An ex-SAS colleague of David, who left due to an injury saving David’s life when in action years ago, contacts him. Now working as a security consultant, the colleague has discovered some information, important to national security, whilst installing security equipment in a foreign embassy. He won’t discuss it over the phone and arranges to meet David personally in Brighton.
Early the following morning, David, as FME, is called to an unexpected death, thought to be a suicide. It turns out to be his friend and not a suicide, though David initially has to treat it as such while he investigates.
The friend’s eighteen-year-old daughter is kidnapped to stop the investigation. The only way to ensure her release is for David to offer his life in exchange. He can try to fake his death while the kidnappers watch, but it’s very risky. Even if successful, can he learn enough to stop the bomb?
Genesis is about David Wilkins as a medical student who, after falling in love with Jayne, discovers she is involved in a quasi-religious cult run by the self-proclaimed Lord Seth. He drugs and kidnaps her to force her to have his baby because she looks like his sister. David rescues her but, unable to have Lord Seth prosecuted, kills him during the rescue, ‘rough justice’, not realising his actions have been noted by an MI5 agent who subsequently follows his career.
Sadly, David is unable to save Jayne from her cult-induced drug addiction and, to spare him, Jayne chooses to disappear without telling him that she is expecting his child. This comes back to haunt him twenty-five years later in Shadows of the Past.
In Genesis, unknown to David, Jayne gives birth. Twenty-five years later, David takes on a recently qualified medic as trainee FME without knowing it is his son. Only at the tragic end does David learn this. The ordeal suffered by David and his family in the interim, and how they deal with it, forms the basis of the book.
David Wilkins, aka Night Owl
Though not my real name, everyone knows me as Dr David Wilkins. Born in South Wales January 1955, I enjoyed a happy and unremarkable childhood during which I decided on becoming a doctor. Whilst a medical student, I fell in love with Jayne. She joined a quasi-religious brainwashing cult which, I discovered, provided a range of dubious services, including a discrete high-class brothel catering to wealthy and influential clients.
In my attempt to save Jayne, I tracked down the cult leader and his ‘church’. Unable to have him prosecuted effectively by the judiciary, I tossed him over a cliff and burned his ‘church’ to the ground; rough justice 1. Unknown to me at the time, an employee of MI5 took note of my actions.
After qualifying, I became an army medic and read the records retrieved from the cult prior to the fire. Captivating if decidedly repellent, they described the cult leader’s fascination with the effects of pharmacological substances extracted from global flora and fauna, and his monstrous experiments on animals, including humans (echoes of Mengele). They prompted me to undertake a PhD in naturally occurring cardio and neurotoxins.
Though awarded my doctorate, MI6 had taken an interest and classified my research as too dangerous to publish. Instead, they offered me a job developing it further in my own laboratory associated with Porton Down. Their belief I would simply hand over the resulting toxins proved delusional. I insisted they could only be used by me, only on ‘marks’ I considered deserving of rough justice: those unable to be stopped by normal judicial means. Under the code name Night Owl, I became an operative, trained in many specialities, including by the SAS. I obtained access to technology and databases you will never know exist.
Me. A paradox:
a caring, compassionate doctor
and a cold-hearted black-ops assassin.
During some eight years as Night Owl, I undertook many missions, some of which, together with other operatives I knew as Cinders and Ghost, have been documented as fictional stories by the author Osian Giles 2. Eventually, I became disillusioned with increasing government immorality and quit to set up a private practice in Brighton, where I took on a side job as lecturer in Forensic Medicine and became a Forensic Medical Examiner (FME), using my expertise and equipment to help the local police to track down and nail criminals; some very nasty indeed.
I bought a disused café, overlooking the sea, on the coast road between Brighton and Peacehaven, and not just for the views. Underneath what was originally a row of fishermen’s cottages, I accidentally discovered rooms and passages once used by smugglers. I converted the property to become my home, with the rooms beneath equipped as my own forensic laboratory and workshops, housing state of the art computer systems, satellite communications equipment and weapons collected from around the world during my black-ops days. Fitted with air filtration and desalination units, a family could live there for years in isolation; a survivalist’s fantasy.
