Absolution - The First Book Of The Vampire Immortalis Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page A

Dracula. The lack of blood at the crime scene more or less ruled out the sadist, but it was the complete lack of blood in the corpse itself that had Buchan puzzled and worried in equal measure. He might be looking for his first ever vampire.
    “One other thing, Andrew,” the pathologist said before ending his telephone summary, “the victim either had a very strange taste in aftershave or he had been used as a lavatory brush prior to death.”
     
     
     
    Sarah Cooper had worked as an Intelligence Analyst at The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham for seven years. She had joined the Security Service, MI5, immediately after graduating from Durham University with a first class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, but after three years of enduring the bedlam of London, she craved a slower pace of life. That's when she successfully applied for a transfer to GCHQ and was now living in the Gloucestershire countryside with her husband Tim, a fellow senior analyst, their three children, Harry, Edward, and Pippa, and their English Springer Spaniel, Candy.
    Sarah's main role was to monitor private and public communications for what are known as trigger words: keywords that are linked to terrorism, crime, or any other subject that the government and its intelligence agencies deem of interest and worthy of further investigation. Every day, the huge computers at GCHQ sift through billions upon billions of emails, telephone calls, text messages and documents, looking for evidence of wrongdoing. Within seconds of an email or text message being flagged up, complex computer algorithms go to work to determine whether the trigger words are being used in an innocent capacity or whether their use warrants further investigation. Only those that fall foul of the algorithms land on an analyst's desk and only those that arouse the concern of an analyst find their way to a senior analyst like Sarah Cooper.
    The number of trigger words being monitored is surprisingly large and varied. Most people would correctly suspect that if they mentioned something like “Al Qaeda” in a telephone call or text message that the security services would be aware of it within seconds. The same is true of words and phrases such as “dirty bomb”, “nuclear”, “Anthrax”, and “suicide attack”. What few realise is that otherwise innocent words might also bring them to the attention of the security services if they are used in certain contexts; words like “police”, “virus”, and “airport” for example.
    There are also certain words that bypass the junior analysts completely and go straight to senior analysts. These are words that are considered of high immediate value or ones that are of a sensitive enough nature to warrant the scrutiny of someone with a high level of security clearance.
    In all her years at GCHQ, Sarah had never once seen this high value word flagged up. It appeared in a pathologist's report prepared for the Lothian and Borders Police force in connection with a suspicious death in Melrose, Scotland. The word was “vampire”. Sarah smiled as she followed procedure and forwarded the report with the standard covering email to a civil servant at the Ministry of Defence by the name of William Edgar.
Probably the same man who looks into reports of alien abductions and Loch Ness monster sightings
, she said to herself.
    Although his email address placed him with the Ministry of Defence, William Edgar actually worked for Sarah's old employer, MI5. Eight years ago, he had been seconded to a top secret taskforce that operated out of an anonymous office deep within Whitehall and had been their ever since. With only two more years to serve, he thought he would probably see out his time with the taskforce and that suited him fine.
    Edgar certainly wasn't smiling when he received Sarah's email and wasted no time in forwarding it on to two others as per protocol. One copy went to an Eduardo Lomardi, a