CHAPTER 1: Friday

Blood spattered on Luke’s face, hands and shirt. There were spots of red on his glasses and a metallic taste in his mouth. Beneath his two fingers he could feel the pulse of the blood, pushing against his pressure. The ambulance was careening around a corner every few seconds.

“It was reported that the patient fell against the concrete supports of a park bench,” the paramedic barked to the emergency room team. “The patient is having convulsions that may have caused the fall, so it’s difficult to get accurate vital signs. A bystander was able to attend to the wound quickly, and he is holding pressure on the wound now. We understand the patient suffers from PTSD, but we don’t have any other health history.” 

The ambulance had been alternating between the full alert siren and the “hee-haw hee-haw” siren. The inside of the ambulance smelled different from the ones Luke was accustomed to. He tried to put his finger on it. Yes, the fingers, concentrate just on the fingers.

The A&E nurses were fast and focused when the ambulance pulled in. 

“I did my best to roll the patient onto his side to avoid a blockage of the airway while respecting the potential for a neck or spine injury in the fall,” Luke said as he tried to keep up with the nurses and the stretcher. But he could tell he was losing the attention of the nurses as they watched the patient’s vitals.

“Don’t mind them, they have what they need from us,” the paramedic said, nudging Luke to the side. “That bloke’s lucky to be in their care, and even luckier you happened to be on the scene. So, you were an EMT over the pond, were you?”

“I took my training while unemployed for a spell, but that was more than a decade ago. I didn’t get to use it much once I got back to work.”

A lady in green protective clothing grabbed Luke’s left elbow. “This way, please.” The paramedic followed Luke and the green lady to a cleaning area. 

“And what’s full-time work for an American who sits in Hyde Park, I must ask?”

As the nurse peeled off Luke’s bloody shirt and started scrubbing everything from the belt up, Luke said, “I’m a specialist working on the Initial Public Offering for British Mutual Insurance. I’m still a little jetlagged – asleep and awake at all the wrong times. So I thought I may as well enjoy the earliest part of the morning while I edited a document.” His tone became more clipped. “I need to get back to that straight away.”

“Well, my parents are British Mutual Insurance policyholders and I know they’re quite looking forward to getting shares from the IPO,” the paramedic chimed in.

“So now that I’ve been exfoliated, do I just go topless out into the world?” Luke joked in the direction of the woman in the scrubs who was now drying him off.

“T-shirts on the shelf over there, sorted by size.” It was as if she was asked the question routinely, which she probably was.

“Thank you,” he said sincerely as he pulled a red, long-sleeved tee over his head. His thoughts were already back to the world outside the emergency department. “I’ll need to grab my backpack out of the ambulance before you charge off on another call,” he added to the paramedic.

He got a confused look in return. “Pretty sure it was just you and the patient that got into the ambulance.”

Luke’s neck muscles tightened as he wondered when he had been separated from his backpack. He grabbed at his pocket and felt the horror where his phone wasn’t there either. He felt a tap on his shoulder.

“Mr Smith?” a well-dressed woman inquired politely. “I’m Mrs Mason from Admissions. I understand you treated the patient that came in with the…” she peered down through her reading glasses to a paper, “laceration to right temple.”

“Yes, I did.”

“We found a couple of Luke Smiths in our Emergency Services database, but none based in London.”

“I would show up on an EMT database in the US, but not here.”

“We have a very different system here.” She started spewing a long description of the National Health Service and the level of public scrutiny its practices were subject to.

He finally interrupted. “What do you put on the form when some random person becomes a first responder?”

She scowled, now both flustered and perturbed. “But you were the first person with emergency training to treat the patient. I will have to get my manager involved.”

He groaned as he felt himself being sucked into administrative quicksand.

— . —

The door burst open. The doors of investment banks tend not to do that. And if a door does burst open, it simply won’t be for the head of Mergers and Acquisitions. So when it did, Victoria Headley, the head of Silverthorne Staley’s Insurance Mergers and Acquisitions looked up, startled.

In front of her was a tall policeman. Beside him was the top man from British Mutual Insurance. Together, the two circled her. She stared up at them in confusion. 

To offset the risks to an investor when a company went public and offered stock in its business, there needed to be a granular level of research about the company. And that’s where Silverthorne Staley came in. It researched and examined and kicked over the stones to ensure that the investor was getting a price that was fair. At the moment, it was being hired by British Mutual Insurance to prepare all the reports for its initial public offering. Although hired by British Mutual, Silverthorne was independent. Autonomous. Respected. And that’s the way Victoria Headley liked it.

The policeman started to introduce himself to Vicky. However, Alaistair Drinkwater, Chief Executive Officer for British Mutual Insurance, cut him off.

He was shouting, his face getting so aggressively close to the woman that the cop shifted his weight in case Drinkwater crossed that very visible line between acceptable aggression and completely fucking not.

