It took hours for Wendy to disentangle herself from the investigation, even with a Home Office thief-taker ID card and the HiveCo lawyer’s assistance. One of the bank employees and four civilians had been wounded, two of them seriously enough they might not survive. Two of the AK-toting thugs had died at the scene, shredded by the shotgun-wielding maniac. The police were collectively furious and confused, and Wendy had contributed to the fracas in a small way, peppering the inner door and walls of the bank with arrow holes. Luckily everything had been caught on camera and the duty solicitor’s pointed comments about self-defense and the relative lethality of fully automatic weapons versus an imaginary bow and arrow finally got through to the Inspector in charge. Wendy was released under caution after four hours of questioning, with a stern admonition not to leave the country and to present herself at the local nick within forty-eight hours for a full deposition.
(That she had until two years earlier been one of the Met’s own was not a point Wendy brought up: it might have led to uncomfortable questions about why she was no longer on the force, not to mention what the blithering hell was she doing engaging in a firefight with suspected terrorists. Best let sleeping dogs—and past careers—lie.)
“Let me get this straight,” Mary, the duty solicitor, said, “you were on the scene to interview the bank manager about a previous robbery, when you spotted the bank robbers on the CCTV feed from the front of the branch. Let’s call them Group A.”
“Yes.” Wendy nodded encouragingly.
Mary nibbled the end of her propelling pencil. “You asked Mr. Granger to lure Group A into an office, and were in the process of arresting them when a different group of robbers—armed ones, let’s call them Group B—showed up.”
“Exactly. I was waiting for Group A to reveal what they were after before I arrested them.”
“And then—” Gibson began.
“I made a risk assessment, that four thugs with automatic weapons—they were shooting by this point—were a far greater danger to the public than the two unarmed suspects I was with, so I temporarily confiscated the item that Group A were interested in, then attempted to get them out of the bank so I could arrest them without fear of Group B intervening.”
“But there was a third party. Let’s call him Individual C.”
Wendy cringed. She’d never actually seen Individual C, but she’d heard the ear-bleeding crash of his shotgun, even over the roar of Group B’s guns. “He made his presence known.”
“What happened next?” Mary scribbled shorthand notes on her pad as she waited for Wendy to continue.
“Individual C shot out the lock on the corridor door. I assessed that Individual C—or members of Group B, if any survived—would be entering the corridor shortly, and they wouldn’t be looking for tea and sympathy. So I shot first, not aiming at people, just suppressive fire.”
Mary waited, but when Wendy didn’t fill the silence, she moved on to the next question. “According to the police you were unarmed when they apprehended you. What happened to your gun?”
“Oh, I don’t need a gun to shoot people…”
Mary sighed and massaged her forehead. “Run that by me again?”
Gibson cleared his throat. “Ms. Deere is a transhuman, class three, one of our augmented Field Investigators. Her ability is what we call a somatic illusionist.”
“I can make imaginary things,” Wendy tried to help.
“She creates illusions,” Gibson clarified. “Illusions that are tangible enough you can weigh them or hit somebody over the head with them. They don’t last very long if she loses physical contact with them—a couple of seconds—and she can’t make anything complicated or very big, but she’s never unarmed.”
“Side-arm baton.” Wendy raised her right hand and produced her nightstick with a flourish. “Or, in this case, a lightweight compound bow and as many arrows as I can shoot before my arm falls off.”
The solicitor froze. “You went up against armed robbers with a bow and arrow?”
Wendy shook her head. “Not exactly—I just fired enough arrows down the corridor to make the robbers think twice about storming it while I evacuated everyone through the fire exit.”
“I think I see why the police are having a hard time working out the sequence of events.” Mary was keeping it professional but Wendy could tell that the solicitor was having a hard time believing her story. “What happened next?”
“The bank should have the CCTV recordings from the interior? I’m pretty sure they also had a couple of cameras overlooking the fire exits and the back alleyway. Um.” Wendy glanced at her boss for confirmation.
Gibson nodded. “We’re getting access,” he said. “Continue.”
Wendy took them through the sequence with the weird and abrupt wave of existential nausea that had swamped her, the teenage kid’s uncanny ability to pick the pocket of an armed and alert thief-taker, then their escape in the getaway car and her abortive pursuit on imaginary rollerblades. “Did you run the plates—”
“Yes. Cloned,” Gibson announced.
“Well fuck.” Wendy was abruptly out of self-restraint. “After all that effort—”
“First things first.” Gibson laid a restraining hand on her forearm. “What’s the legal picture looking like?”
“Well.” Mary the duty solicitor smiled like a rodent preparing to sink its teeth into the ball of an unsuspecting human’s thumb. “Let’s tackle the worst case analysis first. The police can charge you with carrying an offensive weapon. They can also charge you with reckless endangerment. Theft or handling stolen goods would be a bit of a reach—”
“Excuse me?” snarled Wendy.
“—Did you or did you not take an item from a safe deposit box that had been procured under false pretenses?” Mary shrugged: “I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, channeling my inner Crown Prosecution Service jobsworth in search of an easy conviction. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that one would fly because you were given custody of the box by someone in a position of lawful supervision—Mr. Granger—and took the item for temporary safe-keeping in the presence of known criminals, with the intent of returning it. The offensive weapon charge I’d defend by taking the position that, as a transhuman, it’s a manifestation of your person, and you can’t reasonably set it aside any more than an Aikido black belt could reasonably be expected to refrain from using their skills in self-defense when attacked. The outcome … I’d say it depends on how good a barrister we could get for you, and whether the judge got up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. A toss-up, in other words. The hard bit is the reckless endangerment, but it’s all on CCTV, and as you weren’t aiming at anyone in particular…?”
“Who, me? Nope, never.”
“Good, then we have at least a mitigating factor to set beside the thugs with highly illegal automatic weapons who were shooting at you. No, Ms. Deere, the police are highly unlikely to charge you—not unless they have some reason to hold a grudge against you.” She put her pen down on her notepad for emphasis, and smiled brightly.
Wendy offered her a strained smile in return. “We’ll just have to see, won’t we. Sir?”
“I suppose so.” Gibson didn’t sound happy. “I can’t afford to have you off the job because some randos with heavy artillery took a dump in our punch bowl. This pilot program is too important.” He glanced at Mary: “You don’t need to hear this.”
“Don’t worry, I know when I’m not wanted.” Mary stood as she gathered her papers. “I’ll get this written up and you can call me if anything comes up. Be seeing you, I’m sure.” She closed the door carefully behind her.
“Pilot program.” Wendy gave Gibson a hard stare. “How many other transhuman investigators do you have, sir? I mean, surely you must have more than—”
“—How many transhumans do you think there are who’ve done full police training, worked the beat, and passed their detective exams?”
She was about to say scores, surely? But something gave her pause. “How many?”
“Two years ago, when the Home Office set up the TPCF and set this whole ball rolling, they started with one. You might have heard of him: Officer Friendly. Six months down the line, when TPCF was rolled into the Met, they were up to eight. But three of them were borrowed spooks, and the other four were still probationers. I gather they’ve only been full constables for a few months. You’d already left the force, otherwise you’d have been up for the world’s fastest promotion to detective inspector.”
She stared at him. “What you’re saying is, I should have held out for more money.”
