With an irresistible sports fest in the UK and Wimbledon and lovely summer weather in full swing, Phoenix Ark Press are also making the part sporting thriller and Mayan apocalypse story The Godhead Game available for download this Sunday, July 1st. Exclusively available at Amazon.com or Click here Enjoy.
Category Archives: America and the UK
WIMBLEDON AND THE NEW SPORTING THRILLER
Filed under Adult Fiction, America and the UK, Environment, Thrillers
A GAME OF SECRETS, A HUNT FOR SKULLS, A BATTLE OF SPIES
In responding to searches on Phoenix Ark’s website, we have noted interest in the article on Drue Heinz and the CIA. The story of Allen Dulles features prominently in the new thriller The Godhead Game by David Clement-Davies, A Game of Secrets, A Hunt for Skulls, A Battle of Spies, available as an eBook via Amazon.com, but here is some of the factual research that helped to inform the story. Drue Heinz was one of Manhattan’s grandest dames for many years and a massive supporter of the arts, but sadly not Phoenix Ark Press. On the other hand, we have never asked!
FROM THE PHOENIX ARK FILES:
It turned up in a World War II visitor’s book, from an aristocratic home, on a hill in Switzerland, with sweeping views to Mont Blanc. There a glamorous American heiress, and a Swiss Baron, banker, and notable art collector, lived out the war in grand style, and with a considerable taste for adventure. Among their more permanent guests was the painter Balthus. They were also intimately connected with a celebrated spy – Allen Dulles – first Civilian Director of the CIA. The hostess of the house would help Dulles retrieve the Ciano diaries from Mussolini’s favourite daughter, Edda. As part of an American East Coast elite, she was at least an informal agent for the OSS, forerunner to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. As for Dulles, still said to be a romantic hero at the Agency, and a committed lady’s man, the be-spectacled, swashbuckling, but famously discrete lawyer had crossed into Switzerland, via Lisbon and Spain, as the borders slammed shut on the eve of Operation Torch, the allied invasion of North Africa. He was armed with a banker’s draft for a million dollars, and a virtually free hand, as Berne OSS station chief. That he cherished, and fully exploited, culminating in his work over Operation Sunrise, for German surrender in Northern Italy. His all important Swiss escapade is touched on, fictionalised, but largely avoided, in the film The Good Shepherd, starring Matt Damon. Dulles certainly believed in something that seems to have gone into decline, operatives fully enagaged on the ground, and culturally educated and well informed, rather than doing much second hand, perhaps nowadays down the net. He once famously said that all you really need in life is ‘a little bit of courage’.
Dulles had worked for the State Department, became a lawyer with Cromwell and Sullivan, and was a member of Yale’s infamous Skull and Bones Society, initiate to Presidents and security gurus, alike. In Switzerland he set about building a spy network that saw his intelligence gathering reach Roosevelt’s own desk. Since he had turned Lenin from the American Legation door in Switzerland, in 1918, he would never make the same mistake again, and worked with many. He also contacted every American living there, to ask for help, in what he described to Washington as a ‘somewhat distorted world’. It was the kind of world where agents still wore red carnations, or proffered a pack of Camel cigarettes, rather than Gauloise, to establish their allegiance to Free France, or Vichy. One that saw the British and Americans in touch with Admiral Canaris, employer and lover of Mata Hari, as head of the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence. Until Canaris fell, after the attempt to assassinate Hitler, and the Abwehr were abolished. Canaris was effectively replaced by Walter Schellenberg, who mounted two machine guns on his desk in Berlin, and later settled in Switzerland to write The Labyrinth. One of Allen Dulles’s greatest coups though was securing the help of the heroic Fritz Kolbe, who the British had turned away from ‘the shop’, and whose reports were validated in London by none other than Kim Philby, already working for the Soviets. Actually Dulles was too acute to sign his name in a visitor’s book, although his daughter Joan, and troubled wife Clover Todd, both appear in 1944. As does a patient of the psychologist Carl Jung, who, though he never came to the house, Dulles also consulted in Germany, and had his own OSS code number. There too came Dulles’s station replacement in Berne, Robert P. Joyce, and General Barnwell Legge, American Legation secretary. Legge was heavily criticized in a recent military controversy on the internet, for his involvement in preventing downed American airmen escape, under threat of Court Martial, probably because Dulles did not want their Swiss operation compromised. Also for failing to correct conditions at the scandalous camp at Wilmeroose, although one subordinate called him a caring man.
