To read or not to read...a Literary spy thriller
To read or not to read... that is the question! Read the opening paragraphs of this novel and you decide.
She was sitting in the fuselage, trussed like a piece of baggage, battered by noise. Half an hour earlier they manhandled her up through the door because she was too encumbered with her parachute to climb the ladder unassisted; now she was just there, with the sound drumming in her ears, the inadequate light and the hard metal and packages all around her.
If only she could sleep, like Benoit. He's sitting opposite, his eyes closed and his head rocking with the movement of the machine. Like a passenger on a train. It's one of the most infuriating things about him, his ability to sleep whenever and wherever he pleases.
The dispatcher-young, gauche, prominent Adam's apple and slicked hair-stumbles towards her though the racket. He seems a kind of Charon, accompanying the souls of the dead towards Hades. Her father would love that thought. His classical allusions. 'Illusions' she always called them. The airman grins ghoulishly at her and bends to open the hatch in the floor, releasing night and cold into the fuselage like water rushing in from a sprung leak. Looking down she can see the huddled buildings of a town sliding beneath, smudged with cloud and lit by the moon, a mysterious seabed over which their craft floats. Benoit opens one eye to see what's going on, gives her a quick smile and returns to his sleep.
'CAEN!' the dispatcher shouts above the noise. He begins to bundle packets of paper out into the blackness, like a manic delivery boy throwing newspapers to his customers in the darkness of the winter morning. The bundles crack open as they drop into the void. He thrusts one of the leaflets towards her so that she can read the news.
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