Metapox 1: The Hiding Game Saga

NEW AMAZON BEST SELLER

SOUL & SPIRIT MAGAZINE: "In this chic literary debut by Irish astrologer Raechel Sands, CIA field agent Blanka (based at MI6 in London), fights to save the family of germ warfare expert Grigori Grinin, while rogue agent Felicity repeats the chilling mistakes of her past life. Will the angels intervene?"

Excerpt from Chapter 1:

'C' nowadays - Sir Jasper Rolland Loveless - looked at a bank of monitors in the normally locked and unmanned security overwatch room on Floor -1. He occasionally used it to spy on those who spied on his spies: the uniformed internal security guards, but now he, the Queen's chief enforcer, was watching her worker bees arriving for work. Were they hers? Or his? Hundreds of them, it seemed, crunched through the exhaust-blackened remnants of the snow and streamed across the rush hour intersection of Vauxhall Cross. The loyal Crown Servants were carried to Vauxhall Underground and Overground stations from every corner of the metropolis, and he watched them as they waited for the pedestrian light to turn so they could cross on to Albert Embankment. C knew the bees by name, he made it his job to do so. He was a plain man of medium height and build, and he congratulated himself as he thought: the females are all good lookers. They and their male colleagues had perhaps now carried the casualness too far, in their quasi clean-cut, university educated, no-tie, sporty fit alikeness. (Memo to Miss Banks: Not enough beards. Beards are in. HR to push them.) They wanted to believe, the bees, so they were easy to lie to. And some - were easy to lead astray. C found himself staring at the face of his protEgE and former lover, Bio, on one of the cameras.

C always referred to MI6 by its codename The Office in deference to official vagueness, but more honest staff made fun of the dissembling, and assigned clever names as opposed to vague and stupid ones. Marcia Miles, nicknamed 'Bio' by her boss in Science Division, had quickly christened MI6 itself - Wonderland - as it came to be known throughout the Intelligence world.

The next face on the monitor was another woman - a couple of years younger than Bio at thirty-six - C's incorruptible nemesis, Blanka Maguire. Born Boudica Valentina Maguire, Blanka was a blonde blue-eyed Irish-Russian American, only two inches taller than Bio but weighing 90lbs more. She wasn't overweight and didn't look it, but was the product of a secret Artificial Intelligence (AI) program called OhZone.