Better Red Than Dead

Darren Humphries

Copyright © 2020 Darren Humphries

This book is a work of fiction (which should be obvious to anyone reading it) and all characters, events and names are fictitious. Any resemblance to real world places, companies, people or events is purely coincidental except where people are used for dramatic (or hopefully comedic) effect. In these instances, no inference should be made about the real person from the contents of this book.

There are some real-world locations used, but these are used in a fictitious context and no inference should be made about the real place from this book.

All the stunts in this book are carried out by specially trained fictional characters and should not be attempted at home (Fire elementals can seriously damage your insurence premiums)

All rights reserved. Please don’t reproduce or distribute any part of this book without the express permission of the author.

Acknowledgements

My thanks, as always, go to the support group that is Susan, Patti and, most especially Kath.

Without them, the slips betwixt my cup and lip would be veritable tsunamis. Any remaining errors are purely of my own making.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author's note

Epilogue As Prologue - Paris

The Set Up

The Mark

The Crew

Casing the Joint

The Jailbreak

The Smash & Grab

The Betrayal

The Train Job

The Kidnapping

Epilogue As Epilogue - Paris

The Whys and Wherefores

About The Author

The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.

Author's note

I don't normally do these, but a quick note before you get stuck into BETTER RED THAN DEAD. Lady Red was introduced in THE MAN FROM U.N.D.E.A.D. WHO WENT OUT IN THE COLD. The story recounted in these pages takes place following the events of that book, and also THE MAN FROM U.N.D.E.A.D. AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS (included in the short story collection TAKING THE TUBE TO THE OUTER LIMITS). This book is intended as a standalone adventure and hopefully be read that way, but you may get a little bit more out of it if you read those two works first (assuming you haven't already).

Epilogue As Prologue - Paris

The night blazed. Paris wasn't known as the City of Lights for no reason. As she looked out through her ornate and vintage, but recently bullet-proofed, windows, Red was reminded of why she loved this city. The feeling came to her every single night, but it was a feeling of which she never tired. For her, Paris was mankind’s shout of defiance in the face of the universe’s darkness. Take away the sun, that cry said, we don’t need it. We can make our own. Her favourite photos of the planet were the ones taken at night, with Earth’s dark surface webbed in the bright traceries of human life. They were a signal to an uncaring cosmos that, against all probability, the human race persisted. It would be an inspiring thought if she hadn’t been intimately familiar with the less noble manner of how it persisted.

Paris, though, was also a cry against the cultural darkness. If ever anyone were to ask what the purpose of Mankind was, she could point directly at Paris and say, “That. That is what Mankind can achieve.” She could think of no other place that inspired her to make such a statement. Even whilst bustling with the millions of its inhabitants, Paris exuded a grace and elegance that was found in so few places, and no other of the same size. Yes, the city had an arrogance about it, but it was an arrogance born out of the sure knowledge of itself, its history and its worth. There are times when arrogance is the only possible reaction to the facts.

Red couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower directly from her window (she’d need a couple of years working freelance again before she would be able to afford that view), but the glass face of the building opposite reflected the twinkling edifice remarkably well. The ten-minute period of sparkling that started on the hour and was created by hundreds of camera flash units mounted on the iron skeleton, was well under way. She didn’t need to be on the Champs Mars or at the Trocadero to see the couples pausing their hand-in-hand strolls to take in the surprisingly magical sight. She’d been physically present often enough for her memory to be able to recreate the scene perfectly. Even knowing the purely technological source of the twinkling didn’t diminish its effect on those seeing it for the first time, or on those who saw it every night. It took the hard iron symbol of Paris’s global importance and softened it into the very meaning of the most romantic city in the world.

If there was any place where Lady Red felt truly at home then that place was Paris.

As she stood at the window, watching the reflected glory of Gustave Eiffel’s signature erection, some more lights were added to the street scene outside the building. These lights belonged to cars turning the corner of the street and passing along the road. There was hardly anything significant about that. The building in which Red had only recently taken up residence was exclusive and expensive, but the road outside was not private and was in use by other residents of the street and their guests all the time. Neither of those groups, however, arrived in convoy. Due to the pricey nature of the area, she had some very distinguished (for which read rich) neighbours, but hardly any of them habitually travelled with armed escorts. She was already familiar with the vehicles of those who did. It was useful information to possess. None of the quartet of long, dark sedans she now observed slowing down and pulling into the side of the road belonged to any of the people she knew.

The cars stopped and their doors opened to disgorge men in dark suits and ties. They weren’t wearing sunglasses, but Red got the impression they would have liked to. The shades, though, would have made them look far too much like high-priced gangsters. Then again, the matching suits already did that well enough. Even ordinary members of the public would have noticed them and felt trepidation, though they might not have been able to say why. Red could say why. The manner in which the men assessed the scene around them as they stepped out of the cars before taking sports bags out the boots couldn’t have looked more suspicious had the scene come with audio narration for the blind saying “men look around suspiciously”.

Red made a decision. She decided not to run.

She could have run. She never got herself into a situation she couldn’t get out of in at least three different ways. She had been in the apartment long enough now to know all the exits, plus a few ways out nobody else would have thought of. That sort of escape route planning came with the job of being a cat burglar. Not just a cat burglar, the cat burglar.

At least, that was what she used to be. It’s what she wanted to be again. It was going to take her a little time. The men currently making their way to the building’s front door would be set on not giving her that time.

Considering the way the convoy on the street stood out, the new arrivals weren’t interested in subtlety. They wouldn’t have thought to prepare by obtaining copies of keys to the building and wouldn’t be pausing to pick the lock on the main door. It was a good front door, as ought to be expected for a building that commanded such apartment purchase prices. A couple of good kicks weren’t going to be enough to break the lock. A simple spell would do the trick, though. Protection against magic seemed to be the one deficiency in the place’s security. She doubted these men would even pause long enough for a quick casting. Instead, one of them would put a few bullets through the lock or use a enforcer style door ram. Their numbers and open approach meant they were here to make a statement and they were going to make it in the loudest voices they could manage.

And they called themselves professionals.

Red shook her head at the assumed incompetence of her visitors and topped up her glass of expensive wine. When you’re in France, you don’t drink the cheap stuff. That would just be rude. She preferred to be rude only when it served her larcenous purposes. She placed a loaded pistol on the coffee table, where it was clearly visible, and arranged herself on the sofa.

The men wouldn’t all fit in the lift, so they would ignore that and take the stairs. It was only five flights, after all, and they had all looked in pretty good shape from what she had seen of them on the street. If they knew anything about her at all, they wouldn’t have trusted the lift anyway.

That thought brought a smile to her lips. It didn’t last long.

She knew exactly how many steps were on each flight of stairs and which of them creaked, squeaked or made any other noises when pressure was put on them. She knew exactly how long it would take the men to climb those stairs. Assuming a few seconds for them to get themselves organised outside her door, that meant they ought to be arriving right about…

The door to her apartment was hit with three sharp reports and then burst open under a heavy impact.

…now.

The suit-clad men entered quickly. The doorway was a pinch point where they would be at a disadvantage if there was a counterattack and they knew it. They quickly spread out and checked all the rooms. None of them spoke. They made hand signals, which seemed a bit pointless after all the noise they had made gaining entry in the first place. None of them were wearing masks, so they weren’t bothered about anyone being left alive to identify them, so they couldn’t be concerned about her identifying their voices.

The man who came into the lounge looked comically surprised to see her for a moment. What else had they been looking for? Clearly, he hadn’t been expecting his target to be lounging on a sofa with a glass of wine in her hand, appearing completely unfazed by the sudden intrusion into her home. This was not normal behaviour in such a situation. The moment passed and his gun was quickly raised and pointed at the centre of her face. It was a large and ugly weapon, severely overpowered for the task at hand. She had never told any man that size didn’t matter, but there came a point where scale became irrelevant.

The man gave a low whistle of warning and Red was tempted to harmonise with it. She stifled the temptation.

Two other men joined the first, taking up station on either side of the doorway and keeping her covered with their own, ugly overpowered weapons. They would have been throwing off the whole Feng Shui of the place, if she knew what the hell those words actually meant.

The illumination from the hallway dimmed as a large figure came through the doorway, effectively cutting out the light from beyond. Red didn’t need more than the shape of the man to identify him. She had only seen him once before, but that had been enough for it to make sense that he was the one they looked to for this. Such was the size of his presence that the man who had initially entered the room departed to provide some much needed space.

“So they sent you, Pyotr,” she said, her voice a little hesitant.

“Lady Red,” he greeted her in turn, his voice more rumbling than speaking. He didn’t seem at all surprised that she knew his name. Perhaps he lacked the imagination for surprise. His was the kind of voice that could make a child’s lullaby sound like a declaration of hostilities. “Did you think you would be forgotten?”

“Your organisation is famously not very forgiving. I presume Isaacs has learned this.”

“He is like Scarlett O’Hara,” the big man rumbled. “Gone with the wind.”

“Really? Gone with the wind? Are you joking? That’s what you’ve got? He’s gone with the wind? How very lax of you not to have found him. Gone with the wind, indeed.”

“It seemed appropriate,” the man responded, too dumb to be abashed by her outburst. “Do you have any last request?”

“No chance to make a deal?” Red asked. “No small talk? Just wham, bang, thank you dead ma’am?”

“You have nothing to make a deal with that Mr Vasiliev wants,” the big Russian said.

Red thought for a moment, though she didn’t need to. She already knew what her last request would be. “I want to say goodbye to my pet.”

Pyotr thought about the request too, and then nodded. She did not suspect him to be a man known for his sparkling after-dinner repartee. He no doubt considered her request as being too sentimental for words.

“Baby, come here,” Red called in a sing-song voice.

From behind the couch, a long, low shape slunk, keeping its belly close to the floor, its ears flattened against the top of its head. It was clearly frightened by the armed men storming about the place. It was probably picking up fear vibes from its mistress as well.

“What the hell is that?” one of the guards by the door demanded.

“Ugliest thing I ever saw,” the other agreed.

“Hush, you’ll hurt his feelings,” Red said softly, running one soothing hand over the creature’s head. “You’re beautiful, aren’t you, baby?”

Pyotr regarded her as though she had lost all semblance of sanity, but there never was any accounting for taste. People loved cats with no fur and dogs that seemed to be made of nothing but fur and snakes and spiders and rats and noisy birds, none of which appealed to her.

The big man shook his head and raised his gun. The two men by the door did the same thing.

“Ready,” the Russian said. “Aim…”

“Fire,” Red finished the sentence for him.

The Set Up

“You’re blocking my sun,” Red said languidly, not even bothering to open her eyes, reacting instead to the temperature drop on her skin. She had heard the sounds of the man’s approach too far away for there to be any risk of him creeping up on her or presenting any danger. She had recognised him by the pattern of his walk and the smell of his aftershave, which was distressingly unavoidable.

“I think, technically it’s everyone’s sun,” the man’s voice replied in reserved, clipped tones. He wasn’t someone to give away his emotions through speech. Red sometimes suspected this was because he didn’t actually have any. She had never observed him being anything other than calm, measured and precise.

In other words, boring.

“Well, I consider the bit that’s falling right here to be mine and you’re blocking it,” she told him.

One of the perks of working for the man known in underworld circles as The Greek was being able to spend her down time enjoying the warm Mediterranean sun, the delightful Mediterranean cuisine and the sexy Mediterranean men. Since she was employed for her quite unique set of skills, a set to be used only in very specific circumstances, there was a lot of down time to be spent enjoying all things Mediterranean. It was a task to which she could dedicate herself.

“As you say,” the man, who also worked for The Greek, responded evenly and the warmth once more fell upon her skin as he moved aside.

She shifted slightly to achieve an even more comfortable position.

“I thought people with red hair sunburned very easily,” the man, now to her left, commented.

“I read that as well,” she agreed, not giving anything away herself either. It was a learned habit, but it had become second nature to her. The person for whom this man worked knew more about Red than almost anyone else in the world, which meant his right hand man would know it too. That was already too many people knowing too much, but she was not in a position to do anything about it at the moment, so she settled for not adding to their store of knowledge on that particular subject.

“Mister Papandreyou wishes to see you,” the man informed her, taking a seat on one of the chairs beneath the parasol on that side of the poolside patio. He was less of a fan of the sunshine than she was, it seemed.

“And here I thought you’d come to put some suntan lotion on my back,” she replied.

“I can do that if you wish it,” he offered without any obvious enthusiasm, or any obvious lack of enthusiasm for that matter.

Whilst Papandreyou and his lieutenant had been gathering information regarding Red, she had been doing the same regarding them, and she was a whole lot sneakier than they were. No matter how sneaky she had been, however, she had not been able to discover this man’s preferences, sexual, political, automotive or otherwise. He appeared to exist solely to serve the man almost everyone referred to as Mister Papandreyou, including Greece’s President and a good few other world leaders. Perhaps at night, when he was no longer required, he went back to his apartment in the heart of Athens and plugged himself into a wall socket to recharge. Red didn’t believe the science of cybernetics had reached the stage of producing such lifelike androids, no matter how hard the makers of sex dolls were working on the task, but it was frustrating not to be able to wriggle her way behind his mask. He was, in many ways, the man behind Mister Papandreyou’s curtain, but the space behind his own curtain appeared to be empty.

“And keep your boss waiting, Nico?” she challenged him playfully on the whole suntan lotion scenario. “Would that be wise?”

“He is also your boss,” Nico pointed out. “Which I don’t think you would have forgotten.”

“Neither forgotten nor forgiven,” she assured him.