To his credit, Gibson looked abashed. “It’s a pilot program. We had to start somewhere, so we started with you. Management assigned you the codename ABLE ARCHER: that you’re a named asset should tell you something. Once we can recruit some more transhumans, and once you’re past your probationary term, you’ll be in line for promotion. We’ll need someone to take charge of training and draw up professional standards in conjunction with HR. As all that stuff is management-level, I’ll be able to push through a re-grading, then shake the money tree again—if you’re willing to rise to the challenge. But right now, while you’re doing a gumshoe job, you get gumshoe wages. Is that clear?”
“Clear enough.” She shrugged. “It was worth a try.” Gumshoe wages don’t pay enough to put up with gangsters unloading Kalashnikovs at me, she added silently.
“So.” Gibson tilted his office chair back. “Any questions?”
“Let’s see. Do we have any leads on Group A, after you made me abandon the pursuit?”
“Maybe.” Gibson twitched the mouse on his computer, squinting at something on the screen. “Incidentally, engaging in an unsupported solo pursuit of a gang of escaping bank robbers may be brave, but another word for brave is foolhardy. You’re not in the Met any more, you’re not a sworn officer of the law, you’re not protecting the public, and I will be really annoyed if you put yourself in hospital for six months by engaging in unauthorized heroics. Like inviting some thug to run you over with an SUV.” Gibson’s tone was even and he didn’t raise his voice, but Wendy sat up straight as a flush of embarrassment stained her cheeks.
“Sorry sir. Won’t happen again.” She paused. “If I’m not protecting the public and upholding the law, what am I doing?”
“You’re here to take in thieves we’re contracted to arrest, Deere; it’s a business. You’re a fancy version of what our trans-Atlantic cousins call a bounty hunter. You are not paid to put your neck on the line. If you want to play at being a superhero, do it on your own time and don’t come crying to me when it all goes horribly wrong.” His cheek twitched. “So. What exactly was it about the safe deposit box that attracted our targets’ interest?”
“A letter, sir.” Wendy gave him a slow look. “I didn’t get to read much of it, but it was addressed to an Eve Starkey, and it seemed to be an invitation to participate in an auction. Something about sealed bids and a rare manuscript. I, uh, got a number and a description, but no title or author? The letter referred to it as the AW-312.4 concordance.”
Gibson leaned towards his computer and started rapid-fire typing. “AW-312.4? Okay, I’m actioning a search.” He paused, then glanced at her. “This is major. More than one group wants that thing and they’re willing to spray bullets around to get it. We may be pulled off the case—depends how Management assess the risk level. Remember, we’re not cops and you’re too valuable to put your life on the line. It’s just a job. There are some sources I can consult and I’ll get back to you if anything shakes loose, but that’s all.”
“Sources you—”
“Not police, not Home Office. You aren’t cleared for those contacts, at least not yet.”
“Oh. Then what should I do now?”
Gibson blinked. “I don’t know—why don’t you go and write up today’s events while they’re still fresh in your mind? Then … yes, take the rest of today off, and tomorrow as well—I’ll write it up as sick leave. It can’t have been any fun getting caught up in all that. If you need a referral for counseling—”
“That won’t be necessary, sir,” Wendy said hastily. “So, uh. I’ll go write stuff up, then go home. See you the day after tomorrow, I guess?”
“Yes. Dismissed.” Gibson’s eyes were focussing on his computer as she stood. Already forgotten, she headed for the cubicle she’d been assigned for desk work. You are not to put your neck on the line on company time. Message received, loud and clear. But Gibson had overlooked something very important when he told her not to take risks.
This thing with the transhuman gang, the impresario and his not-husband and their teenage sidekick and dreadlock-rocking getaway driver, wasn’t a job; it was personal. It had turned personal the moment they broke her ward, slammed her with mind control mojo, and stole the bid letter out of her inside pocket. Right after she got them out from under the guns of Group B and Automatic Shotgun Dude.
And Gibson was smart enough to notice and devious enough to want some baked-in deniability when she threw down with them. Otherwise, why else would he have given her the day off?
“I can’t believe we did that! Fuuuuuuuu…!”
“Chill out, kid. We escaped, didn’t we?”
“Did you see her on those blades? Where the shitting hell did she get them from anyway? She was chasing us like the fucking T-Rex from the first Jurassic Park—”
“She saved our lives.” Imp tiredly cracked the ring-pull on one of Doc’s cans of highly regrettable lager. “Sure, she was trying to arrest us, but she wasn’t trying to shoot us.”
“She saw our faces,” said Doc. “Fuck. Who am I kidding?” He ran shaky fingers through his hair. “It was a trap and she was waiting for us and we sprang it. She probably knew what was in the deposit box all along.”
“I need to talk to Eve—” Imp cleared his throat—“our employer. No way did she set this up, but there might be a leak in her organization.” She’d told him as much, he just hadn’t felt the need to share it with his family. He was looking out for them, he rationalized: Why worry them needlessly? Now he was regretting it as three pairs of eyes swivelled his way. He took a swig of beer. “What?” he asked.
“There were guns, Jeremy!” Game Boy’s voice rose to a squeak: “Fucking guns!”
“Yeah.” Del was uncharacteristically repressed. “I didn’t sign up for guns, man.”
“Neither did I,” Imp pointed out, but nobody was listening to him.
“We should ditch this job,” Doc proposed. “You can’t make movies if you’re dead, can you? Remember rule number one? Don’t die. If you break rule one, you automatically lose at everything. Don’t do it, Jeremy, it’s not worth it.”
Imp sighed. “Yeah, I guess.” He took another mouthful of regrettable beer. “Um. This.” He brandished the letter they’d found in the deposit box. “It’s probably worth something to Eve anyway, so I should maybe go and haggle with her. See if she’ll pay extra for it. But you’re right, this shit isn’t worth what she’s paying us.”
Del’s sharp-eyed gaze tracked to the letter. “So what’s it say?”
“Bear with me…” Imp smoothed the crumpled paper out. “It’s pretty much what I was expecting: an invitation to submit bids for a map leading to the location of a lost manuscript. There’s some crap about a Darknet marketplace—”
“Let me see that.” Game Boy grabbed at it and the paper somehow slid through Imp’s fingers. “Huh. Good luck tracing this, it’s almost definitely offshore. Bids with a deposit paid in US dollars to a numbered bank account in the Cayman Islands, to be held in crow—no, escrow, whatever the fuck that is—”
“It means the bank holds the money and releases it to the—”
“Enough already.” Imp flapped his beer-unencumbered hand: “I hear you. We don’t like the guns, we can’t go any further without spending a metric fuckton of money that we don’t have, so we’re out of the game, yes? Are we all agreed? So all that remains is for me to sell this to Eve for as much extra dosh as I can guilt-trip out of her. Yes?”
“Yes!” Game Boy shouted at him excitedly.
“Great.” Imp necked the rest of his can, then chucked it atop the overflowing pile in the far corner of the room. “I’m going out. Give me that,” he added, taking the letter back from Game Boy. “Don’t wait up.”
Eve was not happy to be summoned by her brother. She was even less pleased by his choice of meeting place, even though it was within easy walking distance. “You did not bring me here for the coffee,” she hissed. “It’s terrible!”
“It’s Costa.” Imp shrugged. “Would you prefer Starbucks?”
