Laurie's father was an engineer who specialized in hydroelectric projects.  In 1985 he had signed a five year contract with Kenmore Rowton Ltd. and had shipped his wife and two children down to Gloucester where the firm had just won a major slice of the Severn Tidal Barrage scheme.  The success of that ambitious venture had let to Mr. Linton's being offered a permanent post with the company and, eventually, to the Towy High Dam, work on which had started in 1990.

Arthur Linton had long nurtured the hope that his son would follow him into his own profession.  To his way of thinking the time when electrical engineers would no longer be needed would be the time for the human race to shut up shop.  Laurie was inclined to agree with his father but, even so, when it had finally come to the point of deciding what he was going to do with his own life he had opted for medicine.  If Mr. Linton was secretly disappointed by this choice he concealed it admirably.

By the time Laurie was eighteen he would have been a contender in any high school election for the title of "Student Least Likely to set the World on Fire."  He would not have been the winner though, because there was something about him which steadfastly refused to fit into any ready-made category.  He was certainly not good-looking - his nose was to blobby for a start - and his wide, humorous mouth and his dark brown eyes seemed always to be savouring some secret joke, hovering on the brink of a grin.  Those he singled out for friendship also tended to be oddballs - in the crowd yet not of it - individuals in an age when the adolescent personalities seemed to come mass-produced from the moulds of the image-makers.

Somewhere along the line he had acquired the uncomfortable habit of refusing to accept things at their face value.  The word "Why?" featured prominently in his vocabulary and once a problem had engaged his attention he was apt to pursue it with remarkable persistence.  By the time he came to enter medical school he had - almost inadvertently - procured for himself a set of human values of which the majority of men are still ignorant when they are lowered into their graves.  Yet no one could have been less of a prig.  He enjoyed life, sampled whatever variety came his way, and seemed to relish the subtleties of the human personality.  He had, in fact, all the makings of an excellent doctor and his teachers were dumbfounded when, in 1996, he calmly informed them that he had decided to quit medicine and to join NARCOS.  Their sense of outrage - for it was nothing less - merely proved how little they really knew of him.

NARCOS - the familiar abbreviation for Narcotics Security - had evolved out of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (UNCND) and the endlessly proliferating national control machineries.  It was largely the creation of one remarkable man - D. K. Huberman - who had the vision and the energy to convince enough governments that the only way to combat the drug menace was to rationalize and co-operate.  Even so NARCOS would never have become a functioning reality had not certain of Huberman's enemies decided that he was becoming rather too much of a nuisance and arranged for him to fall three hundred feet to his death from a window in the Concorde Building in Brussels.