Day of Absolution - Hardcover

Gardner, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0727858084 ISBN 13: 9780727858085

Verlag: Severn House Publishers Ltd, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

A thriller of style, wit and page-turning tension; Charlie Gauntlet, a retired lawyer who was 'something dodgy in the Foreign Office' is recently married to the much younger Rebecca 'Bex' Olesker, a Detective Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police's Anti-Terrorist Branch. Charlie has more or less come to terms with Bex's demanding and dangerous job, though it's hard for him to stay at home when his young wife is on the front line. Especially when she is facing the mysterious and deadly international assassin known only as Alchemist. She may find him, but will she survive the encounter?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Gardner is one of the world's premier thriller writers, and has published more than forty novels, many of which have been bestsellers. Among Gardner's works are sixteen books in the legendary James Bond series, including Win, Lose, or Die and Never Send Flowers; he has also written six books featuring Big Herbie Kruger, most recently Confessor and Maestro, which was a New York Times Book of the Year. A graduate of Cambridge University who did his postgraduate work at Oxford, he now lives in Hampshire. He has variously been a stage magician, an officer in the Royal Marines, a theatrical journalist, a lecturer in Shakespearean production and a priest in the Church of England.

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Day of Absolution

By John Gardner

Severn House Publishers

Copyright © 2002 John Gardner
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780727858085

Chapter One

So it came about on a bitter and freezing Wednesday in February at the beginning of the new-millennium that Charles Vincent Gauntlet married Rebecca Louise Olesker, at a civil ceremony with people pulled in off the street as witnesses. They had lived together, in Bex's flat in Dolphin Square, for some months and, in spite of the perceptible age difference, were as happy as they had any right to be, if not happier.

Bex was particularly suited, for her work was - well, let's just say that any partner had to really understand the Job. She had given up looking for a husband when she first met Gauntlet. It had always been such a letdown. Men never understood, or they wanted to know more, or they just got jealous of the Metropolitan Police Force. Being a detective chief inspector in the Met was bad enough, but to be in the Anti-Terrorist OS13 Branch was something else.

They had met at the funeral of a colleague.

"You knew old Herbie for long?" Charlie asked her. It was almost a chat-up line, and he was quite surprised when Bex said that she had done some quite wild things with Herbie. "It was sudden," she said, giving a sad little smile, her big brown eyes drooping away. "Very quick I understand., Charlie Gauntlet gave her a kind of bracing nod.

This time her eyes locked on him, lips trembling. "Happened in my sitting room." Her voice cracked, "There one minute, gone the next, silly bugger. He went from life to death in the snap of your fingers. Poor old Herb." And now she fixed him with her eyes so that he felt like an insect skewered against a mount and was totally lost to her.

"What d'you do for a living?" Bex asked him sweetly.

"Me? I'm retired. Like old Herb was, out to grass."

Now, if anyone asked Charles Gauntlet what he had done, he would give a wry smile and mutter that he read law at Cambridge but eventually before he was really ready, went on to cio something dodgy for the Foreign Service. Their mutual dead friend, Herbie, had worked for the same firm, only his job had been even more dodgy. "Should've died years ago, Herb," one of his other iffy colleagues had said. "Took a lot of risks when the curtain was still up."

So that was how Charlie and Bex first got together, only Charles had taken early retirement, and one of the boons he brought to the relationship - and thence to the marriage - was that he was very much an ex-government employee who knew exactly how to keep his trap shut and not ask awkward questions. He knew how to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, which to Bex's mind was bloody nigh impossible.

In retrospect, the marriage was quirky because she wasn't looking for a husband. Sure, sometimes her thoughts strayed to the idea of tying the knot, then, like a sniper with a plethora of targets, she switched and considered better of it. That was until the Saturday evening when she came back to Dolphin Square and told him that, barring accidents and a change in the wind, she had five days free.

"What you want to do, then, Bex?" he growled, looking up innocent and paradoxically wise at the same time. The stare said, Okay, Bex, you want to go to the movies, or are we seeing Les Miserables for the thirty-sixth time and having a good cry? You want to go out and live it up - which meant have an Indian or a Chinese, or even an Italian - or you want to go to the movies? See Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin, like I first suggested?

Later she realized that Charlie, cunning bugger that he was, had led her into a trap simply by the way he looked: by his body language and the tilt of his mouth. He was suggesting that probably there was something exceptionally good to see at the movies, and after that they could have a Madras chicken with Bombay Potatoes and lashings of onion pickle and it wouldn't matter.

"What d'you want to do, my darling? You choose for a change." She could almost taste the Madras chicken. She was a martyr to Madras chicken.

"Okay." He shifted on the settee next to her, one hand straying to her thigh, grinned, dropped his voice, almost picked it up again, and whispered, "Well, I'm getting married Wednesday if you agree."

She did a double take, then a treble. He's joking. No, he's not, the bastard. I can see it in that sly little look he's trying to pull.

Gotcha!

"Charlie?" Stern and very grown-up.

The grin widened.

"Charlie, you've set me up ..."

"Only if you want it. Only if you want to get married, Bex. Make an honest man of me."

"You've arranged it already ..."She remembered that he had quizzed her several weeks before: "Got to make some arrangements, Bex, for when your next leave comes up: your away days, right? Maybe we do something stupid, like take the bus out to Hampton Court. See the armor. Do something daft like get married."

She heard her own voice hurtling from a few weeks ago, "That'll be the day, Charlie. I should live so long."

He now gave her another quick grin, flashing on and off like an Aldis lamp. "So?" Eyebrows lifting, eyes dancing, winking a challenge.

She took a deep breath and committed herself.

So, the police officer and the former lawyer with special duties and clark secrets were married on that raw, cold Tuesday with a delivery-man, a lady bank clerk, a council worker, and a housewife - only you cannot marry a house so she called herself a wife - as the witnesses; and the woman registrar beamed, looking like a coiffured owl as she pronounced them man and wife.

After that, Charlie Gauntlet took Bex-in his arms as though she were a fragile piece of porcelain, which she was not, and kissed her as tenderly as she would ever want to be kissed. And she wondered at the whole business: after all, we were up to our asses in platitudes about family values, on the one hand, while people had cast matrimony to the waves on the other. Nowadays people have "partners" and all that, We also have a lot of nonnuclear, single-parent happy families.

Anyway, they went out onto the ice-slick pavements and hailed a cab to take them to the little Italian place off Fleet Street, where they let the padrone into the secret and he treated them to a bottle of champagne on the house. They ate minestrone, calves liver and onions, tomatoes floating in olive oil and a dash of vinegar. The wedding cake was an apple torte off the trolley, with a fistful of cream, and they ordered brandy with the coffee.

Then they went home for the honeymoon, where Charlie announced that he had tickets for The Flying Dutchman that night.

"Not really the most popular choice these days, Charles," she joked.

"Who's worried by popular?"

She explained that opera was - wrongly - considered elitist by many. Particularly the current establishment, which made him glum, for he had always been politically slightly left of center. Even so, he had been a shade cutting when the prime minister and the chancellor had both chosen Madonna, Oasis, Boy Zone, and Michael Jackson on BBC Radio's Desert Island Discs.

"Thought they were adults," he said again now when his new wife explained the state of the musical nation to him.

"Doesn't stop me liking opera. The Spice Girls aren't obligatory are they?"

"Let's have a little lie down first, darling." She didn't even blush, trollop that she could be when it came to country matters.

Again she was amazed at what Charlie, at slightly less than twice her age, could pull off when he tried. She had learned that if she was not greedy, and if she allowed him to pace...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Severn House Publishers Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0727858084
• ISBN 13: 9780727858085
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar