A single event driven by fate, after Ben told his wife Charlotte he would be late home one night, he left early, and by chance discovers his wife having dinner in their favourite restaurant with another man.
A single event where it could be said Ben was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Who was this man? Why was she having dinner with him?
A simple truth to explain the single event was all Ben required. Instead, Charlotte told him a lie.
A single event that forces Ben to question everything he thought he knew about his wife, and the people who are around her.
After a near-death experience and forced retirement into a world he is unfamiliar with, Ben finds himself once again drawn back into that life of lies, violence, and intrigue.
From London to a small village in Tuscany, little by little Ben discovers who the woman he married is, and the real reason why fate had brought them together.
I mean all you have to do is read the papers and read between the lines. It doesn’t take much imagination to find something worth writing about
For instance,
How could it possibly happen that a leader of a very powerful country become a spy for another?
It doesn’t seem plausible, but is it possible?
It depends I’m guessing, on power and wealth, well, perhaps not so much the power, but it is true that money and wealth are great motivators.
How could it happen when the leader is in the public eye nearly all of the time? And even if that leader has closed-door conversations, which is doubtful he would be on his own, the red not really be an opportunity to sell out to the other side.
Even an exchange of gifts, like apartments or a dacha, wouldn’t be enough of an incentive, well, not for me anyway. But a clear path to investment in a rival country, maybe.
Perhaps then rather than becoming a spy, the leader could adopt a policy of appeasement.
We have history to tell us how well that works, and the fact giving concessions to another county only emboldens it to take advantage of apparent weakness, and then, hey presto, we have another war.
So…
What do we really have?
A lot of speculation and conjecture. It’s easy to construe what might be the truth from a set of circumstances and behavioral patterns of the individuals involved.
It could be likened to two cats circling each other in a cage before the fight begins.
The waters can be muddied by a constant stream of incendiary tweets which fire the readers’ imagination, all intended as a smoke screen, or feelers to see which was the wind is blowing.
Is that leader masterful and clever or is he a naive fool?
My political thriller might have a working title of,
‘Which Way Does The Wind Blow’
I don’t usually have a title for any of the books until after the first draft, or sometimes something might spring out as it’s being written.
But, for now, let’s sit back and see which way the wind is blowing.
This case has everything, red herrings, jealous brothers, femme fatales, and at the heart of it all, greed.
See below for an excerpt from the book…
Coming soon!
An excerpt from the book:
When Harry took the time to consider his position, a rather uncomfortable position at that, he concluded that he was somehow involved in another case that meant very little to him.
Not that it wasn’t important in some way he was yet to determine, it was just that his curiosity had got the better of him, and it had led to this: sitting in a chair, securely bound, waiting for someone one of his captors had called Doug.
It was not the name that worried him so much, it was the evil laugh that had come after the name was spoken.
Doug what? Doug the ‘destroyer’, Doug the ‘dangerous’, Doug the ‘deadly’; there was any number of sinister connotations, and perhaps that was the point of the laugh, to make it more frightening than it was.
But there was no doubt about one thing in his mind right then: he’d made a mistake. A very big. and costly, mistake. Just how big the cost, no doubt he would soon find out.
His mother, and his grandmother, the wisest person he had ever known, had once told him never to eavesdrop.
At the time he couldn’t help himself and instead of minding his own business, listening to a one-sided conversation which ended with a time and a place. The very nature of the person receiving the call was, at the very least, sinister, and, because of the cryptic conversation, there appeared to be, or at least to Harry, criminal activity involved.
For several days he had wrestled with the thought of whether he should go. Stay on the fringe, keep out of sight, observe and report to the police if it was a crime. Instead, he had willingly gone down the rabbit hole.
Now, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, several heat lamps hanging over his head, he was perspiring, and if perspiration could be used as a measure of fear, then Harry’s fear was at the highest level.
Another runnel of sweat rolled into his left eye, and, having his hands tied, literally, it made it impossible to clear it. The burning sensation momentarily took his mind off his predicament. He cursed and then shook his head trying to prevent a re-occurrence. It was to no avail.
Let the stinging sensation be a reminder of what was right and what was wrong.
It was obvious that it was the right place and the right time, but in considering his current perilous situation, it definitely was the wrong place to be, at the worst possible time.
