Cold Warriors Read Online Free

before he'd taken his finger off the button. A dark-haired, smooth-faced man stared at him a moment, then stepped aside and gestured vaguely towards the back of the building. The whole place looked like it had been decorated in the fifties and allowed to slowly deteriorate ever since. Paisley wallpaper was peeling in the corners, red and brown like the rest of the décor.
    Phillips, the man who'd first recruited him from the army to the agency, was waiting in the long, narrow sitting room, a frown squashing his bulldog face. "You're a bloody liability, you know that, Hewitt?" he barked. He was smoking a Silk Cut, filling the room with a blue, flavourless fog. He took another drag, then stubbed it out on the carpet. The burn mark was instantly lost in the lurid crimson-and-blue floral pattern.
    Morgan pulled himself to attention. "Yes, sir."
    "You do realise you're supposed to be killing the other side?"
    Morgan's shoulders tightened. "I think it might've been in the mission briefing, yeah."
    There was a small cough of suppressed laughter. Morgan saw that there was a stranger in the room - a neat little man just the wrong side of middle-age sitting in one of the high-backed wooden chairs.
    "Don't get lippy with me, you little shit!" Phillips roared.
    "It was an accident," Morgan said, but he couldn't look Phillips in the eye.
    "So I hear. Just like that ricochet that went straight through Curtis's heart during basic. Or the supposedly defused IED that took off both of Perry's legs. Or... how did Brown die, I can't remember?"
    "A septic cut. We got back to base too late to treat the blood poisoning," Morgan said.
    "And how exactly did he get the cut?"
    Morgan didn't bother replying. They both knew that a tent peg Morgan was hammering had skidded against a rock and straight into Brown's foot. Morgan still couldn't quite believe Brown had died from it.
    "It's remarkable," Phillips said. "You're only twenty, and you've already notched up a British body count that would give any Al Qaeda operative a warm glow of satisfaction."
    "Your sister died too, didn't she?" the other man asked suddenly, just when Morgan had begun to forget he was there.
    Phillips shot him a look of irritation.
    "When you were seven, I gather," the man continued, "and you chased her into a lake. Tragic, really. And you'd already lost both your mother and father, before you were even born. There's an Oscar Wilde quote about that - I can't quite remember how it goes, can you? Something about losing one parent being unfortunate, but losing both smacking of carelessness. What a lonely little boy you must have been."
    "What is this, Trisha Goddard?" Morgan said, trying to keep his voice light.
    The man smiled a secretive little smile that made Morgan want to punch him.
    "Who the hell is he?" Morgan asked Phillips.
    "Giles here is your get-out-of-jail-free card. If it was up to me, you'd never see active duty again."
    Morgan felt his cheeks flood with a heat that was half shame, half anger.
    "I, on the other hand," Giles said, "think you're far too useful to waste. You simply need to be handled with the appropriate caution."
    "Like radioactive waste," Phillips muttered.
    Giles laughed. "Yes, very much like that. Young Morgan certainly isn't a safe person to be around - it's almost as if he emits mortality, isn't it?"
    "That's absurd," Phillips said.
    "Isn't it just."
    Phillips snorted. "No wonder they closed you lot down."
    "Temporarily," Giles said amiably. "We're back in business now - extreme solutions for a dangerous world."
    Phillips's lips pursed sourly around a fresh cigarette.
    "If you're not MI6, who are you?" Morgan asked.
    Giles shrugged. "A recently reformed department of the SIS - they used to call us the Hermetic Division, back in the day. You may consider yourself officially seconded."
    Phillips nodded when Morgan looked back at him, though he didn't look happy about it.
    Morgan didn't want to work for this smug little bastard, but it didn't look like