In Secret Service by Mitch Silver..

I was wrong, in my previous post i mentioned i would finished the book by Sunday evening. I finished the book, Sunday afternoon around 2pm. I bought the book Saturday nite, read 15 chapters of it before went to bed.

Continued again after breakfast and did not stop until i finished reading it.




Excerpt from the book: 1997

It has been a beautiful summer day, but now it was after midnight and the well known couple just wanted to get back to the apartment for a few hours of sleep before returning to London.

The paparazzi were waiting in front of the hotel on the Place Vendome, so they hurried out the back, she in light-coloured trousers and a dark blazer, he in jeans and a leather shirt. Instead of their usual limousine they were bundled into a less consipicuous Mercedes 280S. The security man from the hotel drove the car. The bodyguard a former member of the parachute regiment who had down two stints in Northern Ireland, got in next to him and fastened his seat belt.

As always, time was of the essence. A couple of photographers on motorbikes were already alerting their colleagues to join the chase. the driver quickly pulled out into the rue de Rivoli but found a car stalled in the lane for the champs-elysees. So he made for the Seine and the tunnel under the Place de Alma, just as the men who had blocked the exit knew he would.

Nothing had been left to chance. The closed-circuit video cameras en route and the speed-enforcement ones in the Alma tunnel had all suddenly "malfunctioned" at the stroke of midnight. The man with the brake box was waiting behind the tunnel's ninth concrete post for his cue, the moment when the Kawasaki motorcycle would come into view.

At exactly twenty five minutes after midnight, the two stuntmen on the Kawasaki came tearing through the concrete maze ahead of the Mercedes and the recently painted white car, weighted down with cement blocks in the trunk, that was poking along the right hand lane. When the driver of the white car suddenly turned his wheel full to the left and rammed the Mercedes, the piercing screech of shearing sheet metal filled the tunnel as the two cars went door to door.

The driver of the Mercedes was fighting to regain control when the man on the back of the Kawasaki-the one wearing the special goggles-turned in his seat and aimed his weapon. The American made Surefire Dominator high-intensity light flashed its 460 blue-white lumens directly into the driver's eyes, forcing the reflex known as optic shutdown. Later, the first paparazzo to reach the scene would report a blinding light coming from the tunnel half a mile ahead of him.

Now the man crouching behind the pillar hit the switch on his "Boston Brakes" box- a misnomer, really, as it was the drivetrain and steering wheel on the Mercedes he was now controlling, not the brakes- and moved the joystick violently left, then right, then left again. The 280s jerked to the left, crossed to the right ahead of the white car, and then came back across the road toward oncoming traffic, smashing into the thirteenth concrete pillar and coming to a stop, facing the way it had came.

In the back seat of the wreck, the boyfriend was dead and the woman who knew too much would soon be joining him. It was simply a question of injecting the dying driver with the syringe of alcohol and chemicals, detaching the shortwave receiver from the Mercedes drivetrain, and to sell the white car story, salting the crash scene with a few broken Fiat Uno parts. The white car had already driven away, followed into the night by the men on the motorcycle. Another car that had been traveling behind the Mercedes now slowed just enough so the man with the brake box could get in. Then it too sped away before the first of the photographers reached the crash.

My take : This book has 435 pages of intense scenes which captivates readers from the beginning to the end.

Its about a young lady Dr Amy (Phd holder) receiving a car from a bank in Ireland. It seems the bank is closing down and the bank were looking for people who had safe deposits there. Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond) had a safe deposit there. He had left instructions that 50 years after his death (he died in 1964), the contains in the box shall be given to Dr Amy. But because the bank was on the verge of closing down, they had to put forward Fleming's request.

The adventure began when Amy opened the box and saw a bunch of documents and letters from Ian to her. Ian and Amy's grandfather was involved in one mission during the fall of Germany. Reason for writing to her (and to be opened after 50 years of his death), so that the characters that was in his letter to her won;t be alive any more.

But since the letter was opened about a decade too soon, some of the people are still alive and would not want to see what Ian has documented.

Once Amy had received the papers and started to read the letters, people started to die and even on her way back to US, she was being followed and nearly killed.

Letters written to her can really cause embarrassment to the US and British government, especially the British Government. Especially the 'real' reason in 1936, King Edward gave up his throne to marry an American divorcee. But in the book, the reason he gave up the throne is because he was too friendly with the Germans and simply give information to other people. He was a 'liabilty' to the British government.

Lovely book, the story is well written and could be 'true' but we will never know..:)