In a very ‘Special Relationship’, British Intelligence were at the house too, many times. In the person of George Younghusband, military number two at the British Legation, and the Colditz escapee Pat Reid, famous for his escape-themed board game, and for so successfully telling The Colditz Story, after the war. Reid never wrote about his time in Switzerland though. More specifically, on the British front, there is Henry Cartright, head of MI9 in Switzerland. MI9 dealt with escape routes out of Switzerland, although the role of MI6 has been little written about, in terms of the use and significance of information that debriefed escapees must have provided to intelligence networks, for attacks on Germany. Cartwright was a world War I escapee himself, whose best seller on the subject was avid Nazi reading in WWII, for obvious reasons. That house was watched closely by the Swiss Police too, reported for high antics, and for harbouring ‘a nest of spies’. Its owners were friends with the head of the Berne police though, and so probably protected, in the semi neutral atmosphere of smoke and mirrors diplomacy. One affected in Switzerland by the changing winds of war.
Soon after the war though, they received a grateful card from the British Legation, commending the couple not only for hospitality, but for their invaluable help to British and American escapees. It makes a family visitor’s book a very important historical document, as are unseen papers on Hitler and Edda Mussolini. Perhaps significantly, they received no such commendations from US Services, since spying rarely stops. The question still remains though as to how much their Brit guests were aware of the depth of their American connections, because the house’s true significance is testified to by a meeting in 1945, still a mystery, that involved a visit by colonels at the heart of SHAEF, The Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and ETOUSA, American Theatre of Operations, during Operation Overlord. They had helped covertly in a war that would see Nazi scientists smuggled to America too, in the battle for the A-Bomb, under Dulles’s Operation Paperclip, and herald the triumph of American world hegemony, in more ways than simple military victory. If information is power, cash rich America certainly won the covert war, because America soon had vast reserves of European files transferred to Washington. Incidentally, some 6000 secret papers relating to Switzerland, and designated Safehaven, remain closed.
There is one rather surprising name in the visitor’s book too though, on an evening in 1943 – Drue Mackenzie Robertson. She is actually Drue Heinz, future wife of the Baked Bean and Ketchup Multi-Millionaire, Henry J Heinz. She was a doyenne of New York Society for many years – writing letters to the New Yorker in 1944, so she may have been back in the States by then – but also became a celebrated patron of the literary arts. One the flapping Phoenix Ark could certainly do with a little help from – for our love of stories, real and fictional! She is publisher of The Paris Review, established the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and her foundation endows the Drue Heinz lecture series in Pittsburg. At the Carnegie Museum of Art, her foundation also funds exhibitions at the Heinz Architectural Centre, and supports The Lincoln Centre Review. Having endowed a chair of American Literature at St John’s College, Oxford, and involved with Hertford College too, Drue Heinz has long been at the very epicentre of American Arts and Culture, but also influential in the UK. In 2002 she was made an Honorary Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
Born Doreen Mary English, Mrs Heinz clearly had a taste for theatrics earlier on, and as an actress, earned a small part in the movie Uneasy Terms, in 1948. It is all a long time ago, and many lives have passed in-between, so distance affords both mystery, and admiration, for a now grand old literary lady. But what of such tantalising ‘skull and bones’ in her cupboard, and was Drue Heinz really part of the OSS too, America’s Office of Strategic Services, or only linked by association? The term spy became a very moveable feast during the war, but it is an open secret that some of the most fertile areas of unwritten intelligence history are neutral territories, and Switzerland is no exception. Drue Heinz was there that night in Switzerland, 67 years ago, in 1943, and her signature is on the visitor’s page too, below her second husband, Dale Wilford Maher. As a graduate of the US Cavalry School and military attaché, Maher is a dead ringer for a spy, and signs himself ‘Master of the Five by Five”. That entry rather bemused this excited researcher, until, last year, one of the obvious links sprang fully armed from the pages of history, to validate a remarkable story, worthy of a movie, or a very stylish spy novel. ‘Five by Five’ was official Nato parlance for the best quality wireless transmissions, namely ‘reading you loud and clear’.