It was meant to be his escape, an escape from the generations of lawyers, what were to Harry, dry, dusty men who had been in business since George Washington said to the first Walthenson to step foot on American soil, ‘Why don’t you become a lawyer?” when asked what he could do for the great man.
Or so it was handed down as lore, though Harry didn’t think Washington meant it literally, the Walthenson’s, then as now, were not shy of taking advice.
Except, of course, when it came to Harry.
He was, Harry’s father was prone to saying, the exception to every rule. Harry guessed his father was referring to the fact his son wanted to be a Private Detective rather than a dry, dusty lawyer. Just the clothes were enough to turn Harry off the profession.
So, with a little of the money Harry inherited from one of his aunts, he leased an office in Gramercy Park and had it renovated to look like the Sam Spade detective agency, you know the one, Spade and Archer, and The Maltese Falcon.
There’s a movie and a book by Dashiell Hammett if you’re interested.
So, there it was, painted on the opaque glass inset of the front door, ‘Harold Walthenson, Private Detective’.
There was enough money to hire an assistant, and it took a week before the right person came along, or, more to the point, didn’t just see his business plan as something sinister. Ellen, a tall cool woman in a long black dress, or so the words of a song in his head told him, fitted in perfectly.
She’d seen the movie, but she said with a grin, Harry was no Humphrey Bogart.
Of course not, he said, he didn’t smoke.
Three months on the job, and it had been a few calls, no ‘real’ cases, nothing but missing animals, and other miscellaneous items. What he really wanted was a missing person. Or perhaps a beguiling, sophisticated woman who was as deadly as she was charming, looking for an errant husband, perhaps one that she had already ‘dispatched’.
Or for a tall, dark and handsome foreigner who spoke in riddles and in heavily accented English, a spy, or perhaps an assassin, in town to take out the mayor. The man was such an imbecile Harry had considered doing it himself.
Now, in a back room of a disused warehouse, that wishful thinking might be just about to come to a very abrupt end, with none of the romanticized trappings of the business befalling him. No beguiling women, no sinister criminals, no stupid policemen.
Just a nasty little man whose only concern was how quickly or how slowly Harry’s end was going to be.
I’m back home and this story has been sitting on the 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
—–
“You left a paper trail, a car registration form at the flat in Bromley.”
I saw him shake his head. “I thought I’d removed any evidence.”
“Good thing then, that I found it, and not Severin who was next through the door.”
He nodded towards Jennifer. “What’s she doing here, she was one of your surveillance team.”
“She came with me. The department threw her out, I found her and asked her if she wanted to find out what was going on. Apparently, she did. Everyone can put their guns down now. We are, believe it or not, all friends here.”
Jennifer put her gun back in a pocket I hadn’t seen before.
Adam lowered his, but it was still ready to shoot if either of us made the wrong move. The old woman’s aim hadn’t changed; she was still intent on shooting me if I moved.
“Mother, give it up.”
A few seconds later she lowered the weapon, but it was still ready. To fire if I moved.
“Can we sit,” I asked. Having a gun aimed at you tended to make you feel week in the knees. I was.
There were three chairs in front of the fireplace, this room also having a fire ready but not lit, and one chair by the writing-table. We sat in the three chairs, the old woman over by the table. She put the rifle down on the desktop, within easy reach.
“My first question,” I said, “has to be, how are you still alive?”
“You left when Severin’s crew arrived to clean up. He left at the same time. Luckily. Then two of Dobbin’s agents arrived and cleaned up the cleaners, as it were, and took me to a safe place where it was discovered my injuries were not fatal.”
“You were hit by a sniper, that’s hard to believe he, or she, aimed to miss.”
“They didn’t. I think I moved slightly because of you, so I have you to thank for my life. Something else to remember, Dobbin doesn’t know I’m here, and I think the only link was that registration certificate. No one actually knows me by Adam Quigley, except, of course, my mother.
“And the USB everyone is after?”
A few seconds of silence, then, “It’s missing.”
“Were you the only one who knew where it was?”
“No, but as far as I’m aware, that person is dead, killed by the explosion you witnessed. We were due to meet there, just before the explosion which is why I was heading there.”
“You walked past it, as I recall.”
“Standard procedure. I walk past, check to see if the contact is there, then come back a few minutes later. I was running late, just got past when it went up. We would have both been in there, and dead.”
“And the USB gone with it?”
“Yes. My friend had it with him at the time. I was going there to pick it up.”
