Gray Salvation by Alan McDermott

lot across to Gareth and head home for a couple of hours.’
    ‘You do that. And make sure you call a taxi. You’re in no fit state to drive.’
    Ellis left her to collate the data and entered her own office. She dug the laptop out of her bag and mated it with the docking station, then went to make a coffee while it booted up. She came back to find the login screen waiting, and she entered her password and waited for the network to authenticate her credentials.
    Once in, Ellis clicked the icon to open the internal mail client and once again entered her password. She was rewarded with the news that she had ninety-three new emails to deal with.
    A typical Thursday morning.
    She began going through them, moving weekly reports into the designated folder and deleting the offer of revolutionary penis-enhancement drugs that had slipped through the spam filter. By the time she’d pigeonholed the last of the emails, no new wars had broken out and, apart from the continuing threat from ISIS, no new terror organisations had popped out of the woodwork overnight.
    Ellis returned to the weekly reports folder and printed each one, preferring hard copies to reading from a screen. As she dealt with each one, she visited the internal portal and added her electronic signature to sign them off.
    She was halfway through the last one when her desk phone buzzed.
    ‘Veronica, it’s Gayle.’
    ‘What brings you in so early?’
    ‘I got a call from the night watch,’ the Russian section leader said. ‘It’s something you need to see.’
    Ellis promised to be down in a couple of minutes. She locked her computer and took the stairs down one level.
    Cooper’s door was already open, and she invited Ellis to take a seat before hitting the remote control for the wall-mounted television.
    ‘This is a recording of a news item that played on Tagrilistan’s national news channel early this morning.’
    The screen showed a man in his fifties wearing a plain grey jacket over a shirt and tie. He was speaking Russian. Ellis asked for a translation.
    ‘The Russian separatists in the country want to do a prisoner swap,’ Cooper said as she paused the playback. ‘They are willing to exchange their recent captive for the ninety-four Russian prisoners of war in Tagrilistan. They also want Milenko to cancel the signing of the trade agreement on the twenty-ninth.’
    ‘Hardly earth-shattering news,’ Ellis said.
    ‘Wait until you see who the prisoner is,’ Cooper said, and hit the Play button.
    A battered face under tousled hair appeared on the screen to the right of the talking head. One eye was swollen, and heavy bruising had puffed up the lower lip.
    Ellis’s hand covered her mouth as she recognised the man on display.
    ‘Andrew!’
    ‘They claim he’s a British spy caught operating illegally in their country, and they’ve set a deadline of five days,’ Cooper said. ‘If President Milenko doesn’t agree to their terms by next Tuesday . . .’
    There was no need to finish the sentence.
    ‘I’ll let the home secretary know,’ Ellis said, trying to gather herself. ‘Send me a copy of the recording and a transcript in English.’
    ‘There’s more,’ Cooper said. ‘We’ve got indications that the Russian withdrawal of troops back across the border appears to be nearly complete.’
    ‘Meaning?’
    ‘They could be paving the way for talks,’ Cooper said.
    ‘I thought Milenko was staunchly anti-Russian.’
    ‘He is, but if he were no longer in charge of the country . . .’
    It fit in with the assassination theory they’d been exploring, but Ellis wondered aloud why they would go to the trouble of kidnapping Harvey if they already had plans in place.
    ‘Contingency?’ Cooper offered. ‘Or it could be that they know Milenko’s stance. He’ll refuse to negotiate with the terrorists, which puts a British citizen in harm’s way. Just another way of destabilising the upcoming talks in London.’
    Ellis didn’t like the way things