These people based at the American Legation then, and guests at a private home, were sending back radio reports, as Dulles himself began nightly transmissions from Switzerland, which in a coming technological age changed the cloak and dagger style of British dominated spying. It was the dawn of a new era, and they specialised in American style code words, like ‘Fatboy’ for Herman Goering. Stationed in Berne, in his beautiful flat in the Herengasse, Dulles’s own rather charming code name was Mr Burns, so you might take another glance at the satirical cartoon The Simpsons. To underline the personal touch, that Dulles would stamp all over the CIA, he called the technique for an operative communicating with a plane overhead by radio, ‘J-E Operations’. It came from the initials of Dulles’s daughter Joan, and his sister Eleanor. Despite British fears, Dulles’s work never compromised the greatest British coup though, in his supposedly ‘gung ho’ and open door approach. A coup embodied in the Enigma project, and Ultra transmissions, concealing the fact Britain had cracked and could read all German messages at the start of the war. British archives, although still closed, reveal a wireless transmitor was installed in their own Swiss legation in 1943.
Dulles, whose obsession would soon become the Soviet threat, and who encouraged later assassination programmes, out of the no-holes-barred tactics learnt in defeating the Nazis, notably had shares in the American Fruit Company, and has a rather more suspect role after his heroic war effort. Allied propaganda was one of his specialities in Switzerland, and as a master of dis-information, he was to be involved in a Mind Control programme, and Operation Mockingbird – perhaps he liked Harper Lee – the CIA’s attempt to directly influence the American media. Another visitor to that house would be Captain Tracy Barnes, a so-called ‘Jedburgh Agent’, and code named ‘Trick’, who would later turn up in the Cuban ‘Bay of Pigs’ debacle. It was of course Cuban bedeviled Kennedy who said of the CIA that he would like to scatter the organisation ‘to the four winds’. But what of Drue Heinz, whose Wikepedia profile is rather thin? Tantalizingly, that evening Drue Heinz signed herself in appealingly Mata Hari vein, for such a sparkling Manhattan hostess-to-be – “Queenie – the Striptease Queen!” The intense passions and fortunes of war, and such heady Swiss excitement, may have been too much for some. Dale Maher died in 1948, and his forwarding address on the internet is simply listed as ‘The State Department’. Drue Mackenzie Robertson married Henry J. Heinz II in 1953, becoming his third wife, and so perhaps beginning her powerful and passionate role in fiction and the arts. A passion fully shared by Phoenix Ark Press, although admittedly with a sometimes sceptical eye on other literary powers that be.
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Filed under America and the UK, Education, Non Fiction, The Arts, Thrillers
EURO 2012 AND THE REAL THRILLER – READ ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD!
TO celebrate such a glut of sport, and Euro 2012 too, the latest sporting and footballing thriller The Godhead Game by David Clement-Davies will also be available for FREE download on Wednesday, July 4th, exclusively at Amazon.com. As a strange email invitation arrives at the FBI in Washington, a famous American LA Galaxy player is kidnapped, along with several European athletes. So a deadly game begins in the rainforests, involving ritual human sacrifice and based around the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, this year. Read it, before it’s too late to read anything else!
Phoenix Ark Press
Filed under America and the UK, Culture, Fantasy, Thrillers
THE LONDON OLYMPICS AND A SPORTING THRILLER OF THE CENTURY
If you want a great read to accompany you to the London Olympics, then The Godhead Game by David Clement-Davies might well be your private medal winner, or way to get away from it all. One of its locations is the British Museum and the attempted theft of a real Crystal Skull there. Set around the apocalyptic Mayan Calendar, which ends this year, 2012, and a strange email inviting players to change their lives forever, it mixes fantasy and politics, to raise large questions about the world and planet today. But at its centre lies a deadly sporting game in the rainforests, that eventually involves the nations of the World, and a Game of Secrets, A Hunt for Skulls, a Battle of Spies.