Red had certainly not forgotten she was indebted to Aristotle Papandreyou, the real name of The Greek, but he was not the person she had not forgiven. The debt she owed Papandreyou had been honestly (or dishonestly, depending on how you looked at these things) earned when she broke into his most secret vault in order to steal one of his most prized possessions. The theft had been the pinnacle of her career as a thief, but she had not been allowed to sink into the completely anonymous retirement she had planned for herself upon its completion. Instead, she had been sacrificed to The Greek by an opponent who had used her identity as a bargaining chip. Admittedly, the chip had been played in a game that had eventually saved millions of lives from invading thousand-eyed, multi-tentacled squid deities from another dimension, but that didn’t mean she had to forgive it. From what she heard, the price paid by the man who had betrayed her into this servitude had been higher still.

As servitudes went, it wasn’t the worst she could have imagined. In fact, she expected it was the kind of servitude to which many people would have gladly submitted. She lived in a luxurious villa nestled in the hills of an island not far from Athens with access to anything she needed and an expense account that resisted even her attempts to break its limit. In return, she was occasionally summoned into the presence of her master and given a task to carry out that only she could. Otherwise, she was left alone to enjoy herself as she pleased.

Except for crime. She was forbidden to carry out any jobs for her own personal entertainment. She was now a tool for Papandreyou’s purposes and he was not a man who approved of his tools ending up in police custody. Not that such an outcome was ever likely when it came to the infamous Lady Red. It was an unfair restriction, not least because her new position in The Greek’s entourage gave her access to some of the richest and most elite gatherings in the world. She was now presented with so many opportunities to acquire so many beautiful, valuable things and she was prevented from doing so by her debt to Papandreyou. It was a cruel and unusual torture for her to have everything dangled in front of her, often in the cleavages of the world’s most beautiful women, and to be prevented from doing what comes naturally.

With a sigh, Red swung her legs off the sun lounger and brought herself upright, opening her eyes for the first time. The tranquillity of the morning had been broken as soon as Nico had arrived and nothing was going to bring it back.

The offender sat in the shade, apparently oblivious to her, his attention taken by the screen of a mobile phone that was almost the size of a tablet computer but could still make phone calls. Red was aware of how good she looked and the effect those good looks could have on men and women alike, but she had long since given up trying to get a response out of Nico. Even in the briefest of bikinis, she would be of less interest to him than a spreadsheet listing Papandreyou Shipping’s assets and liabilities. The only way she was likely to raise his interest in her body was by having Euro notes pinned all over it.

“I’ll get changed then,” she suggested.

“Your current outfit would seem… inappropriate to the occasion,” Nico concurred, without looking up at the outfit to which he was referring. There was far too little of it for it to be properly called that.

With a little more sashay than was strictly necessary, she walked past him and into the cool interior of the villa.

Although Nico’s arrival had broken the calm of her day, the interruption was not unwelcome. It had been a while since she had last been gainfully employed and there was only so much of the decadent playgirl lifestyle she could stand before going a little stir crazy. Use it or lose it was a mantra for very good reasons. She wasn’t going to let Nico see the spring in her step, though, and she took extra time in the shower for good measure.

When she returned, he was still sitting in the same spot and looking at the same phone. For all she knew, the information being displayed on the screen was exactly the same as when she departed. He glanced her up and down and was apparently satisfied, since he stood up and straightened the creases in his trousers.

“The car is waiting outside,” he commented in a neutral fashion. “Am I to take it we will be meeting you by the roadside?”

“Oh Nico, how well you know me,” she said with a grin and headed for the bottom of the quite extensive garden.

The villa was set quite high above sea level and right on the edge of the island. The end of the garden gave onto the top of a tall cliff. The road down to the single village, and its accompanying marina, was a winding one consisting mainly of potholes held together by thin strings of asphalt. This was part of the attraction the place held for its wealthy residents who valued their privacy highly. The state of the road kept random visitors away, but it was also a pain in the backside, literally. The villa had room for a helicopter landing pad in the grounds, and Nico had suggested just such an addition on at least two previous occasions, but she was not going to mess up her lawn or dig up her olive grove for his convenience. Or, more honestly, pay someone else to do it. Besides, with modern holographic technology, there was no need for her to leave the villa at all to attend meetings. Only her employer’s reticence about remote working and the somewhat shady nature of their joint projects prevented such a mode of working.

At the lowest part of the sloping garden, there was a small wooden shed, hidden amongst the olive trees. From the shed, a long wire was slung across the inlet below, crossing above its impossibly clear blue waters down to another shed next to the road on its final approach into the village.

Red entered the shed and switched on the system that automatically tested the zip wire’s functionality. The diagnosis light turned green, as expected. Had it detected a fault, she would have been forced to call Nico back and taken the car ride, which would have been intolerably embarrassing to her. Slipping her hands through the safety loops and taking hold of the bar above her, she stepped out of the shed and into open space. The slight drop before the wire took her weight was always a thrill, the moment when everything could go horribly wrong and she could be swung straight into the side of the white rockface or fall uncontrolled to be smashed onto the sea’s surface below. Of course, neither of these things happened. Instead, the wheel above her spun smoothly down the wire and she was able to enjoy the sensation of speed, the freshness of the air rushing past her and the concerned cries of the seabirds disturbed by her intrusion into their domain.

The far end of the zip wire approached all too quickly and she gently applied the brake. She had this part down to a fine art and brought her progress to a halt just after passing into the interior of a second shed. She was able to release her grip and step gently down onto the wooden floor as though she was stepping off the doorstep at home. She then checked her hair in the mirror stationed there for just that reason and went outside to wait for Nico and the car.

As it pulled up alongside her, she made a point of checking her watch before slipping into the air-conditioned interior. She needn’t have bothered because Nico was studying the screen of a laptop computer built into the back of the driver’s seat and which could be swung out to provide a mobile workstation.

“You know, there’s a whole world out there you could take an interest in,” she chided him lightly, putting her seatbelt on as the car drew smoothly back onto the road surface, or as smoothly as the road surface itself would allow.

“These are working hours,” Nico responded without looking up from the screen. “In these hours, I work.”

“All work and no play makes Nico such a dull boy,” she commented, but expected no response, and got none.

The island was a private one. Its one village housed the workers who served the villas of the rich and privileged. As a result, it looked very much like most small Greek island communities that hadn’t been gobbled up by the tourist trade, only in much better repair. What marked it out from others, though, was the marina. Nobody in the village could have afforded any of the boats moored alongside the wooden jetties projecting out into the Mediterranean. The craft ranged from small, fast runabouts to floating equivalents of the villa she had just left, but the one thing they all had in common was how expensive they were. Status was not something the people living in the island’s villas thought anything about, but that was because it was something they already had. The marina reflected this.

As the car drew up outside the marina’s entrance, a low, sleek powerboat eased itself in alongside the public jetty. This was the place where working boats could tie up for the short periods of time it took to transact whatever business they had in the village. There was a delivery vessel from one of the more exclusive food suppliers already on station and she could see the postal boat making its way back to the mainland. It was a quiet day, and that was the way both she and Nico liked it.

She didn’t wait for either Nico or the driver to open the car door, though they would both doubtlessly have carried out the task had she allowed them to. The only time she had for that sort of behaviour, though, was in public and when it was expected. She preferred to do things for herself. It was one of the few ways to make sure they were done properly.

She walked past the marina entrance and nodded to Marius, the caretaker and daytime security guard. It seemed ridiculous to most people that so many hugely expensive boats should be guarded by a single person, but each of those vessels was protected by so many anti-theft measures it would take someone… well, someone like her… to be able to steal it. It also added to the air of informality that both the residents and the workers tried to foster. This was their home, after all. Possibly not their first, second, or even fifth, home to be sure, but home nonetheless. Marius smiled a gap-toothed smile and waved back, just as he always did. His affable, apparently dim-witted persona was enough to fool anyone who hadn’t done enough research to know that the gaps in his teeth came from the unsuccessful time he had spent on the bare knuckle boxing circuit. Anyone trying to cause trouble would be taught very quickly the lessons he had learned there, which were based more on how to hit very hard than how to avoid being hit.

She walked along the public jetty and climbed down the short ladder to the powerboat, dropping the last metre or so lightly. There was no swell on the sea today, so the deck remained stable beneath her feet. Nico followed her, using all the rungs of the ladder and making the transition from land to boat much more heavily. Considering his employer was the world’s single largest owner of seagoing vessels, he ought to have been more at home on the water. Then again, most of the vessels owned by Papandreyou were huge enough to be as stable as the island in all but the heaviest of seas.

“I’ll drive,” Red said to the man at the wheel and he readily ceded his place to her, moving to cast off the lines. Though it was not registered to Papandreyou Shipping Lines, the boat belonged to The Greek and was regularly used for errands like this one. The man was therefore used to his passenger’s ways.

Nico took a seat in the rear of the boat and pulled out yet another built-in computer. Red wondered how he would possibly survive if the wi-fi networks went down.

As soon as the lines were clear, Red pulled the boat back out onto the open water and gunned the engine until the vessel was ploughing through the relatively still waters at full speed. Nico absently placed an uninflated life jacket spell in his shirt pocket and snapped the seatbelt around his waist. If the boat were submerged, or capsized, the seat would automatically release and take him to the surface.

Red grinned at the sensation of the power beneath her feet and under her fingers’ control. This was the sensation of freedom, a feeling that was otherwise denied her. As the shipping lanes became more crowded on the approaches to Piraeus, the sea port serving Athens, she jinked the boat between the larger vessels and delighted at the increasingly complicated manoeuvres she was forced to carry out in order to avoid the flotillas of smaller boats like her own. Finally, she was forced to cut back on the speed and cruise the boat into one of the large, superyacht marinas just outside the main port area. She could have sailed right into the Papandreyou Shipping Lines section of Piraeus (which covered as much of the port as PSL wanted it to at any given time), but it didn’t pay to advertise. Anyone who was interested enough to know would already be aware of her links with Papandreyou through Nico’s presence, but they wouldn’t know the nature of those links and she was not about to give them any more intelligence than she needed to.

A car that could have been the same one they had left on the island was waiting for them in the marina, presumably summoned by Nico through his ever-present computers. The licence plate told her it wasn’t the same vehicle, and this one was linked to the city’s intelligent road network so there was no driver, but it was in every other way identical. The ride, however, could not have been more different. The road surface was smooth and the vehicle’s suspension took care of any slight undulations that remained. The computers on board the car and beneath the road itself kept the speed consistent and removed the need for any lurching at junctions or when changing lanes.

The distance they travelled wasn’t far. When Papandreyou worked out of Athens, he worked out of the PSL headquarters in Piraeus. It was an imposing building overlooking the main port and the initials of the company were emblazoned on the walls from ground to roof, making them visible for miles out to sea. As a statement, it was both powerful and the opposite of subtle. Anyone attending the building was in no doubt as to who was in charge here, whether they were customers, contractors or government heads of state.

The car didn’t go to the headquarters, of course. There was little point avoiding the notice of anyone watching if you were going to announce your presence by driving up to the front door. Instead, the vehicle drove past the frontage and continued a couple of blocks further on. There, it entered a private parking garage serving two cargo warehouses. They descended two levels and were admitted through a line of cones and a wall of plastic sheeting by workmen who had been busy fixing that particular section of the parking area for about five years now. Beyond the cones, workmen, plastic sheets and industrial machines, there was a tunnel that stretched back to a secret parking area under the PSL headquarters building. It was all very cloak and dagger, but Red appreciated the commitment to security.

It probably would have taken her about three days to locate the secret entrance had she been planning a professional visit during her previous life.

Theirs was the only car in the parking area as Red stepped out of the vehicle and waited for Nico to go through the whole crease-straightening routine with his trousers. She wasn’t sure that the affectation wasn’t there just to annoy her, so she made a point of not allowing it to. They then summoned the private lift, Nico punching in that day’s code to make the doors open. That was another nice security measure, though Red calculated she could override the system in less than a minute.

The lift opened into a small antechamber situated to one side of Papandreyou’s penthouse office. Its existence wasn’t immediately obvious to anyone in the main office or to anyone who was making a study of the building plans. Red knew this for a fact because she had made both surveys early on during the time she had spent working for The Greek. What none of the great man’s security advisors had ever thought to point out to him was that the mere existence of such security measures suggested he was a man with activities requiring such security measures. To any professional, it was like hanging up a sign saying I am also up to no good. Or at least up to things of questionable legality, which was not necessarily the same thing.

Nico immediately crossed the small room, ignoring the plush seats, and opened the door into the main office, no doubt having communicated with his boss from the car or via his phone in the lift. Red followed him at a leisurely pace.

“Ah, my dear Lady Red,” Aristotle Papandreyou welcomed her, rising from his seat and coming around the large desk to greet her with open arms and a big smile.

“Hello, Papa,” she returned the smile and the gesture, which became a hug and the traditional kiss on each cheek.

“You know, you are the only one who I allow to call me that,” he told her as they broke apart.

“It’s because I’m your favourite, I know.”

“Please don’t let my children hear you say that, even in jest,” he told her in mild horror.

Aristotle Papandreyou had been blessed with two children, one of each gender and both of whom had learned early that their father’s great wealth and influence allowed them to act however they pleased, whether he approved of their behaviour or not. They were nicknamed by those who knew them as the Terrible Twins, though they were actually born a year apart.