Eve’s gaze flickered briefly to the Gammon she was test-driving today. He stood close to the entrance, furtively sipping the spiced vanilla chai latte she’d inflicted on him, as if he was scared it would cost him his man card. (He’ll never do, she decided, what if an assassin ambushes me in the fitting rooms at Dolci Follie?) “You did this to punish me for something,” she guessed, projecting wildly.
“Busted.” Imp smiled crookedly. Today he wore his normal art-student-gone-to-seed costume: a beautifully tailored wool coat that featured oil stains and a Frankensteinian line of stitches across the shoulders, paint-spattered jeans, and a once-smart dress shirt.
“So what is it?” she demanded. “Did you get the book?”
“Nope.” He reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a creased envelope which he placed in front of her, oblivious to the Gammon frantically scrambling for his concealed pistol. “This is the bid letter you wanted me to retrieve. They want funds to be placed in escrow. I can’t proceed any further.”
Eve smiled. “Leave it to me.” Behind Imp, the Gammon began to relax.
“No, I don’t think you understand. I can’t proceed any further.” Imp glowered at her. “We were made, Eve, we nearly got caught! A bunch of thugs with guns hit the bank while we were in the back, they were clearly after the same thing, and there was an undercover cop waiting to arrest us. Explosions! Machine guns! Car chases! Not my cup of orange pekoe at all.” He gesticulated dramatically, nearly spilling his espresso.
It all sounded a bit overblown to Eve. “Are you exaggerating?” she asked, raising one perfectly threaded eyebrow at him.
“Am I—” He recoiled indignantly, the picture of aggrieved innocence.
“It’s just that you have a history of, shall we say, creative confabulation. Remember the hijacking incident?”
“I was eight.”
“You cleared out an entire airport terminal! And you kept doing it. There was that time when we went to the zoo and you gave lollipops made from energy drinks to the chimpanzees—”
“It was hot! I didn’t like to see them suffer. And I was drunk.” He crossed his arms defensively. “Right now I’m sober. The bank was full of lunatics with assault rifles, sis. I don’t like it when bad men point big guns at me,” he said plaintively. “I should have listened to—”
“Wait.” She laid a slim, cold hand on his wrist. “It’s going to be all right. Just give me a second to process this.”
Eve picked up the letter and read it carefully. “This looks … useful, yes. I can deal with the money side of things, you don’t need to worry about it.” She reached into her handbag and pulled out her phone, photographed the letter, and emailed it to her duty assistant, along with brief instructions. “Bear with me.” If her kid brother was not exaggerating for effect, then there was indeed an adversary at work, which meant she needed to get a handle on the book fast. The BBC news app had a story about—her eyes widened before she managed to freeze her face. A hot, shivery feeling rippled up her back, prickling sweat springing out under her blouse. Three dead in bank bloodbath. “Okay, I can see why you might be a little upset.”
“Upset—”
Eve flashed him a sympathetic smile. “If I had any idea this was going to happen I wouldn’t have sent you,” she said, putting every microgram of sincerity she could muster into her reassurance. “But it’s done now. I was going to authorize 20K for getting hold of this note, but in view of unforeseen circumstances I’m going to double that. Forty thousand pounds, okay? Where do you want me to send it?”
“We agreed eighty thousand.”
“Eighty thousand for the entire job—for getting the book. This was just the first step, but, fair do’s, it turns out it was a pretty big step: bigger than I expected.” Eve allowed her cut-glass diction to slip back into the more relaxed dialect of their shared childhood, feeling a hateful pride in her ability to manipulate Jeremy so easily despite the passage of time. Nevertheless, a pang of conscience stabbed at her for endangering him. “Forty thousand puts you not too far off your funding goal, doesn’t it? If you want to dump me and bail on the job, I’m not stopping you.”
Imp shook his head. “Look, it’s not just me, sis. I’ve got to think about my homies. They’re really upset. If it was just me, and if you could take care of the troublesome details—” he brushed imaginary lint from his sleeve—“I could see my way to helping you out. But we’ve got a thief-taker on our tail now, know what I mean? We work as a team. I can’t do this job on my own, and they’re going to flat-out refuse if there are guns involved. Or thief-takers. Have you ever seen a public hanging? I mean for real, not on TV?”
“Good point.” Eve chewed her lower lip pensively, quite forgetting her demeanor. “But I think the thief-taker may turn out to be good news. If it was real cops we might have a problem, but thief-takers—it should be easy enough to pay them off. They’re all private sector contractors. Did you get a name? As for the gunmen—leave them to me.” A thought struck her and she tittered quietly, then stopped when she saw her brother’s expression. “What?”
“You scare me when you laugh like that.”
She smiled. “I just thought, my boss owns a couple of private security companies. After I buy out the thief-taker who’s looking for you, I can have them sort out you and your friends’ criminal background checks and actually hire you—on payroll, as thief-takers in your own right—to hunt down the gang of transhumans that hit Hamleys toy shop. Wouldn’t that be priceless?”
Imp’s face was such a picture that she couldn’t hold back another giggle.
“You don’t have to do that,” she told him when she regained control, “but the best way to short-circuit an investigation is to take it over and investigate yourself, don’t you think? Anyway, I’ll deal with the thief-taker. Then I’ll bid on the treasure map. Meanwhile, I want you to sell your playmates on the idea that they’re going to get paid extra and nobody is going to shoot at them—I’ll provide security if there’s even the slightest whiff of trouble. Will you do that for your sister? Special favor, Jerm? Pretty please?”
“Stop batting your eyelashes at me, it’s not even remotely convincing … And yes, dammit, I’ll try, seeing it’s you who’s asking. I’m not promising anything, though. Right now they’re feeling burned.”
School was out but, as Wendy was learning, being Head Prefect in ABLE ARCHER class gave her special privileges—like being able to raid the classroom supplies cupboard for her own projects.
Under the watchful eyes of the New Management coalition, the previous government’s bonfire of red tape had been replaced by a blast furnace, principally fueled by any regulations that got in the way of big money doing whatever the hell it pleased. Loopholes in gun control laws for licensed security guards were the least of it. Data protection and privacy regulations had gone the same way as planning permission and habeas corpus, and HiveCo Security could tap into all sorts of interesting databases … such as the ANPR system used to levy a congestion charge on traffic entering the controlled zone around London, the Highways Agency traffic cameras monitoring major junctions, and even some weird-ass camera network called SCORPION STARE that seemed to have nodes everywhere. Shodan said it ran on IP addresses owned by the Ministry of Defense, but that was obvious bullshit. I ought to get a poster for the office wall, she mused: Judge Dredd: I am the Law.
Speaking of Shodan, HiveCo had a horrifyingly expensive corporate account on the internet-of-things search engine, and once Wendy discovered it, she was fascinated. Baby monitors, color-cycling light bulbs, shop CCTV systems, HD television sets with unpatched operating systems and unchanged administrator passwords: they were all there, leaking secrets incontinently on the public internet if you knew where to point your web browser. The HiveCo corporate feed could search by geographical location, and there was a plugin for Google Maps. Wendy could drill into London using Street View, ask for unsecured cameras in the neighborhood she was investigating, then window-peep to her heart’s content.
It was probably still illegal, but who was going to call her on it in this time of 40 percent cuts to local government—and policing—budgets? If a free and frank exchange of ballistic projectiles in a bank robbery/bloodbath wasn’t enough to get her a charge sheet, then she was unlikely to catch any shit for snooping on smart toilets.
