About the Book
In the United Kingdom, glowing red letters are appearing above the heads of some of the population. Their appearance forces one man to flee his home, while another sees them as an opportunity to get the power he craves. To the Prime Minister, they are just another reason to be blamed for something she has no control over. For a priest struggling with his faith, they might be proof that God exists.
Read an Excerpt
The flight attendant sat in the first-class lounge on the flight from JFK to Dubai. All was quiet. She could take a few moments to herself and relax. Looking around, she could see that all the passengers were sleeping. With no turbulent weather, the majority were likely to stay that way for the duration of the flight.
She watched as the duty barman ducked into one of the two toilets behind the bar. He shouldn’t be using them. They were off-limits to the crew. From the moment the passengers had boarded, he’d been working almost non-stop. The New Year’s Eve/Day flights were always busy for the bar staff. The start of this year had been no different.
Raising her arm, she activated the display on her smart watch. It was 1:17 am; the journey seemed to be taking longer than normal.
Shifting in her seat, she turned to face one of the many monitors built into the bulkhead walls. The screen showed an infomercial encouraging passengers to make purchases from the on-board duty-free shop. She’d watched it so many times she knew it off by heart. Pressing a button with a green map icon, she selected the location channel. The screen flickered as the image changed to show a small yellow plane positioned in the centre of a dark blue background. The plane was on a thin dotted white line showing the route the flight was taking. Towards the bottom of the screen, a small irregularly shaped area of green denoted a land mass.
We should be over the United Kingdom by now.
That meant the area of green must be somewhere north of the mainland, most likely the northernmost part of the Shetland Isles. If everything went well, she should land in just over six hours.
Halfway down the lounge on the right side, a red light appeared above one of the window seats. At first, she took no notice. She’d done enough flights over the last fifteen years to know that passengers carried a varied assortment of electronic devices. Most of them produced light in some manner. It took several seconds for her to realise the light couldn’t be the glow from a mobile phone or tablet screen. Normally, there would be a glow as the light from a screen hit the particles in the air and reflected off them. That wasn’t the case here. This light was different. Her curiosity piqued, she twisted in her seat in order to get a clearer look at the light.
Hanging still in the air was a red letter T. It looked to be almost twelve inches tall, eight inches wide at the top, and possibly had some depth, though she couldn’t be certain. She sat staring at it for several seconds, unable to understand what she was looking at.