Their mother, Georgiana Papadreyou, a former Miss Greece and practising marine biologist, had decided that two children was enough to cement a dynasty and had gone back to heading the research and development arm of the Papandreyou Shipping Line, making it the most ocean-friendly conglomerate in the world. She also oversaw the Papandreyou Foundation, which was one of the foremost philanthropic organisations in the world, not least because it boasted the kind of resources capable of making whole nations worried. She was known to be a quiet, calm and thoughtful woman, who could quietly, calmly and thoughtfully come up with the most devastating punishments for anyone who crossed her, but who could also initiate acts of astonishingly appropriate kindness. It paid to remain in her good books.

Nobody said such things of the children, and refrained from saying anything at all about them in front of their parents.

“You assume I am jesting,” she pointed out.

“I hope you are jesting,” he countered, but with a tolerant smile. “You are as beautiful as ever. The Mediterranean lifestyle suits you.”

“The rich lifestyle suits me,” she amended. “For which I am here to pay.”

“You make it sound so mercenary,” he complained.

“Because it is,” she assured him.

“I consider it to be friends helping friends,” Papandreyou suggested, heading over to a comfortable sofa and indicating that she should join him.

She took one of the chairs facing it. There was friendly and there was pissing off the wife friendly. She didn’t comment on his suggestion. She owed him a debt and he accessed her skills by way of payment. She couldn’t think of any better definition of mercenary than that.

“So what trinket are you wanting me to steal for you this time?” she asked instead, hoping he wasn’t going to send her on some job that could have been carried out successfully by an amateur. She had never refused one of his requests, but there had been a couple of occasions when she had felt the job was decidedly beneath a person of her undoubted skills

“They are not trinkets, as you would have it,” he objected to her description.

Papandreyou was a collector of magical artefacts and had amassed one of the largest, and most significant, collections of such items outside of the famed Evidence Locker run by the United Nations Department for the Enforcement and Apprehension of Demons, the international police force of the supernatural. She had been hired to steal one such magical object from his personal vault, which she had managed to do successfully, but had then been ratted out by an agent of U.N.D.E.A.D. on some sort of personal furlough. That was how she had come into the employ of the man on the sofa. There are some offences that are too big to forgive and Aristotle Papandreyou was known to be as unforgiving as his wife, though a lot quicker to act and keener on simply inflicting physical pain. That job had been supposed to be her last before she went deeply anonymous and lived out her days on the glory of that one score. Things hadn’t quite worked out the way they were supposed to.

Nico walked across the room and dropped a file onto the low table in front of Red. As it landed, a photograph slid partially into view.

“And who might we have here?” she asked, picking up the photograph.

The man pictured was handsome in the kind of rugged manner that would make male fashion models weep. His features were set with a firmness that could have put granite to shame. He had a look of intelligence and competence, combined with a confident bearing that indicated he could have been whatever he chose to be, whether that was a photojournalist in the troubled regions of the Middle East, a military officer or, for heaven’s sake, a starship captain. Hell, he could have donned a blonde wig and called himself an evil wizard and he would have pulled it off. The crowning glory were eyes of the palest, but most intense, blue she had ever seen.

“That is Jeremy Isaacs,” Nico told her.

“Well, hello to Jeremy Isaacs,” Red said with some feeling.

“My daughter was very much of the same opinion,” Papandreyou said with a shake of his head. “As was my wife.”

“Women with fine taste, both,” Red placed the photograph back on the table and then added to Nico, “You can spoil it all now.”

“He is British…”

“He is?” Red asked in surprise. The man in the photograph was blessed with the kind of dark-haired, suntanned looks that denied any link to that nationality’s more pallid colouration.

“… rich and something in line to the throne,” Nico finished. “Though so far down the list everyone has stopped counting by the time they get to him.”

“You sure about that?” she asked him. In her experience, entitled people were the people most obsessed by what they were entitled to. It was a principle not unlike criminals being the people who know the most about their rights under the law. “And, by the way, how rich is he?”

“By British standards, very,” Nico supplied the information immediately. “By global standards…”

His shrug was eloquent about how far down that list Issacs must fall. Britain was trying its hardest to become a tax haven for Russian oligarchs and other individuals of dodgy income whilst still pretending it wasn’t desperate to bring in money from every other country because it wasn’t making that much of its own. The damp climate of the country served to work against these people actually residing there, but they were happy for their money to do so.

“So, who is he?” Red asked Papandreyou. She had allowed herself to become side-tracked by the startling attractiveness of the man in the photograph, but that was because she hadn’t agreed to take on the job yet. She wasn’t actually sure there was a job yet, because these two seemed to be taking their own sweet time getting around to the point.

“Until recently, nobody of interest,” Papandreyou revealed. “Now, he has become a competitor.”

“Hey, wait. I thought you had people to do that sort of stuff,” she baulked at the idea.

“I do,” Papandreyou agreed, “and, in this case, those people are you. I think you have misunderstood what sort of stuff it is I want doing.”

“Oh, right,” Red said, slightly mollified.

“You know of my interest in certain objects,” he said, and it was obviously a rhetorical question. “The market for such things can be fiercely contested and not without its dangers of interference from… the authorities.”

She knew exactly who he meant from bitter personal experience.

“The bidders in this market are relatively few and well known to each other, so whilst the competition is fierce it is also gentlemanly and predictable.”

“Even from the ladies?” she couldn’t resist asking.

“They mainly provide the fierce part,” he riposted immediately. “The point is that the market is relatively stable and we are all aware of our competitors’… motivations. This man, “ he indicated the photograph, “has entered the market and is making bids his visible wealth would suggest he cannot afford.”

“You think he’s being financed by somebody else.” It was not a question, it was the only obvious conclusion to be drawn.

“I am not a good loser,” Papandreyou stated, “but I have learned that one cannot win every situation one faces in life. However, the last time someone took mystical items from me the outcome was… regrettable.”

In another situation, she might have laughed at the understatement of facts, but he was speaking of a guilt they both shared for the aftermath of her stealing the Fateful Blade from his vault. Though she could not have known what was planned for the sword by those who had hired her, and he could not hold himself responsible for holding onto it in the first place rather than handing it over to others who could better control its power, they both felt keenly the weight of the deaths that had followed and they saw that same weight in the eyes of the other.

“You want me to find out who’s bankrolling him and why,” she summarised the job offer as she saw it. “I’m not a detective.”

“The people who tried before you were detectives,” Papandreyou told her. “They found nothing. I don’t need detectives, I need a thief. I need you to steal his secrets for me.”

Red laughed, mainly to break the sudden tension.

“Maybe he keeps them all in a folder on his computer labelled Porpoise pictures.”

“You hacked my computer?” Papandreyou asked, both shocked and outraged at the same time.

“It’s what I do,” she pointed out reasonably. “You force me to work for you, so I do what I have to in order to protect myself. And really, you couldn’t have made easier for me, could you? I mean that folder was either going to provide proof of what I am sure is a very rare porpoise fetish or lots of other things you don’t want anyone to know about. Oh, stop pouting. I left everything exactly where it was and, after I’d finished reading through it all, I made a complete and full report to your Head of Cyber Security.”

“Is that why we stopped using the Swiss?” Papandreyou asked Nico, who nodded once. “With all those banks to protect, you would think the Swiss would know a thing or two about security.”

Red, who knew more than a thing or two about the security levels of Swiss banks, remained silent on the subject. Instead, she asked, “When do I start?”

There had been no doubt she was going to take the job. The Greek didn’t employ people who refused to do the things he asked of them. At least, he didn’t employ them for long and nobody employed them at all after he put the word around. The significance of what he was asking of her, to both him and Red herself, only served to reinforce that.

“If there is a timescale on this, we are not the people who are setting it,” the magnate said, which was both wise and completely unhelpful. She had learned that the Greeks as a race were very good at combining those two things in a single saying.

“The usual terms,” she said, just to confirm it. The usual terms in question were that she had a free hand to carry out the job her way and he did not complain about what it cost. In return, she didn’t rip him off with the expenses and got him what he wanted.

“You will report directly to Nico on this one,” Papandreyou said by way of an amendment. “He will be running the operation for me.”

“Really?” Red wrinkled up her face at the unexpected news.

“He is like my right hand.”

“And we all know what men do most with their right hands,” she pointed out.

“Sign cheques?” Papandreyou said with slight confusion, which Red found cute despite herself and the fact her joke had fallen flat.

“All right, but the first time he makes a decision based on what something costs and not what I need, I’m out,” she declared.

“Of course,” the magnate agreed at once, “but please, play nice.”

“Now where’s the fun in that?” Red wondered.

The Mark

In the flesh, Lord Jeremy Isaacs was every bit as impressive as he had appeared to be in the photograph Papandreyou had first shown Red. She had seen a great many other photographs of the man since then and had yet to find one that lessened her opinion of him in any way. As an eligible, for which read rich and handsome, bachelor, his face cropped up in the gossip columns on a regular basis. One thing about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is that the population do like their gossip columns. In fact, some of those columns have expanded to the point where they now constitute the entire magazine or newspaper. The once great British press learned early that sex sells where news doesn’t. When public opinion turned against the blatant sexualisation of women in newspapers, usually on page 3 but also on any other page where there was space, they had learned that gossip could fill the revenue gap left by the absence of women with no clothes on. It was all very well there being a economic crash wiping out the world’s economies and bringing hardship to millions, but unless the bankers involved looked great in lingerie or were banging the nanny there was no point in reporting it. The country’s printed press had been lost to this process and now the only way to find any news that could be even remotely trusted was to tune in to one the British television news channels. They, at least, had held on to the political non-partisan ethos that the billionaire-owned newspapers had gleefully abandoned. American imports were to be avoided as the only way they could be more blatantly partisan was by openly offering bribes to get their viewers to vote for the party of their choice.

All of this was in the background as Red did her research into the target. When she started, she knew nothing about him beyond his name. By the time she had finished, she knew nothing of any use. Which was not to say she hadn’t learned anything at all. Though he had a high public profile, it was not the profile of a wastrel playboy. This meant he probably wasn’t dressing up at night as a bat and fighting crime on the streets of London. He did, however live in a Manor appropriate to such a secret lifestyle. That was located out in the English countryside and when he had to commute into London, he did so via a private teleport link, the existence of which was evidence enough on its own to confirm the level of his wealth.

He had been part of a few significant personal relationships that had not, for reasons he was too much of a gentleman to disclose, become permanent. He apparently remained on excellent terms with each of the ex-partners. He was currently linked with the heiress to a financial services empire, but she was an heiress who took a hands-on approach to the business and showed more of an aptitude for it than the parent from whom she was to inherit. Lord Jeremy Isaacs, it seemed, was not attracted by looks over intelligence, but preferred instead that his consorts possessed both. As a hereditary peer, he had a place in the House of Lords and, surprisingly, took that role seriously. He attended debates and votes, and his comments on political matters were usually well-informed and thoughtful, though often scathing regarding the sitting government.

He was, in almost every way, exactly what she would not have expected from a member of the British aristocratic class. Except for his love of cricket.

He was a financial supporter of the Gloucestershire Cricket Club and a regular attendee at the Bristol County ground for matches. He was also passionate about the England national team and had not missed a single Ashes match since he was a boy. He had, though, spoken out about the famous incident that gave the regular England versus Australia grudge matches their name. Legend went that the Australians had been so incensed by some decisions made during the very first match between the two countries that they had burned the umpire and poured his ashes into the trophy. Lord Isaacs had publicly denounced this reading of the legend and stated that the ashes in question were, in truth, those of the wooden bails used in the first match and not those of the luckless umpire. Further research to satisfy Red’s idle curiosity had unearthed a secret annual payment from the Australian Cricket Confederation to the family of the inaugural match’s umpire in perpetuity. No reason was given.

◆◆◆

Red walked out onto the tiled floor of the Corinthian Roof Terrace at the Oval Cricket Ground and considered that the clash of bright green tiles (no doubt mimicking the grass of the outfield) against the utilitarian white of the furnishings would have been garish had there not been so many people mingling in the space and blocking most of it. The terrace was apparently part of the 1845 stand at the Vauxhall end of the ground, none of which mattered at all to her. What did matter was that the space was currently offering high-ranking members of both the Surrey County Cricket Club and England Cricket Confederation access to high-end buffet refreshments, drinks and spectacular views of the last day of the year’s test match series against the West Indies.

The series was tied and the previous four days of this match had been punishing for both teams, leaving matters to be resolved in the final afternoon’s play. The visiting team were chasing a testing, but attainable, target of runs to prove victorious. The home side needed an equally testing, but attainable, number of wickets to bowl the other side out and win the series. Cricket was one of the few sports where a single match was played out over days rather than hours, but at least it was more interesting, and combative, than golf.

Red ignored the ubiquitous champagne at the bar and settled for a superior, but unassuming, white wine before strolling over to the balcony. She had to admit the view over the field of play was very impressive. Whilst preparing for the events of the day, she had come to an appreciation of the game that only those who took the time to really understand it could. In recent years, there had been a drift towards shorter versions of the game, played over a single day or even just a few hours, sometimes under spotlights at night in an attempt to attract audiences that increasingly possessed neither the time, nor the patience for the long form. These were undeniably more exciting in their crash bang approach, but lost a lot of the tactical manoeuvring that characterised test cricket. Whilst the game was set around a two man duel between bowler and batsman in the centre of the field, there was so much else going on to make it as much a game of the mind as of the body.

Out on the field, a man dressed all in white, ran a long way up to one end of the pitch and launched a ball at the man holding the bat. The batsman guided it safely away to one of the fielders and received a muted round of applause from the crowd. The ground was filled to capacity and there was a general air of good natured tension in the audience. As the final session of play progressed, the good natures would diminish and the tension would increase.