Wendy wrote up her report in a blazing hurry then hung around her cubicle for a long time, snooping on camera feeds. Eventually she found a view of the back of her own head, disappearing down an alleyway (the view inconveniently barricaded by a row of overflowing bins). She picked up the trail in the high street, where a black Porsche SUV glided along in monochrome silence, pursued by an angry woman on roller-blades. She glimpsed herself weaving in and out of oblivious pedestrians, jumping into the street to avoid a pram, leaping back onto the pavement to dodge a delivery van. The SUV turned right across traffic to dodge down a street running past a park. Right on cue, the woman on skates dismounted, stumbling to a panting halt on the pavement as the order to break off pursuit reached her.
Wendy skipped from camera to camera, swearing whenever she hit a blank spot or a gap in the record—too many systems still only recorded in low-def, or even spooled to tape—but she kept following the getaway car as it cruised past Kensington Park and slowed. She froze a frame in which a door swung open, scrubbed forward a couple of seconds and counted fewer indistinct heads, then backed up.
There. Him. She spotted the teenager in the hoodie crossing the road behind the SUV, heading into the park. She bookmarked and carefully saved the stream, then moved on. No more flung-open door footage, but one fewer head: the flare of a coat, a familiar figure glimpsed from behind, walking along the pavement behind the car. She followed him to a zebra crossing, then a footpath. London’s parks were heavily instrumented, a legacy of IRA bombing campaigns during the early 1990s. The municipal cameras were crap but they let her track Not-Bernard-Harris and Kid-in-Hoodie halfway across the park, in the direction of the mews behind Kensington Palace. Then she hit a blind spot. There was a dead zone where none of the cameras were working and nobody had fixed them because it was all outsourced these days, including monitoring the outsourcing agency’s performance and deliverables, so why bother when you can spend your maintenance budget on comfy office chairs and a C-suite pay raise? Or maybe there was something more sinister than everyday corruption and negligence at work. Hmm.
Fuming, Wendy dropped a bunch of pins around the target area on the street map. Then she went back to tracking the cute getaway woman with the dreads and the infuriatingly insouciant attitude as she drove away from the park. Just a kilometer further away she parallel-parked the Cayenne neatly, then got out and walked a hundred meters and entered a tube station. Which would have been great for further surveillance if only the cameras in the lobby of that particular station had been working, but somehow Getaway Girl managed to vanish inside during a very precise six-minute interval when there was no monitoring because the computer that controlled the station’s cameras was installing a Windows update and rebooting.
It was almost as if her target had known.
Wendy pushed her chair back from the desk and stretched to ease the crick in her neck. She blinked furiously, eyes watering from a couple of hours staring at a too-cheap monitor, and checked the time on her phone: it was nearly half past six. At least she had tomorrow off work, thanks to Gibson not being a total tool after she’d nearly gotten her ass shot off. She’d go home and cook herself dinner, maybe catch up on the washing, and have an early night. Then tomorrow she’d go for a walk in the park and see what she could find.
Back in her subterranean den Eve allowed herself a private Two Minute Hate—at Chez Bigge, one screamed silently in the privacy of one’s own head if one knew what was good for one: all the walls had ears, not to mention eyes and speech stress analyzers—then, with every outward appearance of calm, she placed the bid letter on her desk and tried to stare it into submission. When that failed she busied herself with make-work, directing one of the less unreliable members of her staff to identify the thief-taker at the bank—best to buy off the pursuit, as long as they were clueless about the manuscript. But finally she ran out of delaying tactics. So she took a deep breath, moistened her lips, adjusted her telephone headset, and made the unavoidable call.
Rupert answered the phone unusually quickly. “Yes?” He sounded irritable.
“My Lord.” He liked My Lord as a title, almost as much as he liked Master or Boss. “It’s about the rare manuscript. The acquisition is still in progress, but I’ve encountered some pushback, and I need clarification on how to proceed. Is this a convenient time?”
“Not terribly, no.” Rupert sounded distracted. “Don’t stop, get on with it,” she heard him tell someone else. “Ah, good.” A shuddering gasp. “Talk to me, Eve.”
Oh God, he’s with a rent boy again, she realized, or maybe a call girl, or—Rupert spread his affections widely, and wasn’t terribly happy to be interrupted in the act—“Yes, My Lord,” she said, re-centering herself. “A rival firm is bidding high and there’s already a body count—they tried to preempt with extreme prejudice. They smell of siloviki to me, but it might be a double-blind. Anyway, I’ve acquired the tender but I think it’s time-critical and I’d like your permission to throw money at the problem.”
“Yes, I already heard about it from Dmitry in Smyrna; it makes sense that there would be competition from that direction. Ahh, ahh—yes, how much money?” He sounded slightly breathless. “Keep going,” he added.
“Twenty-five million should get their attention: Permission to escalate if it doesn’t? Of course we’ll repossess most of that when we terminate the acquisition process,” she added; “I’ll put Andrei on it.”
“Yes yes, that’s great, do it, do it—I’m talking to you, Eve, not you there. I mean here. By the way, Eve, what are you wearing?”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m in my purple leather bodysuit,” she began, “and the thigh-high boots you bought me in Cannes.” She extemporized on the fly, narrating a fictional fetish session for her master while he pleasured himself upon his boy, girl, or bondage goat. He eventually climaxed with a glutinous ululation that made her skin crawl, then hung up on her.
Eve stared at the ceiling blindly. I’d like to wrap you up tight in cling film, she thought viciously, trying on a fantasy of her own for size. It wasn’t particularly sexy, but—I’d hang you from a meat hook in the dungeon until you’re ripe and buzzing with flies. Or maybe not. She closed her eyes and waited for the flames of rage and shame to subside. Right now Rupert was a long way away, and he almost certainly wasn’t spying on her through the cameras in her office, since he hadn’t commanded her to undress or masturbate for him. He didn’t respect his chattels’ personal boundaries, and for the time being that category included her. We’ll see what you say when the table is turned, she promised herself, and jotted down a brief reminder for her future self: add observe subordinates’ personal boundaries (where reasonable) to her list of policies when she seized control. Then she spent a soothing five minutes on the internet, pricing up elastrator devices for Rupert.
Next she took a deep breath and placed another call. This one used a Darknet voice server to connect to her personal concierge at a market-oriented Advanced Persistent Threat headquartered in Transnistria: a criminal enterprise so dangerous that the FBI had offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for anyone who could take them down.
“Hello, Andrei? This is Eve, Mr. Bigge’s executive assistant. How are you today? I need the services of an escrow agent with a sideline in post-acquisition repossessions…”
When in doubt, follow the detectives.
The Bond had obeyed this rubric on other track-and-trace jobs and found it to be worthwhile. This time it was turning out to be problematic.
After overcoming the minor obstacle posed by the unreadably ancient hard drive—the lab technician he’d procured from the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park had been pathetically eager to cooperate after the second fingernail—he’d been able to establish the details of Bernard’s banking arrangements. No loose ends: he dutifully buried both body and hard drive platters (after giving the latter a good scrubbing with steel wool and denting them with a hammer) before tooling up and driving to Kensington High Street, whereupon he encountered another minor obstacle in the shape of an armed robbery in progress. The oppo had form and enthusiasm but precious little technique. He tsked silently to himself as he garotted the sentry in the back alley, shoved the corpse in a recycling bin, and cut the data cables to the bank. Then he adjusted his tie, straightened his lapels, and nipped round the front to make his appearance.
