Winter is Coming

By Dan Wood

‘Winter is Coming’ is the sequel to Ignatius and is a highly engaging, fast-paced read.

Top secret technology is stolen from a highly secure US military base and the British Government is implicated. The British Government is only willing to trust one woman and one man to find the culprits because only they have the special abilities that their mission needs.

Sahira Basha and Ignatius Winter find themselves on a deadly mission to recover the stolen secrets and soon realise that elements close to home are working against them, so they must use all their skills and cunning as a senior MI5 officer and ex MI6 and SAS soldier to overcome ever mounting odds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Aug 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839785153

Book preview

Prologue

GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research

Darmstadt, Germany

August 10th 2013

Professor Dick Rolf was walking around the room smiling warmly and shaking the hands of each of his colleagues.

Some team members were filling champagne flutes and others were still cleaning and packing away equipment, but everyone was in good spirits. They’d been working hard since July 14, building on the work of Russian researchers some nine years earlier.

The last four weeks had been spent monitoring the emissions of alpha particles and X-rays to try to fingerprint decay products. The timeframes had been immediate, but time had been well spent and the team had used nuclear fusion reactions to load protons into an atomic nucleus. The resulting science was positive.

One of the experimental physicists on the project was feigning joy along with the others, whilst trying to fight the intense feeling of anxiousness forming a fog around her. She needed to make the call.

While she busied herself with overseeing the procurement of the hi-tech equipment, she could hear a colleague talking.

‘Before we can give it an official name, a committee from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which governs chemical nomenclature, will review our new findings and decide whether more experiments are necessary, but with our findings and those of the Russians, which are by and large compatible, I don’t see a scenario where that will be required.’

The experimental physicist saw that a crowd was beginning to form, and the room was almost packed out to hear the imminent speech that was being demanded of Professor Rolf.

She took this opportunity to sneak out the room. Walking into the disabled, single-cubicle toilet, she took out a phone and dialled a number known only to her. The call was answered before the tone of the second ring had finished.

‘Talk to me.’

‘We confirmed it. It’s real...’

‘How long until it becomes public knowledge?’

‘I don’t know. Two weeks, maybe three weeks maximum.’

‘You’ve got work to do then, and not much time to do it.’

With that, the recipient of the call hung up. The physicist sat her petite figure down on the closed toilet seat and brushed both hands through her dark locks. She wished that she had never agreed to become involved.

1

Present day

Dr John Rainsbury was just leaving the English Village and was waiting for his shuttle to work. He only wished it was a real English village back in his country of birth, rather than a gimmick name given to one of the four areas on the base where he had been working for the past three years.

English Village was the name given to the housing administration part of the base and the other three areas, known as Ditto, Carr and Baker were work and logistical centres.

The name had always bothered him and was out of place for where he was, which was one of the most secure military facilities in the world: Dugway Proving Ground.

Following a call this morning, Dr Rainsbury knew that today was going to be his last day on the base, and there was no regret at the thought of leaving. The last three years that Rainsbury had spent on the base hadn’t been the best years of his life. The work was interesting, but the base and the people were abhorrent. There was no part of him that was going to miss this place.

In a matter of weeks though, his bank account would be overflowing, and it was only fair compensation for what he had gone through and what he was going to do today.

Waiting for the shuttle to take him to the lab, Rainsbury reflected on his first day and the orientation lecture all the new residents received.

‘Welcome to Utah and Dugway Proving Ground. We are a US Army facility established in 1942 to test biological and chemical weapons. Eighty-five miles north-east of us is Salt Lake City. The base encompasses 1,252 square miles of The Great Salt Lake Desert, which is an area equivalent to the size of the state of Rhode Island. As you can see, we are surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges and have a population of nearly 1,000 people.

‘Our mission is to test United States and Allied biological and chemical weapon defence systems in a secure and isolated environment. We also serve as a facility for US Army Reserve and US National Guard manoeuvre training, and US Air Force flight tests - mostly from nearby Hill Air Force Base in Clearfield.

