Read Shroud of Concealment (Jake Dillon Adventure Thriller Series) for Free Online Page B

intelligence field officers that MI5 is ever likely to see. Lost his right eye in a shootout with a bunch of terror suspects in Manchester about six years ago, after which he was given the choice of working behind a desk or early retirement. Needless to say he took the sensible option and now lives down there – owns a forty-six foot power cruiser which he moors in the marina. I’d say that both could come in extremely handy, should the need arise.”
    Dillon closed the door gently behind him as he left LJ’s office. He picked up the file containing the operational details and went straight to the underground car park to collect his Porsche. With his overnight bag in the boot, he weaved his way through the heavy city traffic towards the M25 motorway, and then down the M3 towards Southampton with the sky turning blue-black, bruised with garish clouds. By the time he’d turned onto the M27, heavy raindrops were killing themselves on the windscreen as he headed towards his destination.
    * * *

    Dillon entered the airfield on the north-west side, driving between industrial buildings and large aircraft hangers, until he reached the helicopter charter company’s low single-storey building located at the edge of the runway. He parked the black sports car on the apron and was immediately escorted to a waiting Robinson R-44 Raven, its rotors already in motion. They were in the air within minutes, flying three hundred feet above the rooftops towards Poole and the Sandbanks peninsula. The pilot headed towards the coast, flew over Bournemouth pier and, a moment later, was skimming over the white sandy beach of Sandbanks. As they rounded the point at the Haven Hotel, Dillon looked down on the port side – the chain ferry linking the peninsular with Studland was mid-channel, fully laden with vehicles and foot passengers. The pilot tacked round to starboard, and gained height as they neared the area Dillon wanted to view from the air.
    “Go around the harbour and approach that area over there from the other direction,” Dillon instructed the pilot, and pointed at the individual luxury properties that lined the shoreline below. Virtually all of them had their own mooring, some even had impressive boat houses. Charlie Hart’s mansion had both and a large power cruiser tied up at the bottom of his landscaped grounds. Dillon used the Nikon camera with a long zoom lens attached to get close-up images of every aspect of Hart’s property. Once he’d satisfied himself that he’d seen enough, he instructed the pilot to head back to the airfield. Ten minutes later, the Raven was put down on the airfield apron again. Dillon went and climbed in to the driver’s seat of the Porsche whilst the girl in the office processed the paperwork for the credit card payment. He connected the digital camera to the car’s specially adapted on-board computer system, downloaded the images and simultaneously sent them back to Vince Sharp in London. Thirty seconds later, he received a text message telling him that the file transfer had been successful.
    Dillon drove slowly by the gated entrance to Charlie Hart’s mansion. It wasn’t going to be easy to keep watch on the luxury house, especially with double yellow lines on both sides of the road for as far as the eye could see and CCTV cameras everywhere. How things had changed since his last visit to the area, he thought. But he decided to park directly outside the high gated entrance anyway, knowing that there would almost certainly be a camera looking directly at him, and that if Hart was straight he would make a note of the registration number and give it to the police to look into, and then forget the whole thing. But if he wasn’t, he’d probably take steps to find out who it was harassing him.
    Ferran & Cardini had the personnel and surveillance capability to easily set up a team to watch Hart’s movements, but first Dillon wanted to see for himself who and what he was up against. It was