The bowler raced in again and this time the batsman had the measure of him and cracked the ball up into the sky. Other players raced to try and catch the spherical red missile, but it passed over the boundary rope and into the crowd, who cheered and moaned in equal measure as six more runs were added to the scoreboard.

Red rolled her eyes and tutted.

Moments later, she sighed heavily and clicked her tongue as the batsman struck the ball off to one side and it ran across the grass until it came to rest against the rope. Another four runs appeared on the scoreboard total. A similar fate befell the next delivered ball, to the other side of the ground this time.

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” she muttered in irritation.

“Excuse me young lady, but is something wrong?” A portly gentlemen with more hair on his chin than the top of his head asked, turning towards her. The crest on his blazer marked him out as a member of the county team’s support.

“Only with what they’re doing out there,” she replied, venting just a little of her obvious frustration. False obvious frustration, but a good enough facsimile. “I can’t believe I make it here for the last day and they’re going to blow it.”

“You think so?” the man asked with a spark of interest.

“If they keep running out the fast bowlers, yes,” she decided. “The pitch is rock hard, has been all week and the weather has just dried it out more. The ball’s sitting up and travelling straight. The Windies are going to knock it all over the place. What’s needed here isn’t power and speed anymore, it’s guile. They need to get the spinners on, give Palmer, Lake, even Emerson a run out. That’s how they’re going to win, not by trying to throw it right through the batsmen’s heads.”

The man turned back to the group he was part of and announced, “Hey, Jeremy, looks like I’ve got someone here to agree with you.”

“About what?” another man, who was unmistakeably Jeremy Isaacs because Jeremy Isaacs was a man it was impossible to mistake, turned towards them.

“Fast boys out, spinners in,” Red’s new companion summarised.

“Finally, someone else who sees it,” Isaacs said and eased his way through the others with the practised ease of someone used to negotiating social groups.

“But this is the fastest bowling attack we’ve had in a generation,” the shorter man complained.

“Absolutely,” Red jumped straight in enthusiastically, “but this is also the best batting side the West Indies has produced since… well since forever. We’ve got to get the spinners on to make use of the cracking wicket or we can just pack up now and go home.”

“Jeremy Isaacs,” the newcomer said, holding out his hand, which Red took. From her research, she had not expected him to use his title and was pleased to see she was not wide of the mark.

“Elynore Welby,” she returned the introduction.

“I am more than pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said, releasing her hand.

“Because I am a woman who knows a bit about cricket?” she enquired archly.

“Because you are a person who knows enough about cricket to agree with me,” he corrected her.

The man beside them made a harrumphing sound.

“Oh yes, this is Marcus Crisp,” Isaacs made the introduction. “He doesn’t agree with us at all.”

“Then he is, with all due respect, wrong,” she said with an apologetic smile for Crisp.

“Would you care to make a wager on that?” the man demanded.

“I have just spent my entire disposable income for half the year in getting my membership,” she demurred.

“How very extravagant of you,” Crisp allowed.

“A very wise investment,” Isaacs disagreed. “For someone who appreciates cricket.”

“Nurture not nature,” Red admitted. “I had it forced on me from an early age by my father. Rest his soul.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Isaacs said sympathetically. “Recent?”

“That’s why I’m back in the country,” she said with a nod. “Nothing to keep me away any longer.”

“Well, I am deeply sorry for your loss and happy for our gain,” Isaacs reiterated with a nod of his head.

Red smiled despite herself. She would have smiled anyway in playing the part, but her reaction was a completely natural one. Jeremy Isaacs was, it seemed, something of a charmer. She would have to watch out for that, though she doubted her currently dowdy appearance would attract his attention much. It isn’t true that men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, but it is true they do it less often. The small fact that the glasses she was wearing picked up all kinds of electronic information from the area around her was of purely secondary importance.

Down on the pitch, another ball raced away to the boundary, bringing cheers from the visiting side’s supporters in the crowd.

“What’s that now; six an over with five wickets standing? This is going down to the wire and if they don’t change the bowling attack soon we’ll be on the wrong side of the result.”

“Who would you suggest they bring on?” Isaacs asked, and Red could tell he was genuinely interested in what she had to say. He wasn’t humouring her or flattering her in the hope of getting a telephone number.

“I think Lake’s the most likely to make an early breakthrough, but Emerson will be the one who determines the outcome in the end.”

“And Palmer?”

“Pop him in from time to time, just to break up the batsmen’s rhythm, keep them off their balance, but it’s the other two who will bring the results,” she decided.

“What would you say to a place on the board of selectors?” Isaacs joked.

“How much does it pay?” she responded and they all laughed.

“You must come and join us,” Isaacs insisted. “At least until the result is decided. I need the support. Really. I’m surrounded by naysayers.”

“Well, we can’t have that, can we?” Red said and allowed herself to be led into the heart of the social gathering.

Red could move easily in these circles, especially after spending so much time amongst the glitterati of Aristotle Papandreyou’s court. She knew the type. They considered themselves to be masters of all they surveyed, mainly through a mix of inherited money, public schooling and advantageous marriages. She doubted any of them had ever had to work hard for a living, but people played the hand they were dealt, so she couldn’t find it in herself to particularly blame them. She was accepted by them immediately; the lord’s invitation to the join the circle assured that. If he said she was all right, then they would take that recommendation at face value, insulated by the knowledge that nothing bad could ever actually happen to them. Besides which, her plain looks and clothes that were trying too hard to be better than they actually were marked her out as someone below them in the pecking order, so treating her nicely could be seen as their charitable good deed for the day, possibly the week and, for a few of them, potentially the decade. When they got home, they would criticise her outfit, hair and makeup, whilst remarking on how brave she was to fight the obvious obstacles of her lowly start in life. None of them would consider this in any way wrong.

None of which bothered Red at all. These people were of as little interest to her and she was to them. They were merely the bees clustered around the flower she intended to pick. She smiled at them, laughed at their jokes, listened to their stories and charmed them all effortlessly and all the time kept her eye on events on the pitch below.

When the tacticians in the English dressing room finally abandoned the speed attack and brought on the first of the spin bowlers, she and Isaacs shared a high five celebration, much to the amusement, and annoyance, of those in the group who had decried their assessment. Much to the lord’s delight, it was Palmer who was brought into the attack first, but Red was vindicated when, just one over later, Lake came in from the other end and took a wicket with his very first ball. She gave Isaacs a triumphant grin, which he acknowledged in good humour. Since they were both supporting the same side, it didn’t really matter who was proved right as long as the outcome was the one they wanted.

The overs passed and the run rate fell. So did wickets, but not with enough rapidity to put the result beyond doubt in either direction. As the hour grew late towards the end of the session, the visiting side were in striking distance of the victory, but were hanging onto their last wicket by a thread. The batsmen tried to turn a safe single into two runs and managed to scamper home inches before the ball smashed the bails from the top of the stumps. A slow motion video replay of the action showed the batsman had landed his bat in the safe area with the barest minimum margin to survive the call. The runs were added to the score, eliciting a chorus of moans from the balcony.

“Last over, eight runs needed,” Isaacs summarised, gripped by the excitement and tension of the game. People who didn’t watch cricket couldn’t know how impossibly tense the last half hour of a five day match could be. Not that many of those who did know were necessarily willing to sacrifice the five days for the sake of that last half hour. “It’s got to be Emerson to bowl. He’s on fire.”

“Sinclair,” Red offered an alternative option.

“Sinclair? He’s not even a spinner. You want to go back to the fast attack?” Isaacs was surprised to say the least.

“The spinners have penned them in, stunted their ambitions,” she explained her thinking. “Let Sinclair at them and they’ll panic.”

“That really is aggressive thinking,” he said, but seemed to approve.

The captain on the field, and the team up in the England changing room didn’t agree. Emerson, a short and compact player with a precision bowling action and safe fielding hands, checked the ball and set himself for the start of his short run up. The West Indian player launched himself at the delivery with a certain reckless bravado. This was the end of play and only the brave would succeed. He struck the ball, but more by luck than by intent. It raced off in a totally unexpected direction and made it to the boundary just before the sprinting fielder on that side could prevent it.

“Damnation!” Crisp said with some vehemence. Considering what it meant to be properly damned, Red thought the response was a little strong.

“Four runs left,” Isaacs said, transfixed.

Emerson came in again and the batsman tried the same tactic. This time, the mishit fired the ball right back the bowler, who snatched at it in the air. The crowd thought he had caught it, but he cried out as his fingers were bent backwards by the impact and the ball spilled out of them onto the ground. The other England players rushed to gather around their unfortunate colleague. The two surviving batsmen met up in the middle of the wicket to talk tactics in the unexpected pause.

“I think he’s really injured,” Crisp said and he was proven right when signals were shared from the field to the dressing room and Emerson left the field, holding one hand with the other, the fingers sticking out at odd angles.

“Oh, that is bad luck,” Isaacs sympathised.

Down on the pitch, there seemed to be a heated debate going on amongst the England players as they waited for the substitute player to descend to the field of play. So unexpected was the turn of events that he needed a few moments to warm up even though there were only four balls left in the match. After what seemed like an eternity to the crowd, a tall, rangy blond-haired man emerged holding the ball.

“Sinclair it is,” Isaacs confirmed to Red with some admiration.

“I think mainly because he won’t give the ball to anyone else,” she pointed out.

The players took up new positions around the field, directed by the captain and the bowler. As a fast bowler, Sinclair needed a longer run up than the spinners in order to build up his momentum. He set himself and came sprinting in towards the wicket. An entire stadium collectively held its breath. His arm spun over his shoulder almost faster than the eye could follow. The ball he released was certainly faster than that and the bails were bouncing on the grass before anyone really grasped what had happened. For a moment, there was absolute silence as more than twenty five thousand people’s brains tried to catch up with their eyes. Then, the place erupted.

Whilst on the terraces below people were bouncing up and down, showering pints of beer and other drinks all over their neighbours, who didn’t seem to notice let alone care, the more reserved group on the balcony cheered just as loudly and broke into a round of back-slapping and hand-shaking. Cheek kissing was also in evidence to include the ladies of the group.

Isaacs pointed directly at Red, “You called it. You just bloody went and called it.”

“Yes, but they did it,” she said modestly, pointing to the players on the field who were running for the steps up to the teams’ changing rooms as the celebrating crowd spilled out onto the field and rushed to embrace them. Sinclair didn’t bother even trying to make it back. He stood in the centre of the wicket with his hands in the air until the crowd surged around him and he was hoisted aloft.

Red glanced at her watch, “And I’m going to be terribly late.”

“You can’t go now,” Isaacs objected. “Surely you want to see them lift the trophy.”

“I have an aunt who has absolutely no interest in cricket and I’m already going to be in her bad books,” Red made her excuses.

“Listen, listen, I’m holding a small fundraising event for grass roots cricket charities at my country place next week,” he said it as easily as only a man who believes it is normal to have more than one place could have. He wasn’t boasting, simply reflecting the reality of his situation and status. “You should come.”

“You wouldn’t raise many funds out of me,” Red told him. “Not until I get a job anyway.”

“Others will bring the money. It would be nice to have someone who is genuinely impassioned by the sport. You know, to spread the faith. Like a holy crusade.”

“When you put it like that, how could I possibly refuse?” she wondered.

“You can’t. Besides which, you can also use it as a networking event. You might even be able to shake a job loose from one of these wastrels,” he insisted.

“Yes, all right,” she accepted. “It’ll make a change from job applications and sending out CVs.”

“Good, that’s settled then. Give me your number and I’ll text you the address, though you can hardly miss the place.”

The Crew

“I’m going to need a crew,” Red told Nico over an ultra-secure video link. Symbols in the corner of the screen confirmed there were currently no attempts to interfere with the link, either electronically or magically.

“You have not yet located the target,” Nico stated. He didn’t seem surprised by her progress or annoyed by the lack of it. In fact, he showed no emotion at all. He didn’t even look up from the tablet computer he was showing more attention to than the video call.

“Not yet,” she admitted, “but I’ve narrowed it down to his stately home near Bristol.”

She had spent the last two nights eliminating both Isaacs’s London office and his town house from consideration. Breaking into the office had been insultingly easy, telling her before she even started looking that she would find nothing of interest there. She had searched thoroughly even so and was, as a result, really sure there was nothing of interest there.

The town house hadn’t been much trickier except that Isaacs kept a small staff on retainer there. The cleaner was only present in the day and the cook attended only when there was going to be someone there who needed feeding. Waiting staff was brought in from an agency for any planned dinner engagements. Once a week, a gardener was brought in from the country estate to tend to both the indoor and outdoor plant life. There was, however, what could only be described as a butler who kept the place in pristine condition throughout the day and a security guard who patrolled the place at night.

Red didn’t want to take the time to rig up some sort of internal video feed to monitor the guard and didn’t think it was necessary anyway. The day she couldn’t evade a single, bored security man was the day she would hang up the catsuit for good and take to baking her own bread. Her breadmaking days still remained some way in the future, though, as the guard had settled himself at his post and was asleep within minutes. He remained that way for the entire time she was there, except when an alarm on his phone woke him up to carry out the sloppiest patrol she had ever witnessed. Red bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t write a letter on Isaacs’s behalf to the security company, complaining about this incredibly unprofessional behaviour. Whatever the peer was paying for his security, he was being ripped off. The only saving grace was that there was nothing in the house worth taking. Which is to say there was a lot of stuff in the house worth taking for purely monetary gain, but nothing at all that interested her.

“The Manor is where I’ll need to operate and I will be checking the place out later this week. In the meantime, I’m going to need a techie and a general support person no matter where I have to hit. We can start recruiting those now. I’ll add the specialists later, once I know what specialisms I need.”

