The Gilgamesh Conspiracy Read Online Free Page A

descent into a personal disaster that had begun years ago on New Year’s Day in 2003.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    1 st January 2003
     
    Gerry Tate was thoroughly bored. The evening in the bar in the United Kingdom’s embassy in Kuwait had started off with a heated debate about the developing Iraq situation which appeared to be escalating towards a crisis point, but as the hour had approached midnight, the alcohol consumed by her fellow drinkers had slowly dragged the conversation down to a convivial but frivolous level in keeping with a New Year celebration. She gazed at the clock mounted on the wall above the rows of bottles behind the bar and when it reached 3.00am she and her few remaining fellow drinkers, mostly young and exclusively male, raised their glasses and called out ‘Happy New Year!’
    Along with a much larger group she had made the same greeting three hours previously, but that had been at midnight local time. A few staff with no family or little regard for their exhausted spouses had decided that it could not properly be New Year until the time reached midnight in London, three hours later than Kuwait. Not, they assured one another, because they yearned for their home country but merely because that was the location of the prime meridian through Greenwich, and any right thinking person would know that this must be the correct time to celebrate the New Year even if they lived in New Zealand or Los Angeles or any place in between.
    Gerry’s opinion was that this was a load of bollocks, but she was in the executive operations department of the British intelligence service and accustomed to guarding her thoughts. She had stayed on in the embassy bar because it was her task to determine the loyalty of a middle-aged diplomat named Laurence Baxter who now stood four feet to her left and who was draining his seventh beer of the evening. A neutral observer might think that Gerry was as inebriated as Baxter, having been plied with free drinks by the men who had been eager to make at least the acquaintance of the tall, attractive young woman who had appeared amongst them a few days ago. In fact a quiet word with the barman had ensured that whenever someone bought her another gin and lemonade he had only poured lemonade into her glass. He had been very surprised when she had made the request, but when she suggested that he should pocket the difference in price he had been happy enough to agree.
    Gerry watched Baxter stagger off towards the gentlemen’s toilets and concluded that if he was going to pass any information to his Russian girlfriend tonight then it was unlikely to be coherent. She actually felt sorry for the woman who had to endure his attentions, and imagined that she would be relieved when she found out that he had been recalled to London. Gerry’s remaining task was to establish whether Baxter genuinely believed his girlfriend to be a Canadian citizen or if he knew that she was Russian.
    ‘Excuse me gentlemen,’ she said and walked off towards the doorway.
    ‘Oh you’re not leaving us are you Emily?’ said a drunken commercial secretary, a handsome twenty-five year old Oxford graduate who had decided that now was the moment to make a serious pass and he grabbed her by the arm.
    A moment later, without understanding how, he had lost his footing and now he was sprawled on the floor with the remains of his beer spilt over him and acclaimed with raucous laughter by his fellow drinkers. Gerry walked casually on and disappeared inside the ladies’ cloakroom. Peeping out through the cracked open doorway she watched Baxter stagger out the gents’ and towards the security post at the main entrance. She followed a few paces behind as they approached the one remaining guard manning the entrance. Rather than waving them through the security gate he carefully checked their IDs and insisted that they walk through the archway scanner that until recently had only been used to search people entering the embassy. With