Flight Path: A Wright & Tran Novel

by Ian Andrew

  Flight Path

  By

  Ian Andrew

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  June 2015

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Coming Soon

  Fall Guys

  Also by Ian Andrew

  Face Value

  A Time To Every Purpose

  The Little Book of Silly Rhymes

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  For

  Nancy & Nita

  Jean & Jesse

  Also by Ian Andrew

  A Time To Every Purpose

  Face Value

  The Little Book of Silly Rhymes & Odd Verses

  Acknowledgements

  Once more I am indebted to a host of individuals who have generously given of their time, expertise and good humoured tolerance. Without them the story you are about to read would be a weaker version of itself.

  To my fantastic editing ‘team’ of Angeline, Helen, Lauren and Sara. Thank you for taking the time out of your incredibly busy schedules to help me. Any remaining mistakes in here, are mine alone.

  To Sara again, and Kirrilee, my accomplices in crime and to Kirrilee’s anonymous neighbour. Thanks for your continuing advice and guidance on police procedures and mortuary forensics, it is invaluable.

  To Chris and Amy, thanks for keeping me straight on Int Corp training and deployment guidelines.

  To Steve Harland and all at Ottobock® Australia, Tomie Pfeiffer at Orthopaedic Appliances Pty Ltd and especially to Nicky Ashwell, the first recipient of a Bebionic hand. The information you provided was superb and more importantly, your enthusiasm for the field of prosthetics is inspiring.

  To all the readers, family, friends and Facebook followers who loved the first Wright & Tran and in doing so encouraged me to write the next, thank you, I am humbled. Thanks also to Dotty McLeod, Siobhan McGarry, Meghan Woods and Debbie Davies for the fantastic media coverage they have afforded me.

  Finally, as ever, to Jacki. Thanks honey, for everything. None of this gets done without you. Also, congratulations on all you’ve achieved this past year. You make me very proud.

  Nothing is more precious, nor more worthy of protection, than an innocent.

  June 2015

  Stowmarket, Suffolk.

  As dawn broke on his thirty-third birthday, paratrooper Darren Caistor stormed up Wireless Ridge on East Falkland. It was the last of the three battles he fought on those far-away islands and when the soft glow of the South Atlantic sun revealed the carnage, he had barely managed to stifle his tears. He always said it was his toughest birthday. He was wrong.

  His wife’s head leant on his shoulder, her chest heaving in quiet misery. The soft sobs of his daughter and son-in-law echoed off the sterile walls, muffling the gentle sounds of the nurses as they moved around the bed.

  Through blurry eyes Darren watched shadowed shapes gliding across his vision. He knew, in a detached way, that the room was almost silent, yet his head was filled with a screaming rage. A roar of blood, thoughts, frustrations and a desperate desire for revenge thundered inside him. As a nurse moved past the window, the curtains swayed and the briefest of glints from the rising sun shone through. It caught the swirling dust motes, twisting them in a soft-yellow lance of light that flashed across the length of the room, like a heavenly sceptre. Its point came to rest on her soft face.

  The sudden light cast a warming glow, gentle and reviving, but her eyes remained closed, her heart still. The curtain swayed back into place and the light was gone. Its sudden removal breached the last of the old soldier’s defences. Tears streamed down the former Company Sergeant Major’s stubbled cheeks, dripping unheeded as the room fell back into darkness.

  On the dawn of his sixty-sixth birthday, Darren Caistor wept for the soul of his seven-year old granddaughter.

  Chapter 1

  Camden, London. Wednesday, 18th November.

  Kara Wright looked through half-closed venetian blinds at the busying street-scene below. The weak, wintery November sun hadn’t yet managed to rise above the tops of the buildings, but a limp infusion of grey crept down the Kentish Town Road. It gave just enough light to pick out the heavily-cocooned early-risers, struggling against the wind that threatened to freeze them before they reached the warmth of their work.

  She frowned at the weather awaiting her, but for now, wrapped in her dressing gown, towel atop her head, cup of tea in one hand and a slice of toast in the other, she was quite content. Her day didn’t promise much.

  A half hour from now she would venture out for a run with her business partner, Tien. The rest of the morning would be spent working on some background-checks for a City-based HR firm, followed by an afternoon meeting with a financial advisor called Shonel, who was trying to inform her about the best way to plan for the future. Kara was yet to be convinced about share portfolios, unit trusts or Government bonds.

  She took a bite of toast just as her mobile phone vibrated its dull drone on the coffee table. Chewing quickly and taking a swig of tea to wash it down, she made her way across the room and noticed the incoming call had its number withheld. Placing her cup on the table, she retrieved the phone.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello Kara. It’s me… Today?”