“All right,” Nico agreed with surprisingly little resistance. “You have names in mind?”

“For the tech bod, yes, but he’s not local, so I’ll need you to arrange discreet transport for me. And he won’t come cheap,” she warned.

“Very few people of worth do,” Nico said, unexpectedly sagely. “And the other?”

“Oh, I have a contact here I can use for recruiting,” she said vaguely.

“Do I want to know?” Nico asked.

“No, I really don’t think you do,” she told him. “I’m on my way there now.”

“Fine. I will arrange an untraceable teleport conduit for you,” he told her, “which also will not come cheap.”

Red ended the call and securely locked the laptop three different ways. If anyone tried to hack it, they would find themselves on the end of a very nasty combination of electric charge and nausea spell, both of which were carefully calibrated to ensure the unlucky individual managed to make it out of the flat before they started vomiting and their bowels let loose.

She paused by the door to shrug into her raincoat (it was inevitable that it would rain at some time during her visit to England) and to check the jet black bob her hair was styled in. The black eyeshadow and lipstick was probably a bit too far, but in some circumstances the more obvious you were, the more invisible you were. Satisfied with her appearance, she stepped out and locked the flat door six different ways. Anyone messing with that was going to wish not only that they had never been born but that neither had their parents or grandparents.

The London Underground had seen significant improvements and upgrades since her last time in the city and the journey was quiet, agreeable and short as a result. The lines she was using were equipped with the new ejectorport seats, an innovation being adopted by cities across the world. The trains no longer stopped at the stations. Passengers took their places in seats on the platform and dialled in their destinations. When a train passed with space available, the seat was teleported aboard automatically and the reverse process took place at the end of the journey. In an emergency situation, the chair was teleported onto the tracks twenty feet behind the train. The technology was very new and only worked over very short distances with strong power supplies nearby, but it had revolutionised travel in the city. Fewer people could be crammed into the carriages, but journey times were reduced, which meant trains could make more journeys. The two balanced each other out in terms of capacity, but made the journeys themselves so much more pleasant.

The improvements, however, stopped at the door out of the Underground station. The area of the city Red had ventured into was neither downmarket nor upmarket, but she knew for a fact it was definitely market. There was nothing you could want that couldn’t be bought around here, assuming you knew where to look. If you didn’t know where to look, then you had no right to be wanting those sorts of things in the first place. The High Street was brightly lit by shop fronts and signs announcing the names of the all the usual suspects. Clothes, food, electronics, entertainments and drinking establishments with impeccable, or at least generally acceptable, reputations jostled for space on either side of a road jammed with vehicles and pedestrians. There were even cyclists, the automatic controls of the road network giving them a very false sense of security. There is just something about a cyclist in lycra that calls for a car door to be opened in front of them.

It was early evening, so the area was bustling as people spilled out of the places they went to between finishing work and going home. Red had never worked a nine to five job, so she had no information about what those places might be. It was a bit early for the nightlife to kick in, but there were a few early starters about, and even a few who hadn’t finished from the night before. She avoided both.

Only a few streets away from the bright shop façades, the picture was very different. Only a few of the streetlights were working and the local borough council was paid quite a lot of money to keep them that way. The official reason given for the lack of illumination, if anyone asked, was that it improved viewing conditions for the local astronomy club. A local astronomy club had been set up specifically to reinforce that explanation, but the membership list was always full and anyone asking more questions ended up seeing stars of an entirely different variety.

Despite the lack of lighting, Red walked the streets confidently. Quite apart from being sure of her own abilities to either run away from trouble or to cause more trouble for anyone who bothered her, these were streets of commerce and any commercial enterprise that allows its customers to be mugged on the way to or from making a purchase is going to see their balance sheet become decidedly unbalanced in favour of the red column. As a result, levels of crime in this area showed as negative on the Metropolitan Police’s maps, the local residents only too happy to hand over offenders from other areas to the constabulary.

Her destination was a rambling Victorian house situated on one corner of a crossroads. The curtains at the windows were plum-coloured, at least during the day. At night, they were no colour at all because they were enchanted to prevent the passage of any light at all through them. The roads themselves were narrow and made even more so by skips situated at strategic points. In this neighbourhood, the only passing trade was the specialist undertakers halfway down the street. Making Sure Death Lasts Forever, was their sales pitch.

Red ascended the stone steps to the main door of the house and rapped her knuckles sharply on the wood. She knew better than to do something as foolish as use the doorbell or knocker; she didn’t give her fingerprints away that easily. The door opened almost immediately to reveal a man who was too short, too bald and too well-endowed in the belly area for the leopard print thong he was wearing. Red saw rather too much of him before he reacted to her presence and wrapped the sheer silk kimono he was also wearing around him, restoring his modesty and reducing her mental anguish. The memory of that sight was going to see her through many therapy sessions, she was sure.

“Can I help you, love?” he asked, leaning against the edge of the door in a come hither fashion.

Red stayed thither quite determinedly.

“Do you mean can I help you love? or do you mean can I help you, love?” she asked, taking this to be one of those moments in life where grammar really did matter.

“I mean, what do you want, dearie?” he clarified with a hint of annoyance.

“I’m looking for the lady of the house,” she told him.

“There ain’t no ladies in this house,” he said with a knowing smile that was much more sickening than knowing in Red’s opinion.

At another place, and another time, and with someone else, Red might have argued that the services being offered did not define whether you were a lady or not. She instead resorted to explaining, “I mean Mrs Meeks, if she’s still using that name.”

“Who’s asking?” the man with the unfortunate underwear became suddenly suspicious and was as bad at hiding that fact as he had been at hiding the thong. She could immediately tell he wasn’t going to let her speak to anyone inside without being given a very good reason. If she’d been carrying fake police identification, that might have sufficed, but she hadn’t expected to encounter this obstacle. This had been a very active establishment that required nothing in the way of names to gain access. It had mainly required something in the way of money. There was no sound coming from within to suggest the property was being used for the trade that had previously been plied there. There should have been music and discussion and the clinking of overpriced drinks in cheap glasses.

“I’m a friend,” Red said.

“No you’re not,” the man denied. “I’m a friend and I know all her other friends, none of which are you.

“It was from while ago. I’m sure she’ll remember,” Red suggested.

“I’m sure she’ll remember your name, if you’re goin’ to give it me,” the man insisted.

There were an awful lot of things Red was sure she wasn’t going to give to him. One of the things she didn’t want to give to him was her name. Unfortunately, it was the only name Eileen Meeks knew her by. “We had a professional relationship, so she only knows me by my professional name.”

“Well our relationship ain’t professional,” the man said with a wink that made Red feel physically sick. “You don’t give me a name, I don’t give her a name and nobody talks to nobody.”

Red knew he had a point. Here she was, a stranger, turning up in the middle of the early evening and asking to see the house’s owner and not even willing to give her name. There were lots of reasons why that should be the case, but some of them were less than pleasant ones. He was only being careful, which put her in a difficult position. She trusted Eileen and needed to speak to her. In order to do that she had to get past this doorkeeper, apparently. She could have laid him out flat with a couple of open-handed jabs, but if what he said about his relationship with Eileen was true, and there could be no other excuse for the manner of his dress, knocking him unconscious was unlikely to gain her the assistance she was looking for.

“All right. I’m Lady Red.”

The kimono-wearer snorted slightly. “You ain’t no Lady Red.”

“Really? Because I have it on good authority that I am and I think I might be the one who knows,” Red contradicted him.

“Lady Red’s got red hair,” he stated, as though this proved everything. Clearly, the concept of hair dye, or wigs, had passed him by. “Anyways, she’s not been active for donkeys.”

Red was familiar enough with colloquial English not to enquire as to a donkey’s what. She also wasn’t going to get into a debate the difference beween what  constituted being  active and what constituted being reported in the press.

The pause, though, was enough to make the man bored. He leaned back into the house and shouted, “Eileen! Someone here to see you, babe. Reckons she’s…”

He stopped speaking at this point on account the pain shooting through his left foot. The fluffy flip-flops he was wearing had done nothing to protect his toes from the heel of Red’s boot. She shoved him back, followed him inside and shut the door behind her.

“What did you bloody well do that for, you damned lunatic woman?” the man shouted, when the pain allowed him to inhale again.

“To be honest, I didn’t want the whole street to know who I was,” she told him through gritted teeth.

“Oh, you’re here on the sweet n low,” he said and actually tapped the side of his nose as he winked at her.

“You mean the down low?” she asked.

He didn’t get a chance to answer because a woman who was every bit as short and stout as the man hustled into the hallway. She, at least, had the decency to have her underwear concealed beneath proper clothing. Her hair was bright purple, her lips bright green and her eyes shifted colour depending on the angle from which you saw them, which was quite disconcerting if you weren’t prepared for it.

“Well bugger me with a lit blowtorch if it isn’t Lady Red,” the woman announced, making Red flinch at the imagery. She didn’t flinch as she was enveloped in a warm hug that was ninety percent flesh, five percent stale perfume and five percent fresh sweat. “Albert, this is Red, Crystal’s girl.”

“Crystal?” the thong-wearer, now revealed to be Albert, furrowed his brow. “Was she the one from the sacrificial animals shop?”

“No, that was Ruby,” Eileen said, rolling her eyes.

“I thought Ruby worked in the profane icons warehouse,” Albert said.

“It was Jade as worked there,” Eileen corrected him. “Ruby worked for the fence down on Basildon Street, melting down all the gold and stuff.”

“Really? I always thought that was Pearl.”

“Nah, Pearl’s a singer,” Eileen put him right again. “In a nightclub. Somewhere south of the river. You know, the one who don’t cry out loud.”

“Which one was Crystal then?” Albert asked, apparently completely befuddled.

“Oh never you mind,” Eileen gave up on the task. “Fifi needs her walk.”

“What? Now?”

“Yes, now,” Eileen insisted.

Albert huffed and puffed, but he kicked off the flip flops and replaced them with a pair of green wellington boots. Over the kimono, he threw a long raincoat and jammed a hat onto his bald head. He took a lead down from where it was hanging by the coatrack and shouted, “Get yourself in here, Fifi! It’s time to go walkies.”

The dog that lumbered in was huge, heavily muscled and so dark it disappeared into shadows as though it wasn’t even there. Apart from the eyes, that was. They shone with a general hatred as bright and deep as the inside of a particularly angry supernova. Red thought its given name might have had something to do with its inner discontent.

“Now, she’s not done her business today as yet, so make sure it’s a long walk. You’ve got pick up bags, haven’t you?” Eileen fussed.

“I’ve got ‘em all right,” Albert replied. He took another long look at Red and then shook his head. “You ain’t no Lady Red. Hair as black as night, anyone can see that.”

“Well never you mind about that,” Eileen advised him, “and don’t you go discussing my personal business with anyone else, you hear me?”

“I hear you, woman. I ain’t deaf.” He opened the door and the dog bounded forward, almost yanking the man off his feet. Had he been any less heavy himself, he would have been dragged bodily down the road behind the animal.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Eileen said as she looked fondly after the pair before closing the door, “and you’re right; if brains were explosives he couldn’t blow his nose. Thing is, he has a right stick of dynamite elsewhere.”

“No, no, no, absolutely not. I do not want to hear anything about that.” Red blocked that mental image. Hard.

“Anyways, you didn’t come here to talk about me marital bliss, I’ll be guessing,” Eileen took the hint about what was a suitable topic of conversation. “Come on in and tell me what you’ll be wanting whilst I make us some tea.”

She bustled off, rattling through the bead curtains that hung in every doorway. With no obvious alternative, Red followed her.

The house was decorated in a style that could only be described as sixties flower child overkill. If there was a single furniture covering in the place that wasn’t tie-dyed, Red failed to pick it out. Every lamp was lava of some description, the posters on the walls advertised the legendary world tour of trippy psychedelic band The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel and the air itself was a miasma of uncontrolled incense burning. It was the kind of place in which only a cat could be comfortable because a cat would be the only cat who knew where it was at.

“Place has changed a bit from how you remember it, I guess,” Eileen called from the kitchen.

Red followed the sound of her voice and caught up with her. “You’re not in business anymore?”

“I’m not in that business anymore,” Eileen corrected her slightly. “Albert’s got me on the straight and narrow.”

She glanced sorrowfully down at her hips, “Well, on the straight anyway.”

“Albert’s… new,” Red ventured.

“Albert’s everything I could want in a man,” Eileen said with a misty smile on her face.

“Really?” Red asked before she could stop herself.

“Spoken with the thoughtless arrogance of someone with youth and breasts that still point up,” Eileen chided her gently. “The man is nuts about me. Of course, he’s also just nuts, but right now what more could I want?”

“I’m happy that you’re happy,” Red said, and meant every word.

“I’m happy,” Eileen confirmed, pouring hot water into a teapot that could only be described as handmade by a complete amateur. “I’m also not a fool, so what is it you need for this caper of yours?”

“I thought you said you were straight,” Red reminded her.

“There’s degrees of straightness. I don’t run a house no more, but I still dabble in other things when the opportunity presents itself. I’m not above putting my fingers in a pie or two still.”

Red made a mental note not to sample any of Eileen’s cooking. She did, however, accept a cup of the woman’s tea. One sip was enough for her. Tea, it appeared, did not figure amongst the various ingredients of the liquid in the cup.

“You wouldn’t be back here if you didn’t have a job on the go. It must be local, or you’d be contracting elsewhere and it must be pretty soon or you’d be contracting with better people.”