“No copies?” It was too much to expect there would be, even if it was worth more than life itself.
“No. That sort of information needs to be in as few places as possible.”
“You knew what it was about?”
“Yes.”
“And…”
“It’s above all our pay grades. But something I can tell you; I know why your Severin and Maury wanted it back.”
“It was theirs?”
“Yes. They originally stole it. I stole it from them and trying to return it to whom it belonged.”
“Nobbin?”
“God, no. I’ve since discovered he’s as crooked as all the rest. But now that it’s gone, it doesn’t matter who the owner of the information is. Just staying one step ahead of the jackals, that’s the job in hand.”
Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.
I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.
But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.
Once again there’s a new installment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.
“So, how do you know your way around this place?”
We walked slowly and carefully because there was a lot of rubbish in the alleyway, mostly from cracks in the walls where the concrete lining had broken away. At times there were mounds of rubble, and we had to carefully walk over these.
The ground was dusty and signs of footprints from past visitors, but it had been a long time, they had almost disappeared. There was also a dank, musty aroma, just short of being nauseating.
“The result of a misspent youth. Not many people know there’s a passageway around the whole perimeter of the mall, with only four entry points from outside, and two inside. This was how we escaped when we came along for some shoplifting.”
“Did you ever think of going straight?”
“Wasn’t much chance of that. There were expectations, and when I did try to give it up, I got ostracised, and ended up having to commit bigger follies to regain acceptance.”
We reached the end of the passage, where it turned right. At a guess, I would say we were in one of the corners of the mall, near the front entrance.
She turned left and then stopped. I could see the bottom of the steps leading up.
A stopped next to her and we shone both torches up the stairs. The light only went as far as a landing.
“What’s up there,” I asked.
“Offices. A holding cell. It’s where the security team used to be. It was separate from everything else. The security guys used to shake down the teenage girls up there, and not in a nice way.”
“You?”
“Once, but I told Vince and he sorted the bastard out. Didn’t happen again.”
A small sidebar to life in a mall.
She started up the steps. “If anything is going to be anywhere, this will be the place. The front of the mall was the safest part, built properly on solid foundations. As work continued, heading sideways and back, corners were cut. It’s not the only shoddy building there is in this area.”
The Benderby’s construction company had built most of the buildings in the county, always coming in at the lowest price. The only place not cracking or falling to pieces was the town hall.
At the top of the stairs, there was another wide passage with rooms branching off it.
It was a little less dusty and musty up here, but the rooms were quite messy, with papers scattered everywhere. It looked like someone had been looking for something. The first room didn’t look like it had been used since everyone left, nor the second.
The third was a different story. It was reasonably clean, a large desk in the middle of the room, and several boxes on the side with rolled-up papers, probably blueprints or plans.
I went in. Nadia kept going up the passage to check the other rooms.
I pulled out one of the rolls and laid it on the table.
It was a map, one that stretched a hundred miles in each direction and giving a very clear view of all the river systems, lakes, mountains, and coastline. Our town was almost in the middle of the chart.
I pulled out another and it was almost the same.
I looked at the writing at the bottom. One was dated 1972, the other dated 1956.
I kept rummaging through the rolls until I found one that was dated 1935. Our town wasn’t a town back then, nor did Patterson’s Reach exist.
And carefully examining the inlets, bays, and coves, given the parameters of what remembered from Boggs’s map, it could be any one of a dozen locations. I didn’t take that much notice when I’d been looking at Boggs’ collection.
“Hey, Smidge,” Nadia yelled out.
I wished she wouldn’t call me that.
I went out of the room and down the passage, past about four other offices, until the second to last. She was standing outside an office with a shut door. I tried it, and it was locked.
“A locked door in an abandoned Mall. What are the odds?”
“That there’s something in there that someone wants to keep secret. This has to be Alex’s lair. What was in that other room?”
“Maps.”
“Any use?”
“Perhaps. Boggs probably had the same, but I never took much notice of his. Trouble is, I was having difficulty believing there is a treasure buried out there somewhere.”
“A lot of people seem to be looking for this non-existent treasure, so there must be something in it.”
“Any of your keys fit?”
She tried the first, no, the second, the same one she had used to get in, and it worked. A skeleton key perhaps, that oped every lock in the place.
The door swung open and we shone the torch lights inside.
