Duncan Falconer [Stratton 01] The Hostage (epub)

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.His last piss was before climbing inside the boot, over six hours ago.He could sense a little pressure there.A drink might put his bladder over the top.Peeing his pants was not a major issue for Spinks.It would not be the first time he lay in his own urine for hours on end.There was something he found pleasant about the sensation of warm pee spreading around his crotch area.He took a good swig, dribbling on himself in the awkward position, and swilled his mouth to rinse the sandwich down.As he swallowed he placed an eye back into the beam of light to look outside once again and what he saw nearly made him choke.He dropped the bottle, letting the water spill, and scrambled to find the communication prestel that hung out of his sleeve on its wire.He had to summon every effort to stifle a cough so he could whisper into the collar of his jacket where the tiny microphone was stitched.‘Four two Charlie,’ he begun, but had to stop to clear his throat again.‘Four two Charlie, he’s coming out.I say again, O’Farroll is coming out.’Spinks kept his eye to the hole with unblinking concentration.From where he was parked he was perfectly positioned to see the front door of the church and the people coming out of it.The church was a solitary, squat, grey construction on the edge of a quiet country road a good mile from the nearest town.All the buildings in this undulating, rambling part of County Tyrone a few miles west of Lough Neagh were grey, or so they seemed.Even the rich countryside that surrounded them had a grey tint.Perhaps it was the dark skies.It rained a lot this time of year.The church didn’t look big enough to hold more than fifty people but then not that many turned out on Sunday mornings these days.Two men in warm three-quarter-length business coats over their Sunday best suits walked out of the entrance, past the tilted, unreadable gravestones and through an opening in the squat stone wall that ran along the side of the road.They stopped to chat while the rest of the congregation, mostly older people, headed to their cars parked on the grass verges.‘O’Farroll and one unknown male static on main outside the obvious having a chat,’ Spinks whispered.A strange noise came from his hidden wireless earpiece deep inside his ear, like a garbled human voice underwater.After a second the words became clear.It was the secure communications system that chopped up the sender’s transmission and then sent it through the airwaves all jumbled up to be un-jumbled at the receiver’s end.It was said the most sophisticated code-breaking computers would take a month to piece together just one sentence.‘One three kilo, roger that,’ said a female voice in answer to Spinks’s message.Spinks kept an unblinking watch on the two men.The female voice was that of Agatha, who preferred to be called Aggy even though she didn’t like either name.In fact, anyone calling her Agatha would generally be ignored, unless that person was a senior officer, of course.Neither name was her real one though.No operators used their real names in case they were ever captured and tortured.It seemed odd to have a truncation of a false name but she hadn’t known she would need a secret identity until the day she arrived at the clandestine selection camp.It was all so top secret.Only during that initial processing when her bags and clothes were confiscated and she was stripped and searched did they ask her for a cover name that she would use from that moment on, before she met any of the other recruits, whose identities were also secret, and then for the rest of her time as an undercover operative.If she passed the gruelling four-month selection process, that is.The impatient intelligence officer had given her seconds to come up with a name and she quickly chose Agatha because it was the name of a favourite aunt and then immediately decided she didn’t like it.By then it was too late.He had recorded it and gone into the next room where another recruit was being stripped and identity checked.It was Agatha, or Aggy, from that moment on.Aggy was pretty and in her early twenties.Her face, specifically her eyes, was distinctly feline but everything else about her, her mannerisms and clothes, was masculine [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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