Linford Mystery
3 total works
The place is South Africa, 1997: Superintendent Baston of the Security Branch is stabbed to death in a police safe-house in Durban. When seven days pass with no arrests the city's top detective, Senior Superintendent Jack Forrester, is assigned the investigation. From the moment he is handed the case file by Inspector Jackson, his Security Branch liaison, he knows vital facts are being kept from him and that his every move is being watched. The crime scene itself is an enigma, and Forrester's inquiries bring him into conflict with the Security Branch as it jealously guards information about Baston and his work. The trail takes him from drug traffickers to a disbanded terrorist army, the bodies of two more policemen, and the discovery of a connection between Moslem vigilantes and a sinister, international, terrorist network. As each piece of the puzzle brings him closer to the truth behind the superintendent's murder, he realises he must trust no one, and question everything. When Forrester makes an arrest, he realises he's become the unwitting victim of both Jackson and the terrorists the Security Branch are hunting.
As the danger escalates, he makes a drastic decision in a desperate bid to avoid a wave of terror that leads to more than a hundred bombs being detonated in the garden city of Cape Town and, ultimately, the horror of September 11.
As the danger escalates, he makes a drastic decision in a desperate bid to avoid a wave of terror that leads to more than a hundred bombs being detonated in the garden city of Cape Town and, ultimately, the horror of September 11.
Special Branch and the CIA descend on the spa town of Buxton to recruit a retired Secret Service officer. Jackson's mission: to foil Operation Condor - a top secret plan conceived by the East German Stasi in the Cold War, and now in the hands of al-Qaeda - by eliminating three sleepers. His first kill is clinical. Then, poised for the second, he finds himself the target of a Secret Service assassin and a Special Branch ambush. After a desperate escape, he flees to London to contact a former colleague at the South African embassy. There Jackson discovers that his only chance to stop Condor is to find out which student at a secret police school in Pomerania passed the plan to al-Qaeda. Double-crossed a second time, he establishes the identity of the traitor and escapes to Dublin, where he tracks the man to a Caribbean island. In Barbados, Jackson must outwit the traitor, the CIA, and the Secret Service. Meanwhile, in England, Special Branch eagerly await his return...
Two days after September 11, 2001, an intelligence officer from the South African Secret Service arrived in Washington, D.C. Jackson, a former captain in Cape Town's anti-terrorist squad, set to work with the FBI to track down Richard Reid, the notorious British al-Qaeda operative. These five short stories begin in Boston after Reid's arrest, and move from Logan International Airport to Oxford in England, and then Quebec City in Canada. The fourth, set in the Italian Alps, follows Jackson's final mission for the Secret Service. "Special Service" sees him coerced into working as an undercover agent for the Metrolpolitan Police's SO12, four months after his retirement to England. When the operation - involving a Cornish terrorist brigade - goes wrong, the consequences prove fatal. Set in the years between "The Secret Policeman" and "The Secret Service", Rafe McGregor's first two novellas, these stories can be enjoyed either on their own or as part of the Secret trilogy.