Prologue
Belicista; Warmonger - a person who advocates, endorses, or tries to precipitate war.
Trojan; a program that gets access to a system by appearing to be harmless, but is designed to do something damaging.
PROLOGUE -
Harry Locke was a gangly, rake-thin, and gaunt looking man. If you did not know anything about him you would assume, he was either ill or some sort of recovering drug addict, thanks to his almost ghoulish appearance. His sandy coloured hair was thinning and combed over from left to right across the top of his head. He wore large, black rimmed glasses, and regularly left for work without bothering to shave.
This morning however, Harry had made an effort to shave. He also decided to wash his unusually thin hair, and to wear his smartest navy-blue suit, with a thin, silk blue tie. This morning Harry looked like a man transformed. He sat at the small, rickety table that was positioned in the middle of his kitchen, eating what he always ate early in the mornings, bran flakes covered in raisins. The kitchen was a mess this morning, but this didn’t bother Harry. After finishing his breakfast, and dusting down his trousers which were now covered in crumbs and specks of milk that had splashed out of his cereal bowl, Harry broke his regular morning tradition that he had repeated for over 30 years. Normally after getting dressed, having a shower (sometimes, but not always) and eating his bran flakes, Harry would take his battered, torn, brown leather satchel out of the cupboard in his room, and check he had everything for the day ahead. He did this whether he was leaving his old, dirty apartment on the outskirts of London, or whether he was waking up in a dingy motel in Mexico City. If he had checked his satchel this morning, there would have been many more items and documents to check over than usual, due to the fact that he had just returned from a 2 month assignment in central Spain, and his satchel was bursting at the seams with pieces of torn up paper and stuffed brown envelopes.
Most journalists these days would simply carry around a surface tablet or take all their notes on their mobile phones. Especially journalists who worked for online news firms like Harry now did. But Harry Locke was old school. Frustratingly so for those who worked with and for him. He had worked in print journalism for over 30 years now and had only made the switch to online news firm Insight five years ago and had spent most of that time out on assignments all around the world. This is the reason he always gave for why his apartment was so sparsely furnished.
Harry shuffled his way into the small bathroom adjacent to the kitchen door, untucked and lifted up his shirt and removed the bandage he had wrapped tightly around his bruised ribcage. The wound was still a dark purple colour, and caused Harry to flinch every time he bent over. His frail frame was not built to withstand this kind of damage. He prodded the centre of the bruised area with two of his fingers, feeling the swelling that had congealed around his ribs. Again his brought a sharp wince, and he grimaced before rolling his shirt back down. For a moment he just stood, motionless, looking at himself in the mirror, contemplating what he was about to do. Harry let out a deep sigh and as he did, opened the small cabinet draw next to the sink. Inside, wrapped in a small, dirty cloth, was a shiny silver revolver with brown material wrapped around the grip. Harry lifted it out of the draw, feeling the cold of the metal against his already cold skin. The gun felt incredibly heavy in his weak hands. A lot of good this did me….Harry thought to himself. He tossed it back into the draw, not bothering to close it, as he knew they would ransack his place at some point over the next few days, so there wasn’t much point in hiding it anymore.
“Well here we go….” Harry muttered to himself quietly, taking one last look in the mirror, before heading out of the bathroom.
He left his apartment without his satchel for the first time this morning, another break in tradition. Looking like a man re-born after his clean shave and snazzy wardrobe change, he made his way down the four flights of stairs that led to the bottom of his apartment block. Like all apartment buildings in this part of town, the stairwells were dimly lit, with fluorescent lights intermittently flicking on and off. It was 6.25am in the morning, and as was the case every morning that Harry left home, his elderly neighbour on the 2nd floor was out on the landing sweeping the hallway.
“Morning Mr Locke” she asked in her smoke addled cockney accent.
Harry never bothered replying. But as in keeping with this particular morning, he broke routine and decided to give Mrs Lambert a gentle nod of the head before carrying on his way.
The elderly neighbour smiled and carried on with her own daily routine, pleasantly surprised at finally being acknowledged by her usually ignorant neighbour.
As he pressed the steel button to release the fire exit door, Harry felt the cold, biting, January breeze sting his pale cheeks. The door let out a deafening screech as it always did when people came in and out of the old apartment block. Plans had been in place for years now for the local council to upgrade the building, but Harry never held out much hope that it would ever actually happen. Not that he cared much anyway, as he spent little time there. The walk from his apartment to the local train station usually took about 10 minutes. On days when it took less than this you knew Harry was on his way into work to collect his next assignment abroad. He always seemed in a frantic state on days like these, despite clearly preferring his own company on those long, tiresome investigative projects that ventured to all corners of the globe. Every so often Harry would slip slightly on the railing leading down the stairs, causing a shooting pain to pierce his concentration, and force his face to contort in pain. Every time it did, he remembered that heavy boot repeatedly slamming into his ribcage…….the gloved fist that helped bruise up his midriff so it now looked like a giant beetroot. Most of all he remembered what he was told, as the nozzle of the gun was held against the temple of his skull….the tear that had rolled down his eye as he nodded in agreement…..and the dark, inescapable feeling that had overcome him afterwards.
This morning he arrived at the station in just over 12 minutes. A man of obsessive routine, the 24-minute train journey into the middle of London would almost always be taken up with a daily call to his daughter. Harry never usually allowed himself to smile, but during those 24 minutes that he would spend entirely on the phone to her, he could be seen to be visibly happy. His daughter worked and lived away from London, but the two of them kept in regular contact. One of the few pictures Harry ever took was of Aitana glancing over the railings at an overlook near the River Thames. It was the background image on his beat up phone, the one he was now looking at as he made his through the station. He gripped the phone hard, gritting his teeth together as he did so, willing himself not to shed another a tear. Harry rarely cried. He closed his eyes, wiping away the one tear that had just made its way to the tip of his right eyelid, and instead concentrated for a moment, with his eyes closed, blocking everything else out, all sound and movement around him. And again, that image of Aitana near the railings filled his mind, and the smile that always adorned his face as he made his way to work each morning, was again present.
The biting cold whipped up again, and other passengers on the same platform shielded their faces and wrapped their coats up tighter. Harry let the icy wind sting his face, bringing his hot red blood to the surface of his face, giving him the complexion of an elderly drunk. He closed his eyes again for a moment. The train will be here any second now he thought to himself. The train was an escape for him. Off in the distance the it cannoned into view, storming down the tracks towards the platform. Harry always thought they had an inevitability about them. A sureness. It was what he counted on. As the train neared, Harry shuffled down towards the front of the gangway, up towards the fence that signalled the end of the platform and the start of the scrapyard that sat next to this small station on the outskirts of London. It was another break in routine, as after near 30 years of catching the same train whenever he was in London, he had learned to stand in exactly the right spot every time to ensure he was right in front of the doors when the train stopped. This was a narrow, one-way train track, so getting this pin-pointed hadn’t taken long. He stood and listened as the booming train moved closer.
Once again, Harry closed his eyes, the icy wind now disturbing his thin sandy hair that he had for once made an effort with this morning. And once again, that peculiar smile crept across his face. A smile that was rarely seen by those who worked or knew him. That same smile he always had when talking to his daughter each morning. He continued to smile, and with his eyes still shut,gripping his phone still hard in one hand, and feeling the cold against his face, Harry stepped out over the end of the platform….