The Godhead Game, centred strongly on the Internet, is availably exclusively to eBook and only from Amazon.com We are delighted to announce that it will be available for free download on Monday, July 2nd
Phoenix Ark Press
Filed under Adult Fiction, America and the UK, Fantasy, London, Thrillers
MIKE JACOBSON – PHOENIX ARK PRESS ACCUSES ABRAMS CEO AND PRESIDENT OF ABUSE
“Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you’ve never been hurt and live like it’s heaven on Earth.” — Mark Twain
“The Warrior of light does not talk about his defeats.” Paulo Coehlo
Though we intend never to allow such a ‘defeat’ to any author, in the increasing ruthlessness and cynicism of modern publishing, most Abrams posts have again been suspended. We do not think readers are especially interested, it is a drain and waste of energy, at the moment, and everyone has their problems and injustices to face. We would rather help than talk on about our wound, so fight well and know your good friends! We maintain the firm challenge though that what happened at Abrams was betrayal, both personal professional, effective conspiracy, that has criminal implications, before it was forced before a CEO, humanly and creatively awful, breach and repudiation of contracts and astounding in the story that unfolded around it too, the good ‘miracle’ Abrams and worse, a Children’s imprint, denied, however ‘mad’ it was convenient to paint it as. Yet having had other evidence of strange ‘realities’ just yesterday, involving James Innes Smith, always look for the good, in everyone’s lives.
We invite Abrams CEO Mike Jacobson to show a modicum of courage and honesty though and explain why Harold Rove was removed, why David Clement-Davies was ‘mobbed’ and his work, person and contracts abused, and why the internal corruption continued. We invite them to make speedy redress too and give no guarantee not to persue and present the entire story in another, more suitable medium, until they do. But to slay Goliaths in the centre of bad foreheads, you need to polish the stone. The things those people have done, over so long, professionally and legally, are outrageous. In not challenging our blogs, monitored by an oxford lawyer, we suspect still, on some bogus and hypocritical ‘principle’ of breach of Privacy, still worse Human Rights, they are further underlining that they know full well they were massively in the wrong and adding ammunition to the case against them. We invite Abrams Vice President Sarah Van More to explain her actions, dishonest words, and why she now has Harold Rove’s job. We also invite Abrams to compensate over the loss of earnings surrounding Fell. We invite Harold Rove, Tara Break, Sarah Van More and Mike Jacobson to open their eyes, as well, inside and out, with a touch of love and intelligence, and to start telling the truth, or doing something good, either in publishing or in life. We invite Tara Break, editor of Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes, daughter of an eye doctor, most especially to open her cynical eyes, or to read either Fell or the George Herbert poem sent in the middle of this – “Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back.” Then to read Phillip Pullman’s amazing Trilogy His Dark Materials and understand something about her duty in this.
But as for life, forge on and try to help and inspire. Our means is telling better stories and returning to passion, intelligence and laughter, before being blinded by the people who look only with fear, with all the faith of knowing about something truly extraordinary. Well, it’s all extraordinary, so tune into the extraordinary! It really is under every stone. The next story coming soon is The Terror Time Spies.
Phoenix Ark Press
Filed under America and the UK, Publishing, The Phoenix Story
Protected: US PUBLISHER ABRAMS BREACHED THE PRINCIPLES OF THE US CONSTITUTION
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Filed under America and the UK, Books, London, New York, Publishing
MAYAN CALENDAR END AND 2012
There is a great deal written about it on the internet, including sites dedicated to the so called Mayan prophecy and the end of the world. That has been calculated as 21st December 2012, so just six months to go, although another caulcuation would place it on the 23rd. The Winter Solstice was of course a hugely significant time, not only to the Mayans. It stems from a reading of the Mayan Long Count Calendar and a stele in Honduras, the ‘6th Monument’. That relates to the end of the 13th Baktun, Baktun’s being extended lengths of time, where one scholar has interpreted the incomplete inscription as reading Then it shall happen, the darkness. There are also references to the Mayan Monkey God Bolon Yokte Ku.
David Clement-Davies does not pretend to be a Mayan scholar, but his new thriller The Godhead Game incorporates many of the real theories about this year and the end of the Long Count, to discuss contemporary beliefs and fears, in our increasing Age of Anxiety. Another theory is that it does not represent any kind of catastrophe at all, but the beginning of a new age of Man and even a new spiritual age. Perhaps that is what the story is really about, Mankind waking up to one another again and nature all around us, good and bad.