“You’re the best,” Red objected.

“Nice to hear, but we both know it’s not true no longer,” Eileen demurred, slurping at her own tea. She snapped her fingers, “Your mark’s dirty, but you don’t know how. If you don’t know who they’re connected to, you don’t know who you can trust. Since you don’t have the time to recruit elsewhere, you have to go to a small-time hustler who’s independent and has a personal connection, so’s not likely to rat you out to the big boys and girls.”

“Sharp as ever,” Red complimented her. As a summary of her situation, it was spot on despite being based on almost no evidence at all and grounded in something that only approximately matched the English language. There was a reason why Eileen Meeks had been known as the smartest unaffiliated operator in the city in her day. The house they were in had served a base of operations for many business ventures of the less than legal variety. The negotiable affections it had offered had been a front for a top rate operation for the fencing of stolen goods, a marketplace for tools of questionable purpose and a supplier of cleaning services of a most specialised nature. If you had a skill to offer that couldn’t be advertised in the local job centre or if you were in need of someone for a job that would equally have been frowned upon by the employment services, Eileen Meeks would have been able to set you up. She would also have styled your hair for a very reasonable price.

“My brain’s the only part of me that’s not sagging yet,” Eileen said with a grin, “But we don’t have all night. My Albert’s going to be back soon and we’ve got this book we’re working our way through…”

Red hoped that was all the details she was going to be given.

“… so why don’t you let me know what you need, love, so’s I can set about getting it for you.”

“I’m setting up a crew,” Red revealed.

“I knew it! I knew I was right. I knew you had a job on,” Eileen declared, very pleased with herself.

“I’m going to need someone who can provide IDs,” Red continued. “Good quality stuff and possibly corporate as well as state.”

“Forger, no problem,” Eileen confirmed.

“A general operative, smart enough to be able to roll with the punches, but not so smart they think they know better than me.”

“Dumb muscle, got it.”

“A driver. Clean, no record. Someone who can get whatever vehicles I need at short notice.”

“Wheel man, check.”

“I’m also going to need somewhere to put everything together, off the grid and off the books, nothing fancy, but no unflushed toilet bowl either.”

“Mastermind’s lair, sorted.”

“How long?” Red queried.

“A couple of days, no more,” Eileen confirmed. She had written nothing down, but she had shown her mind was as clear as Red remembered, so she wasn’t about to challenge the older woman on her memory. “I’ll give you the names and you make the contacts, OK?”

The front door rattled as someone opened it and then slammed it behind them. Red could hear Albert berating the dog. Considering the animal could have bitten his head off whole and left room enough to spare in its mouth for several tennis balls, Red was a little worried for him.

Eileen produced a card from the sleeve of her tie-dyed kaftan. “Use the number on here. It’s clean and won’t lead back to me. Call me in a day or so and I’ll let you know where and who.”

“And the price?” Red asked.

“Are you going to haggle with me now?” Eileen asked with raised eyebrows.

“I guess not,” Red said.

“I should think not.”

Eileen showed her to the door. Albert and Fifi had passed deeper into the house, which Red considered to be a blessing in no disguise. Any opportunity not to risk another encounter with leopard print underwear was an opportunity to grasp tightly.

The older woman stopped by the door and took Red’s hands in her own, her face suffused with an earnestness that had been missing before. “I’d heard you were dead. I’m glad that’s not true. Don’t make it true any time soon, will you?”

“It’s not something I’m planning on,” Red reassured her.

“Good, good.” Slightly flustered by the moment’s honesty, Eileen opened the door and all but shoved Red out onto the street. “Now be off with you, ‘cause I’m on a promise.”

Which was again more than Red wanted to know.

The door closed, but not before Albert could yell from somewhere inside the house, “Come on, Eileen!”

◆◆◆

Red took a moment to process what had just happened and then set off back to the Underground station. She took out her mobile phone and checked for messages. There was one from Nico, just a place and a time with no explanation. It was a place she didn’t know and a time that was inconvenient, but there was nothing she could do about that. She barely had time enough to ride the Underground back to her flat and pack an overnight bag before heading back out.

Her destination this time was the Olympic Park. More accurately, her destination was the transport hub of the Olympic Park.

When London had staged the Olympic Games in 2012, one of the upgrades to the area had been the establishment of an integrated transport hub that served teleport, road, rail, Underground and local air traffic routes. At the height of the games, there were tens of thousands of people passing through the hub each and every day. Once the games were over, however, the demand slumped quite considerably and much of the hub’s land had been redeveloped into things the council deemed to be more useful to the local people. The railway station had been completely closed and turned into a huge water-filled staging area for dolphins who had signed up for the swim with humans themed attraction the aquatic centre had been turned into. With both people and dolphins paying for the privilege, animal rights protestors had ceased their condemnation of the activity.

The heliport had been scaled back to a single landing pad maintained solely for emergency access. The rest of the land had been broken up and turned into a wildlife preserve. The wildlife chosen to be preserved there was of non-lethal, particularly irritating varieties in order to keep the local youths from hanging out there and littering the place. There had never been airship hangars for the visiting VIPs on site. Those had been housed just outside the city limits and had been converted into the world’s largest indoor holographic games setting. For the price of hiring a fake gun, you could fight aliens in just about every setting in the solar system. Fighting tripods on the dusty plains of Mars was a favourite pastime, apparently.

The teleportation centre had been hardest hit of all once the games were concluded. The whole place had just been boarded up, waiting for a buyer to come forward. What the public didn’t know was that the place had been bought out almost immediately, but the new owners had no intentions of redeveloping it. Instead, they had reconnected some of the pods to the teleport network without the appropriate licenses. This meant they could access the system without leaving all the indelible traces of normal teleport travel. It also meant they didn’t have access to all the system failsafes. Red had heard the horror stories of what could happen if a teleport went wrong, but those applied equally to the normal system as well as the unlicensed one and were probably apocryphal. She wouldn’t usually have dreamed of using the unlicensed system, but she was under the clock here and she couldn’t afford the time of creating another persona just to take one return trip without leaving any trace.

The Rings Café still managed to operate just outside the boarded up walls of the teleport centre. Its logo was a tabletop with five interlinked cup rings staining it, which Red thought was pretty clever, but probably didn’t give would-be customers raised expectations of the hygiene regime they could expect inside. It was a twenty four hour place, so hygiene considerations wouldn’t have been high on most of the patrons’ checklists anyway.

The place was almost empty when she entered, which suited her. She went straight up to the counter, where a young man with a ponytail and uninterested expression abandoned his comic book to shuffle across the serving space so he could take her order. She perused the boards behind him for a moment before ordering something that wasn’t on them.

“Celery latte.”

“Celery?” the man pulled a face and then nodded.

“You have restrooms here?” Red asked, faking the American accent she was going to have to start using soon enough anyway.

“Sure, over there,” the kid nodded and set about activities that looked busy, but which had nothing to do with the preparation of beverages.

Red followed the direction of his nod and went through the appropriately marked door. She ignored the ladies and went straight to the door marked for staff only. Despite the sizeable lock set into the door, the handle turned easily and she slipped inside. Where there ought to have been a grubby toilet area for the benefit of the café workers, there was an escalator heading down. At least, it would have been an escalator had it been working. It remained stationary, so she supposed it was really just a staircase.

She descended the steps into a cavernous area that was kept mainly in darkness. The sound of her footsteps echoed across the empty space, but she was making no effort to hide her presence. She felt vulnerable in that open area, but could probably lose herself in the darkness in a matter of seconds if the need arose. She didn’t expect it to.

She crossed the floor towards the only illuminated space. In a pool of light, there stood a cluster of teleportation pods. The official pods were smooth and polished and professional looking. The surfaces of these were broken by open panels from which snaked cables that wound around each other in such a chaotic manner she couldn’t hope to tell where one started and ended, like the puzzles in the children’s comics. She hoped the technicians had better luck unravelling it. The mess of interwoven cables all converged on a long table crammed with computer equipment, none of which seemed to match and all of which seemed to have been modified by randomly selecting components from a catalogue and sticking them together. On the whole, it did not inspire confidence.

“I know what you’re thinking,” another young man, who could have been the twin of the one in the café except that his hair was dark where the server’s had been blond and this one wore glasses where the other had not, said as he emerged from behind the bank of computers. “Doesn’t look like much, but got it where it counts.”

“Are you talking about the pods or you?” she asked doubtfully.

“Either, or, and,” he offered. “Don’t worry, neither of us has lost a customer yet. So, you ordered the celery latte; a popular flavour if ever there was one. Would you like anything sprinkled on the top?”

“San Francisco,” she told him. It was possible he could have sent her closer to her desired destination, but that would have told him more than she wanted anyone to know. San Francisco was a large enough city to mask her intentions from anybody wishing to make enquiries later.

“We can do that,” the young man said cheerfully and started to fiddle with various controls and keyboards.

The light above one of the pods blinked into life.

“If you’d like to step into my parlour,” he said, using a reference that was unnecessarily ominous.

Red stepped into the teleport chamber and the door slid shut as she turned around, cutting off her vision of the young man, once again tapping away at a keyboard. After a second of nothing happening, the pod door slid open and Red squinted at the harsh daylight that assaulted her eyes. As she exited the pod, she noticed that both the computer set up and the man behind it seemed very similar, but everything else had changed. Instead of the dark, cavernous area beneath a café, she found herself in an equally cavernous area that was brightly lit by sunlight blasting down on her through skylights in the roof high above. The paint applied to the panes of glass did nothing to impede the illumination, though it did prevent anyone passing overhead from seeing what was going on beneath. Instead of an abandoned Olympic teleportation hub, this was an abandoned shopping mall. Some financial crisis or mismanagement had befallen it and someone similar to the investor in London had bought it for a song and failed to turn it into anything useful.

Except to people like Red.

“Everything where it should be?” the young man operating the system asked with a southern American drawl edging his voice.

“Appears to be,” she agreed after a quick check.

“Looks like it from where I’m standing,” he confirmed.

“My order’s a return celery latte,” she warned him.

“Oh, we don’t use that codeword,” he said. “People actually drink those things here.”

Red tried not to imagine it.

“Don’t worry, I’ll remember you. Exit’s that way.”

Red wandered past other unworking escalators and found herself an emergency exit that had been vandalised to remove the word emergency. It let her out onto the street, which bustled less than she had expected. She walked a couple of blocks away before the heat forced her to signal a passing cab and asked to go to the main teleportation hub.

“Mad dogs and Englishmen, huh?” the driver commented as the cab left the curb and muscled its way into the flow of traffic.

“What?” Red asked, coming instantly alert, but not showing it.

“Go out in the midday sun,” the driver completed the quotation.

“Oh, yeah, right,” she said, catching on. “Joe Cocker, right?”

“Noel Coward, actually," the driver told her.

“Never heard of him.”

The main teleportation hub of a major city is a always a busy place and the San Francisco hub was no exception to the rule. Though there is a huge amount of organisation going on, the presence of the general public ensures that it looks like utter chaos at all times. It took Red only a few cursory checks to be sure she wasn’t being followed or observed. She made her way to the lockers and dialled in the appropriate code to her chosen one. Inside were all the documents she needed in order to access the normal facilities of urban life. She didn’t have to worry about leaving traces here and those she did leave would all be under a standby, disposable persona. Fully equipped, she took a fast suburban train to San Jose and then a taxi to her final destination.

The so-called dotcom boom had truly gone boom and left a lot of hopeful interweb start-ups floundering in a quicksand of debt and unfulfilled promise. Those that survived were locked in a perpetual struggle to remain relevant and innovative as technology, and public taste, surged ever forward in unexpected directions. Silicon Valley remained a mosaic of the hugely successful and the barely existing. The location Red was heading for was one of the latter. The shop front was unimpressive and could easily be passed without even being noticed at all. That didn’t matter because the day job of supplying high end components was not what kept it in business.

Red left the taxi a couple of blocks away from the store and walked straight there as soon as the cab had departed. She didn’t stop to check around her before going inside and taking a moment to be grateful for the air conditioning.

A middle-aged man of native American descent was fiddling with a device of unknown purpose on a counter at the far end of the store. Red couldn’t identify the purpose of any of the devices on the shelves, which was rather the point that brought her there in the first place.

“Ralph Eaglestone,” Red identified him with a happy smile.

“That’s my name,” the man confirmed, not looking up from the device.

“Not always, it’s not,” she said.

That caused the man to stop what he was doing and pay attention to the new customer. A big grin broke across his face.

“Hey Red,” he greeted her and abandoned the work on his desk to come around and envelope her in a big hug. “It’s been a long time.”

“Too long,” she agreed, “but we were neither of us big on social calls.”

“Which I guess this ain’t,” Eaglestone surmised. “You can buy me lunch.”

“Don’t you have to finish that?” Red indicated the half assembled device on the table.

“Perk of being the boss is you pick your working hours,” he told her and reached for a jacket.

Flipping the sign to closed, he locked the door and led her down the street to a small deli, where he ordered the most cholesterol-laden cheeseburger she had ever seen. The salad she chose must have contained a whole fried chicken. They took seats at a table right at the back of the establishment. It was early yet, so they had the place pretty much to themselves.

“I heard you were no longer in play,” Eaglestone commented between bites of the huge burger, which he washed down with an ironic diet Coke.

“Just swapped my freelance status for a consulting job,” she denied.

“Uhuh,” he received the news sceptically, even though she considered it to be a fairly accurate summary.

“I need a tech guy,” Red told him. “Low risk, but he’s got to be good, good like you. You know anyone like that?”