The Reservoir Dogs re-enactment society went down hard. The Bond wasn’t self-indulgent enough to hang around for Mexican stand-offs and long expletive-filled soliloquies. His plan was simple: grab the document, go full Terminator on any witnesses, and get out. But the plan went off the rails immediately after he unloaded a breaching round into the door to the back offices. Some assclown wanted to play Robin of Sherwood. Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem, but Robin was rocking it like he was snorting bath salts: he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of arrows and they flew thick and fast.
The Bond, not being suicidally inclined, declined to storm a narrow corridor under beaten fire. But now he encountered a snag. Not being sartorially challenged, he hadn’t thought to pad out his pockets with flash-bangs: they ruined the hang of his jacket. So he had to wait for a lull in the re-enactment of Agincourt before he stuck his Atchisson AA-12 around the corner and sent half a magazine of HEFA rounds downrange. And it turned out he’d waited just a second too long. The rain of baby fragmentation grenades stripped the wallpaper very efficiently—the bank’s shopfitters could thank him later—but they failed to flay the flesh from the bones of his enemy because Robin Hood evidently moonlighted as the Scarlet Pimpernel.
By the time he’d searched the offices and made it to the back alleyway the alleyway was empty. He swore bitterly and tossed the assault shotgun in the paper recycling bin. Then he marched out onto the high street, pondering his options.
“Fucking amateurs,” he huffed in disgust as he banged out an update to the boss via secure email. Then he stalked off in high dudgeon to a five-star hotel in Knightsbridge, where he’d drink a dry martini or two, pick up a MILF in search of some rough, and await an update on the identity of Eve’s little helpers.
The following morning he rose before dawn, showered and dressed alone—the shag had staggered away at some point in the early hours, her scorecard updated—and checked in with HQ. Apparently Ms. Starkey had subcontracted the job of acquiring the manuscript to her brother, and it was he who had been in the back at the bank the day before. The Bond was intrigued to learn that Starkeys didn’t reproduce by laying their eggs in paralyzed estate agents. It made the leave no loose ends directive somewhat iffy, to say the least. On the other hand he now had a name for his Robin Hood: a HiveCo Security thief-taker codenamed ABLE ARCHER. Well, well, well. ABLE ARCHER was clearly extremely motivated to locate Ms. Starkey’s brother and his playmates. And so was the Bond. Starkey Jr. was very much off the grid, not showing up on the electoral register, the telephone directory, or any regular utility bills: his public footprint was so smudged that he might as well be sleeping under Waterloo Bridge. But he was in possession of the note, and absent authorization to go interrogate the ice queen the Bond was going to have to locate Jeremy Starkey himself.
A plan came together in his head. Obtaining ABLE ARCHER’s phone number was easily accomplished through channels at HiveCo—all it took was an enquiry from the Bigge Organization about her availability for hire. Once he had her mobile number it was trivially easy to submit a location services disclosure order through one of the Bigge Organization’s security subsidiaries, and with the LSDO in hand to start stalking her phone. Presently the Bond was back in the DB9, crawling towards Kensington Park. Where he was pretty sure ABLE ARCHER would attempt to pick up the trail come morning.
Meanwhile, Eve’s escrow fixer had been busy overnight.
“Ms. Starkey? This is Andrei. I have news for you—yes, yes, your offer to preempt is accepted by the vendor. I keeped the offer to fifty million dollars US, this is acceptable, yes? The vendor requires completion within eighteen hours. The deposit wire transfer to VX Bank (BVI) Limited in Tortola for five million, I email you the account SWIFT and IBAN details now—”
“Excellent!” Eve smiled and nodded, even though there was no way Andrei could see her. She paused her review of options for improving her zygomatic arch and checked her Outlook inbox. Sure enough, the email appeared as she watched. “I’ll review this and issue payment immediately. How is fulfillment to proceed?”
“The vendor will email me the collection instructions once the bank confirms the deposit is in their suspense account. I have local subcontractors on-site in the British Virgin Islands: you don’t need to be aware of the details. Title deeds to appropriate properties to the value of forty-five million, held by the usual vehicles. We transfer ownership as usual: wire me my fee and I take care of repossession of assets once you confirm goods are correct.” He chuckled drily. After a second or two, Eve joined him. “Do you ever get the feeling that you’re living in a sixties crime caper movie?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, I can’t say that I do,” she said indulgently. Her cheek twitched. “But don’t let me keep you! I have funds to transfer.”
It took a little more than twenty minutes for Eve to dole out the payments—even with her stratospheric degree of access, Finance required confirmation that Rupert had authorized her to transfer millions of pounds to an anonymous numbered bank account in a tax haven, and to spend another few dozen million buying title to certain opaque investment vehicles that owned luxury properties and transferring them to a law firm in another tax haven—but by nine o’clock (eleven hundred hours in Dubăsari) the money had hit the vendor’s offshore account, and Andrei phoned her back to confirm that the payment was confirmed.
“They have the deeds, many gracious thank-yous, Ms. Starkey, and I am forwarding you the encrypted email they sent me under your public key. When you have opened it you need to reply to the address in it to confirm receipt, is that acceptable?”
“I’ll do that,” Eve said. Outlook binged for attention, and she glanced at her screen again. “Aha, this looks like it.” The message was quite large, and decrypting the attachments took almost a minute, but at last she could see them: a Word document and a PDF file, evidently a scan of some sort. “Excellent, I have decrypted them. I’ll be back in touch shortly to confirm stage two.”
Eve opened the covering letter first. The manuscript, it seemed, was bound inside the cover of another book, and misfiled on the wrong shelf in a private library somewhere in London. The directions to retrieve it could be found in the attached PDF, a scan of a hand-drawn treasure map of some antiquity. The handwriting was the beautiful copperplate cursive that clerks had used before typewriters, its authorship anonymous. She frowned as she looked at the scan. Weird: it wasn’t a normal map, one with an absolute frame of reference and a compass rose. Rather, it was a series of waypoints on a treasure hunt. The starting point was an oddly familiar address on Kensington Palace Gardens. And then—
She swore softly to herself. It’s a set-up. Got to be. There was absolutely no possible way that it could be a coincidence.
“Meet me at the same cafe as last time,” she told her brother, then copied the map onto a memory stick and deleted the unencrypted copy from her PC. “Make sure nobody follows you. And leave your phone at home.”
Half an hour later Imp sat down across the table from her in the branch of Costa. “Morning,” he grumped. “This had better be good.”
“Had a bad night? What did your crew say?”
“They said thanks for the forty large, now fuck off.” He rubbed his forehead. “I really don’t think it’s going to work.”
“Well, maybe I can change your mind.” Eve waited patiently while he stirred three sachets of sugar into his coffee. “While you were lying in, I sorted out the map. You don’t have to worry about anybody else coming after it—the auction is closed. And it turns out the manuscript is right on our doorstep. How well do you know—” And she told him the address.
“How well do I—” Imp froze—“the old family home?” he said, with studied disinterest. “Never been there, why?”
