Find out more, or, follow J Jackson Bentley at:
www.facebook.com/jjacksonbentley
http://jjacksonbentley.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/jjacksonbentley
www.flickr.com/photos/jjbauthor
You can also contact the author by email at:
jjacksonbentley@london.com
Extract from:
CHAMELEON
A City of London Thriller
By
J Jackson Bentley
Prologue
Vastrick Security, No 1 Poultry, London, Monday 9am.
Dee exited Bank tube station and was assailed by the biting cold wind. Banked snow still lay on the edges of roads and pavements but it was now deep frozen and granite hard. The ground underfoot was slippery where the occasional light rain had speckled the ground with water droplets that turned to ice on contact. She could feel the crunch of ice and frost under her boots.
Luckily, Dee didn’t have far to walk. The office block accommodating Vastrick Security was less a hundred yards away, but even that distance was a challenge in this, the coldest January since records began. Almost everyone was wearing scarves across their faces, and those that weren’t had frost forming on their cheeks where their expelled breath had frozen onto their skin before it could evaporate.
The sky was dark grey and heavy laden with black clouds. The winter solstice had passed just a couple of weeks earlier, and there seemed very little difference in the level of daylight between now and the shortest day. At nine in the morning it was just beginning to grow light, and yet it would be dark again by four. The grey clouds meant that the light levels would remain subdued all day, keeping the street lights illuminated almost constantly. Grey skies, grey weather, grey world.
Dee looked both ways before crossing the street, and whichever way she looked it was as if Ansel Addams had taken monochrome photograph of a city in winter. Most of the commuters looked as though they were wearing dark colours to match their dark mood. The occasional colourful outfit stood out like a beacon in this conservative area where neon was rare and the colours used for shop fronts were subdued.
Dee entered the office building through the swing doors and felt the immediate heat of the door curtain scorch her head. In the summer the door curtain would blow a wall of cool air across the entrance to stop the heat penetrating into the working areas. Today the wall was a wall of radiant heat which could have cooked a chicken. She passed through the invisible wall of heat and into the lobby area, which was several degrees cooler than it was designed to be. Glass atria may be great to look at, but they don’t keep much heat in.
Dee took the lift to the Vastrick Security offices. She had officially become a Vice President of Vastrick on January 1st this year, mainly, she suspected, because she had managed to get herself shot three times on her last big case.
When she stepped into the lobby she noticed that Andy was on reception duty. Andy was an investigator and so he was usually in the back office, but Dee guessed that the disruption to the roads and trains meant that some of their people would be working from home again. She was right; there were four backroom staff in the office, one investigator and one close protection operative, other than Dee herself.
Geordie, the other close protection operative, had been stuck in London since yesterday due to the failure of the trains to run from Kings Cross up to Newcastle, where he lived, and from which region he took his nickname. Everyone had called him Geordie for so long it was rare for anyone to refer to him by his real name, Pete Lowden, but everyone in the business knew who Geordie was, and he didn’t mind anyway, and so it really didn’t matter too much.
Dee removed her coat, scarf, boots and other sundry outerwear. Replacing her boots with sensible flat shoes, she was dressed in grey trousers, red roll neck sweater and a black tailored jacket. If anyone had seen what she was wearing for underwear they would have found it amusing. She was wearing her new husband’s thermals and had to admit that they kept her warm. At five feet eight inches tall, she was approximately the same height as Josh, her husband, and so the full length leg of the white thermal leggings tucked nicely underneath her socks.
The attractive young woman both missed and envied her new husband. He had been sitting by the pool at his five star hotel in Dubai enjoying Mediterranean style temperatures yesterday, when they spoke using the video service provided by Skype. He appeared to be enjoying himself far too much for her liking. But Josh wouldn’t be back for another three weeks. He was assessing the value of the loss incurred when a small shopping mall on Sheikh Zayed Road had been severely damaged by fire. The insurers were insistent that Dyson Brecht send out a senior loss adjuster, and Josh’s boss Toby had picked him. Dee would have gone along too if she hadn’t recently taken three weeks’ leave to go on honeymoon, and get shot.
Dee was just settling into her desk and booting up the computer when Geordie came in. He was over six feet tall, muscular without an ounce of fat on him, with close cropped dark hair. He was quite striking in his way. He had the rugged good looks that most women favour. He was dressed in his usual Chinos and Vastrick Polo top. Yesterday someone had asked him how he managed in the cold weather with just a polo shirt and a padded jacket. He looked at them with his piercing blue eyes and joked that he had encountered worse weather than this in the summer in Newcastle, which he then assured the London staff was just inside the Arctic Circle. He had said it with a straight face, and found it amusing that some of them actually believed it.
“We have a walk in,” he said with an economy of words that was typical of him. Despite his appearance he was quite shy around women, something that made him even more attractive to a lot of the female clients.
“It might be a time waster who has no idea of our hourly rates, but bring them in to Conference room 1 and we’ll give them fifteen minutes,” Dee said. Geordie headed towards the reception area whilst she walked across the corridor into the conference room and switched on the lights.
Dee was still asking housekeeping to send someone up to take orders for drinks when the ‘walk in’ stepped through the doorway. The woman was around Dee’s height but her hair was stacked on top of her head and wrapped in a colourful scarf that contrasted well with the rest of her outfit. She was accompanied by a handsome middle aged man dressed in a business suit and tie; her husband, perhaps. Although she was heavily built - she was probably too big for a size twenty dress - she carried herself well. Her ebony skin shone with good health and her dark eyes did nothing to conceal the intelligence that lay behind them. There was no hint of a smile, however, and Dee could see the tell-tale signs of worry which had brought her to their offices.
She was obviously a woman who believed in being direct.
“Hello, Mrs Hammond,” she said, in an accent Dee placed somewhere in central Africa.
“I am Victoria Hokobu and if you do not help me I fear I will be killed in the next seventy two hours.”