Lizzie parked her car in the almost empty car park of the Mercure Hotel on Norwich’s Boundary Road. It was a strange place for a hotel, she thought as she blipped the locks and made her way to the entrance. There was nothing in the local area that made it attractive as a location apart from the airport which was still a couple of miles away and surrounded by its own hotels. Perhaps that was why it was so empty?
She was wearing her one and only business suit. It was a lavender colour and, according to her mother at least, made her look like a proper executive. She adjusted the skirt as she walked, realising too late when she’d got it out of the dry-cleaning wrapper at Adams’s flat that it was slightly too large. Not so much that she was in danger of it slipping down over her hips, but large enough to concern her. Lizzie had accompanied it with a silk cream blouse and matching flats. She didn’t feel like an executive, regardless of what her mother had said, and she was fairly sure she didn’t look like one either.
“Can I help you?” the dark-haired woman sitting behind the reception desk said as Lizzie walked into the foyer. She was about Lizzie’s age and spoke with a clipped accent that Lizzie couldn’t place. It sounded Eastern European, but she couldn’t be any more specific than that.
“I’m here for the Allied Forth presentation?” Lizzie replied, hefting her small handbag under her arm and rechecking her skirt. There wasn’t much in the bag. Her phone, a notepad and a couple of pens, and a small bottle of water.
“You’re early,” the receptionist replied, hiking her well-practised smile even higher. She pointed to one corner of the foyer with a perfectly manicured fingernail. “There're complementary refreshments just there. Please help yourself to tea or coffee.”
Lizzie thanked the woman and made her way over to the tea and coffee, checking her watch as she did so. The presentation was due to start in about twenty minutes, so she wasn’t that early. She made herself a cup of coffee and retreated to the opposite corner of the foyer.
Over the next quarter of an hour, the foyer gradually filled up with other people. From her vantage point in the corner, Lizzie could observe them without having to make small talk, exactly why she had chosen that corner. Most of them were female and under thirty, although there were one or two men there as well. Lizzie’s eye was drawn to an older woman, mid to late forties perhaps, with a tie-dyed skirt and kind eyes. The woman was definitely the outlier from a demographic perspective.
At precisely five minutes before two, a pair of doors Lizzie hadn’t noticed opened, and a woman stepped through them, clapping her hands as she did so.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” the woman said. “Would you like to come in and take a seat?”
Lizzie picked up her bag and got to her feet, hanging back until the majority of the attendees had gone through the doors. When she followed them into the room, Lizzie looked around to see a bland conference room, lines of utilitarian chairs in front of a white screen hanging from the ceiling. She took a seat at the rear of the room. The room was functional, and along one wall was a closed bar. It obviously served many other purposes.
At the front of the room was a young woman. It wasn’t the one who had asked them to come in, but the woman at the front was looking nervously at the thirty or so people in the room. Lizzie watched as she cleared her throat and pressed a button on the lectern in front of her. The white screen lit up with a logo containing the stylised letters AF intertwined in a Celtic font.
“Good afternoon, everyone,” the young woman behind the lectern said. Lizzie turned to see the woman who had welcomed them into the room behind her, moving her hands up to tell the girl to speak up. “My name is Claire, and I am here today to tell you how Allied Forth changed my life.”
Lizzie reached into her handbag to get her notepad and opened it to take some notes. When she looked down at the first page, she saw a handwritten note.
Just remember what we were doing eight hours ago. It was Adams’s writing, his blockish letters obvious. Lizzie didn’t need to do the maths to work out what he was referring to. She felt her face colouring as she ripped the page from the notebook, but she smiled at the same time.
For the next thirty minutes, Lizzie listened to Claire. The PowerPoint was full of photographs of the shy-looking presenter in what she told them was an orphanage. Teaching a class of beaming black children. Playing games with them in the sun. As she flicked through the photographs, Claire told the group how much the experience had changed her. Given her more confidence in herself. Allowed her room to grow and heal. Lizzie wondered what she was healing from, and how it compared to her own experiences, but she figured if Claire wanted them to know, she would tell them.
