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      HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      Copyright © Brockhurst Publications Limited 2019

      Cover design: www.mulcaheydesign.com © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

      Cover images: Front cover © Julio Viard/Alamy (aircraft), Folio Images/Alamy (man)

      Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 978-0008333010

      Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008333027

      Version: 2020-04-07

       CURATOR’S NOTE

      Desmond Bagley’s novel Running Blind has a brilliantly gripping opening sentence: To be encumbered with a corpse is to be in a difficult position, especially when the corpse is without benefit of death certificate. As a teenager introduced to this master thriller writer by my older brothers, I was hooked. The Golden Keel, Bagley’s debut novel, came next on my reading list, quickly followed by The Enemy, Landslide and the rest of his exhilarating output. My hunger for more was only stopped by the untimely death of the author in 1983.

      Ever since, Desmond Bagley – or Simon, as he was known to family and friends – has been woven into my life in a variety of strange ways. Years after his death, I struck up an email correspondence with his remarkable widow Joan, who completed a couple of his unfinished manuscripts for posthumous publication, before she died in 1999. The baton was passed to Joan’s sister and brother-in-law, Lecia and Peter Foston, with whom I have had the pleasure of developing a delightful friendship over two decades.

      Meanwhile, I hassled Bagley’s publisher, David Brawn of HarperCollins, with a view to writing a biography (the brief book-cover rubric hardly does his extraordinary story justice). I wrote a two-part screen adaptation of The Tightrope Men, entitled simply Tightrope – which has yet to be made, if any producers are looking in. I followed with enthusiasm Nigel Alefounder, whose website desmondbagley.co.uk reveals the fine work he has done over many years to keep the Bagley flame alive.

      My heartfelt thanks and appreciation for their commitment and support go to all these people and more – including, of course, my own ‘Joan’, Tricia, to whom this book is dedicated.

      And then came the discovery of a ‘new’ Bagley manuscript among his papers, written in 1972 and subsequently archived in Boston, Massachusetts. Investigative researcher Philip Eastwood – who hosts the website thebagleybrief.com – found the novel there in the form of a typed first draft with extensive handwritten annotations by the author and his original editor, Bob Knittel. In addition, correspondence between the two showed in some detail the plans Bagley had for a second draft.

      I couldn’t be more thrilled and honoured to have been invited by David Brawn to implement those plans. Permissions and assistance have been very kindly forthcoming from the trustees of the Bagley estate, the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in Boston, and Sam Matthews and Leishia-Jade Finigan of Moore Stephens in Guernsey, without whose co-operation this book would not have seen the light of day.

      What follows is, unquestionably, a Desmond Bagley novel. The emendations may be mine; the brilliance is his.

       Michael Davies

       Dedication

       For Tricia – who else?