Free The Insulators by John Creasey Page A

and he looked across at the steel spike protection on top of the walls of Buckingham Palace, then out of the other window at the Quadriga statue, which, as with so many people, inevitably recalled that of Boadicea who had led the early Britons in the savage attacks against the occupying Romans. He thought of the cold, stone replicas of the knives fastened to the hubs of her chariot wheels as she had destroyed and plundered Londinium to avenge her Roman-ravaged daughters and restore the pride of her kingdom and the lands of kings, enemies before the Romans came, brief but passionate allies against the Roman legions.
    Ever since there had been wars; as many waged today. And there was the war being waged between Palfrey’s Z5 and the unknowns of The Project who poised a new threat at the heart of the world and its hard-won, blood-coated partial freedom.
    What if men and women had to be sacrificed in these wars?
    What if Janey had to be tortured, lacerated, mutilated, killed? What else could he have done but offer her as a sacrifice after such constant planning?
    They were in the King’s Road, with its boutiques and its flower-happy people and shops filled with gay clothes and boots and exotic spices and perfumes in the shadow of the wall of the Royal Chelsea Hospital, where the pensioners still lived out their lives, and on fine days came out and watched and must have marvelled at the long bare-looking legs and the inviting thighs and the sheep-and-goat-skinned youths, the hippies, with hair as long as the hair of any of those old-time warriors.
    “I seem to remember Romain Square now, sir.” The driver turned his head as they paused at traffic lights.
    “Good,” Philip said – and sat back, and froze.
    The man in a little blue car was just behind the taxi, and another man, whom he had seen among the guards at The Project, was in a car alongside him. In this car were two others, and one of them, next to the driver, had a radio-telephone microphone in his left hand, and was talking.
    If they wanted to kill him, they could easily do so.
    How had they been allowed to get so close? Why weren’t Palfrey’s men on the alert? Why—
    He choked off his thoughts.
    The taxi turned left, towards the river, to drive along the small and narrow streets, the houses where modern terraces stood close to tall Victorian dwellings and here and there a small but graceful Georgian house as well as tiny cottages which had stood in the same tiny gardens for at least three hundred years.
    The car with the three men from The Project was close behind but there was no sign of the little blue car or of the man with the Qantas and T.W.A. labelled briefcase. Philip found his hands clenching and his teeth gritting.
    Suddenly, men appeared from the nearby houses – not one or two, but dozens. One car pulled in front of the blue one, and on the instant the car behind him was surrounded. Before the occupants had time to lock the doors they were wrenched open, the men inside yanked out. Philip twisted round in his seat to see out of the back window, one of The Project men put his hand to his mouth, one of the invaders dragged his hand away. Philip saw the distortion of his face as whatever he had swallowed made him writhe and scream.
    The taxi driver appeared to notice nothing, but turned two corners. A man wearing a peaked cap and a raincoat within an upturned collar, stepped out of a little blue-painted house which seemed to match the sky, and the driver asked in his soft voice: “Can you tell me where Romain Square is, sir?”
    “Why, yes,” said the man. “First left, then first left again.” And he smiled.
    Philip recognised him; it was Palfrey.
     
    Number 1, Romain Square, was a Georgian house, the walls painted white with black woodwork, black doors and burnished brass knocker, letterbox and bell push. There were some smaller, pleasant houses on two sides of the square, as well as a Victorian period public house with weathered red brick and