“Sure I do,” Eaglestone confirmed. “I’m good like me.”

“No way,” Red immediately refused. “Callie’d gut me in my sleep.”

“She would,” he confirmed, “but she’s not in the picture anymore.”

Red placed her cutlery on the plate and gave him her full attention, “What did you do?”

“What makes you think it was something I did?” he complained.

“That woman would never have left you unless you did something,” Red pointed out.

“Sometimes marriages can be complicated,” was all he would reveal.

“Whatever it is, you see her and you put it right,” Red told him severely.

“Yeah, ‘cause it’s just that simple,” he said ironically.

“Make it that simple,” she insisted.

“The job,” he changed the subject.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure,” he confirmed.

“All right,” she decided and took the glasses she had been wearing at the Oval out of her bag and slid them across the table to him. “This is what I have on the target. He’s been doing deals he doesn’t want anyone else to know about. I need to know who he’s been talking to. It’s the contact I’m after. It shouldn’t be too hard to spot which one that is.”

“The one with all the security, I know,” Eaglestone nodded. “Is that all?”

Red shook her head, “No, I’ll need you in England in a couple of days. This,” she indicated the spectacles, “and whatever we find out then will tell me what I’m up against. Then again, this might tell me all I need to know.”

“And when has that ever happened?” he asked.

“It’s happened,” she objected.

“When?”

“OK, so not often,” she allowed. “That’s the job. Are you in?”

“A gig with Lady Red? Was there ever any doubt?”

“I’ll let you know where,” she promised and went back to her salad.

◆◆◆

Where turned out to be an anonymous office in a building filled with anonymous offices. Somebody had taped a temporary sign on the door announcing that the occupants were now representatives of Daisy Chain Hazardous Waste Disposal Services. They had spelled hazardous wrongly for good measure to make sure any genuine potential customers who happened to be passing were further put off popping in to make an enquiry.

Red made sure she arrived half an hour early to have things prepared for when the first two members of the crew arrived. At this point, there wasn’t that much to prepare since she didn’t have the information she needed, but it was their first meeting as a team, albeit a partial one. She’d worked with Eaglestone before, but the other new arrival was a stranger to both of them. Red didn’t like working with strangers, but everyone was a stranger until you got to know them. The last time she’d used a crew, both the technician and the general operator had been killed. She’d resisted using a team ever since, but she couldn’t do this job on her own. She was taking a chance, but with Eileen’s recommendation it was a risk she could live with.

Her confidence was increased when the recommended man showed up in a business suit that the sales representative of a small company might be expected to wear. He looked smart, but not excessively so, and as comfortable as if he wore the suit every day. Red welcomed him in and sent him to the refreshments table. Long planning sessions always went better with a supply of snacks and coffee.

Eaglestone arrived shortly afterwards, also dressed in business clothes, though much more casual than the other man’s suit. His ethnic origin meant he would be notable anywhere in the UK, but he had done his best to minimise that. He could do nothing about his size, which was on the large end of the spectrum, though not in the manner of a man who didn’t look after himself. He embraced Red immediately and then advanced on the other man with one hand outstretched. They were about the same height and the younger man had a much stronger, fitter physique, but Eaglestone’s American, naturally outgoing nature made him seem larger than the other man.

“Ralph Eaglestone, tech guy,” he introduced himself.

“Derek Russell, general all round stuff,” the other man replied and matched Eaglestone in the handshake department.

“And everyone calls me Red,” Red entered the conversation.

“Are you really her then?” Russell asked. “Lady Red.”

“Oh, that’s her all right,” Eaglestone confirmed before she did. “And everything you’ve heard is true, but it’s what you haven’t heard that’s the real goods.”

“Wow, it’s an honour,” Russell almost stuttered.

“No, it’s a robbery,” Red contradicted him. The last thing she needed was someone who was going to be all star struck.

“Gotcha,” Russell said with a nod of understanding. “This everyone?”

“For now,” Red confirmed. “We may have to bring in some specialists when we know what we need.”

“Right you are,” he accepted her at her word.

“Before we get on to what you need to know, here’s what I need you to know,” Red said, leaning against the side of the desk. “This is a commission, but you don’t get to know who’s paying. As far as you are concerned, I’m the only person you need to know about. Apart from the mark, nobody is going to get hurt by what we’re going to steal. Do the job right and nobody needs to get hurt at all. Understand?”

The two men nodded, though Eaglestone was already aware of how she operated and what she expected.

“You should have both already received a down payment.”

“I usually get paid the whole amount up front,” Russell complained, though not too much, which was not surprising considering the size of the down payment.

“Which hardly incentivises you to finish the job properly,” Red pointed out. “You needn’t worry, I’m good for it. Anyone want to take a walk before I go any further?”

Neither man moved, so she picked up a photograph and walked over to a pin board covering much of the office wall. She pinned the photograph into the very centre of it.

“This is our man, Lord Jeremy Isaacs. He’s rich, influential, likes cricket…”

Russell let out a small snort of amusement.

“… and is dealing with some people we don’t know about, people we would very much like to know about.”

“Wait a minute,” Russell interrupted suspiciously. “This isn’t cop stuff, is it?”

Red smiled. It was a perfectly reasonable question for a man in his position to ask. “No, it’s not cop stuff. You came with a personal recommendation from someone I trust. I assume she gave you the same.”

“She did,” he acceded and gestured for her to continue.

“This is a robbery like any other, only we’re stealing information instead of valuables.”

“Makes ‘em easier to carry, I suppose,” Russell commented.

Red picked up a leaflet from the desk, opened it and pinned it to the board next to the image of Isaacs. It displayed an aerial shot of a rambling stately home in acres of countryside. “This is Hefferton Hall, near Bristol. It’s the ancestral home of the Isaacs family. The information I’m looking for is somewhere in here.”

“Somewhere?” Russell queried.

Red smiled slightly, “Don’t worry about that. We’ll know exactly where before we do the job. Ralph, what do you know?”

Ralph took a mobile phone out of his pocket and gave it to Red. “That’s his cellphone, completely cloned and completely ordinary. You’ll be wanting these back as well,” he took the spectacles out of his other jacket pocket and handed them to her. “The only things of interest are a number of texts he received on the dates you gave me.”

The dates had been provided by Nico and corresponded to the dates when the magical items Isaacs had outbid Papandreyou on had first come to the shipping magnate’s attention. Red was guessing all interested parties were informed at the same time. As an assumption, it was a bit of a stretch, but one she thought was reasonable. Even dishonest purveyors of goods couldn’t afford to alienate their customer base by favouring some of them over the rest.

“On those dates, he got texts from a very specific unlisted number. That unlisted number cannot be traced. You can trust me on that, because I’ve tried.”

“They all match?” Red queried.

“They all match,” Eaglestone confirmed.

“What do the texts say?” she asked.

Eaglestone shook his head, “That’s the thing, they don’t say anything.”

“Nobody sends blank texts,” Russell said, confused. “Unless…”

“The text itself is just a signal,” Red finished the thought.

“They text him, he calls them back,” Russell agreed.

“And there’s nothing in the text to give anything away,” Eaglestone added. “Which brings me to the other thing I got off those glasses of yours.”

“What’s that?” Red asked.

“He was carrying another phone,” Eaglestone revealed, “but this one was totally dark. Completely impervious to those glasses of yours. The only thing that told me it was there was the fact there was nothing there at all.”

“I don’t get it,” Russell said.

“Everything gives off a signal. Usually you can tell something’s there because you can see the shape of the signal,” the American explained, “and sometimes you can tell it’s there by the shape of the hole it makes.”

Russell nodded, “OK, I understand that.”

“So, the task at hand is simple. All we have to do is to get his friends to text him on his normal phone so he calls them back on his special phone at a time and place of our choosing,” she laid it out for them.

“Is that all?” Russell asked sceptically. “And you know exactly how to do that, do you?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” she confirmed with a grin, looking at the photo of Hefferton Hall. “Because I’m invited to a bit of a do.”

Casing the Joint

The photo on the pin board in the office did not do justice to the reality of Hefferton Hall, Red discovered as she negotiated the winding approach road a couple of days later. The scale of the place was enormous, but appeared smaller because of the expanse of the grounds surrounding it. Isaacs had sent her detailed instructions for finding the place, but they had proven to be redundant because there were brown road signs directing her to it from several junctions down the motorway.

The owner’s idea of a ‘small fundraising event’ was her idea of a large town festival. Some of the fairground rides in attendance could be seen from a mile away. In the open countryside, the sound of the music and screaming probably carried even further than that. As soon as she pulled up into the VIP parking area and climbed out of her rented car, she could smell the aromas of hot dogs, candy floss machines and popcorn makers. This section of the car park was filled with high-end vehicles of the luxury and sports varieties. The security man at the gate had looked askance as she pulled up in her distinctly lower-end car and rolled down the window, but her name had been on the entrance list, as promised, and so he had lifted the barrier and let her in. Had she not been in the middle of a job, she might have decided to boost one of the best of the sports cars on her way out just for the fun of it. Since she was in the middle of a job, she bit her lip until the urge passed.

Signs directed her through the trees and around the side of the imposing edifice of the building. On the far side, the lawn sloped gently away from a patio area large enough to stage a drag racing meet. It sloped down to a lake upon which you could stage a major sea battle at full scale. That was the normal situation; today the lawn was filled with stalls and attractions and crowds to the point where it was difficult to see any of the green surface at all. On the lake, a sea battle actually appeared to be going on, but it was being waged by flotillas of rowing boats, canoes and pedalos. Brightly coloured bunting was strung between the stalls and tents and flapped gaily in a breeze light enough to add to the enjoyment rather than detract from it. Off to one side, there was a performance area where local community groups could twirl batons, dance, sing, perform gymnastics or whatever particular pastime they represented. At the moment, as far as she could tell, there was a competition going on to see who could throw a wellington boot the furthest.

“I may have overestimated my chances of standing out,” she muttered softly as she took in the scene.

“How so?” Russell queried in her ear. He was sitting inside a van in a motorway services about twenty minutes away. Together, they had worked out an exit strategy in case things went horribly wrong. She knew from past experience, though, that if things went really horribly wrong she would be on her own.

“It looks like the whole county’s here,” she told him. Her concern was now not about being too noticeable, but rather about not being noticeable enough. It would be easy to be lost to sight amongst so many people. She needed to be close enough to Isaacs when the time came or else she wasn’t going to learn what she needed.

It was then that she noticed the discreet sign directing her to the VIP enclosure and understood. Whilst there was a whole fair taking place just beyond the patio, the important people set themselves apart, looking down on the common folk having fun, quite possibly sneering at them. She wondered briefly whether the VIPs were being enclosed to protect them from the common folk or the other way around. She shook such thoughts out of her head and focused on the job at hand, fixing a smile on her face and heading for the patio. Again, her assumed name was checked against a guest list and again she was invited in, this time past a velour rope rather than a pole barrier.

She looked around for anyone she knew, but saw nobody she recognised from the balcony at the Oval, so she headed to the bar and ordered a non-alcoholic drink. She then wandered across to the house and glanced through some of the windows. Most of the rooms had large chandeliers and large portraits or bookshelves full of large leather-bound tomes. Large seemed to be the order of the day. She considered it must be like living in a museum.

“Please don’t be intimidated,” a voice said behind her and she turned to greet Isaacs with a smile.

“I’m not the kind of girl to be intimidated by anything so simple as size,” she said, taking a sip of her drink to mask her amusement.

“That is refreshing to hear,” Isaacs said. He had a glass of champagne in his hand, but from the state of the bubbles within the liquid she assessed he had been nursing the drink for some time.

“It is a bit grander than I had imagined, I have to admit,” she told him. “Expensive to keep up, I should think.”

“Very,” he agreed, “but with the public viewings, we manage it. Just as well, really. If I let it pass out of the family, the entire ancestral line would come back to haunt me. And some of them were holy terrors, I can tell you.”

“I can imagine.”

“On any other day, I’d be only too happy to give you the tour, but as you can see…”

“You’re a little bit busy. Yes, I can see that.”

“Don’t worry, though. I’m not going to simply abandon you. There are some people here that I wanted you to meet. Or rather who I wanted to meet you. We can talk some cricket.”

And talk some cricket they did. As he had done at the Oval, Isaacs introduced her into the circles in which he moved and she was accepted immediately. He waxed rhapsodic about her knowledge of the game and her understanding of the tactics. She was happy to go along with this.

The original memory potion, which had allowed her to absorb everything there was to know about cricket, had worn off the day after the cricket match. She had taken another one the night before and relearned everything. Such potions were completely illegal, but mainly on health grounds. They worked on the brain in the area of short term memory, expanding it and allowing information to be imprinted there for up to a couple of days at the most. This would have made cheating at tests simplicity itself, which was another reason for the ban. It was also the reason why compulsory potion testing took place before all major exams and pub quizzes. Despite their single use efficacy, it was not advisable to use potions like that to learn the same material on multiple occasions over a short period of time. Short term memory was not meant to store information for long periods and so the imprints were necessarily time-limited, but vivid and easily accessible. After a while, depending on the dose of potion taken and various metabolic factors, the imprint faded and the brain could go back to doing what it was supposed to do in the way it was supposed to do it. Occasional use brought few or no side effects and nothing that was permanent. Overuse, however, was another matter. Multiple similar imprints forced on the short term memory had the habit of becoming fuzzy and confused, like watching a 3D movie without the glasses. This was manageable with a single repeat imprint, but try it too many times and the short term memory centres of the brain collapsed into mental kaleidoscopes, taking cognitive reasoning and sanity with them. Red was willing to risk a second dose, but she expected never to have to think about the game again after today.