For a story that was conceived during those long boring hours flying in a steel cocoon, striving to keep away the thoughts that the plane and everyone in it could just simply disappear as planes have in the past, it has come a long way.
Whilst I have always had a fascination with what happened during the second world war, not the battles or fighting, but in the more obscure events that took place, I decided to pen my own little sidebar to what was a long and bitter war.
And, so, it continues…
——
Jackerby trusted no one. He had been given orders by someone further up the ranks than Wallace and his people, someone who suspected that some or all of the Englishmen turned German turned Englishmen were traitors.
The only men he could trust fully were those who had come with him in the glider, a dozen at most. It’s why he had just completed a secret briefing with his second in command who would take over the operation if anything happened to him.
Not that it would, but he liked the idea of being prepared, and humoring the others into believing they were essential to the operation. Eckhardt would be a good man in a crisis, battle scarred from the Russian front, and glad to be on this operation for obvious reasons.
He would do anything Jackerby asked, even kill Wallace and Johannsen if he was required to.
That might yet be necessary because Wallace didn’t seem interested in going after Atherton which made him think that Wallace wasn’t all that he appeared to be. Atherton was a thorn in their operation and had to be eliminated. The fact Wallace and Johannsen didn’t agree with him raised suspicions as to their motives.
Was there ultimately going to be a triple cross?
He had been lurking in the shadows when Wallace gave the drunken fool Leonardo his orders to go down to the village. More defectors. Jackerby couldn’t understand why anyone would want to leave the Reich, especially when they were winning the war, and, if it were up to him, he’d executer the lot of them not send them back.
But, orders were orders.
He went back to Eckhardt and told him he was going down to the village to observe Leonardo and his team in action, and that he was in charge of the men in his absence.
Eckhardt, on the other hand, knew that Jackerby, if he could find a way that would not cause them trouble, was going to eliminate Leonardo because they were a liability. The plan was once Leonardo and his men were gone, Jackerby would take over rounding up the defectors. Or, more to the point, they would go missing before reaching the castle. There was only one that mattered, the rest were dead weight. And once the prize had been captured, Jackerby would escort him home and collect the kudos for himself and his men.
The ultimate prize; leave to reunite briefly with their families and a cushy job in Berlin, away from the horrors of war in the trenches.
Leonardo and the five others that made up the resistance left the castle by one of the underground tunnels. Leonardo knew of two, both of them shown to him by Carlo. He knew that Carlo knew where more were, but Carlo was not particularly helpful at the best of times.
He also knew Carlo might be stupid enough to storm the castle, especially after what Leonardo had done to Martina, and, when it hadn’t happened, he suspected Atherton had appealed to him to wait.
Atherton, too, he knew had some idea of the layout of the castle, have been told to keep an eye on Atherton when he first arrived because he was reportedly an archaeologist. Leonardo had, and reported back to Wallace that it appeared Atherton had been surveying the castle. He had simply been told to keep Atherton under surveillance, and make notes of any discoveries, and particularly what Atherton was doing.
He had, not that it amounted to much. Not when he realized Leonardo was following him. Leonardo decided not to tell Wallace Atherton had rumbled him, just that he was roaming the passages looking for something.
It had worked so far and kept Wallace off his back, but it wasn’t going to last.
Bottom line, Leonardo had to find and kill Atherton before any trouble started, otherwise, it would be his neck on the block.
Jackerby followed.
It wasn’t hard to follow Leonardo because he and his man were the last people to know what stealth was. He could hear them crashing through the forest between the castle and the village up to 250 meters away, he was making so much noise.
But, Jackerby thought, perhaps Leonardo didn’t need to worry about alerting his presence to Atherton, not if he was already working with him.
To Jackerby and his paranoia, it made sense. Maybe he was going to meet with Atherton right now and do a deal with the defectors. How many others had turned up at the village in the last week or so, and never made it to the castle?
He was right, Jackerby told himself, not to trust them. Everyone, in the end, was an enemy of the Reich.
It took 20 minutes to reach the outskirts of the village, and when Jackerby could see the edge of the woods, and the barn and remains of the farmhouse just the other side of the tree line, he dropped back, found a suitable observation point, and waited.
Leonardo and his men had stopped at the back of the barn, and one of his men was about to go find the defectors. The rest of Leonardo’s men would wait with him, and surprise their guests, before taking them back to the castle.