He started the book some time ago, researching at the British Museum, and was especially interested in real totemic Crystal Skulls, that exist in various museums around the world, and in private collector’s hands. Some may be Aztec, Mayan and Toltec. But then the Spielburg film Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls came out and the project was shelved, until now. A huge fan of the Indiana Jones stories, he found the use of the skulls less than satisfying. So this is his take, crafting an adventure that incorporates both a physical contest and a strange mind game, with the search for a skull that could destroy the universe itself! Full of philisophical ideas, it posits the existence of a mysterious and deadly Council, and a group called the Imaginati. So the Games begin – A Game of Secrets, A Hunt for Skulls, A Battle of Spies. “Read it, perphaps before it’s too late to read anything at all,” he jokes, with a grin like a Crystal Skull.
Phoenix Ark Press
Filed under Adult Fiction, America and the UK, Environment, Thrillers
PHOENIX ARK PRESS ARE PROUD TO PUBLISH THE GODHEAD GAME
Also available on Utube at http://youtu.be/Z62x9mzO5NA
Filed under Adult Fiction, America and the UK, Books, Environment, Science, Thrillers
EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT FROM THE GODHEAD GAME
FACT: December 21, 2012 sees the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar and the Tortuguero Stele exists pointing, thirteen hundred years ago, to some great contempoary happening.
FACT: There is a real legend around 13 Crystal Skulls, used in the film Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skulls. You can see examples in the British Museum, The Smithsonian, in Mexico City and Paris.
FACT: Details about the Skulls, the Dresden Codex, Archbishop Landa and the British explorer Frederick Mitchell Hedges are all true, including the libel case Mitchell Hedges fought with the Daily Express and lost.
FACT: Scientists do talk of a Polar Flip in the Rotation of the Earth’s axis and crystal fields at the centre of the Earth. Crystal is Silicone Dioxide, also common sand. Nicholas Boyle has predicted a World Crisis in 2014. Many around the World point to the significance of 2012, or seek different kinds of Spiritual freedom, meaning and expression. Perhaps there should be a realignment of human language.
FACT: The game of Ulama was perfectly real, as is the Skull chapel at Evora. Many of the strange events referred to in this story by the characters are true.
FACT: Tim Berners Lee is not a member of the Twelve and all references to real individuals, including additions to Eugen Boban’s story, has been used in a fictional context!
The rest is fiction. In almost every case the original Spanish and Portuguese used has a translation.
THE GODHEAD GAME
David Clement-Davies
PROLOGUE – June 10th, 2014, London
In London’s British Museum it was midday as an English guide and small group of eager tourists gathered around a little white plinth, in something called the Wellcome Trust Gallery. On top, a strange semi-transparent skull sat motionless inside its little perspex case, lit eerily by the museum lights – indeed almost seemed to be floating inside it.
“Crystal Skulls,” whispered a Turkish woman excitedly, to the guide, “They’ve been linked to the end of the Mayan Calendar, back in 2012? Is there not legend when thirteen sacred Skulls are brought back with each other, they will tell a great secret about the origin and true destiny of Mankind? ”
“Like that Spielberg movie?” said another tourist, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls?”
“Ah yes,” sighed the guide, rather tolerantly, “But no one knows just what secret, Madam. A lot is claimed for the power of the Skulls, and their links to 2012.”
The guide suddenly sensed someone was watching from across the Gallery and felt strangely nervous. She had seen him in the great museum before, hovering around the strange head, like a thief.
“But all we know about 2012 is the great Mayan Long Count, that started in 3114 BC, certainly ended then – dawn, December 21st, 2012, after five thousand years. Some believers really expected the End of the World,” added the guide, with a cheerful smile, “Although we still seem to be here. Always the way, I fear.”
At that very moment, in a museum in Washington, just before Monday opening, a crowbar smashed through a glass case and a pair of gloved hands reached in to snatch away a similar Skull, as the disconnected alarm bells failed to sound.
THE GODHEAD GAME
ONE PART ONE
Brazil, 2014, World Cup Match
The US soccer star Mark Fabian stooped to place the shining white leather ball, then targeted the waiting goal mouth. If the striker could score now, the roar in a stadium would blast back like an H-bomb, but without the Mushroom Cloud, or the awkward dead bodies.
