Black Ops: The 12th Spider Shepherd Thriller Read Free

message had been added to the drafts in the last couple of hours: LOCATION ONE. SOONEST. TEXT ME WHEN IN SITU . Harper smiled to himself as he deleted the message. Even if someone really had hacked into his account, the message wouldn’t tell them much. Location One was London. He waved over at Rose. ‘Rose, coffee, black. Two sugars.’
    ‘Coming, Mr Lex.’
    ‘And a bottle of water.’
    Harper went back online. There was a KLM flight due to leave Bangkok at two thirty in the morning. He booked himself a business class seat and a connecting flight to Dublin. Rose brought him his coffee and Harper thanked her.
    ‘And when I’ve finished this one bring me another, and another. In fact, if you can put me on an intravenous drip, that would be great.’
    Rose frowned, not understanding.
    ‘Just coffee, Rose, and keep it coming.’
    He sighed and looked at his watch. At this time of night it wouldn’t take much more than an hour to get to Suvarnabhumi airport. He had plenty of time to get a couple of coffees under his belt before heading home to grab what he needed.
    T here were two of them sitting in the back of the van, and the ventilation wasn’t the best. The air quality wasn’t helped by the continuing flatulence of Jamie Brewer, Spider Shepherd’s number two on the surveillance operation.
    ‘I’m sorry, mate, really,’ said Brewer after breaking wind for the third time. ‘I had a curry last night.’
    Shepherd wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘That is awful. Really.’
    ‘Mate, I’m sorry.’
    Shepherd would have loved to open the rear doors but that wasn’t possible, not when it was packed with transmitting and recording equipment. The van they were in had the livery of a courier company and sitting in the front seat was a brunette in a beige uniform. Her cab was sealed and they had to talk to her via an intercom.
    Shepherd stared at one of the four flatscreens on the side of the van. It showed an electronic map of the area around them along with six flashing red dots. Above each of the dots was a number from one to six, representing the six watchers on the operation. The watchers had been tasked with following Ahmed Khalaf, a twenty-three-year-old former medical student who had ended his studies early and travelled to Syria to fight alongside the jihadists of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Khalaf had been easy enough to track as he had posted numerous photographs on his Facebook page. He had been allowed back into the country but MI5 had kept him under surveillance from the moment he had arrived at Heathrow. It was clear from the way that Khalaf behaved once he was back in the UK that he had been well taught by ISIS. He didn’t have a mobile phone and he didn’t own a computer. He made calls from phone boxes and twice a day he went to one of several Internet cafés. It was clear he was up to something and MI5 put him high up on their list of priorities. There were three teams of five assigned to Khalaf, working eight-hour shifts. Shepherd had been assigned to monitor the teams and he took it in turns to do ride-alongs. Surveillance was a difficult job at the best of times and long-term surveillance was especially demanding, hour after hour of sitting outside buildings followed by short bursts of frenetic activity. As days turned into weeks and even months, the job got that much harder. Surveillance teams would start to make assumptions and let down their guard. A target might leave the house every day at the same time, walk down the road and turn left. He might do that every day for a hundred days. But on day one hundred and one he might turn right and disappear. Shepherd’s job was to make sure the teams didn’t lose their edge.
    For the first couple of weeks of surveillance Khalaf did nothing out of the ordinary. He spent most of his time in a bedsit in Stoke Newington, venturing out only to pray at a local mosque. MI5 had two men in place at the mosque and they were able to ascertain that