The building stood like a spike against the backdrop of the London skyline, pointing upwards, condemning the heavens. A silver finger reflecting the fading sunlight of the day, the Shard was certainly one of the most recent and impressive additions to the London skyline. Originally known as the Shard of Glass, the skyscraper was designed by Renzo Piano, an Italian architect, in the neo-futuristic style. It was seventy-two floors high and contained offices, a five-star hotel, cocktail bars and restaurants. It was one of the most striking buildings on the planet and the tallest building in the United Kingdom.
Tom Lyth took the escalator up to the entrance for the viewing platform, using the opportunity to do a casual 180 degrees turn to scan for any surveillance. He had left his hotel along the Albert Embankment over an hour ago and had run the usual detection routes to identify any signs of possible surveillance. He had taken a taxi from outside his hotel and headed along the Thames, cut through Lambeth and the taxi driver, knowing his business, had taken the side streets to avoid the congestion before turning towards Southwark. Lyth had paid him and walked back over Blackfriars Bridge, continuing with his anti-surveillance until he was as satisfied as he could be before returning to the south side of the river.
He had passed through security quickly and then two separate lifts took him up to the viewing gallery located on the seventy-second floor. As the final lift doors opened, he was greeted by a tall, thin, cadaverous man and, like the best of funeral directors, he was dressed in a black three-piece suit. His jet black hair was slicked back over a pale, alien skull that gave him the appearance of the un-dead. By contrast, horn-rimmed glasses gave him an owlish quality.
Mattius Slotkin, the Seer’s personal assistant and major-domo. He was a corporate lawyer and hatchet man, a kingmaker, someone who knew where all the bodies were buried, probably because he had played a part in putting them there in the first place, although Lyth would have put money on it that Slotkin had never fired a gun in his life. But then again, he didn’t need to. He gave the orders for men who would.
No handshakes or friendly greetings, just a perfunctory slight nod of the head in acknowledgement to each other.
“The far corner, facing towards Lambeth. A seat is waiting for you. The bodyguard will melt away far enough when you arrive,” said Slotkin, in his New England drawl.
Tom Lyth nodded and made his way up the stairs. As he entered through its doors, he was gratified to notice that the viewing gallery was near empty, only a handful of tourists and people at the bar. The room was glass floor to ceiling and gave a complete view of every angle of London. It was stunning. He sauntered casually around the room, taking his time acclimatising to his environment, playing his role of a tourist, and once he had the pulse of the room he approached his contact.
At the far end of the gallery, the Seer sat facing the sun. From her prime position, she could have studied the capital stretched out before her, picking out the iconic buildings of this famous city and the sweep of the river that ran through it like a grey vein. It all looked so small from up here, she remembered.
The Seer was early sixties, looked elegant and relaxed, someone who had control of her situation and place in the world. The designer suit, cut perfectly to her slender frame, was of a business grey and was offset perfectly by the blonde hair that fell effortlessly onto the stylish jacket. She wore black designer sunglasses and carried a thin white cane which was currently resting on the chair next to her.
The Seer smiled to herself as he approached, sensing him. She could imagine him in his habitual dark grey suit, black shirt and that relaxed, confident air that he exuded. She nodded to the bodyguard, a discreet, fit-looking man in a perfectly tailored business suit, and he melted away to a nearby table.
“They ran a whole empire from this city,” she said casually. “Countries, whole continents brought to heel by the money, boots and bullets that emanated from London.” She turned to her guest and smiled sadly. “Oh, how the world turns... empires rise and fall. History teaches us that well.”
“But not the Prism, surely?” said Lyth, scanning his eyes across the city. “We have survived, unnoticed for generations.”
The Seer shrugged in resignation. “For all our sophistication and subterfuge, we are still classed as outsiders, renegades, by certain governments and world power players. Our aims run counter to theirs. In many respects, we are hunted just as much as the extremists and terrorists that we fight against.”
He took the seat opposite her and relaxed. Their relationship was Ying and Yang; a respect that was infected with a mutual recognition of each other. In a different situation, they could have been lovers, but not here, not like this. In this environment they were nothing more than allies; a meeting of minds, conscience and skills.
“Who knows I’m here?” he asked.
The Seer knew the Fisherman’s rules; the fewer people who knew his identity and what he looked like, the better. Anonymity was his greatest survival tool. “Just myself and Mattius. The rest of the Prism is out of the loop at the moment, even the Architect,” she said.
Nobody knew his real name, everybody inside the Prism knew him simply as the Fisherman; only the Seer knew the Fisherman’s real identity and she would never tell.
The Seer and the Fisherman; connected by some invisible bond. They were a secret unit within a secret organisation. The Fisherman was the Seer’s stiletto in the dark, her spymaster; an expert at the recruitment and running of covert sources, an infiltration specialist who often worked undercover and who, if necessary, was able to use the tools of stealth assassination to remove a threat to either his operations, the Prism as a whole, or for the sake of humanity. Through the use of his agents, spies and undercover networks, he had penetrated deep into the heart of the secret world. The Fisherman was the boogey-man that struck an ice-cold pick of fear into the hearts of the terrorists and extremists, even if they did not know who he was.
By contrast, the Seer had been a Senior Executive Director in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, until a terrorist bomb over fifteen years ago had left her blinded and scrambling on the desert floor while bullets had rained above her head. She had been rescued by a Special Operations team, her agents had not. She had retired from SIS and had been recruited by the leader of the Prism, the Architect, and since that time she had devoted herself, and her skills, to the Prism as its intelligence chief.
“I see that you took care of the Yuri Petrov problem for us,” she said.
It had been a little over a year since the operation in Tunisia when his agent, Solange, had been murdered and he had barely escaped with his life. Once he had made it back to Europe, the intelligence on the USB stick had been handed to the Seer and had been analysed by her people, confirming what they suspected; Yuri Petrov was part of something bigger, a small cog in a bigger network. It had given the Prism a window into the Russian’s operation and who he was selling dangerous weapons and technology to.
After the blown operation in Tunisia, Yuri Petrov had gone underground, preferring to stay in the shadows and downsizing his illegal operations. But all that was irrelevant to the Fisherman; he wanted to fulfil the mission he had been given and he wanted revenge for the death of his lover and agent. And so the Fisherman had spent the next six months tracking down the whereabouts of Petrov.
The only way that he could find Petrov was for the Fisherman to go underground also. The Fisherman waited, he bided his time until he saw an opportunity and then he took it. He made a deal to get the information that he needed from one of Petrov’s rivals. He spent months infiltrating the Russian’s organisation, in disguise, and then one night, when all the players were in place, the Fisherman and his Scalpel assault team attacked Petrov’s compound in Islamabad. They wiped the Russian’s people out until only Petrov and his brother were left alive.
“You have heard the phrase, ‘beware the fury of a patient man’? Yes?” said Lyth to the Seer as they sipped at their drinks, gazing down at the sprawl of London.
“Of course,” said the Seer.
That night, the Fisherman had showed Petrov how deep his fury really was! At gunpoint, he made the two brothers go into a nearby freight container and threw in a hammer. The Fisherman told them that whoever won, he would let them go free. Then he had locked them in. Only one man could survive. At first, there was silence from inside, but soon, very soon, there was a commotion, bodies being thrown around. Then there came screams and roars. The fight went on for thirty minutes. Eventually, it was Yuri Petrov who came out alive. He was bloodied and sweating and exhausted, his face a mask of horror.
“And did he survive?” enquired the Seer.
“Yes. Just,” said Lyth, remembering what he had done to the Russian. The Fisherman could not allow his enemy to go unpunished; his thirst for revenge was just too much. By the time the SCALPEL team had finished with him he had been barely recognisable.
“They say these days he is reduced to begging on the streets of Islamabad, selling his body when he has to. I don’t expect him to survive for very much longer,” said Lyth flatly. “I take it that you have something new for me?”
She sipped at her glass of sparkling water and then nodded. “One of our old sources has come alive again.”
‘Alive’ meant reactivated. The Fisherman’s sources sometimes lay dormant for months or even years, ready and primed like a ticking time bomb to reconnect with their handler, ready to provide information to the Prism.
“Who?” he asked.
“Sailfish. In fact, he’s more than come alive; he’s positively clawing his way out of the coffin and up from the grave. He used the emergency protocol to reach out to us.”
“Why now? Has something happened?”
The Seer shrugged. “He has been spying for a long time, one of your oldest agents, I believe. Perhaps he’s sailed too close to the wind too many times, or perhaps Project Pandora is finally coming to an end?”
Lyth nodded in understanding. It was the way with agents; they burned themselves out or took unnecessary risks. Sometimes their nerves were shot. But not Sailfish. He was tough and didn’t scare easily, so if he had been in contact outside of normal channels, then it was serious. “I suspect it may be the latter, the project he was working on must be nearing completion. To allow it to continue, or for Sailfish to stay in place, is putting everyone at risk. Was that all?”
“There was a Jpeg attachment, a file. I assume that it has a hidden meaning?”
Lyth smiled. Only he, as Sailfish’s controller, knew how to decode the hidden message attached to the Jpeg. “Send it to my secure email address.”
The Seer nodded, whispered into the voice activation on her phone and sent across the attachment. “It’s done.”
Lyth didn’t even look at his phone. He would check the email when he was back at his hotel, then scan it and decrypt it securely. Only then would he know what they were dealing with.
The Seer smiled. “No one has your eye for the human factor, that deftness of touch when it comes to dealing with agents. The Fisherman casts his net and lands the catch. He was your man; you recruited him, you ran him. Now I would like you to bring him back home to us safely, to see what he has for us, because if what he has is very valuable, we can’t afford to let it slip through our fingers.”
“It seems that Sailfish’s time is over. We are probably looking at an extraction operation. I’ll need all available Prism resources to get him back safely,” he said. “How did he make contact with us?”
“Ah, yes. It was through the approved emergency contact route – his sister.”
And that, thought the Fisherman, is going to complicate matters.
It was an hour later and Tom Lyth was sitting in his hotel suite, powering up the laptop that he used exclusively for Prism operations.
He opened up the email from the Seer, downloaded the jpeg attachment and then ran it though the specialist software to retrieve the hidden message from deep within its code. It read:
My Dear Friend of the Sea
The day I thought would never arrive has finally happened. I do not know if I am scared or relieved, so perhaps I am a bit of both.
I will keep the information concise. My time working as your source has, I believe, come to an end. This is not something that I would wish, but I suspect that through our work together we have made the world a safer place. We always knew that it was only a matter of time before Project Pandora was in its final stages.
I have held the secret information back in my head as long as possible, for years in reality. But now the security people at Trillium are becoming suspicious that I am perhaps stalling for time about moving the technology forward. If this suspicion is allowed to grow, I fear, with justification, that I would be arrested and interrogated by Trillium. I do not wish to follow my esteemed colleague Schulmann to an early grave…
We have a small window of opportunity. I have implemented the extraction protocol and I am ready to use the computer virus programme that you gave me that will destroy all the files about Pandora from Trillium’s servers. I will do that in the moments before I leave the island. It is all I can do.
I have much to tell you about Pandora!
I will be in Vienna within the next week or so and I hope to see you again, my friend.
Sailfish