and life is pretty much a roller coaster with highs and lows.
Our roller coaster had just come or of the final turn and we were braking so that it stops at the station.
There was no question of going with her to New York. Yes, I promised I’d come over and visit her, but that was a promise with crossed fingers behind my back. After a few months in t the new job the last thing shed want was a reminder of what she left behind. New friends new life.
We packed her bags, three out everything she didn’t want, a free trips to the op shop with stiff she knew others would like to have, and basically, by the time she was ready to go, there was nothing left of her in the apartment, or anywhere.
Her friends would be seeing her off at the airport, and that’s when I told her I was not coming, that moment the taxi arrived to take her away forever. I remember standing there, watching the taxi go. It was going to be, and was, as hard as it was to watch the plane leave.
So, there I was, finally staring at the blank sky, around me a dozen other plane spotters, a rather motley crew of plane enthusiasts.
Already that morning there’s been 6 different types of plane depart, and I could hear another winding up its engines for take-off.
People coming, people going.
Maybe I would go to New York in a couple of months, not to see her, but just see what the attraction was. Or maybe I would drop in, just to see how she was.
As one of my friends told me when I gave him the news, the future is never written in stone, and it’s about time you broadened your horizons.
It’s time to go back to working on Bill’s backstory now that we’ve filled in some of the gaps.
Like some TV shows and books, some of the action sometimes takes the form of flashbacks.
In Starburst, Bill has a complete backstory, of a time that he had mainly forced into the deep dark part of his memory, waiting for something or someone to trigger it.
This whole back story, from the moment he entered the war zone, to the moment his war ended, and those that participated throughout that time, will be in the form of flashbacks, the first of which is triggered by the painkiller Bill is given after being shot in the Aitcheson incident.
These flashbacks will not necessarily be in any sort of order, but I have been thinking about this part of the story and produced an outline of the sequences I will require, give or take. There may be more, or less, depending on how the story progresses.
…
Part 1 – From arrival in the war zone to being assigned to Davenport’s squad
Being sent to, and the first patrol in Vietnam
Death and mayhem some months after sent to Vietnam
First meeting Barry in army mobile hospital
R and R in Saigon, with the first of the Vietnamese girls
Psychiatric help, time in the stockade
No soldier who trains for war, nor can they have a real idea what war is like, and certainly a war in the jungle, on the enemy’s terms. Bill is like any other soldier, happy to go into service, but soon the reality, and death becomes apparent.
Endless rain, endless heat, endless and sometimes needless death, and a deep mistrust of those whom you are supposed to protect, start to work on the mind of a person young enough not to understand what is going on.
Then, when trying to blot out the memories of death, enemy and friend alike, something has to give. Of course, the last place you want to end up in the stockade.
…
Part 2 – A lifeline, and a pass into the so-called Davenport Operation
Training as a spy?
Colonel, calling Bill into a briefing on the Davenport operation
Talking to the Commanding officer in Stockade, as a preliminary to Davenport service
…
Was Bill sent to the stockade because he committed an act of folly, or his incarceration a part of a much larger plan, a plan to have an inside man to report on Davenport?
It’s not the first time someone higher up the chain of command has had ideas of trying to find out what Davenport is doing, and where only rumors abound of his ‘interests’. Agents had been sent in before, and those agents had disappeared.
Was Bill about to be the next, or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