“It’s interesting that you should say that.” She smirked, and took a sip of her drink. “It turns out that’s where the directions to retrieve the manuscript start. It’s a schematic, a kind of diagram rather than a traditional map, and it says you need to start on the top floor—the third floor—of the ancestral pile, where there’s a secret door. Do you know anything about that?”
“A secret door on the third floor?” His indignation was clearly feigned: “What rot!”
Eve just smiled tightly until he caught on, at which point he flushed silently and glanced aside.
“Ball, court, your side of the net.” She slid the USB stick across the table towards him. After a moment he palmed it. “I don’t know when you broke in there or why, I probably don’t want to know, but that’s where the treasure hunt starts.”
“This stinks,” he warned her.
She nodded. “It reminds me of Father. ‘In magic, there are no coincidences.’” Her smile slipped. “Tell your crew, I can guarantee no pursuit—the other bids have been terminated, the trail dead-ends here. No thugs with guns will come after you, but I do need that manuscript, and there’s another sixty thousand in it for you.” Eve paused. “No, fuck that shit. He’s not watching and you’re fam, right? Get me the manuscript and I’ll round it up to a quarter million, total. I’m pretty sure I can fly it under the radar. If necessary I’ll hit my own savings. But do yourself a favor and do not under any circumstances look past the title page, ’kay? Or even handle the book yourself. Treat it like radioactive waste and let someone else pick up the lethal dose. Because it’s the kind of book that Dad taught us about, rather than the kind he taught us from: it’s the kind that eats people.”
When Imp got home he found Doc and Game Boy in the back engaged in a Warcraft nostalgia tour, but no sign of the Deliverator. A miasma of burned toast filled the kitchen. Charcoal briquettes that had once been crumpets sat forgotten atop the overflowing compost bin.
“I’ve been to see my sister again,” he announced to the backs of their heads, “and she upped her offer. She also said the guys with guns are out of the picture. But I still think we should turn her down.” Then he chucked the USB stick at the back of Game Boy’s head.
Game Boy reached out and snagged it without looking, then brought his hand back down to the keyboard in time to do something unspeakable to a green-haired minotaur with unfeasibly large jubblies who was wielding a glowing purple labrys the size of the Empire State Building. Moments later he slid the stick into a spare port on his gaming rig. “Get the healer,” he chanted in the voice of Elmer Fudd.
Imp winced: “Dude, that’s not how you sing Wagner,” he began, then something explosively pyrotechnic lit up the battlefield that spanned the row of monitors.
Doc waved his fists in the air, and disconnected. “You distracted me!” he accused.
“Then you’re too easily distracted.”
Imp watched Game Boy play on for a few minutes.
“What’s she offering now?” Doc asked cautiously.
“A quarter million if we complete the job.” Imp shoved his hands in his pockets. “But I don’t like it.”
Game Boy broke off his song to ask, “What of?” just as Doc said, “You’re right, that’s too fucking much. There’s something wrong with it.”
Imp took a deep breath and nodded. “Evie got hold of the map. Guess where it starts?” His index finger circled in the air, pointed inexorably towards the ceiling.
“Well fuuuuu…”
Doc’s frustration finally got Game Boy’s undivided attention. He logged out, then spun his chair around. “How much money did you say again?”
“A quarter of a million, minus the forty thou we already got paid.” A tinkling of tiny bells rattled through the room, tinny as the one-bit sound chip in a novelty greeting card. Imp shrugged. “But the map starts on the top floor, at the door to nowhere. And it’s old. Like, old enough it probably dates to when my family lived here. Do I have to tell you how scary that is? I don’t believe in coincidences, GeeBee. And Eve, she said don’t, whatever you do, try to read the book.”
“Why ever not?” asked Doc.
“Because it’s a fucking spell book,” Imp finally snapped. “I know one when I smell one, I learned that much from my dad.” He paused. “It’s why I don’t have a family.”
“What about your sister—”
But Imp was already shaking his head. “Evie is—” He hesitated to say dead inside, but the more he thought about it the more it felt right. He wasn’t sure the sister he remembered growing up with was even in there any more, screaming wordlessly behind the glossy lacquered mask she wore all the time now. Eve had been all right when she was young, but after things went bad she’d turned hard. Not just hard: she’d turned to stone, made of herself a ferocious engine of destruction warped in widdershins coils opposed to Imp’s clockwise rebellion. Their paths might cross twice in a turn but their directions couldn’t be more different. “She went wrong,” he said, then stopped, leaving the final words unspoken: after Mum.
“Not seeing it,” said Doc, even as Game Boy burst out with “A spell book! Cool!”
Oh Jesus, Imp thought, rolling his eyes, spare me. “It’s not cool,” he snapped. “If you think it’s cool you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. If you mess with it you will die in agony, slowly. It’s the sort of thing that puts ideas into your head, ideas like corpse-worms and glowing phosphorescent hagfish, chewing their way through your dreams as they core out your soul.”
“Is that why you were looking at all those old tomes in the library?” Game Boy asked cheekily.
“Oh for—” Imp sat down heavily. “It wasn’t in the library,” he said. “I’d have felt it. Spell books, there’s a kind of weight to them, like you’re reading your own execution notice, or a dead god’s last will and testament.” Books bound in human skin and written in a formal propositional calculus where each axiom was a closure wrapped around eternal damnation. “Big sis’s boss is paying for a retrieval, and he’s paying large, which means it’s rare and dangerous.”
Which meant it wasn’t a fake-out, like the 99 percent of soi-disant spell books which eventually turned out to be a joke, a diary of a psychotic breakdown, or a farrago of myths and legends. Maybe one time in a hundred a spell book turned out to be that rarest of rare things—a necromantic laboratory workbook, a dream quest protocol, a distillation of true knowledge so compact that it burned like a beacon in the black void, attracting the attention of things that fed behind the walls of the world.
He continued to think aloud: “Eve won’t get it herself, but is willing to more than triple her offer to us. She’s worried. She knows—she believes in us—that we can do it, but it’s dangerous.” He met Doc’s transfixed gaze. “So I’m selfish!” He burst out: “I don’t want you to die and leave me alone.”
“But a quarter of a million! You could make the movie! I could be a star!”
“You could die inside and something else would be walking around wearing your body like a cheap suit,” Imp cautioned. “Would it be worth it then?”
“But it’s somewhere upstairs,” Doc pointed out. “Which means nobody else is going to get to it without us knowing. And your sister says the guys with the guns aren’t going to bother us. How about we discuss it when Del gets here?”
“Huh. About that. Where is she?” asked Imp.
Doc looked at Game Boy: Game Boy looked at Doc. And suddenly it was apparent that neither of them knew where she’d gone.
Del walked across the park, her hoodie raised to cover her hair, heading for the side-street where she’d dumped her hot wheels the day before.
Successful career criminals have several rules of thumb to live by. Don’t shit in your own backyard is one; three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead is another; and for a third, never return to the scene of a successful caper. However, Del was not a successful career criminal. Rebecca was the Deliverator—ironic nod to a fictional hero, the protagonist of a cyberpunk epic about ninjutsu, linguistics, and extreme pizza delivery—and she broke the rules in all innocence.
Del mostly didn’t drive: she didn’t have a license for one thing, and she couldn’t be arsed jumping through the flaming hoops of the test process for another. She was happy with her bike, thank you very much. She could get just about anywhere in London on her bike faster than anything with a motor, flowing through crevices and pedestrianized zones like water. She could take it on the tube for the occasional excursion out as far as Zone Six, but her bike had its limits: and one hard limit was that you couldn’t take your crew with you.