‘We are controlled by the United States Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC). This area has also been used by Army special forces for training in preparation for deployments to Afghanistan.’

The man then went into details about practicalities of life on the base. This was a standard spiel to all new employees of the base, but missed out so much of the true purpose of the base and what was actually carried out here.

Dr Rainsbury understood why this was and he didn’t need any further information as he had already been briefed in extreme detail about the goings on at the base as well as his purpose for being there.

He saw the shuttle bus approaching and standing from the bench, picked up his briefcase. He climbed on to the shuttle bus nodding at the driver who had ferried him to his laboratory almost every day for the last three years, although never bothering to know his name. His stop was always the first pickup point on the repeating route, and he enjoyed these few minutes of being the sole passenger on the bus.

Rainsbury walked halfway down the aisle and picked a window seat on the opposite side of the bus to the driver. He pulled out some documents from the briefcase he was carrying and sat pretending to read them, but was mentally rehearsing the plan he had in place for the day.

A matter of minutes later, the bus pulled up to another stop within English Village and a group of base employees boarded. Whilst recognising many of them, there was only one employee who Rainsbury knew by name. It was one of the lab assistants from the laboratory where Rainsbury worked. He was called Matt Manning-Smith. Matt was a short man with slightly sticking out ears, that were jagged at the top and were accentuated by his military style buzz cut that he hadn’t changed since he was fifteen.

Matt was popular with most of the PhDs within the lab, but he and Rainsbury had never seen eye to eye. Although he had never said it, Manning-Smith made it clear that he didn’t respect Rainsbury as a scientist. As Matt walked down the aisle of the bus, he made eye contact with Rainsbury and nodded his head forward saying:

‘John’.

Rainsbury didn’t reply or react, but he was fuming inside. He knew that he would refer to any of the other scientists as ‘Doctor’. This little shit needed to be taught a lesson.

The rest of the short trip to the laboratory was spent in the usual morning calm, with most passengers engrossed in their own thoughts and only a smattering of quiet conversation between some.

As the bus pulled up to the relevant stop, Rainsbury made a point of getting off before Manning-Smith and made a call to his Mum, for no other reason than to ensure that he didn’t have to go through the multitude of security checks, making small talk with Manning-Smith. The fact that he might never be able to talk to her again may have also played a minor factor in the call.

Once through the intrusive security, Rainsbury took the lift four floors underground to his laboratory. As he walked out of the lift, he saw the two usual guards standing by the door to his laboratory.

‘Morning Dr Rainsbury. You know the drill.’

Rainsbury smiled warmly as he replied: ‘Sure do.’

The guards then did a final check of Rainsbury’s body and briefcase. One of the guards said: ‘Thank you, Dr Rainsbury. Have a good day.’

They both then headed for the lift and pressed the button to go up, which was the only available direction for it to take.

Rainsbury knew that this meant he was the last member of the workforce in this laboratory to arrive, as protocol dictated the guards left after the last member arrived. This was to reduce the risk of them being around for too long and catching a glimpse of something they didn’t even nearly have the clearance level to see.

Entering the lab, he looked around at his colleagues who were already busy working with the highest spec scientific equipment, or on laptops that looked like open briefcases. No one paid him any attention, not even so much as a glance up from their respective equipment.

When he had first started at Dugway, things had been very different. He had been greeted by these same people with open arms and they couldn’t do enough for him. They believed that he was an unknown genius, and they were having the pleasure of working alongside him.

The story that the base knew about Rainsbury (and any background check would reveal), is that Rainsbury was a child genius, recruited by the British Government at age eighteen, by which time he had already received his double Doctorate from Cambridge.

He was immediately put to work in a top-secret British facility where he had made epic breakthroughs in the fields of elemental chemistry and rocket propulsion that changed the global thinking in these fields.

The only problem with this story is that it wasn’t true and although these breakthroughs had been made, it wasn’t him that made them. His real story was very different.

Dr Rainsbury had been educated at Cambridge and received a Doctorate in Chemistry. Although being a certified genius and well versed in his field, he wasn’t an exception in this world. Amongst the company that Rainsbury studied with, he was very average. This still made him brilliant, but not ‘epic breakthrough’ brilliant.

