Pursuit of the Patriarchs

Chapter 1

It was a typical summer day in London. Thick gray and black clouds hung over the city to add to the humidity in the already thick air. The rain would come to lessen the mugginess, but not by much.

Along one side of a street, people were walking along the sidewalks passing diners and shoppers lingering within the small buildings. Pleasant scents of food drifted out of the kosher deli that offered so much more than sandwiches. They ignored the less pleasant scents lingering around them from those typical stenches of any city and those on the other side.

It was on the other side that held the scents of homeless and hopelessness drifting off them in waves of stench coated despair. Shops that used to bring life to the side of the street had shut down years ago and never reopened. As long as the homeless remained on their side, they were free of harassment by police and shopkeepers alike.

The ignored and forgotten remained ignored and forgotten. From time to time they were moved to other parts of London, but only to remain in their shelterless state. Come winter, they'd be forced off the streets into cramped shelters to keep them from freezing to death, but that was the extent of help they received.

Maggie, at least that's what every agency who had targeted her with interest called her, was walking towards the Kosher deli that had been targeted by some suspected offshoot of the IRA yet to be identified. She was wearing a brown wig and brown contacts to conceal her identity, which she did rather well with thick makeup. Baggy brown clothes hid what wigs and contacts couldn't. Her hands clutched a white bag from a local shop which held the bomb she would use with the intent on killing everyone inside the deli.

She didn't fear her face showing up on any number of cameras that used recognition software, which shouldn't have been possible in a place like London. The likes of her should've shown up in any number of servers, since she wasn't new to death and destruction.

Someone with a great deal of skill was protecting her. It was impossible to know if that unknown person worked for some intelligence agency or private contractor. In a connected world, such a person could be anywhere.

There was nothing special about the deli, it was just one of hundreds that could be found throughout the city. It had never been used by British intelligence, royals, politicians or military for any reason, including getting their meals. Had there been some typical reason the deli had been targeted for the traditional political matters of the various fringe groups of the IRA, it wouldn't have struck anyone as odd.

Oddity is what caught the attention of agencies beyond the British boundaries and was the reason the American spy, Johnathon Ritter, was sitting among the homeless that lined the street on the opposite side of the shops. Maggie stopped and glanced at the homeless without seeing anything who stood out. To her, he was just one of the thousands who had been forgotten and ignored.

Johnathon was used to being ignored and looked past. There was nothing about him that ever stood out. Everything about his physical appearance, from his brown hair, brown eyes, height, weight, and athleticism was average in every way. He was the type of man who could go into a party and leave without anyone noticing he was ever there.

Many who were average struggled in life, but Johnathon wasn't one of them. Being a spy somewhere within the alphabet soup of American intelligence agencies meant not standing out kept him from getting killed or captured.