A touch down or a home-run, a basket or a goal – is there any feeling on Earth like it? A wall of approving sound energy, forty feet high, rolling towards you in a glorious vibration – a great Mexican Wave.
It was just what Mark Fabian needed too, with a yellow card threatening to flash red, and wreck the famous striker’s badly embattled career. Across the goal mouth in front of the pacing goalie the Jamaican mid-fielder who had just fouled handsome Mark Fabian was helping to form the defensive human wall, as the American had the urge to aim the kick straight at Jones’ head, or his wedding tackle.
The LA Galaxy star, representing the USA now, centred himself instead, breathed deep and in the stands, just near the entrance to the World Cup changing rooms, a pair of heavily tanned thugs looked on and waited.
“Go on, Fabian, bend it, bend it like…”
On the 5th floor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington DC, Daniel Fabian’s head was hammering like an industrial road drill, as he gazed back at his own brother on the plasma TV screen, from the door of the noisy systems room, 935 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The savage heat across Washington was nailing the steamy air to the melting tarmac outside, strung out like a singing copper wire, between the Lincoln Moument and the Whitehouse, where Barak Obama was getting into his stride in his second Presidential term, but now looking forward to a weekend of Golf at Camp David. In the great US political capital it felt like a storm was coming.
Dan Fabian had just arrived and wondered how his famous bro was doing in the World Cup match in Brazil. Inside the systems room a small group of colleagues were taking a welcome break to watch the TVs, that relayed news to the FBI, 24/7, on this floor, from across America and around the Globe too – Fox, CNN, NBC, BBC, Canal Plus, AL Jazeera. Below the famous Department of Justice insignia, with its red and white badge, and its great motto – Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity – silent world news scenes showed more violence in Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt and Libya.
Although here most gave States side news, effectively Federal news, and thus ordinary Federal crimes and disasters. Except the middle screen, now showing the World Cup thriller in Brazil, the USA versus Jamaica, courtesy of a nod from the boss, in the heatwave. They weren’t FBI field agents on this floor, but Human Resources, admin, systems and IT specialists, like Daniel Fabian. Most were in civilian clothes too: jeans, sneekers, or All Stars.
“Hey, your bro’s up, buddy,” said a guy called Bob Breckan, noticing Danny standing there, “Direct free kick, I think. Dumb ass game though, soccer. No one gets the rules.”
Daniel smiled limply. Didn’t they say you can’t understand America, he thought, its eagerness to let you step up to the plate and swing the bat, strictly for the team, unless you understand Baseball? When you reach the base, you are in the Safe Zone again, but otherwise you are out there on your own.
Dan was feeling like hell, as the FBI employee fiddled with the game Ap in his hands: Angry BirdsIII. He saw the flash of Mark’s blonde locks on the screen, dyed for the match, and thought how, since their final vicious bust up, the Fabian twins had done everything they could to differentiate themselves.
On the screen another US player was running onto the quilted green pitch, soaking up the digitalised love. A substitution had delayed the free kick, if Dan and his colleagues had understood the language, or rules, but in the glare of the camera, Mark Fabian took aim again, as the American tried to clear his mind. The mantra of sportsmen is see the thing as it happens, or find the Zone.
“Prefer Ice Hockey, Bob,” muttered Dan in Washington, thinking of the current Stanley Cup Finals, as he turned away, and beyond the screen Daniel’s twin struck hard, lifting the curving football perfectly around the human wall.
A roar erupted in the stadium, and the FBI room, from the guys at least, “Wer—ooooah”, a growl of sympathetic scrotal energy, just to prove this was far more important than a mere game. Out of the corner of his eye though, Dan Fabian saw two field agents come sweeping down the corridor.
“Hey, agent Koernig,” he cried, running to catch them up, “Koernig, look, I know you’ll be interested in my special report …”
“I don’t read novels, Fabian,” snapped Koernig, “Get out of my face. And you know what they’re calling you round here? Indianna Jonah, or the Washington Walter Mitty. Take your pick. Hey, are you guys all on damned vacation?”