The conversion work took 4 years. When finished, I asked Saphir, my gorgeous girlfriend, to marry me. She said yes but our plans had to be put on hold because that very day, the 10th of March 1999, her 24th birthday, someone tried to kill me. So started a train of events requiring all my black-ops expertise, with the help of my old black-ops colleagues Cinders and Ghost, to identify and bring to justice the perpetrator.
Footnotes
Having qualified as a medic, David joins the army. Whilst there, based on experiments performed by Lord Seth in Genesis, he completes a PhD in naturally occurring cardio & neurotoxins.
The MI5 agent who noted David’s actions in Genesis, having moved to MI6, declares his thesis too dangerous to publish and MI6 agents visit him at Akrotiri, an RAF base in Cyprus, to tell him so. They offer him an opportunity to head his own research laboratory associated with Porton Down, the government’s bioweapons facility. If he can increase the toxins’ potency and manufacture them in-house, far better to eliminate those considered detrimental to British interests by stealth and ostensibly ‘natural’ causes, than by bullets and explosions.
David doesn’t trust the government and accepts only if he can deliver such ‘rough justice’ himself, after reviewing the evidence for its necessity. After three years, his research successful, he spends two years training with the SAS and in spy craft. He becomes a black-ops assassin, Night Owl, with the former M15 agent, now in MI6 and known as George W, as his ‘handler’. His first mission, in Tenerife, is not to kill but to gather information on an Egyptian buying arms for a terrorist attack. His objectives become blurred when he discovers other serious criminal activity in Tenerife. Can he deal with both?
In his second appearance as an FME, David still has Night Owl’s skills and access to databases and advanced technology. He is asked by George W, his ex-handler at MI6, to keep an eye on the Spanish daughter of an asset in Barcelona. She is currently a student at Oxford University. He can hardly refuse, given the help that George W provided during Treason. Having just taken his wife, Saphir, to Paris for her birthday, she encourages him to take Toni, his other ‘wife’, on the trip. After all, it should be straightforward.
Once in Oxford, David encounters a Mossad agent of the Israeli intelligence services, guarding the son of an Israeli cabinet minister who is studying there. He unearths a terrorist plan to kill an Israeli professor whilst giving a lecture to a group of students, one of whom is the son of the cabinet minister. Only a twisted mind could conceive of the way the bomb would be smuggled into the group.
It’s Wednesday the 10th of March 1999; David Wilkins, ex black-ops assassin Night Owl and now a Forensic Medical Examiner with Sussex Police, has a regular lunch date with Saphir, his gorgeous girlfriend. It’s her 24th birthday and he plans, over lunch, to ask her to marry him and move into his just completed new residence. He’s bought her a Mercedes two-seater sports car as a present and they decide to go for lunch in that, rather than in his Porsche as they usually do.
This is very fortunate; it means they aren’t in his Porsche at one o’clock, when, left parked in the University car park, it is blown up by someone obviously trying to kill him.
The result is a tale of suspense, horror, death, personal sacrifice, psychological manipulation and romance. An emotional roller coaster of intense happiness, sadness, despair, helplessness and humour.
It involves:
- David: ex-army doctor, now forensic expert, capable of deep empathy and compassion but also cold, emotionless decision making. With an ultimate sense of justice but also some deep, dark secrets.
- Saphir: his young but mature, Goddess-like girlfriend. Intelligent, sensuous, capable.
- Juno: an ex-drug addict, prostitute. Now with decent future prospects.
- Psycho Sam: charming but damaged from early childhood. Fascinated by pain and fire.
- The Home Secretary: obsessed and depraved by power.
- The Prime Minister: torn between moral outrage and saving his government.
- Nigel: a detective sergeant and David’s liaison officer, with potentially divided loyalties.
- Toni: a university student on work experience. Changed from girl to woman.
- ‘Cinders’ and ‘Ghost’: two ex-colleagues of David, known only by their code names; the former outrageously permissive, the latter an obscure martial artist. Both devastatingly efficient.
- ‘Grandpa’: who wants to retire but can’t.
MI5, MI6, black-ops, a drugs cartel, specialist weapons, explosives, psychoactive drugs, Southern England, France, Spain, Greek islands. A fictional tale - but every detail could be occurring.