After receiving his Doctorate at age twenty-five, he was recruited to work for the British Government in a top-secret laboratory in Cambridge. His role was very much supportive though, rather than leading, and he was effectively a lab assistant.

The first couple of years, he had worked diligently and by his own admission, was often lost and over-awed by the science involved. He was, however, grateful for the opportunity as he was very aware that a lot of other scientists of greater academic stock than he could only dream about this job, but for a variety of reasons, that often were the result of the vetting process, he had landed the role over them.

At age twenty-seven, Rainsbury woke up one day with the sudden realisation that he was at the pinnacle of his scientific career and quite simply, wasn’t good enough to progress beyond where he was. This thought scared him more than any other he had ever had.

As if by mystic force, Rainsbury was engaged one afternoon in a supermarket by a stunning blonde, who was flirtatious enough to make him believe that she was interested in him, but not overly flirtatious for the meeting to be too good to be true.

Seemingly by coincidence, Rainsbury crossed paths with the stunning blonde again in his gym and this time the conversation lasted a bit longer and the flirting became subtly more apparent. After a couple of weeks and several more gym meets, Rainsbury and the blonde lady who had introduced herself as Rebecca, met for coffee. This progressed to evening cocktails and eventually the pair shared a bed.

The relationship was seven weeks deep and Rainsbury couldn’t be happier. He was with the woman of his dreams, and she had turned up at the perfect time for him. His career was a train wreck in his mind, and this angel had been his saviour. This thought was about to come crashing down, along with the rest of his world, very shortly.

One night after a few cocktails and as they both lay naked in bed, Rebecca turned to Rainsbury and said:

‘I need your help and it’s very important.’

He looked at her lovingly and said: ‘Whatever I can do for you. I want to help.’

Rebecca started sobbing and her performance was Oscar-worthy. She told him that, when she had bragged to her family back in Russia about how she had fallen in love with a brilliant British scientist. They had been so very happy for her and in turn had bragged to the people in the local town about how their daughter had met an exceptional English gentleman. But then disaster struck.

Rainsbury had only half heard the last part of her speech as something he never knew had struck him. He stated, more than asked:

‘You’re Russian?’

Rebecca looked at him and replied:

‘Yes darling. I thought you knew?’

‘No, no I didn’t. But you don’t have an accent and have never even mentioned Russia before?’

This part was important to Rainsbury. Despite how much he had fallen in love with this woman, there was still one person he loved more. Himself.

He hadn’t spoken to anyone at work about Rebecca as he wanted to keep this part of his life separate from work right now, due to his mental anguish at the state of his career. He knew that if the people at his work knew he was dating a Russian woman, his clearance would likely be revoked, and he would be without a job.

His thoughts were interrupted by Rebecca replying to him:

‘I personally have lived in the UK since I was two. I don’t like to talk about Russia due to the struggles my family have endured over there. Is it a problem?’

Rainsbury’s reply was non-committal:

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

But what Rainsbury did know is that the last thing in the world he wanted was to lose Rebecca, even more than his job. He brought the conversation back to topic, determined to be there as support for the woman he loved and ensure he got what he wanted, which was to keep this woman.

‘What disaster happened, sweetheart? We can work through it together?’

Rebecca sobbed again, before answering between sobs:

‘Some local mafia have kidnapped my sister and say they will kill her, unless we give them some information about your work’

That statement felt like a swift punch to the ribs for Rainsbury. It completely blindsided him and he felt as if he was standing in the middle of a room that was spinning around him. He tried to calm himself, but the tremor in his voice as he replied, showed that he had been unsuccessful in that.

‘You want me to spy on my country?’

Rebecca did an impressive job of looking shocked.

‘No, absolutely not. They are not interested in that type of thing. They think all scientists make drugs for pharmaceutical companies and they think you do that and can use you to make money for themselves. Once they realise you don’t do that, they won’t be interested in us anymore.’.’

The sobs then began again with additional force.

‘If we don’t do what they ask, they will kill my sister. They have done it to many families before.’.’