“Yeah, nice shirt,” said the second agent sacrcastically,“from what I hear though you’d better keep your head down, Danny, with the Bureau shake up. Morrington’s moving the bases, even in systems.”
“The World Cup,” explained Dan, with a shrug, “and it’s Friday”.
In their ties and pressed if damp shirts, the Special Agents grinned patronisingly and pushed straight passed the mere IT man, to the lifts, as Danny Fabian turned towards the drinking machine, to ease his hangover and burning throat. He wondered what pieces they were carrying and felt jealous.
“So Scobey’s suspended,” said Koernig, looking rather furtive, as the two suites waited for the lift, “Internal Affairs are nosing around again, with the shake up. He’ll carry the can, for beating the crap out of those Florida dealers.”
Mark’s twin cocked his ears, as the roars coming from the TV down the corridor, blended into a great, familiar murmur: The mob. The crowd. The World.
“He should jump before he’s pushed. Where we headed anyhow, Koernig?”
“The Smithsonian,” answered Koernig wearily.
“A night in the museum?” the other joked.
“That frigging Skull theft, Monday. Now there’s talk of Higher Powers, so guess it’s up to us to make the weather.”
Across the screen in the systems room, the white leather football sailed true, but hit the post and bounced back out of the penalty box, to the US forward Caleb Andazio, who trapped it and was trying to turn, for a second strike. The Jamaican Raol Jones ratted in again and slipped the ball away from the American forward, racing back towards the opposing goal mouth, straight into wide open space.
Mark Fabian came hurtling towards him though, at a diagonal, wanting to inflict maximum damage now. His outstretched boot struck Jones hard in the upper thigh, his studs puncturing the skin, as sheer momentum carried him on. The wayward footballer heard a scream and the whistle screech, as he sensed the referee’s hand go to his top pocket. “No, God damn it, no.”
Just then, in Washington, as the system’s man turned towards his office, Mark’s twin collided hard with another Bureau man, coming down the corridor, Special Agent Butcher. It knocked his hand back, crushing the Angry Birds game and the iced water cone against his chest.
It soaked both of them and Butcher, gunning for Section Head in the shake up, dropped the file he was carrying. He swore and shook out his shirt, as Dan bent down to pick up the file, seeing it was marked Classified. It was open and headed Missing Athletes, Potential Kidnap Cases, Europe and USA.
On the World Cup soccer pitch in Brazil Daniel’s twin, who like Danny looked a bit like the actor Russell Crowe, was cussing, protesting furiously, as he picked himself up, but it was already too late. The world can change, in a split second. The card was out of its sheath and like a Samurai’s sword, once drawn, it had to be used on the erring striker. To draw blood. “Jesus Christ”.
The human sound vibration of expected love had turned to a furious hiss, as Jones played up the agony, screaming and bellowing for the cameras, milking the sympathy. Mark strained against the decision, as the hissing grew in the crowd, then tore off his strip and stamped it in the grass, in full view of the catcalling World Cup crowd.
His bare muscles flexed at them like iron bars, and across his chest was a huge tattoo of a panther. The LA Galaxy Star, though representing his country now, had had it done in prison. The American lifted a clenched fist, then let his middle finger uncurl.
“Missing Athletes?” Dan Fabian whispered in surprise, seeing Carl Whitfield, Detroit, and thinking he recognised the name of a famous American Football player. He wondered with a smile if someone would be kind enough to kidnap his damn twin, live on TV.
No such luck, Dan realised, not when protected by all those eyes, and all that glorious adoration. Mark’s life, a no-bained footballer, was one of dough, celebrity and adoring babes, and he was in the safest place on Earth too.
“Hey, give me that,” snapped Butcher, snatching the Classified report. “Jesus, Fabian, get your dick out of your hand. Folk here have real jobs to do.”
On the pitch the hissing got worse, as Mark spat on the grass and strode passed his own bench, his team, ignoring them all, on up the gangway. The blonde American striker was sick of the beautiful game. He was sick of the world in fact. As Mark did so, outside in the stands the two heavily tanned thugs slipped around the railing, straight after him.
His twin brother frowned back at Agent Butcher, on Pensylvania Avenue, dickhead he thought, as Butcher noticed the Angry Birds game, which had started beeping, and Dan fumbled to turn it off.
