Saints and Sinners

Chapter Seven

The Rosen Estate

Sanibel Island

Florida

Sean Fletcher lounged back in Jacob's old chair, watching a turtle walking slowly across the grass towards the water. It was making progress, step by step, unlike Fletcher. Inhaling his first cigarette of the day, he sighed and tried to clear his head of all the dark thoughts. No point in letting the ominous clouds of impending doom overtake him, he thought, because he just had to focus and concentrate. He turned his head as he heard one of the old sun-bleached boards creak, and saw Gideon Palmer emerge from the house carrying a tray of coffee.

"You read the report then? Brett is doing well?" Palmer said, putting the tray down on the table between them.

"He certainly seems to know what is going on...but not blowing his cover restricts the way we can use the information he provides?"

"Yeah...spies do cause their own problems?" Palmer said, his voice dripping with sarcasm as he bummed yet another cigarette. "But we have a new independent source that can confirm that five hundred female convicts flew over to Manchester airport, where the Order transport picked them up and delivered them to a training convent near sunny Blackburn? No Brett involvement in the leak, so we can use it?"

"Okay...fire one press release, with me available for media comment?"

"And we know that a hospital management specialist called Graham Balcombe visited the site in Boston with Connor Symonds...again an independent source?"

"Balcombe? Why do I know that name? Other than the fact that Brett mentioned him in his report?"

"He is married to Hugh and Caroline's oldest daughter...my niece, Norman?"

"Really?" Fletcher exclaimed, as he poured them both a coffee from the metal flask. "Small world, eh?"

"He flew here on a three day consultancy visa...but the paperwork has been lodged with the immigration department for a residency visa for him, his wife and their two daughters. It lists his intended temporary address as the British Ambassador's residence?"

"Brett intimates that his expertise is setting up new hospitals?"

"Yes...I followed up on that a bit...he is fifty years old, almost fifty-one, and he has spent the last ten years opening new hospitals all over Britain, using his own modular scheme. The Boston convent hospital is an exact replica of the British model, perfected by Balcombe. He worked out the optimal ratio of nurses to grunt labour."

"Nice guy, then?" Fletcher growled, and Palmer grinned at him.

"Cold, calculating professional...the convent is built into the hospital, so that the nuns are right there...no wasted time travelling...cells, showers, canteen, chapel, hospital, like a little conveyor belt...once a nun is inside, she never has to go outside again?" Palmer explained as he showed Fletcher a floor plan of the new convent. "Symonds has employed Balcombe to deliver a rapid roll out...once they get one up, the plan is to open one a month?"

"Okay...I need to start talking about this...and you can get busy whipping up some local objections in Boston? We could do with a few more demonstrations?" Fletcher said, reaching for his phone. "I have a reporter from the New York Times arriving in an hour...I'll maybe give her a bit of an exclusive?"

"Sounds good to me...it looks like Brett and Grace will have my niece as part of their little set pretty soon?" Palmer sighed, and Fletcher nodded, feeling for his friend and missing their communications with Slade and Blackstone just as much as the Professor. People tended to forget about Caroline Blackstone. They had all been fighting to get Brianna and Caitlin back at first, and then when they got Bree and Gideon out of Britain in twenty-twenty-four, their focus remained on his little sister, but Caroline was stuck there too. She was obviously safer with Hugh Blackstone, but never safe. And Palmer had not been able to stay in regular contact with them for many years. He had obviously never even met his nieces, or their husbands, so it would be weird for him having Catherine in Washington.