Luc: A Spy Thriller by Greg Coppin Page A

like to visit and once there they would just follow their nose. I think they just liked the planning.
    ‘What’s a good place to go to?’ my uncle asked me in his deep, gruff voice. He handed me a Baedeker guide book of Cairo. I looked up at him with big wide eyes.
    ‘Me, Uncle?’ I couldn’t quite believe he was asking my advice. Looking back it’s obvious he was just being kind in trying to involve me. But at the time his and auntie’s enthusiastic assurances that they valued my help was very convincing.
    I scoured that red-covered Baedeker (I loved the maps), and wrote a long list of places I thought they should go to. And I loved doing it. It was almost like being there myself.
    They left in the New Year. I ran home from school each day, eager to know if my parents had heard from them. Then one day I was pulled out of class. My parents took me home, my mum was unusually silent in the car. In the lounge they sat me down and told me that Uncle and Auntie had been involved in an accident. Their rented car had come off the road. They hadn’t survived.
    It was my first encounter with death.
    I blamed myself. My five-year-old brain reasoned that they were going to a place that I had written on the list. It was my fault. My parents tried to assure me otherwise, but I knew.
    Two days later I received a postcard from Uncle and Auntie. There was a photograph of the Sphinx on the front with the words ‘Greetings From Cairo’. I was hugely excited and relieved and it took my parents a long time to convince me that they had still actually died.
    I have that postcard still.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    The explosion had been massive and it was caught on various camera phones by tourists and locals and the pictures were now being shown on TV screens throughout the country.
    Pictures of the blast ripping through the vulnerable iron roofed huts, sending lethal shrapnel flying for half a mile.
    Those little camera phones had caught the lot from a variety of angles and distances: the bang, the dust, the silence , the screams, the panic, the acts of heroism - it was all there.
    I heard a noise behind me and I saw that Lucia had come into the room. I didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. She had changed out of her bloodstained clothes and was now wearing jeans and a grey T-shirt from the stock cupboard. Her hair was still dark and wet from the shower and I could smell the fresh scent of the soap.
    ‘I can’t believe it,’ Lucia said, her hands pressed together against her nose, as if in silent prayer, her eyes staring at the screen.
    I nodded. I didn’t say anything. What could I say?
    ‘Who would do this?’ she said.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. But I want to find out.’
    We continued to stare at the pictures. They were being played on a loop. Half the screen was showing the pictures, the other half interviewing a terrorism expert or a government minister or another reporter.
    At the moment the Minister for National Security was speaking to the camera. He was an imposing man with dark brown skin and shining eyes and he wore a navy blue suit.
    ‘…this terrible atrocity today. We mourn those who have died. We care for those who are injured. We hunt those who are responsible. The world needs to know that Belize is a strong, united country - that as Belizeans we are strong individually, and even stronger together. And I speak now directly to those who carried out this cowardly act: you picked on the wrong nation. We are coming after you.’ He turned and walked away from the camera, a myriad of reporters all asking him questions.
    The floor creaked and Mike Haskins entered the room. A short man in a Hawaiian shirt and baggy linen slacks. Haskins ran the safe house here.
    ‘Forty injured. Six dead. That’ll rise,’ he said.
    Both of us already knew that. Neither of us answered him.
    I’d had enough of watching the TV.
    ‘Actually, do you think we could get some food, Mike?