Lizzie, having given enough presentations in her career in the RAF, knew that Claire wasn’t a natural presenter. Neither was she. Anything where Lizzie was the centre of other people’s attention was uncomfortable, but she was enthralled with Claire’s story. The young woman at the front of the room was naturally honest, and genuinely changed by her experiences with the organisation.
“I know it’s a cliché,” Claire said with relief in her voice that Lizzie recognised as being from the impending end of her presentation. “But I can honestly say that the experience I had with Allied Forth was life changing. Would I go back to Sierra Leone?” A genuine smile spread across her face. “Absolutely. That’s why I’ll be leading the next group of volunteers.”
There was a polite round of applause as Claire finished her presentation. The woman who had welcomed them into the room then stood next to her, waiting for it to finish. When the clapping had finished, she continued.
“Now, I know you’ve probably got a lot of questions for Claire. I know I have. But before that, I’d like to introduce a representative from Allied Forth’s primary sponsor, without whom none of this would be possible.” The woman turned and smiled broadly at another, slightly older woman standing to the side of the screen. “They have been incredibly generous in their support. For those of you who do volunteer, it’s this company that will be repaying your wages to your employers and providing everything for you while you are in Africa.” A further smattering of applause sounded as the woman standing to the side stepped forward to take centre stage.
Lizzie looked at the new arrival. She was smartly dressed and had her hair styled in a mussed look that Lizzie knew was almost impossible to carry off well. The woman clasped her hands together as if in prayer and nodded in Claire’s direction briefly before returning her attention to the attendees.
“Thank you so much, all of you, for coming today. My name is Doctor Lobjoie and I am here, as the lovely Helena has said, on behalf of my organisation which funds the programme.” Her voice was pure middle England with no trace of any accent, despite her foreign sounding last name. “I am the Operations Manager for the parent company supporting Allied Forth.”
Lizzie’s hand was poised over her notebook, where a series of scribbled notes detailed—Lizzie hoped—Claire’s presentation.
“My company is determined to give something back. That is why, at the Ascalon Institute, we are privileged to support the work that Claire—and hopefully many of you—do in the field.”
9
Titch folded the last of his flags away and secured them in his cupboard. He should have taken them all down the previous evening after his Zoom call with George and Charlotte, but he was so stoked at having passed the first test, he’d decided to leave them up for the night. The chances of the barrack block senior coming round on a Sunday were so low they were almost nil, and seeing the Bismarck-tricolour when he’d woken up that morning had been a fantastic start to the day. White for nationalism, red for socialism, and the misunderstood symbol on the central disc. The black swastika wasn’t a symbol of hate for Titch. It was a symbol of purity.
The flag that he had so carefully arranged behind him the night before was, if the dealer he had bought it from was to be believed, once hung on a wall in a luxury apartment in the Bogenhausen district of Munich. The apartment’s owner, a fireb
rand politician with a small, very distinctive moustache, had gone on to great things. In Titch’s opinion, at least. Titch had bought the flag at a militaria shop in Ghent, Belgium, during a battlefield tour that wouldn’t have appealed to many historians, amateur or otherwise. The owner of the small shop, which dealt in a very niche area of militaria, had shown Titch a photograph apparently showing the flag in situ.
At the same shop, Titch had also bought a metal stamp, complete with its own swastika, which he fancied had been used by a Nazi bureaucrat to stamp the paperwork to send Semites to their deaths. He had also bought a helmet and stick pin at the same time, and almost bought an armband that the proprietor assured Titch was from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Two things had put him off the armband. One was the price, and the other was the fact that a Jew had probably worn it.
His sacred relics concealed in their lockbox, Titch decided to have a wander around the camp he would be calling home for the next couple of years. It was a Sunday afternoon, and he had nothing better to do. He would have used the gymnasium, but he had to do an induction before he could get access to it. As if he needed induction to a gym. It was just an excuse to justify the jobs of the Physical Training Instructors who only cared about how good their arms looked in their white singlets.