Hence Imp’s insistence on teaching her to drive. Which, she had to admit, had been a ton of fun, from the process of stealthily casing her ride, sneaking in and springing the door lock, faking out the anti-theft immobilizer, and hot-wiring the ignition; to the raw physical power rush of putting metal and mass and explosive fuel in motion and taking to the highway. Driving held her attention. And driving spoke to her. Not in the same language as cycling, of course, but driving was like learning a second tongue, one that expanded and illuminated her view of the world. Being trapped inside a padded box and forced to interface with the road through a complicated series of linkages and gears and motors was claustrophobic after the fumes-in-her-face freedom of riding her bike, but some of her mojo came across nonetheless. She could ace the North Circular in a jacked Toyota Tercel faster than Sabine Schmitz could lap the Nürburgring in a Transit van, and the only times the plod had got on her tail she’d left them, well, plodding.
But modern cars were increasingly hard to steal. It wasn’t just the chips and the remote unlocking and the LoJack trackers and the secret policeman in the engine management software. These days you had to worry about the pentacle scribed in goat blood under the driver’s seat, the black tallow candle and the curse-stained ivory gear knob, the nightmares that would follow you home, dreams of your car-smashed carcass in a continuous stream of creative and agonizing exsanguinations whenever you closed your eyes. They’d keep it up until your throat was raw from screaming and throwing up. They’d keep it up until you turned yourself in to the insurance underwriters for exorcism and punishment, or aspirated and drowned on your own vomit without ever waking up.
So the 2010 Cayenne had been something of a sweet find for Del. It was old enough to predate in-car electronics sophisticated enough to support curseware, new enough to be seriously hot, and best of all, once equipped with the right cloned plates it was the identical twin to a wholly respectable Mom’s Taxi in Chelmsford, owned by an investment banker’s wife from the Home Counties who stayed the hell out of the congestion charge zone and used her five hundred horsepower turbocharged teutonic battle wagon to bus Emily and Callum to school and back every day, with a shopping side-quest to Waitrose twice a week.
Even though the Porsche was now dirty—Imp had warned her the bank had cameras out back, so they’d made the cloned plates—Del couldn’t quite bring herself to abandon it for good without at least a token attempt to keep it. I could get new plates, she bluffed herself, if it hasn’t been towed. Because that would be easier than finding a replacement, for sure.
Hence the early morning walk.
Gotcha.
Del swung round the corner and spotted the row of parked cars. The Cayenne was still shoehorned between a BMW and a Fiat, but some arsewipe private security company had stuck a boot on one wheel. Glowing green runes warned of appalling consequences for unauthorized removal. Also, a squirrel had shat on the windscreen. Del fumed silently as she turned away, barely caring if anybody saw her, barely noticing until warm fingers closed around her right wrist, shockingly intimate, followed by a sudden snik of cold metal.
“Not exactly an ice-cream van, is it?” chirped a voice as her arm was yanked up behind her shoulder. “Let’s you and me go somewhere and talk, KLF girl.”
“What—” Del grimaced—“the fuck are you on, woman?”
“Justified and Ancient! I’m not stupid, I know how to work Lyric Finder, even though the band split before either of us were born.”
A metallic chinking and the drag of leg irons told Del that she was well and truly in the shit. The bottom dropped out of her stomach as if a trapdoor had sprung open beneath her feet. Fear threatened to choke her. She tried to swing her left hand but there was a manacle on that wrist too, and it twisted behind her back abruptly and then there were chains everywhere, locking her down and leashing her to the Cayenne’s door handle.
The woman walked round in front of her. She had pale skin and spiky chestnut hair and eyes like a police recruiting poster, and if Del had met her in Ruby Tuesday over a couple of beers she might have thought she was cute, but there was nothing cute about this sickening sense of dread, about the chains, about the telescoping baton that kept flickering in and out of visibility in the woman’s hand like a bad special effect. “I dunno what this is about, woman, you’ve got the wrong person, lemme go—”
“Chill.” The woman reached out and tugged Del’s hood back, then as she recoiled tapped her gently on the forehead with one index finger. “We know who you are: Rebecca McKee, age 21, no fixed abode but we know where your mum lives, we know where your dog goes to school, no fixed abode but you’re a demon on two wheels and you’re also the getaway driver for the gang that turfed Hamleys the other week.”
Del flip-flopped like a gaffed fish for a few seconds, then yanked at the leash as hard as she could. With a scream of abused metal the Porsche’s passenger door handle bent and she began to sidestep away, but the chain between her ankles somehow turned into a rigid bar. She began to face-plant and ended up with her nose tucked into the cleft between the cop’s neck and shoulder. The woman smelled of lavender; Del wrinkled her nose and opened her mouth to bite, then felt strong arms circling her. “Will you just stop freaking out for a moment and listen to me?”
Del drew a shuddering breath: “Chains—”
The chains were gone, but the woman held her in a bear hug that trapped Del’s arms. “Take a deep breath. And another. That better?” She peered into Del’s blown pupils. “Still freaking. What are you afraid of? Are you on—”
“Don’t kill me—”
“I’m not going to! Will you chill the hell out? I just want to talk, for Christ’s sake!”
The adrenaline spike began to subside, the waves of chagrin, embarrassment, and grief finally washing Del up on the shore of acceptance. “What the fuck you want, then?”
“I’m Wendy, and there’s an ice-cream parlor on the other side of the park: Is yours a 99?” A flashing smile lit up Del’s face and she felt the knot of tension in her chest twist into hopeful incredulity.
“I’ll—” she took a deep breath—“what?”
“If I let go of you, will you come with me and let me buy you an ice cream and explain things? I’ll let you go afterwards, I promise.”
Del managed a shaky nod. Wendy still didn’t let go, but the arms wrapped around Del no longer felt like handcuffs. “You’re not going to arrest me?”
Wendy rolled her eyes. “I’m not a cop, and I’m not on the clock, so no, I’m not—I can’t—do that.”
“But Imp said you were—” She realized her mistake and shut her mouth before she could leak any more secrets.
“Imp is your theatrical friend with the shit fashion sense?” Wendy smirked at her expression. “Yes, I might have told him I was a cop. I might also have been kind of lying: whatever it takes to get the job done. I’m a private sector thief-taker, it’s not my job to enforce the law. And like I said, I’m not working today.” She opened her arms and took a step back, baffling Del. Suddenly she could feel the cold again, up and down her front. “Are you coming for that ice cream?”
Del shook herself. “Woman, it’s fucking December.” She stared at her, openly perplexed. “What?”
Wendy rubbed two fingers together. “My treat.”
“I don’t believe this,” Del muttered, but Wendy held out a hand. She stared at it for a few seconds before she took it. Wendy drew her closer, placed Del’s hand on her arm, then led them back into the park, towards the kiosk.
The Bond sat on a park bench, staring at his phone in faux-idleness. Fucking dykes, he thought, clutching resentment close to the shrivelled cockles of his heart. The burring hum of a quadrotor drone drifted overhead like a nightmare hornet. He squinted at the phone screen, lips curled judgmentally. The feed from the drone’s stabilized imaging platform showed him the sway of the getaway driver’s bundled dreads, the thief-taker’s slyly stolen glances, the slight quirk of her lips. She held her target’s arm too close. Bet they’ll be in bed within twenty-four hours. Assuming they last that long. His imagination leered lasciviously.
