Free Chameleon - A City of London Thriller by J Jackson Bentley Page A

family gathered for the reading of
the will. Despite her parents’ best efforts, Gillian inherited over
a hundred thousand pounds in cash, along with another one hundred
thousand pounds from Nick’s life insurance policy.
    Her parents,
aggrieved that their suggestion that she donate half of the money
to the upkeep of the estate was ignored, made her pay for the
funeral. The funeral was lavish and sentimental. No-one in the
Hampshire area had a bad thing to say about Nick, and Gillian was
surprised to hear from a number of women whose husbands had not
beaten them again after Nick had ‘had a quiet chat’ with
them.
    A man who
could easily have been a clone of Nick, except for his close
cropped hair, took Gillian to one side and introduced
himself.
    “ James
Mellanby. I served with Nick in the Army, special services section.
Your uncle wanted me to have a word with you about your
future.”
    Nick’s old
army friend knew all that there was to know about Gillian, and so
his next invitation was not unexpected.
    “ Gillian, we
have your health records, your psych report from University, we
know about your academic achievement in science, and I had one of
my colleagues watch you compete in the shooting world championships
last year. We would like you to come to London and speak to a
recruitment officer for the Special Intelligence
Services.”
    So it began.
Gillian Davis trained hard and qualified as a spook, a spy or an
intelligence operative whilst completing her Masters Degree and
Doctorate. Her speciality was ‘authorised assassination’; the
Americans termed it ‘wet work’ or ‘termination with extreme
prejudice’.
    The British
Intelligence Services were more circumspect, using ironic terms
such as; ‘Retirement’, a seemingly natural death using no weapons,
‘Redundancy’ where the assassination was intended to send a message
that one of the world’s security organisations were involved, and
finally, “Permanent re-assignment” where the assassination left
clues implicating another person or agency.
    Gillian took
to the work with relish, and found herself working in
internationally diverse teams, but her most regular partner was the
best sniper in the business, Douglas Mc Keown, who insisted his
surname was to be pronounced as Mc Ewan. All of which was
irrelevant, because he was always called Mac or Scotty.

Chapter
1 4
    Barbican
Tower, City of London. 2008
    Gillian had
been with the Agency for almost five years when she received her
latest assignment.
    Perry Jensen
was about to be permanently re-assigned, but he didn’t know it. He
probably believed that at thirty two he was too young to ‘move on’.
If that was the case he should have been more honest, or more
careful.
    Jensen had
been a hacker as a teenager, a geek as a student and a playboy as
an adult. His lifestyle was funded by his company, which in large
part was reliant on Jensen’s encryption software. Who better than a
hacker to protect your secrets?
    Perry had
worked for most major companies, at one time or another, providing
encryption software, at very high prices too. If greed and pride
had not overcome common sense he would have lived until a ripe old
age. Unfortunately he had provided bespoke encryption software to a
company he knew only as Thames Consulting Partnership, but which
was actually a front for MI5. Even then he would have been fine if
he had then left them alone with his complex encryption software,
because they believed it was world class, but sadly he could not
resist the old temptations.
    One evening,
when he was bored and sitting in front of his computer, he decided
to see what Thames Consulting did for a living. Opening up a back
door he had created in the software, he went in and looked around.
He saw nothing of interest and he moved on quickly to another site,
but his presence had been noted. Even at this point he may have
been merely spoken to by his client and warned, had he not
arrogantly accessed the highest level