Titch left the accommodation block and stepped out onto the road. RAF Honington was an enormous base with a rich history. Titch had read up on it when he found out he was going to be posted there. There was a lot that could be learned from history, and it was the only subject at school that he had actually cared about. Originally part of Bomber Command during the Second World War, the airfield had been home to many aircraft over the years. It had even taken part in the Berlin Airlift after the war, which Titch considered to be one of the last noble actions of the British military before the rot had set in. After that, Canberras, Shackletons, and Buccaneers had all flown from its runway before giving way to the Tornados. But it wasn’t the history of the base that appealed to Titch. It was the station’s motto. Pro Anglia Valens. Valiant for England. That appealed no end to Titch’s sensibilities.
The majority of the personnel on the base belonged to the RAF Regiment. A few years previously, obviously when some senior officer down at Air Command realised that the majority of the customers of the RAF Police were from the regiment, the scuffers had moved in and lived alongside them in an uneasy, and often broken, truce. As he walked down the road, he saw a couple of police officers driving past in their car, pretending to be real coppers but falling well short in his eyes.
Titch crossed the road and walked down towards the runway. The buildings on either side of him were, in the main, old, red brick with matching roof tiles. He passed signs for units and detachments that he knew he would never visit. As he got closer to the runway, he saw an isolated squat building that he recognised instantly, even though he’d never seen it before. It had a sturdy fence around it—a wire within a wire—and a heavy gate with a Simplex lock. To the side of the front door of the building was a metal hatch. It was the armoury and was where Titch would be working.
The armoury stood alone because of the amount of explosives secured within it. It had to be a certain distance from anything else in case something exploded inside, and the instantly recognisable hatch was where weapons would be handed out. Stock first, cocking handle fixed in the rear position so the recipient could confirm it was unloaded before taking it to the sand-filled bay to fire off the action. Hopefully safely. Titch had never had a negligent discharge in his life, and if he did, his career as a weapons technician would be over before it had begun.
He continued past the armoury and realised that he had reached the edge of the runway, so he looped around and started walking back to the accommodation block. He’d been at RAF Honington for less than a couple of days, and he was bored already.
In front of him, Titch saw a group of men running down the road in his direction. They were all wearing olive green T-shirts, camouflage trousers, and boots. Titch could see from the straps on their shoulders that they were carrying backpacks, and they all had a rifle clutched across their chest. Running five abreast, a solitary instructor ran next to them in a high-visibility jacket.
Titch stopped to watch the group running past him. From the look of them, they were Phase One trainees. All young, clean shaven with close cropped hair, and blowing hard. He grinned as the main body ran past and he saw a couple of trainees about fifty yards behind the group, with their own instructor shouting at them to get a fucking move on. Behind them was a safety vehicle. As he drove past Titch, the driver grinned as he pointed at the two struggling trainees. Then he mimed drawing a knife across his throat. The two young men would be sent home soon enough.
Titch had thought at one point about joining the RAF Regiment. He knew he was fit enough to pass the assessment, but he liked playing with explosives a lot more than getting drunk and fighting, which seemed to be their core activities.
As the group of trainees receded into the distance, Titch carried on walking back to his block, the rest of the day stretching in front of him. At least he had an excellent selection of porn back in his room.
10
General Luke Waterfield hadn’t, all things considered, done too badly in his military career. He was the Chief of Defence Staff, after all. As he sat in his most prized possession, his Bentley Continental GT that he had bought when he was last promoted, and waited for the gates leading to his drive to open, he reflected on that fact.
