Odd Reunion
In Odd Reunion, Harry Lewis spots a face she’s not seen for twenty years. And so begins the reunion with her estranged mother who has a troubling story to tell. It’s a story that will eventually lead to the discovery that her partner, Javier, is dead. On the other side of London, the teenage daughter of Harry’s long-time friend has been raped and Harry, Saxon, and their colleagues at N2K, the secretive establishment where they work, plan to avenge her. Their actions lead to the discovery of a huge drugs network linked to sources in the Middle East. And that is where two CIA agents are tracking a greater threat – Iraqis working towards the destruction of Britain and America.
Under cover of darkness, Creed, armed with a high-powered rifle, takes aim at the man at the centre, who is on the verge of success, but totally unaware that he’s about to become a martyr to the cause. The strings of the story come together at a former wartime aerodrome twenty miles south of London. How will matters end? There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to read Odd Reunion.
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ODD REUNION
Behind the matte-black lens of his rifle scope, his gaze was unwavering. He didn’t blink. Every twitch of muscle, every shift in light, was catalogued and dismissed. The target shuffled in his chair and the sniper adjusted, not with haste, but with the grace of someone who had done this before and knew that patience was the key to a successful hit. He waited for the rhythm of his pulse to settle, aligning the moment with the lull between beats. His finger hovered over the trigger, not pressing, not hesitating – rather, feeling its texture, its resistance, as if asking permission from the weapon itself.
A final inhale. As still as a stone. Then silence. The kind of silence that feels sacred, like the pause before a conductor’s baton drops. His body became an extension of the rifle, the rifle an extension of his will.
Finally, after a partial exhale, he held his breath for a short, natural pause, aiming to finally align his sights before squeezing the trigger. Not a jerk. Not a pull. A squeeze – slow, steady, inevitable. The moment stretched, suspended in tension, until the rifle cracked – a sharp, surgical sound that sliced through the stillness. Not thunderous, not chaotic. Just final.
A fraction over half a second later at a velocity of 748 metres per second the 6.5mm round cut clean through the window glass and pierced the skull of the man in front of the computer. Time didn’t slow – it shattered. The bullet, a whisper of metal and velocity, met flesh and bone with brutal precision. In that fraction of a second, the body jerked, not from pain but from physics. His head snapped back, a marionette’s final twitch, and the world around seemed to pause in stunned silence.
In that final instant, as the bullet tore through his brain, time fractured. Yousef al-Rashid didn’t see the sniper. He didn’t hear the shot. But he understood. Not in words, but in sensation – a sharp bloom of heat, a collapse inward, and then nothing. He dropped. One moment upright, the next crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut. No drama, no flailing. The simple effect of gravity doing its work. And then the world let go of him.