“Systems!” Butcher snorted, “Can’t you take anything fucking seriously, Fabian? You’re your own worst enemy. Three months our team spent tracking a supposed Mexican Drugs Cartel, on your brilliant leads, and what do they turn out to be? Just what they said. A Cancer fund-raiser on God damn Facebook. Indianna Jonah they’re calling…”
“Hey, Butcher, there was every chance…”
“The point’s there shouldn’t have been any damned special reports, not to Morrington,” hissed Butcher, “You’re in systems, not a field agent. Stick to Websites, and the Fun and Games. Jesus it’s hot.”
Daniel glared back at him. Butcher was always on his damned head.
“And you applied for a transfer to Langley?” added Butcher suddenly, raising an acusing eyebrow. “Fifty US States not big enough for you, Fabian? Getting ideas above our Pay Grade? Wanna see the World?”
“A High School buddy at the Company,” said Dan, with a guilty shrug, “He thought I could do with a change of weather. Friendlier faces, maybe.”
“And they made you Agency Director, right?”
“Told me to try again in a few years,” shrugged Daniel, feeling like a punctured football.
“Where’s your damned loyalty? Your Fidelity. It’s about the team.”
In the empty US World Cup dressing rooms, Mark Fabian’s sweat drenched forehead shone with a halo of frustrated fury. “Jesus H fuck,” the footballer shouted, pounding his fist straight into his locker and buckling the metal.
Daniel’s twin tried to relax, as he thought of his humiliation in front of the World, and he had just pulled a towel and his cell phone from his dented locker, when the footballer heard a noise right behind him. He supposed it was one of the assistant coaches come to pour oil on troubled waters.
“Hey, not now, guys,” he growled, wiping his face with the towel, “Just leave me….”
The famous Striker was aware someone was right behind him and as he swung round, for a second he thought some of the opposing team had slipped into the changing rooms too. Yet the two large bone crushers glaring at him weren’t in kit, but cheap dark suites and polyester ties. He decided they must be officials sent to drag him back onto the bench for a roasting.
“Look, guys,” he growled, hurling the towel back into his locker, “I’m not coming back out. Not after that World Cup farce. I’ve reached the end of my fucking…”
“No, Senor Fabian,” said one bone breaker, in a smoothly murderous Spanish accent, as he punched the soccer star straight in his pretty face, “like all of us, Senor, you’ve reached the End of the World.”
Copyright David Clement-Davies 2012. The cover image and text are the Copyright of David Clement-Davies and Phoenix Ark Press.
Filed under America and the UK, Fantasy, Thrillers, Uncategorized
PRESS RELEASE
Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to announce, for the first time, the publication to e-book of The Telling Pool by David Clement-Davies. Available from Amazon, The Telling Pool is a mystical and richly woven Arthurian fantasy, following the adventures and coming of age story of Rhodri Falcon, which was short-listed for the Tir Na Nog prize in the UK. Its publication precedes a number of exciting new titles this year including Scream of the White Bear, The Terror Time Spies, The Dragon Book and The Godhead Game. Also to be published are exclusive US editions of FireBringer and The Sight and a coedition of The Sight and Fell.
From Booklist:
Gr. 6-9. A wizened crone at the village fair reads the cards for young Rhodri Falcon, revealing the suffering to come from a looming war. In his haste to escape from the crone’s strange intensity, Rhodri is drawn toward a grizzled and blind blacksmith who speaks of quests, a true sword, and the mysterious Telling Pool. These ancients’ interest in Rhodri, the son of a Welsh falconer who serves a Norman lord during the time of the Third Crusade, hinges on an ancestry of which he has no knowledge: Rhodri is descended from Arthur’s Guinevere and has an important role to play in the dark times ahead. With the aid of the blacksmith, the powers of the Telling Pool, his beloved rock falcon, a wise young woman, and an infamous sword, Rhodri must walk a difficult path to save his family, king, and country from the forces of evil…a satisfying and well-crafted story that through Arthurian lore, brings a steadfast young boy to manhood and adult understanding. Holly Koelling
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Filed under America and the UK, Books, Childrens Books, Phoenix Catalogue, Young Adult
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