Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) Read Online Free Page A

served in Special Forces. Two minutes’ intensive strength and endurance exercise, pause, then repeat for fifty minutes. The memory of the attempted mugging in Mayfair was still fresh and he would do his damnedest to keep up his fitness.
    Now his phone was flashing insistently. Before answering, his eyes flicked to the TV monitor on the wall. Had something big happened? Some horror committed by Boko Haram in Nigeria? A hostage crisis in Yemen? ‘Breaking news’ read the subtitled caption. ‘House prices surge in London suburbs.’ No clues there then. But a phone call at this time of day could mean just one thing: the office. Wiping the sweat out of his eyes with his forearm, he glanced at the number on the small screen and recognized it immediately. The voice at the other end asked how quickly he could get over to Vauxhall Cross. In the few months since he’d started working for MI6, he had fitted in surprisingly quickly. If he chose to stay, and many didn’t, he had been told he could go far.
    ‘How soon can I be in?’ Luke checked his watch. ‘Depends how smartly you need me dressed. I’m in the gym.’
    ‘I don’t care what you’re wearing,’ said his line manager, Angela Scott. ‘Come dressed as an astronaut, for all I care. Just get in here now.’
    He knew better than to ask what was going on. In any case, he’d be briefed soon enough. ‘Roger that.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Sorry. I haven’t quite shaken off the military jargon yet. I’m on my way.’
    She hung up.
    In sweat pants and trainers, Luke took the lift down from the gym to the underground garage. Elise and he lived in one of those modern steel-and-glass apartment blocks that had sprung up on the south bank of the Thames. Mussels Wharf, it was called – they’d had a few laughs about that. Renting for now, but maybe they’d look to buy something next year – if they were still together, of course. He got a few funny looks as he pulled out into the traffic, but he always did, driving a scratched Land Rover Defender out of a flash Thameside apartment block. His London friends liked to claim that it stank of manure but Luke didn’t give a monkey’s. This was his way of staying in touchwith his country roots. Besides, there was something pleasingly familiar about its blunt, functional lines and its quasi-military practicality.
    Past the New Covent Garden fruit-and-veg depot, and the hideous concrete statue at Vauxhall Bridge – what were they thinking, building that? – then his windscreen gradually filled with the imposing green-and-sandstone fortress that now paid his salary, Vauxhall Cross, known to those who worked there as VX. It was the publicly declared headquarters, since 1994, of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. What a difference from Century House, the dingy old tower block in Lambeth where his uncle had worked before the move to Vauxhall. What a soulless dump that had been. Once, Luke had gone there with him. He had been just old enough to take it all in: the petrol station at street level, the brown raincoats hanging on pegs, the brown suits, even the brown soup in the canteen. To him it seemed a monochrome world inhabited by chain-smoking men in suits and typing girls with names like Betty who stooped to stroke his cheek. But he remembered his uncle talking about some real characters there. A woman who knew every detail in every file, back in the Stone Age before it was all digitized and encrypted. His uncle had talked, probably more than he should have, about the occasional ripple of excitement when a Soviet defector was reeled in, and the brief, intense feeling of camaraderie as he and his colleagues had stood together and sung Christmas carols. ‘Nothing like it,’ he had told his nephew, ‘all of us working for a common cause. One day you’ll understand.’
    The lights were changing now and Luke tried to focus on what he was about to walk into. But still his uncle’s stories kept flooding back to him. A tea trolley