  She had spoken to the old man only twice before. Once in the Huntingdon Police Station when he had first approached her and once in a pub in early August, when they had established their communication protocols. Since then there had been nothing. Her life had continued, seemingly unchanged, yet immeasurably different. She had waited, not patiently, but waited. Now, his calm voice sent a frisson of excitement through her and she felt her heart quicken.

  She glanced at the phone screen to check the time before putting it back to her ear, “Yes, today. I make it 6:27?”

  “I concur. Zero?” he asked.

  “Zero is fine,” Kara said and the call disconnected.

  She sat in her favourite squishy armchair and reached for her tea. The towel on her head sagged against the soft upholstery and the tight tuck released, allowing gravity to drape the damp cloth down over her shoulders. Kara didn’t notice. She was busy running through the procedures that had been agreed at their last meeting. They had determined that their relationship, not quite illegal, yet not quite above board, not exactly clandestine, but certainly not open, needed secure means of communication. Electronic telecommunications didn’t provide that in the present day.

  They decided to reinvoke the best of the old tradecraft skills, practised for decades during that often hot, Cold War. No one could bug everywhere in London, so all they needed was a way of establishing meeting points without having to mention them plainly in phone calls. That needed a code but one that had to be cipher-less. They weren’t in the game of swapping co
de books, or driving past dead letter drops. The old man had had a good laugh when she had suggested chalk marks on benches or lampposts. She remembered him sitting opposite her, in the rustic and charming surrounds of a real-ale house in Pinner, his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat pockets like a Dickensian patriarch, ‘Oh no my dear Kara. My days of looking in rain swept vistas for a dab of chalk are long gone. We shall be simpler. You and I shall choose a suitable mix of locations and use them to our advantage.’

  The resultant system was indeed simple, yet robust. A phone call made by either to the other’s normal mobile number, from an untraceable burner phone. That eliminated the two being tied to each other by traceable phones, yet allowed them each to call a single, easy to remember number.

  The caller would request a meeting. The date of the meeting determined the location. The rendezvous time would be plus four hours from the time of the call.

  To work, it only required a list of thirty-one prearranged locations. Dependant on the day or the time they could modify the date-location by adding or subtracting numbers. If the meeting was to be on a Sunday at 09:00, there was little chance of using one of the pubs on the list.

  Other than knowing the locations, the code needed nothing else and it gave enough variables to make counter-surveillance a practical impossibility. They built in a single contingency for meetings that needed to be called in dire emergencies, but strived to keep things as simple as possible.

  Kara had used a memory-story placement technique to memorise the thirty-one locations. The meeting was today, the eighteenth, and the modifier had been zero so it was the eighteenth location, the identity of which came easily into her mind. Finishing her tea and toast, Kara picked up her phone and dialled the first number on her favourite’s list. It rang three times.

  “Hi, what’s up?” Tien asked.

  “Want to go for our run now and keep it short?”

  “Yep, I’ll be there in five.”

  The call disconnected and Kara hustled to get changed. As she was lacing up her running shoes she smiled at the thought of her friend. Never one to enjoy long runs, Kara’s offer of a shortened effort would certainly have pleased Tien but that wasn’t what made Kara smile. The two of them had an instinctive awareness of each other. Tien had known it was more than a shortened run, she had known something significant had occurred but shut down her requirement to ask anything about it. There was no, ‘why, what’s going on, is everything alright’ on the phone. Just an acceptance and confirmation. It was true they had been partners for a long time, but they had always had an intuitive link. Kara could clearly recall their first brief meeting, when what looked like a walking Bergen had come through the flaps of a tent pitched on the edge of Basrah Airport.

  It was February 2006, Southern Iraq was pleasantly warm but the dust was being whipped about in strong winds, assisted by the jets and propellers of a seemingly constant stream of aircraft arrivals and departures. Out of this swirling yellow maelstrom appeared a lightly-built, delicately featured girl with the rank of Lance Corporal and a look of nervous determination.

  Kara had almost laughed at the size of the rucksack the girl had been lumbered with, “You must be our little helper, sent over from the Int Corps?”

  “Yes Sergeant.”

  “Well, thanks for being volunteered. I’m Sergeant Kara Wright, but you get to call me Kara, this,” Kara pointed to the woman sitting at a desk just behind her, “is Lieutenant Commander Victoria Oxford. You get to call her Ma’am or Lieutenant Commander Oxford. All good?”

  “Yes Serg-, I mean, Kara.”

  “Great. Dump your gear and grab a brew. I’ll take you through what you’re going to be doing for us. What’s your name?”

  “I’m Lance Corporal Tien Tran and given the ranks in here, I guess you can call me whatever you want.”

  Kara was still smiling at the memory when she went out her front door into the freezing cold of the November morning. The sun, still not visible above the rooftops, was lending the street a strange silvery hue, mirage-like, as Tien rounded the corner.

  “I’m not stopping, it’s too cold,” she called out in puffs of condensation as she passed.