Right now. Somewhere not far away…
To tell more here would spoil the story. Suffice to say, it takes all of David’s expertise as an ex black-ops assassin, together with help from Cinders and Ghost, to find out who wanted him dead, and why – and to bring the perpetrator to justice.
Book Extract Chapter One
Chapter One
Fire crackled in the stairwell, the only exit from the fourth-floor bedsit. He faced the door. Frozen. Immobilised. With electrics gone, eyes riveted on the main source of light; flickering fingers reaching towards the tiny, frosted-glass window of the door; smoke percolated beneath. Perspiration poured from his body; with the intense heat, with the fear. Magnolia gloss paint, darkened with the years, bubbled, crinkled, grew darker still. A beeping smoke alarm, activated too late, seemed to grow louder, more intense…
Suddenly awake, the doctor turned off his pager. He knew this dream, an unwelcome but infrequent reminder of his first day on duty, twenty years previously. In the back of an ambulance when he certified three children DOA; fire victims.
He remembered the small arms and legs. The taut, blackened skin. The pork-like smell of roasted flesh…
The doctor shuddered. Over the years many things had troubled him, things from his dubious past, things he could share with no decent living soul. None had affected him as much as the disfigured angels in the ambulance. It had left him terrified of fire, worried him every visit to the top floor of a house converted into flats.
The thought of children burning even terminated his last job.
Still, he had a new life now, plenty to look forward to; though he continued his training, almost religiously kept his skills honed.
It had only been a twenty-minute powernap, taken between calls. He turned the car heater and engine off and stepped out on to Hove seafront. Tired eyes automatically registering every detail of his surroundings. His perspiration real, he raised his arms, letting the cool sea-breeze dry his dampened shirt.
The pager shrilled again, his attendance required; he phoned in for details.
An unexpected death…
Book Extract Chapter Six
Chapter Six
David fired up the Porsche and reversed out of his space in the now almost full carpark. He was about to accelerate away and then stopped. Smiling to himself, he acknowledged he must be losing his touch, drove back into the space, vacated the car, and leaned against its side. He would wait five minutes to test his theory.
He hated being wrong, and after six minutes was about to give up when a Mercedes two-seater sports car, with its roof down, arrived in the carpark and drew alongside him. The edges of the pale-blue, leather seats and fascia were piped in contrasting deep blue, which exactly matched the pearlised paint of the car’s exterior and, by an apparently strange coincidence, the eyes of the driver.
‘Hello,’ said David. ‘Don’t suppose a gorgeous young lady like you would take pity on a sad, old doctor and invite him for lunch?’
Saphir appeared to internally debate the prospect. ‘Possibly, if you promise to be good.’
‘Good?’ said David, leaning forwards and gently kissing her forehead, nose, then mouth. ‘I won’t just be good, I’ll be perfect!’ Without removing his eyes from hers, he traced his way around the front of the car until safely in the passenger seat.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said, ‘It’s lovely and amazing to drive and you’re a sneak!’
‘A sneak?’ David feigned hurt.
‘Yes. Now I know why you were so insistent I didn’t change my old BMW last November.’
‘It’s still a good, reliable car; we’ll keep it as backup.’
She leaned over and kissed him. ‘Anything you say darling.’
‘Yeah, right,’ David mocked, smiling.
She smiled back, took his hand, rested it on the gear stick with hers above, put the car into first and took off.
They headed out of the carpark and down the road leading towards the A23. The sun shone, early flowers bloomed, apple blossom caressed the trees like wisps of cotton wool. They were in love, content, and most important, whatever happened, they were together.
Unfortunately, it was now only seventeen minutes to 13.00 hours.
They could have taken the A23 and cut across left, bypassing Poynings, the quickest route to Treverton Manor but not the most pleasant. Instead, they took a small road off the roundabout marking the Brighton end of the A23. Under the narrow, stone, railway bridge, and up the steep hill towards a second roundabout, where they turned right. This country road passed near the Dyke and right through the centre of Poynings. Saphir squeezed his hand as they passed a pub on the right, acknowledging their first date, in the flower-decked gardens.
She noticed she was gripping his hand more tightly and the memories had made her moist for him. She tried to concentrate on the road ahead. The car was travelling at just under thirty miles an hour. Thirteen metres per second to be exact. It was 390 metres to a hairpin bend, in that narrow, winding road. Unseen, and coming the other way, a twenty-ton lorry trundled along at ten metres per second and was 300 metres from the same corner; the driver talking on his mobile phone.
