Crunch Time Read Online Free PDF

often harangued himself. The answer he came to was the cost of the lives of two good people, lives that he, ridiculously, blamed himself for losing. However, in clinical retrospect, they would have died even if Condoleezza Rice had seen sense and cancelled her visit. Henry, unknowingly, had set a violent express train going and lives would have been lost anyway.
    He had almost been killed, too. A constant physical reminder of what had happened to him was his broken right cheekbone which even now remained tender to the touch and throbbed constantly as it steadfastly refused to heal properly.
    And then, six months after that day of extreme violence, he had heard the news that his good friend, the American FBI agent Karl Donaldson, was fighting for his life in a Spanish hospital after having been found grievously wounded in mysterious circumstances in a square in Barcelona. It was an incident, Henry knew, that was connected to the hunt for the terrorist who had masterminded the assassination attempt on Rice.
    Henry shook his head to try and rid his mind, at least for a while, of these horrendous musings.
    He was not to blame for anything, he had been assured repeatedly by many different people, and he needed to put it behind him and move on.
    Unfortunately, having a brittle character at the best of times, he had found himself clinging to the edge of nervous exhaustion, breakdown and depression. He had been there before and it was a place he did not wish to visit ever again because it was dark, bleak, featureless and very frightening.
    He glanced at the stack of paperwork accumulated on his desk. His mouth twitched in distaste.
    Things might not have been so bad if work had been more interesting and challenging. With the exception of a drugs-related death investigation he had been involved in, most of his time had been spent cooped up in the office, pushing unimportant pieces of paper and staring into space.
    Through his office window he could see the Special Projects Team, the group of misfits who had been chucked together to do the projects no one else wanted to touch with a barge pole – and because no one else wanted those particular individuals in their departments.
    However, Henry had tried very hard with his team and the work and been proud, in a perverted sort of way, that he’d managed to complete two very unsexy projects and launch three others which were going as well as could be expected, despite their unpopularity.
    He rose from his chair, realizing he needed to move, get the blood circulating.
    Passing through the Special Projects office he nodded amiably at his staff and emerged on to the narrow top-floor corridor of the headquarters building, making his way to the stairs.
    It was his intention to have a mid-morning stroll and do some networking at the same time. He trotted down to the ground floor and snaked through along the ground floor to the Intelligence Unit where he had a chat with the DI in there; then he walked out of the HQ building itself and walked across the sports pitches to the Pavilion Building which housed the Serious and Organized Crime Unit, formerly the Major Crime Unit. He had a very pleasant conversation with the very nice female DCI, who was running a government-funded project on street crime. She declined his invitation to join him for a late breakfast, so he meandered back to the HQ dining room where he caught the tail end of the breakfast service. Then, armed with a bacon roll (which he promised himself he would run off at lunchtime) and a large coffee, he took up a position in one corner of the room.
    He watched a few people come and go, his interest only perking up when a man he detested with a vengeance walked in, accompanied by a woman who Henry did not really take much notice of.
    The man was Dave Anger, his former boss on the Force Major Incident Team, who had a massive downer on Henry because Henry had slept with his wife many years before, when she wasn’t actually his