INTRODUCTION

My names is Johnny Roberts, well that’s not my real name, but then I have had more names than I can remember. I live in a house with no number, in a road with no name. I carried a gun for more than fifty years and used it more times than I care to think about.

After ten years as a Royal Marine Commando, taught on how to be aggressive and how to take life, I was flipped, to become a police officer with SCO19, the Counter Terrorist Specialist Firearms Unit, London, as a team leader. Both were occupations where I could legally carry a firearm, for good reason.

When I decimated the indoor assault course record at Hendon police college, Mr G, a person you will meet later, advised me not to show out so much, not to show my true skills, to be Mr average. He never really knew how hard that was to do.

But these were my day jobs, because I also worked covertly for an organisation that does not, and never has, existed. I carried a gun 24/7 because I upset a lot of people and became a target, as did my family. 

My covert role ended the prospects of people declared to be an enemy of the state. In my day job, as an experienced bodyguard and instructor, I shared that expertise with men and women who would become PPO’s (Personal Protection Officers) for the Royal Family, the Prime Minister, some Members of Parliament, visiting dignitaries, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, and many others.

In my day job I was team leader for the infamous Black Team, the team that brought a new style to firearms operations in the early days of the department and the first multiple shooting of ‘bandits’ in London.

 Sometimes it became necessary to deal with people protected by men or women, that I had trained, no easy task. 

Though I retired from my day job, it is more difficult to retire from an occupation that you never had. But I have been left with one final task to complete, not a simple one as it will involve others who, like me, would never retire. 

But my operational time ended when my link, for want of a better word, passed. All I received was coded message. Stand Down.

It was some time before I discovered this, as his link had also passed. My tenuous line to the organisation had been severed. Which was the pre-arranged signal to work on a new project that no one, for various reasons had been able to do, but which I had been prepared for should such an event occur. Can I do it? I don’t know, you’ll need to follow on and see.

That is how it works; you keep going until your link is broken. People like me find it difficult to retire.

But what is a person like me? A very hard question to answer, my story may explain a little, a lot, or nothing. 

It all begins with the young marine travelling to places he had never heard of, at the incident that led to his recruitment into an organisation that does not exist.