Echoes of the past: A Novella

The man by the fireplace had his face. James looked away. He should have looked longer.James Rowe is forty years old - a London designer with a quiet life and no reason to be anyone's target. He attends a private soirée in Paris, leaves early, and in the cold of the Île Saint-Louis, something brushes his wrist in passing. A contact so slight he barely notices it.By morning, the mark has begun to spread.A genetically targeted toxin, precision-engineered for a Russian oligarch, is now working through a body it was never meant for. As scientists race against the clock, anonymous packages arrive at James's London address: Victorian memoirs, each opened to a photograph of a man with his face. Three men. Three eras. 1895. 1942. 1983.Someone has been mapping his bloodline for a hundred and thirty years.In a Cold War archive hidden beneath Paris, the answer waits - and Programme Meridian, an intelligence operation older and stranger than any official record shows, has reached the end of its forty-year cycle.For the last time.