Thunder Read Online Free Page A

grey space between the system and anarchy.
    He felt proud of his intense self-orientation and lack of compassion. He was glad he’d had all feelings for others brutally shagged out of him while he was still so young. It had served him well in later years. His reputation for ruthlessness and delivering spectacular results was the reason why, young as he was, he was now only one step away from his ultimate prize...
    His encrypted cellphone started ringing and he snatched it up, “Ace.”
    “Boss, it’s Deuce.”
    Greere smiled at the sound of his subordinate’s gritty voice. He liked Ellard. Ellard didn’t care about anything. Ellard just did his job. Ellard didn’t want to do anything else, didn’t want to get promoted, to settle down, to waste time with some other life-partner or to have kids. Ellard wanted nothing. Ellard enjoyed doing what he did best: running assets. He also seemed to enjoy disposing of the odd one now and again.
    “Go ahead, Deuce,” Greere replied.
    “Tin is in place,” said Ellard, and Greere could hear the man laughing to himself in the background. “He really likes his code-name.”
    “Will it cause a problem?” Greere asked sharply. At times Ellard’s penchant for winding up agents could cause unforeseen complications.
    “No, sir. Not with Tin. He’s a good little boy. It’s nice to put him in his place. You’re familiar with his cover name, aren’t you?”
    “Yes, Deuce, I am.”
    “You know he thinks it makes him sound posh, don’t you?” Ellard was still chuckling. “Vittalle! I think it’s just typical of the little tosser. I keep thinking he’s some sort of ruddy bottled water...,” Ellard’s voice was consumed by bellowing laughter and Greere wondered what manner of cynical expression would have been plastered over his subordinate’s campaign-hardened features when Tin had announced his chosen persona’s name...
    Most likely, knowing Ellard, he’d just laughed out loud in the new agent’s face...
    Ellard knew better than to care about the feelings of other agents...
    Greere smiled and hung up.
    ~~~~~
    I flick through the newspapers from the time. I was out of it for the best part of two weeks and therefore missed the initial deluge of outraged press-coverage.
    The doctors have explained to me, in no small detail, that during those first few days it was touch and go whether I’d survive at all. They’re saying that it must only have been some tremendous resolve and tenacity of spirit that made me pull myself back from the brink so many times.
    I wish I hadn’t.
    The papers make grisly reading. Over and above my family, exactly eighty-six people were within fifty metres of the van when the bomb went off – either on foot, or in vehicles. None of them survived. Most were atomised in an instant.
    I suppose, in a small way, I am grateful for this. At least my loved ones didn’t suffer. The doctors say that there wouldn’t have been enough time for even the most basic of nerve signals to travel to their brains in the milliseconds involved. They would simply have been living normally. Then gone.
    But eighty-six isn’t the end of it.
    The van and surrounding vehicles were turned into a massive cloud of shrapnel and flung outwards into the surrounding crowds. Because I was lifted, I flew outwards as part of this detritus. They think that this contributed to why I am the only survivor amongst the additional two hundred and twelve innocent people who ended their lives within a one hundred metre radius. I am the only one, who was both outside at the time and that close to the explosion, that survived either the initial blast or the injuries sustained from it.
    The man with the grey beard, who I saw breathing his last desperate scream of pain, turns out to have been one, retired, Doctor James Albertson. Grandfather to six-year-old Jamie Albertson Junior, who he doted over, and who he was also in the process of taking for a day out to see the sights on that fateful