Oblivious to the drone, Wendy steered Del towards the coffee and refreshments kiosk. Once they were indoors, the Bond recalled his remote-controlled minion. He opened the aluminum briefcase and packed the drone away to recharge. Then he picked it up and followed his targets over to the kiosk, to rent a seat for the price of a coffee.
The Bond had come to appreciate the benefits of wearing a well-cut business suit and conservative tie. It made you anonymous, at least if you were a clean-shaven white male like him. It was the civilian equivalent of the camouflage BDUs he’d worn to work before he took Rupert’s shilling. Go low, people thought you were the Money; go high, they thought you worked for the Money. And the Money came with a license.
The Bond wasn’t quite boring enough to be a Gray Man—a totally average guy, the perfect street-level tail—he was too tall and muscular. But with his suit and briefcase nobody would spare him a second glance. Nobody dreamed it contained a drone with an optional grenade launcher and thermobaric rounds, nobody imagined the suppressed Glock 17 Gen4 and its spare magazines, the duct tape and the gag and the row of foam-wrapped syringes loaded with flunitrazepam and suxamethonium. All the paraphernalia of what those in the trade euphemistically termed “wet work.”
There was no equivalent anonymity for women or anyone else who didn’t code as white and male. Both the thief-taker and the thief were distinctive and easy to track: the butch ex-cop in her combat pants and paratroop boots, the dark-skinned bike courier with her dreads and skintight leggings. Put them in a boardroom or a ballroom and they’d stand out. Put them in cocktail dresses or skirt suits and drop them in a drafty warehouse or a bus terminus and they’d still stand out.
After giving them time to get settled, the Bond entered the kiosk and settled into a corner seat, where he pretended to look at his phone as he sipped his coffee. Smartphones had been another major innovation in tradecraft: everybody carried one, you could use them to track owners who were clueless about SIGINT, and you could hide your gaze behind a screen more easily than a newspaper. So he waited, and while he waited he eavesdropped.
“It’s my day off and I was stood down from the job,” the thief-taker was explaining, “so not only do I not have to arrest you, legally I can’t. Unlike a police officer I don’t have any particular powers of arrest, except when I’m on the clock and executing a warrant. Even then, I’m supposed to wait for the force to show up and do their job. I mean, the common law power of citizen’s arrest—section 24A of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984)—only works if I catch y—er, someone—in the act of committing a crime, and it has to be something serious, like assault or theft. At any other time I’d be committing a crime myself—unlawful detention.”
The car thief narrowed her eyes suspiciously: “But you cuffed me!”
“Yep.” The thief-taker briefly looked abashed. “You were having a panic attack. I thought you might hurt yourself. Also—” she side-eyed the car thief—“don’t you think it was a little bit hot?”
“Fucking give me a safeword next time!” Del glared at her. “And ask, don’t grab!”
“Consent is kind of difficult to get when you’re freaking out.” Wendy paused. “But next time, just so you know—if there is a next time—if you want me to chain you up, all you have to do is—”
Mount Deliverator blasted out a pyroclastic flow: “No!” She subsided, glowering. “We are not having this conversation in public!”
“You’re so easy!” Wendy taunted: “You’re so far in the closet you can see snowflakes falling in the street light!”
“You’re going to get us chucked out! And I haven’t had my ice cream yet!”
And so on and on and back and forth, verbal fencing moderating into heavy flirting for almost half an hour as the coffee cooled and the ice cream melted and the thief-taker worked—very effectively, the Bond thought—at building a rapport with her mark. Her snitch. Her informant.
Grooming, they called this, when conducted for unlawful ends. Not that the Bond cared one way or the other about legality—the only lawful authority that rocked his world was the privilege of money—but it was interesting to watch Wendy work her target over with words rather than weapons. It was apparent that they had a rapport, and not just the polarity of predator and prey, the cop and the robber, or even the black lead and the red lead clamped to the terminals of the car battery in the basement. The Bond had heard about the easy intimacy that the very best interrogators used to make their subjects spill their guts out of a misplaced desire to be helpful, but he’d scarcely credited its existence before now. His interrogations were messy affairs involving pliers and screaming. They usually ended up in a shallow grave in the forest: not in an ice cream parlor, feeding the other participant spoonfuls of frozen yoghurt while gazing wistfully into their eyes.
After a while Rebecca was sprawled at ease in her chair, not even trying to flee when Wendy went to order more refreshments. Instead, her gaze lingered on the other woman’s ass. Then when Wendy returned, Rebecca’s hand shyly crept across the table to touch her arm. (Disgusting, thought the Bond, salivating slightly as he leaned forward.)
“Admit it, you wanted me,” Del said. “I mean, something from—”
“I know what you mean.” Wendy smiled. “And yes. But what I want, and what my boss wants, and what his customer wants, are all different things, and my boss and the customer get zip while I’m off the clock. So this is me time, or maybe us time.”
“Is there an us? You’re moving kind of fast.”
“Would you rather I moved slow?”
“… Not really. So what do you want?”
“I thought maybe we could hang out together? Go for a drive in the country or something.”
Del snorted. “Fat chance.” Of a sudden, her expression clamped down, guarded and remote.
Wendy slowly reached inside her hoodie’s pouch. “I can get your ride un-clamped. What do you think?”
“You know that’s not—” Del licked her lips.
“Not your car, right? Doesn’t matter, I’ll do it anyway. Then we’ll go for a drive together.” She produced her phone with a flourish, then raised one eyebrow. “If you like?”
“You can’t just…”
“Watch me.” Wendy dialed a number. (The Bond waited patiently as the illegal picocell in his briefcase snatched her call from the aether, decrypted and recorded it, then forwarded it to its destination.) “Hey, boss? Yeah, it’s Wendy. Listen, can you do me a favor? There’s a car parked—yeah, that one, yeah, listen, some chancer’s stuck a wheel clamp on it, yeah, can you get it removed? Really? Okay, that’d be great.” Wendy paused. “Hang on, they what?” Her voice rose. “Can they even do that? Well, fuck!” She ended the call, then noticed Rebecca staring at her. “What?”
“What’s happening?”
“I do not believe this.” Wendy shook her head. “Shit was a lot simpler when I was a cop.” She noticed Rebecca’s sudden tension: “Oh, it’s not about you, you can relax. Boss man says the boot’s coming off your car within the hour.” She shrugged. “The bad news for me is, I’ve been pulled off your case completely. So my employer doesn’t get paid. Boo hoo, some other job will come up. The good news for you is someone coughed up more money than Hamleys insurance underwriters to buy out the investigation, and because we’re HiveCo Security—not law enforcement—money talks. You have friends in high places, it seems. Do you have friends in high places?”
Rebecca boggled. “I don’t get it.”
“Well that’s okay because that makes two of us. But it does make life a little easier, doesn’t it? Now I’m not being paid to haul you in, but my boss is going to want to talk to you: he’s actively trying to hire transhumans for this program I’m part of, and as there’s always been a revolving door between thief-taking and smarter crim—” Her phone vibrated—“job done, boot’s off. Listen, that’s a sweet ride. How about we head for the M40, then once we hit the M25 you show me how fast you can lap London?”1