  Once Kara had caught up they settled into a comfortable side-by-side rhythm, heading north to the open spaces of Hampstead Heath.

  “Good morning to you. What’s occurring?” Tien asked.

  “Franklyn called, it appears we have a meeting,” Kara answered, watching her friend as she said it. The reaction was as she expected.

  Forgetting the cold, Tien pulled up quickly, eyes wide and eyebrows raised, “Seriously?”

  Kara, jogging on the spot, nodded, “Yep, seriously.”

  “Do we know anything?”

  “Not yet, but we will when we get to location eighteen at 10:27. I just need you to confirm that my memory is correct.”

  Tien set off jogging again. She too had memorised the list using her own technique, “I think today is a lovely day for a trip to Canons Park,” she said.

  Chapter 2

  Stanmore, London.

  Tien pulled out of her parking bay and headed northwest. She liked systems and especially simple, elegant systems. She considered the meeting-code a simple, elegant system and especially liked that it didn’t dictate transport options. That meant she could initiate all manner of security sweeps and dry-cleaning runs before Kara set foot near the meeting place. It was one reason why there was a four-hour gap between the call time and the rendezvous.

  She also knew the precautions probably weren’t strictly necessary, but Tien and Kara had routines. Well-practised and much used, their extensive pre-meeting security procedures had not let them down, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan, or much closer to home. Besides, it was how they were trained to operate and Tien still wasn’t all that comfortable with the idea of Franklyn and the shadowy people he represented. People who formed a deniable organisation for purposes that may well have been admirable, but certainly fell outside of the law. They, whoever they were, had decided that the law and justice were often incompatible and on occasions it would be necessary to step in to redress the balance of the scales. Or rather, necessary for others to step in.

  Tien had no problem believing that the UK Legal system was neither simple nor elegant. It was often overly-complicated, flawed and ugly but, it was still the law and that gave her cause to be cautious. Although she was the first of her family to be born in the UK, she was the product of her heritage. Her Mother’s parents had both been lawyers in colonial Vietnam. They were born to a society that had been skewed toward their French masters, yet, they had gained education and worked from within, trying to make a bad system better. When they had met as lecturers in Saigon University, they had found kindred spirits. Passionate for the plight of the common people as much as for each other, they had begun to organise peaceful protests, but time had been against them.

  Tien slowed for the double-roundabout, the powerful BMW automatic dropping effortlessly through the gears. She steered without having to use what she still referred to as the suicide knob and it caused her to smile. Her new prosthesis gripped the leather of the steering wheel as well, if not better, than the left hand she had lost in Afghanistan. Relaxing and firming her grip through sensors in her upper arm muscles, the Bebionic hand was a quantum leap in technology and had instantly relieved the mounting frustrations she had been encountering. Tien had come home from the London clinic after the final fitting and, in the privacy of her own apartment, cried with a mixture of joy and relief for nearly three hours. The intensity of the emotions had surprised even her.

  As the car accelerated she passed a turn that led to the expanse of Highgate Cemetery, with its most famous internee. She mused on Franklyn and the organisation he represented. Perhaps he just wanted a better, more just society, like Marx, who was turned to dust over her right shoulder. Perhaps, but actions always had consequences and those worried her. She doubted Franklyn’s actions would have the ramifications of Karl’s. But she al
so doubted Karl had foreseen what would come of his impact on society. How his theories would be manipulated, leading to wars and non-wars, the mass slaughter of peoples and enforced migrations. She steered the car onto the dual-carriageway and wondered, if Marx had not lived, would she be here, driving past his resting place. Her Grandparents, on both sides, had been the victims of communist regimes sweeping through their homeland.

  Tien shook her head and decided that philosophical musings on the reasons why she was in London, or on whether Franklyn was a safe bet, were not what she needed now. Besides, when Kara and she had discussed Franklyn’s offer back in July, the day after the initial Police Station meeting, she had agreed to support her friend. There had been no coercion, no pressure. Kara, sitting in the wrecked old armchair that still held pride of place in her apartment, had been plain-spoken, eventually.

  “Tien, this offers us a chance to do something that could make a difference. Something that matters.”

  “And what else?”

  “And get paid for it?”

  “We don’t exactly need the money now, do we?” Tien had said, uneasiness in her voice as she spoke about the windfall they had received courtesy of their last case.

  “No, I suppose not,” Kara had conceded, “But we can help when things aren’t fair. We can be a force for good.”

  “Great, shall I rush and get us some capes, a mask maybe? I look good in an all-in-one cat-suit.”

  Kara had laughed and reached for her drink, toasting Tien, “I’m sure you do.”

  “What’s the real reason?”

  There had been a pause. Kara had stared down at the gently swirling, golden-brown bourbon.

  “It’s okay Kara, just tell me.”