The time was half a minute to 13.00 hours.
They registered each other at the same moment. The wheels on the truck locked. Those on the Mercedes did not, courtesy of its antilock braking system. The lorry swerved to its left, ripping branches from the hedge. Saphir steered to her left, mounting the muddy, tyre-streaked grass verge of previous incumbents.
At exactly 13.00 hours, by some miracle, the vehicles missed each other by less than a centimetre.
Saphir, having regained the road, pulled off at the next layby, gripping the steering wheel hard with both hands.
‘Jesus,’ she breathed and looked at David. She could hardly believe he seemed so unperturbed. ‘You did…you did actually notice that,’ she almost shouted.
‘Of course,’ he said, appearing slightly amused. ‘But I had every confidence in you, though it was a close shave. Are you okay now? Or would you like me to drive?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, through gritted teeth.
Not for the first time did she wonder at his ability to remain calm in any situation, and even spread that calm to others.
Perhaps he would have been less calm, and certainly not amused, had he known their shave with death had been closer than imagined.
At 13.00 hours precisely. About nine miles away in the university carpark. A bomb under his white Porsche 911 had exploded.
Book Extract Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty
…
Boss Manning had ordered a space to be cleared in the large storeroom with seating for twenty; several lesser persons would be granted standing room. They consumed various alcoholic beverages and became suitably subdued as Boss Manning explained about the death of his nephew and how it was the responsibility of a certain Dr Wilkins.
Out of respect they held a minute’s silence.
He then explained Dr Wilkins would not be punished for his transgression by death or severe injury but by being sent a film of his beautiful girlfriend being tortured; a porn film they could now all watch. A cheer went up.
When Boss Manning opened the metal briefcase in which the film had been delivered, he found a small poster of Saphir wearing a bikini, which David had thoughtfully included. When this was held up, a louder cheer prevailed. Boss Manning then held up another small poster, this was clearly of the same woman, now strapped naked to a snooker table. Her more intimate parts were blanked out using computer software and the words ENJOY!
The clamour to put on the film increased. Boss Manning, head held high, strode over to the freezer in which the head and hands of his nephew still resided, and ceremoniously pushed the VHS tape into the player now installed on top. A 42-inch LCD screen was ready to give them all a bird’s eye view. Boss Manning strode back to his seat in the centre and pressed the play button.
A title screen came up.
‘Yes’, they all roared. More words appeared.
‘Yes’, they all roared.
Ten seconds later, the video tape exploded; microseconds later, the large metal briefcase exploded. Apart from the powerful explosives, David had included some white phosphorus and some extremely poisonous chemicals. Though he wasn’t to know, he need not have bothered with these, half the storeroom was stacked with bottles of spirits, the resultant fire left very little behind.
David had initially been reluctant to include the pictures of Saphir but did so in the hope of distracting them from investigating the other items too closely; it worked! He had made the final decision to include them and the title credits after thinking it was like sending them a personal message from Saphir. Of course, she had no idea the message had been sent though, to David’s satisfaction, she had helped assemble some parts of the bomb.
Apart from ensuring Southampton caused him no more problems, David considerably reduced the workload of the local drug squad for the next two years. They blamed the explosion on a local drugs war; no other dealers seemed to want to take over the patch.
…
Though it involves Night Owl, Judy’s Diary is mostly about Cinders, one of his two black-ops colleagues, whose code name results from her ability to play princess or pauper, just like Cinderella. She is just as lethal as Night Owl but – as in Treason – also uses her feminine wiles.
Judy, an old friend’s daughter, goes missing during Fresher’s Week at Bristol University. Due to her black-ops work, Cinders only has very infrequent contact with her friend and only finds out about this when, a year later, a body is found in Judy’s former hostel. The victim looks like Judy but isn’t. Why would someone replace Judy by a dead look-alike? Is Judy still alive?
Believing that Cinders works as an undercover investigator on her long trips abroad, her friend asks Cinders to investigate her daughter’s disappearance. She does so via Judy’s diary, which her mother could never bring herself to read.