‘Why can’t we just tell them that I don’t work for a pharmaceutical company and work in a government research facility?’ Rainsbury suggested.

Rebecca was still sobbing as she replied:

‘They will never believe us. They are very clever, John. They have many scientists on the payroll. They understand how every different scientific facility works. They need specific details to know that the type of facility you say you work in matches up with the details provided.’

Over the next fifteen minutes, Rebecca slowly and subtly introduced into the conversation the details that were required to ensure that these alleged gangsters would set her sister free.

Rainsbury’s intelligence should have let him know immediately what was happening and it probably did to some extent. But his desire for this relationship to be real, fogged his ability to make any sensible decision around the position he had been put in.

After Rainsbury had shared details about his top-secret facility, which included confidential details such as the amount of staff, the unique specialities of the scientific personnel and the high-level equipment being used, Rebecca had come to him, seemingly full of joy, and let him know that his sister was free and well, and she was forever in his debt as was her entire family.

The next few months were blissful. Rebecca couldn’t do enough for the relationship. Once again, Rainsbury knew deep down another demand was coming, but was blinded by the seductive, beautiful woman who was giving herself to him.

The second time Rebecca made a request for information, she didn’t even try to include a pretence of a family situation or any other disaster scenario. She simply stated that she needed the information, and the implication was that failure to provide the information would result in Rainsbury’s previous exploits being exposed.

Quite simply, Rainsbury was too weak to fight, so tagged along, gradually exposing more details about his work to an unknown source to him of Russian origin. It had occurred to him that there was no proof that there was any Russian involvement, and with hindsight, the fact that Russia was mentioned, made it more likely that the information was heading to another source entirely.

Over the next six months Rainsbury leaked highly classified information to his alleged Russian contact. He was handsomely paid for the information, but he still felt he was a victim as he hadn’t wished to be in this position.

As is inevitable in these circumstances, the British Government soon realised that information was being leaked and it didn’t take them long to find the source of this leak. Rainsbury was arrested and after a quick and very low-profile trial, was sent to prison for a substantial period.

In prison, Rainsbury spent months in a deep state of depression before he realised that if he didn’t utilise his brain power, he would eventually go crazy. As a keen and very talented chess player, he had initially tried to use this passion to exercise his mind. Unfortunately for him, the standard of chess within his surroundings didn't come close to matching his capabilities. So he moved on to other avenues of mental stimulus.

To begin with, almost as a hobby he began to analyse the security systems and protocols of the prison. Over time, he understood every flaw in the system and realised that escape was a possibility. He had stashed away the money he had received for leaking information and although it wouldn’t set him up for life, it would be more than enough to set him up to start a new comfortable life somewhere else, under an alias.

The thought of starting his life again as a new person was a powerful motivator for him and he put all his energy into meticulously planning his escape. It was evident to him that although his extremely high intelligence hadn’t made him a superstar scientist, his aptitude for planning prison escapes seemed unmatched, certainly in his head at least.

Over the next few years, he made three brilliant escapes from secure prisons and was subsequently caught three times. It seemed his ability to be on the run was a lot less than his ability to escape. The final time he was caught, he was taken to a secure facility that most people didn't even realise existed. This facility offered absolutely no opportunity of escape, even for him. The facility was a lot more comfortable than any other prison he had been in, but he was still locked up, with no foreseeable option of freedom. His deep depression was close to breaking point when he received a visit one day that offered him hope of a future.

It was this meeting that eventually led to where he found himself today. He sat in his lab, pretending to work on his laptop whilst continuously checking his watch. No one else in the laboratory was bothered enough by him to pay any attention to what he was up to, so he needn't have worried. After seventeen minutes, he looked up and sure enough saw the guards walking past. They were in sight for approximately thirty seconds, before they disappeared again, to return in another seventeen minutes.

