Assassination Day (2004)

Clive Egleton's Peter Ashton novel, first published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton and in the United States by St. Martin's Minotaur in August 2004, begins with the novelized memoirs of Ross Frazer, a dead intelligence officer. The London literary agent handling the manuscript and the New York bookshop owner it came from are both murdered, and Ashton, an assistant director of the Secret Intelligence Service, finds that a disgraced former colleague, Jill Sheridan, has gone missing. (Open Library)

Watches

Omega (unidentified model): Jill Sheridan is held in a windowless cell lit by a halogen lamp, and her captors have taken her wristwatch with her other belongings, so that she cannot tell the hour or the day (p. 164). When she is moved, blindfolded, she counts seconds to measure the journey and accuses her escort of stealing her Omega (p. 221). At the house of Damaris Theophilus she opens her suitcase and finds the watch wrapped in tissue paper on top of her clothes, and asks why the light is on: it is five past ten at night. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: The Omega wristwatch had been wrapped in tissue paper and placed on top of her clothes. (Clive Egleton, Assassination Day, scan cataloged as St. Martin's Minotaur, 2004, p. 224; her demand for the watch is on p. 221; Internet Archive scan OCR)