Under the Clock

An ordinary novelist. A second-hand desk. A secret that should have stayed buried.Daniel Mercer is forty-eight, reclusive, spectacularly ordinary and perfectly content with a life consisting of dark-fantasy novels, an increasingly musty flat and Ernest, the goldfish who listens to everything Daniel says and understands absolutely none of it.Then his therapist suggests he should take more risks.So Daniel goes to London Waterloo Station.He intends to sit beneath the famous clock, watch people and collect ideas for his next book. Instead, a mysterious woman approaches him, embraces him like an old friend and slips something into his pocket.A key.Not an ordinary key, either. An intricate mechanical object created decades earlier by legendary precision engineer Otto Falkenberg. Only one was ever made.And somehow, it belongs to Daniel’s desk.For seventeen years, Daniel has written at an old oak desk he bought for £45 from a charity shop. Green leather top. Six drawers. Five that open.One that doesn’t.Daniel never cared enough to find out why.Other people do.The desk once belonged to Tahir Erdem, an intelligence operative from an era when Istanbul was still officially known internationally as Constantinople. Hidden inside its steel-lined drawer is something governments and intelligence agencies have searched for across generations: an undeveloped roll of 110 film containing photographs of documents that were never supposed to exist outside secure archives.Suddenly Daniel’s pleasantly uneventful existence becomes considerably less uneventful.He is watched, followed, threatened and pursued across borders by people who assume he knows far more than he does.They’re wrong.Daniel knows almost nothing.He has never fired a gun. He can’t fight. He has no intelligence training and possesses none of the qualities normally associated with international espionage.What he does have is a brown suit, an old leather case, a notebook, a tendency to apologise when other people walk into him and the remarkable ability to be overlooked.Fortunately, the woman who gave him the key is considerably more capable.From Waterloo to Istanbul and back again, Daniel is dragged through a world of intelligence agencies, old betrayals, hidden loyalties and secrets people are prepared to kill to possess. Cars, boats, aircraft and motorbikes carry him farther from the quiet life he understands, while Istanbul overwhelms him with crowded markets, mosques, ferries, calls to prayer, smoke, coffee, spices and danger.And because Daniel is still a novelist, whenever nobody is trying to kill him, he takes notes.People. Places. Smells. Food. Conversations.Material for later.If there is a later.But the closer Daniel gets to the truth, the more uncomfortable the question becomes.Who should be trusted with a secret that nobody should possess?By the time Daniel finally understands what has been hidden inside his desk, he must make the first truly consequential decision of his life.And when everything is finally over, there may be only one sensible thing for a novelist to do with such an extraordinary experience.Write a book.After all, it was only a story.Wasn’t it? 6