Rainsbury planned to use these seventeen minutes very efficiently. The guards returned exactly as expected and as soon as Rainsbury saw them walk past the window by his desk, he got up and snuck out his lab so that he was casually strolling behind the guards. He sneaked up on the pair of them and with a syringe in each hand, injected both the guards in the neck. The paralytic was instantaneous and both guards fell to the floor with minimal noise. Soon enough the paralytic would completely shut down their lungs and they would both suffocate to death.

Rainsbury took the sidearms of both guards which were two Glock 17 Gen 4 9mm, along with both security passes. He knew that the guards’ routes now took them around some outside hangers, before they returned to his laboratory and did another walk past seventeen minutes later. They did this route continuously for four hours before a shift change and two new guards followed the same process. Maybe he didn’t have the worst job here.

The guards’ security passes would be monitored, so after approximately nineteen minutes, if they hadn’t been activated to enter the most secure laboratory on the whole site, they would be radioed for a welfare check. Rainsbury knew this after chatting to the guards previously and casually, over a period of months gaining tit bits of information, which he put together. Once the guards didn’t respond, other units would be sent to check up. This had never happened before. Well, not in Rainsbury’s time here, so he didn’t know exactly what the timings would be. So he planned on working on the seventeen-minute timeframe in case the reaction was quicker than he had expected.

He walked back into the lab with one of the Glocks in the back of his trousers and the other Glock by his side. His invisibility to the team worked in his favour now and no one noticed him moving around. It wasn’t until he was standing just behind Manning-Smith and still no one showed any interest, that he made sure he grabbed their attention by announcing to the group with a smile:

‘I bet this will get your attention.’

Rainsbury lifted the Glock in his hand against the back of Manning Smith’s head and pulled the trigger. Brain matter shot out the front of his head and he collapsed to the floor dead. Rainsbury wasn’t a weapons expert but had spent hours on a range in Salt Lake City, practicing with a Glock 17 Gen 4. The standard magazine for this weapon chambered seventeen rounds, but both the guards carried adapted magazines of nineteen rounds, which was plenty for what was needed.

The room stood in stunned silence with only one of the scientists screaming, whilst the rest were paralysed with fear. They were scientists after all and had no experience of these types of situations. Rainsbury lifted the Glock again and started shooting at the remaining people in the room. He aimed for centre mass and when they fell, he walked up to each colleague individually and put a bullet through the head of each of them.

The massacre was over and Rainsbury made his way towards the door, when he realised one of the scientists in the lab was missing. He looked around worried as it seemed the plan was falling apart at the first hurdle.

Just as Rainsbury was starting to really panic, he saw the petite, dark-haired scientist named Liv Conroy-Smith, run back into the room. She looked at him as she entered and said: ‘I heard explosions, did the equipment falter. Is everyone…’

Before she could finish her sentence, she became aware of her surroundings. The blood on the walls and floor, the lifeless bodies of her colleagues, her friends. She looked up at Rainsbury and saw him smiling back at her. Immediately she figured out the situation and showed a calm that she didn’t feel and that her other colleagues weren’t even able to attempt.

‘John. we’re on the same team. I was in Darmstadt in Germany in 2013. I’m the reason that we have the information we need.’

John maintained his smile whilst he replied.

‘My instructions are to leave no one alive.’

Liv’s voice raised an octane as she responded:

‘That didn’t mean me. I have been instructed to go with you. We can escape from here and disappear and spend a few weeks in a nice hotel by the beach, just you and me.’

Rainsbury had asked Liv out on many occasions and had often been obvious in his desires for her. She had made it blatantly clear that she had no interest in him whatsoever. Liv was losing options though, so was trying to use the only bargaining tool she felt she had left: herself.

It didn’t work though. Rainsbury had seen straight through her attempt. He still smiled but looked at her with a new intensity and said: ‘You never seemed interested before, it is funny how you seem interested in me now Liv? Bad news though. I’m afraid your ploy hasn’t worked.’

Liv didn’t even attempt to run. She stood in fear staring at Rainsbury, whilst a tear ran down her cheek.

He lifted his gun and shot Liv in her centre mass and then slowly started walking towards her to put another bullet through her skull. He was within six or seven steps of her, when he heard the alarm sounding.

2

Rainsbury looked at his watch.