As far as “Jackerby was concerned, they would never reach the castle, and this time, he would take care of Leonardo, and the others.
It would be easy to say that Atherton had killed all the members of the resistance, and then got killed himself in a shootout with Jackerby. It was a plausible reason for all the deaths, though he would have to come up with a suitable excuse for leaving the castle and following Leonardo and his men when Wallace had expressly forbidden it.
Wallace.
Perhaps if he got his hands on Atherton he’d ask him if Wallace was a traitor.
Investigation of crimes don’t always go according to plan, nor does the perpetrator get either found or punished.
That was particularly true in my case. The murderer was very careful in not leaving any evidence behind, to the extent that the police could not rules out whether it was a male or a female.
At one stage the police thought I had murdered my own wife though how I could be on a train at the time of the murder was beyond me. I had witnesses and a cast-iron alibi.
The officer in charge was Detective Inspector Gabrielle Walters. She came to me on the day after the murder seeking answers to the usual questions when was the last time you saw your wife, did you argue, the neighbors reckon there were heated discussions the day before.
Routine was the word she used.
Her Sargeant was a surly piece of work whose intention was to get answers or, more likely, a confession by any or all means possible. I could sense the raging violence within him. Fortunately, common sense prevailed.
Over the course of the next few weeks, once I’d been cleared of committing the crime, Gabrielle made a point of keeping me informed of the progress.
After three months the updates were more sporadic, and when, for lack of progress, it became a cold case, communication ceased.
But it was not the last I saw of Gabrielle.
The shock of finding Vanessa was more devastating than the fact she was now gone, and those images lived on in the same nightmare that came to visit me every night when I closed my eyes.
For months I was barely functioning, to the extent I had all but lost my job, and quite a few friends, particularly those who were more attached to Vanessa rather than me.
They didn’t understand how it could affect me so much, and since it had not happened to them, my tart replies of ‘you wouldn’t understand’ were met with equally short retorts. Some questioned my sanity, even, for a time, so did I.
No one, it seemed, could understand what it was like, no one except Gabrielle.
She was by her own admission, damaged goods, having been the victim of a similar incident, a boyfriend who turned out to be a very bad boy. Her story varied only in she had been made to witness his execution. Her nightmare, in reliving that moment in time, was how she was still alive and, to this day, had no idea why she’d been spared.
It was a story she told me one night, some months after the investigation had been scaled down. I was still looking for the bottom of a bottle and an emotional mess. Perhaps it struck a resonance with her; she’d been there and managed to come out the other side.
What happened become our secret, a once-only night together that meant a great deal to me, and by mutual agreement, it was not spoken of again. It was as if she knew exactly what was required to set me on the path to recovery.
And it had.
Since then we saw each about once a month in a cafe. I had been surprised to hear from her again shortly after that eventful night when she called to set it up, ostensibly for her to provide me with any updates on the case, but perhaps we had, after that unspoken night, formed a closer bond than either of us wanted to admit.
We generally talked for hours over wine, then dinner and coffee. It took a while for me to realize that all she had was her work, personal relationships were nigh on impossible in a job that left little or no spare time for anything else.
She’d always said that if I had any questions or problems about the case, or if there was anything that might come to me that might be relevant, even after all this time, all I had to do was call her.
I wondered if this text message was in that category. I was certain it would interest the police and I had no doubt they could trace the message’s origin, but there was that tiny degree of doubt, whether or not I could trust her to tell me what the message meant.
I reached for the phone then put it back down again. I’d think about it and decide tomorrow.
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.
Stranger’s We’ve Become, a sequel to What Sets Us Apart.
The blurb:
Is she or isn’t she, that is the question!
Susan has returned to David, but he is having difficulty dealing with the changes. Her time in captivity has changed her markedly, so much so that David decides to give her some time and space to re-adjust back into normal life.
But doubts about whether he chose the real Susan remain.
In the meantime, David has to deal with Susan’s new security chief, the discovery of her rebuilding a palace in Russia, evidence of an affair, and several attempts on his life. And, once again, David is drawn into another of Predergast’s games, one that could ultimately prove fatal.
From being reunited with the enigmatic Alisha, a strange visit to Susan’s country estate, to Russia and back, to a rescue mission in Nigeria, David soon discovers those whom he thought he could trust each has their own agenda, one that apparently doesn’t include him.
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.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 