“Do you or do you not have the files! Where’s Luke Smith! This officer wants him!”

“I’ve called him, texted him and emailed him,” Vicky said assertively. While she stood to face them, she subconsciously eased away. She was remarkably contained given the circumstances. “I’m certain that not answering one’s phone is not grounds for arrest.”

“You’re right!” Drinkwater responded. “It’s you under arrest for stealing client data from BMI.” He grabbed her phone out of her hand. The policeman stepped up, carrying cuffs, while Drinkwater yelled, “Who did you sell it to!?”

As calmly as she could, Vicky announced, “Excuse me, I need to visit the ladies.” She lunged forwards, grabbed her handbag off the table and bolted for the toilet, only a few yards from the conference room. She locked herself in a stall and hurriedly sent a text to Luke from her personal phone: “There’s a policeman here with Drinkwater to arrest me! You need to find out what they are so paranoid about in that file of death claims. ASAP!”

Then she deleted the message from the sent folder. The policeman started banging on the door. Or maybe it was Alaistair Drinkwater. She quickly logged onto her office email but saw that she’d already been locked out. 

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Had she given Luke good advice? Had she put him at risk? The banging had become shouting. What on earth was going on here?

— . —

Six hours later, the staff pushed him out the door. Later, Luke realised he’d been left alone to quietly slip out, solving everyone’s problem. Instead, he’d waited patiently, sitting where he’d been told to sit. The room had been airless and hot. He’d tilted his head against the wall and closed his eyes. Jetlag caught up with him and he’d slept, surprisingly well all things considered. 

Finally he was shooed out. “If I can’t get back to the park to look for my laptop and phone, I’m going to have a blood pressure emergency,” Luke muttered to himself. If the backpack and phone were still somehow in Hyde Park, he’d have to call Vicky Headley, the leader of the IPO team, and explain why he’d been completely off the grid for hours and hours. 

He refused to even consider if the backpack had been stolen. The fallout would be … unthinkable. 

As the bench came into view, Luke saw Jocko, the man who’d been with the patient, still sitting there with the backpack right beside him. Luke sagged with relief. “Your friend is at St. Mary’s. He is in good care there,” he said as he got closer to Jocko. “His vital signs were stabilising once we got him to the ER.”

Luke knew Jocko was a member of a group of veterans who  suffered from PTSD. As stressful as this episode would be for anyone, he couldn’t imagine what it must be like for someone with those challenges. Jocko was still very distraught and smelled like he’d slept in a tin of old tuna. But he was an angel of mercy as far as Luke was concerned. “I’m so sorry I’ve been so long.” 

Jocko shrugged amiably. Luke reached inside his backpack. Both the phone and the laptop were still there. He could feel his own vital signs returning to normal. “Thank you so much for minding my bag. You have no idea how much that means to me.” 

“You have no idea what you just did means to that man. And to all of us at the camp.” Jocko extended his hand. His look of deepest appreciation and the feel of a calloused hand were things that Luke didn’t normally encounter in his financial circles. Both felt good. Pleased grins of mutual appreciation were exchanged. 

He wouldn’t have minded talking with Jocko, maybe having a walk around the camp, seeing if there was anything he could do – though he doubted there was. First though, he needed to reconnect with his boss at Silverthorne, Vicky. He turned the phone on and read the most recent text. His brow furrowed. He looked at the previous text: “That jerk Drinkwater from British Mutual threatened me. He thinks we stole data. I told him you needed to do a standard check, but he doesn’t get that.”

He scrolled through the earlier messages that began nearly six hours earlier by asking when he would be in the office, topolitely telling him to come in right away, to begging him to call in, to finally demanding he call her immediately. He couldn’t believe his eyes. 

At the end of the previous day, as part of the standard due diligence in work like this, he’d requested a data file from British Mutual Insurance to check against the death claims calculated from another source. Because they didn’t have the time to subdivide the file into what Luke needed and what he didn’t, the IT department had sent him the entire file with absolutely all of the information on every death claim, every name, every amount, every personal detail. There was no reason to believe Luke or anyone at Silverthorne would even look at the additional information that the full file contained. 

While he held his phone, it vibrated, startling him, and he dropped it on the pavement. That type of vibration indicated a news story on the British Mutual Insurance transaction had just hit the newswire. He picked up the phone and stared in disbelief at the picture of Vicky in handcuffs being led by a policeman. It was clear she was crying. 

What had he done to cause this? The guilt was like a punch to the gut.

Then anger invaded every fibre of his mind and body. She hadn’t done anything wrong! 

He scrolled down the article and almost dropped his phone for a second time. There was his own picture! He went back to the text of the article. It said he had stolen data and it supplied a good description: 5’11” with a slender athletic build and green eyes. It even mentioned his most distinguishing feature, his disfigured left ear. The article wrapped up by letting the reader know that he was still at large.