Blackout (Sam Archer 3) by Tom Barber Read Free Book Online Page A

reasons. The building was officially the United States Embassy in London.
    But it was also the unofficial British substation for the Central Intelligence Agency.
    Outside the building was a glass hut with an x-ray machine and body scanner. S eeing as an application for a U S visa could only be approved after an appointment here, every day there was a long queue of hopeful people waiting to pass their bags and contents of their pockets through the machine and be patted down before they entered the building. Once inside, they were then shepherded to a long waiting hall to the left and told to wait for their final interview and hopefully , an approval. As a matter of course, they would be looking at a several hour wait at least before they got called, the entire process from joining the queue to leaving the building taking close to four hours, sometimes more, and it wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend most of the working day in there, waiting to be processed.
    Walking past the queue of people waiting to move through the security point, the American moved in through a side door to the hut as people stuck in the line looked on enviously. Two guards were working the x-ray machine and metal detector and they nodded at the man as he placed his briefcase on the conveyor, grabbing a grey bin and dropping a wallet and mobile phone into the tray. His dark suit was cut to fit, 42 regular with a 32 waist, so he had no belt, nor any spare change in his pockets.
    ‘Morning sir,’ one of the guards said.
    ‘Good morning,’ the man said.
    He walked through the metal detector which didn’t make a sound. Although he knew it wouldn’t, the American still felt that moment of relief that every one did when they passed through one of the machines and it didn’t go off.
    He retrieved his things from the tray , returning them to his pockets, then scooped up his briefcase and headed off towards the entrance to the Embassy.
    He’d lived in London for over a decade and after a rocky start, he found that he liked it more and more with each passing year. He'd arrived here in 1999, fresh out of his training at Camp Peary just outside Williamsburg, Virginia, aka ‘The Farm’, where every CIA trainee goes to learn his craft and hopefully then graduate into a position with the Agency. He’d excelled at the paramilitary and tradecraft operations set up by the agency instructors, and being just twenty five at the time and a non-smoker , had been in excellent physical condition, cruising through all the fitness tests. He had learned everything he could ever need in the field, from defensive driving and handling Zodiac boats to hand-to-hand combat and parachuting. He’d learnt interrogation techniques, manipulation and evasion tactics, how to deceive and turn the tables from having an enemy watching you to you watching him, and had finished the training fully expecting to become a n NOC, a non-official cover, an operative who would work overseas with no official ties to the United States Government. Basically, a spy.
    But then, at his final interview and to his dismay, the instructors had decided that they wanted him behind a desk. He had scored very high ly on the leadership and aptitude tests and they said his talents would be wasted undercover in some foreign country. Instead, they had offered him a well-paid job in London in charge of a small team, and he’d had to adjust his thinking, determined to make the most of the opportunity given to him.
    He'd been born and bred in Staunton, Virginia and found after he’d arrived in London in late-February 1999 , that the weather in the UK was comparable and not such a shock to his system as it might otherwise have been. During his time here, he'd seen agents arrive on postings from Florida or California, and the frequently grey and gloomy weather had been a nasty surprise for them. He’d been one of the few students in his class in high school who'd enjoyed learning about British history, about their