It seemed a long, long time since he had stood on the parade square as a second lieutenant, full of pride and passion and desperate not to be the soldier who fainted on the parade square. It was a long time, though, almost forty years. General Waterfield had taken a while to get going in his military career. He spent three years as a second lieutenant, eleven as a lieutenant, and five as a captain. It was when he hit lieutenant colonel that things really took off. Waterfield managed to land a job as the military assistant to the Chief of the General Staff. This resulted in two things. One was a trip to the palace to receive a Member of the British Empire medal from Her Majesty herself. The other, and this one was far more influential, was a wide network of friends and acquaintances in very senior places. His discretion—coupled with their indiscretions—had enabled him to benefit from their influence over the years. A word in an ear here and suddenly Waterfield was the Commanding Officer of a battalion of Green Jackets. A promise of silence there and his Member of the British Empire became an Order. Waterfield’s wife got yet another dress for her wardrobe. “You simply can’t,” she had said at the time, “wear the same dress twice to the palace.”
Waterfield put the car into gear as the gates stopped moving and the car growled through them, its wide tyres crinkling in the gravel of his driveway. This was the bit he loved most about coming home. Driving around the curve and seeing his house, his wife standing on the steps to greet him, having been alerted by the gates being opened.
The car purred under his feet as he drew to a stop in front of the house.
“Pleasant drive, dear?” his wife of thirty-six years, Amelia, said as he got out of the car. The door shut almost silently behind him, and Waterfield kissed his wife on the cheek. She was almost a full foot shorter than he was, and he had to bend at the waist to reach.
“Not too bad until I left the A11,” Waterfield replied. “Then it was just tractor after tractor.” It was a small price to pay for living on the North Norfolk coast, which wasn’t called Chelsea by the Sea for nothing—at least by the locals who couldn’t afford to live there. “Did you see the press conference?”
“Of course I did,” Amelia replied with a smile. “I recorded it for you.”
“What did you think?”
“You were fantastic,” she said, turning to enter the house. “Very elegant, very distinguished.” Waterfield followed Amelia into the hallway, a grand entrance to a grand property. The Tudor gabled house had been in Waterfield’s family for generations. Another thing that w
as a massive help in reaching the higher echelons of the military was family money. Lots of family money.
“The prime minister insisted it was me who did it,” Waterfield said as they walked through the house to the kitchen at the rear. As he got closer to the kitchen, the most amazing smell of cooking appeared, and Waterfield’s mouth started watering. “He said it would show good leadership. The buffoon. What would he know about leadership? He’s never commanded a thing in his life.”
“He is the prime minister, darling,” Amelia said. “Is beef stew okay for tea? I’ve done the suet dumplings just how you like them.”
“They smell fantastic,” Waterfield replied. “I’ll just get out of this suit, and we can eat.”
“Perfect,” Amelia said as she crossed to the enormous Aga that dominated the kitchen. “When are you back in London?”
“I’ll probably drive down Tuesday evening. Have you checked the weather?”
“Of course I have.” Amelia opened the door of the cooker and the smell intensified. “Tomorrow’s perfect sailing weather, and I’ve already spoken to David in Wayford Bridge. He’ll have the boat ready for you first thing.”
Waterfield left the kitchen, his stomach grumbling, and made his way up the sweeping staircase to the first floor. Amelia’s bedroom was the first one on the left, and his was the first one on the right. The other bedrooms were guest rooms. Waterfield and Amelia had never had children, which he was privately quite happy about, although he’d never told her that and never would. Her brother had four children, all now teenagers, and when they were younger, they would come to Waterfield’s house, make an incessant amount of noise and mess, and then mercifully leave.
As he got changed into a pair of sweatpants and a baggy top, Waterfield thought again about the press conference. His own private opinion was that initiation ceremonies were a good thing. They helped the men, and women these days, bond and sorted the wheat from the chaff. Waterfield couldn’t see the difference between a forced march over hilly terrain and some drunken horseplay in a regimental bar to help forge those bonds. After all, when the bullets were flying, the troops on the ground needed to know the calibre of the surrounding men. But that wasn’t something that he, as Chief of the Defence Staff, could say on national television, was it?
Enemy Within: A heart-wrenching medical mystery (British Military Thriller Series Book 3) Page 4