“Man, these people are boring,” Russell muttered in her ear through an invisible earpiece.

“I’m with you on that,” Eaglestone agreed.

She ignored them both and kept on smiling and talking about run rates and batting averages and training regimes. She believed she was something of a hit with the good and the great of the local cricketing world. Eventually, Isaacs had to leave her side and attend to other groups. Red continued to mingle, apparently at random, but always keeping her host in sight.

“We’ve just had word the cat’s out of the bag,” Eaglestone informed her.

She surreptitiously checked her watch and saw that this was right on time. Nico had arranged for information regarding a newly available magical item to be supplied to the dealers who had arranged the sales on the occasions Isaacs had won the bidding. It was a highly sought after piece from Papandreyou’s personal collection, but nobody had to know about that. The underworld auctioneers would be keen to let their customers know about it and arrange a sale. The clock was now ticking. She redoubled her efforts to stay close by Isaacs, watching him carefully without appearing to watch him at all. About half an hour later, she saw him stiffen slightly. He was in deep conversation with representatives of a local women’s group and continued that as though nothing had happened.

“The Eagle has landed,” Eaglestone told her, which was the code phrase for Papandreyou having received confirmation that his new and desirable magical artefact had been placed on the market. The suppliers clearly used a generic mailing list for such matters, so everyone was informed at at the same time.

“Issacs has got it too,” she informed them both under her breath. “Are we ready?”

“Whenever you are,” the tech guy confirmed.

Isaacs seemed to be winding up his conversation with the ladies. Red suddenly clutched at her eye.

“Are you all right, my dear?” one of the older women in her current group conversation asked.

“Lash has gone in my eye,” Red told her. “It’s OK. I just need to find a mirror big enough to get it back out.”

“The ladies room is just through there,” the woman said. “Can I help?”

“It’s a one woman job,” Red assured her and headed for the indicated door into the building.

“Nicely done,” Russell complimented her.

As she walked across the patio area, Red opened the clutch bag in her hand, reaching in to take out a handkerchief. As she did so, a device, about the size of a penny, rose out of the bag and sped away. She was only able to keep it in sight for a few seconds before it was lost against the clutter of the background. If she couldn’t see it when she knew it was there, nobody else ought to notice it.

“Microdrone is in the air,” Eaglestone confirmed. “Target is locked and heading for the building.”

Red continued into the building herself and went into the public toilets there. She went straight into a stall and locked it behind her. From out of the clutch bag, she took a powder compact and flipped it open, pressing an unobtrusive section of the decoration. The mirror dissolved into a feed from the microdrone. Eaglestone was remotely controlling it from a hotel room in the same service area where Russell was sitting in his van.

The lens in the drone was tiny, so the image was distorted around the edges, but clear enough in the centre for her to recognise the back of Isaacs’s head. The microdrone was small enough to be close to silent when flying, so she did not have to worry about him hearing it. It was only likely to be detected by someone walking into it by accident or it happening to cross a plain white background just as someone looked at it. This being a very old house, there were very few plain white backgrounds and Eaglestone was flying the device well above head height.

“What did I miss?” she asked in a low voice. There had been nobody else in the toilets when she entered and she hadn’t heard anyone come in, but she didn’t want to be caught out as a crazy woman talking to herself in the loos.

“As soon as he was clear of the women in the hats, he checked his phone and headed straight for the door,” Eaglestone reported immediately. “Apparently, he suddenly had somewhere to be.”

Red watched her target’s progress. She’d memorised a plan of the stately home (the old fashioned way, no potions required) and was monitoring his progress on her mental map. He took stairs up to the first floor and then went down a long hallway. This turned onto another hallway that formed one side of a central quadrangle. When he reached the last door on the left, he paused to take a couple of objects out of his pocket.

“That’s a key and a phone,” Eaglestone confirmed what she was seeing. “It’s not the phone he got the message on.”

There were two men stationed outside the door and, though they were dressed in the same way as the volunteers you usually find in stately homes (usually to tell kids to get off the priceless antiques), these looked capable of throwing unruly children the full length of the hallway without exerting themselves. To Red’s observant eye, they were both armed and not with small guns.

“I guess that’s the landing zone,” Eaglestone commented.

One of the guards produced a key of his own and placed it into one of the two locks in the door. Isaacs followed suit and the door opened to admit him. The microdrone darted after him, but the door swung shut behind him before they could get more than a glimpse inside. They could see clearly, however, that the phone in his hand was active.

“A location specific phone,” Eaglestone commented. “Sneaky.”

The image from the microdrone headed back down the hallway as the guards took up their positions either side of the door again. It seemed to take forever for the device to locate an open window. Once it did, it darted outside the building and tracked the wall back to the room that was the centre of their interest. The room inside was dark, utterly so. There was not a single reflection from inside, even though the day was bright.

“That’s a null room,” Eaglestone said.

“What’s a null room when it’s at home?” Russell asked.

“There’s nothing coming out of it,” Eaglestone explained. “No sound, no heat, no radio waves, no light, nothing. You can’t eavesdrop on a null room. You can’t look into a null room. It’s the ultimate anti-surveillance protection.”

“So we’re ever so slightly buggered then,” Russell summarised.

“Absolutely not,” Red said happily, snapping shut the compact and flushing the toilet. “I know what we’re going to do and I know who the other members of the team need to be. Ditch the drone and go home. We’re done here.”

As she was washed her hands, Red knew the microdrone would be making its way over the heads of the people enjoying the funfair until it reached the lake. There it would ditch and sink to the bottom to slowly dissolve. It was a neat way of getting rid of the evidence, though it did limit the device’s usefulness in rainy conditions. She checked her appearance in the mirror and went back out onto the patio terrace. She smiled reassuringly at the older woman who had shown concern and went to get herself another drink. She might actually try some of this one. It was fully half an hour before Isaacs reappeared and took on the role of being the host once more, as though nothing had happened.

Red avoided running into him again until the evening came on and the air started to take on a chill. At this point, she made her way through the thinning crowd to make her farewells.

“Going so soon?” the host asked, his disappointment only slightly false.

“I have to get back to London,” she told him, “but I did make a couple of interesting contacts that might lead to something.”

“Oh?” he said, clearly not remembering her supposed employment situation.

“For a job,” she reminded him.

“Good, that’s very good. I thought you would,” he dissembled very well.

“I’ll no doubt see you around, perhaps at the Oval or another England game,” she said. “If not, you have my number.”

“I do,” he agreed, though Red was sure he was unlikely to use it. He was used to supermodels and the prettiest women of his class, dressed to impress. Her deliberate schlubiness was designed specifically not to attract him in that way.

“Absolutely,” he agreed enthusiastically. “We’ll see how well you can predict the outcome of the next one.”

“It’s been a fun day. Thank you.”

“You’re entirely welcome,” Isaacs told her, but a glance over her shoulder just as she went around the edge of the building confirmed that he had forgotten her already and was attending to his other guests as though she had never been there.

The Jailbreak

The Marie Antoinette Memorial Prison was the largest prison in the world and yet was still not the most famous. Alcatraz held onto that title, mainly because nobody made films about the M.A.M.P. No uplifting stories of redemption through birdkeeping or hiding your escape tunnel behind a Hollywood starlet’s poster ever came out of this prison. You couldn’t even shorten its name into something memorable. The prison itself was situated deep in the Loire Valley and couldn’t have been architecturally any more different from the chateaux for which the region is more properly renowned even if that had been the designers’ intention. It might well have been their intention because there were fewer places on the planet less inviting than The Marie Antoinette Memorial Prison.

Despite being named after one of France’s most active social reformers, whose work with the poor and the incarcerated was legendary right down to her progressive cake distribution programme, reforming the inmates was not on the prison’s agenda. This was a place to securely lock people away from a society that was terrified of them, mainly after being terrorised by them. This was not the American justice system, running on profits and locking people up for racial, or purely financial, reasons; everyone in the M.A.M.P. deserved to be in the M.A.M.P. It is said everyone in prison proclaims their innocence, but that wasn’t true in this prison. Here, inmates sought status through tales of their crimes. Not only were they all guilty, they were trying to prove they were more guilty than the rest, and of much worse crimes.

The prison was constructed exactly as you might have expected for a facility holding such criminals. The fences started so far away from the main complex that you couldn’t see it. Inside the last of the fences (half of which were alarmed and half of which were electrified, but it was impossible to tell which was which) stood a hexagonal wall with only one way to the top, a route that had guard posts at both top and bottom of a staircase that could be retracted into the wall when not in use. Armed police patrolled the walls in shifts of only two hours, to ensure their vigilance remained unaffected by boredom. The wall was built to withstand a direct artillery barrage or, this being the more likely scenario, being crashed into by a lorry full of explosives. Vehicles did not pass through the wall, all goods and personnel having to be off-loaded and taken through a series of staggered, reinforced doors. If anything large had to be brought in, it was brought in by helicopter, with half a dozen other choppers in attendance, each manned by expert sharpshooters. Events such as this were the only times aerial traffic was allowed over the prison and were very rare indeed. Any unauthorised approach by an aircraft was intercepted by jets from a nearby French Air Force base. Smaller drones were just shot out of the sky by automatic guns.

The building situated just inside the only gates through the outer wall was like a military base itself. It was heavily fortified and reinforced and housed a garrison of armed police. Any attempt at a prison riot was met immediately by a force the prisoners could not hope to withstand. The armed officers were well-equipped, well-trained and only too happy to dole out punishment. The prisoners knew this and so significant disturbances were kept to a minimum. From this building, which also housed all the administrative and healthcare functions of the prison, the detention blocks radiated out to fill the hexagonal space, leaving some areas for exercise yards and, this being the only concession to humanising the space, some patches of greenery. The cell blocks ran four storeys high, but were still significantly shorter than the safety wall. The blocks on the right were more numerous and housed the male offenders. Separated from those by two strong wire fences, the space between which was mined with gas grenades and patrolled by perpetually annoyed attack foxes, were the women’s wings. Location was the only thing that differentiated them from the male wings. Not a lot of concession was made to gender in the M.A.M.P.

The blocks were constructed of heavily reinforced concrete, specially tempered steel, and glass that sneered when it was called bulletproof. A small army could have taken the prison, but would have needed tanks and air support to do so. Every inch of public space was monitored by closed circuit television from two control rooms that ran independently of each other. Every lock needed two officers on either side in order to be opened and there were twice as many locked doors in the place than any other prison. You had to adjust the statistics for size because there were very prisons in the world as large as the Marie Antoinette.

“And the specialist you want is in there?” Russell had said with dismay when Red laid out the challenge facing them. “I mean, it’s impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible,” Red had denied before adding, “Well, yes, some things are impossible, like walking on the face of the sun with only a liberal application of factor fifty, but this is quite possible.”

“Dupont is a top notch driver, I’ll grant you that, but the world’s full of good drivers,” Eaglestone had added, agreeing with his crewmate.

“Aline Dupont is not one of the top drivers, she is the top driver,” Red had corrected him. “Besides which, it’s not her skills with a car I need her for.”

“I don’t see it,” After poring over the maps, photographs and reams of notes regarding the prison, most of which had come from the interweb, neither of the men had been able to come up with a viable strategy and had thus determined the task to be beyond them.

Red had a lot of sympathy with their position, but was way ahead of them. They had been focusing on the problem in front of them, which they took to be how do you break an inmate out of one of the world’s most formidable prisons? Anyone was going to struggle in tackling that head on. Head on was not Red’s favourite attack strategy. She was considering things from an entirely different angle. She preferred to tackle problems by sidling up on them from the side, preferably the blind side, and then mugging them when they weren’t looking. Instead of trying to figure out how to break a prisoner out of the jail, she was focusing on how to allow an inmate to walk out of the prison all on their own.

“Can’t we just buy her out?” Croft had asked, showing a certain amount of initiative and a different slant on the issue. Gerald Croft had been much easier to bring into the crew than the final specialist was proving to be. Red had called Eileen. Eileen had called Croft. In less than an hour, he was on board.

“And what do you do?” Russell had demanded, backed up by Eaglestone, when Croft presented himself in the office the following day.

He had shown them and they had, to be blunt, freaked out, which was precisely the point.

“Oh, that is gross man,” Russell had declared with some depth of feeling.

“The freakiest shit I ever saw,” Eaglestone had added with uncharacteristic swearing.

“This is France’s most secure prison,” Red had pointed out again in answer to Croft’s suggestion about corruption. “You can’t just pay a bribe to the highest official and she’s sprung.”

“That makes life more complicated,” had been his less than helpful response.

“I’ll say. Have you ever been there?”

“It should not come as a great surprise that I don’t make a pastime of hanging around women’s prisons,” Croft had said, “especially French ones.”

“The French,” Eaglestone said with some distaste.

“Do I detect a non-fan of our continental cousins?” Russell had jibed.

“Arrogant, rude sonsofbitches,” the American had confirmed.

“Look down on you like you’re beneath them, not as good as they are?” Croft had guessed.

“That’s right,” Eaglestone had nodded.

“A bit like the way you Americans look down on everyone else in the world?” Croft suggested.

“Hey, now wait a minute,” Eaglestone had backed up quickly.

“Oh boys,” Red had chosen to interrupt. “Mr Russell, would you please explain the rules of polite conversation to Mr Croft?”

“No religion, no politics, no trying to decide whose balls are bigger,” Russell had listed.

Red had always worked with international crews, taking the best people from wherever they happened to be. There was always a period in the early stages of any team’s formation where tensions could arise and fracture the unit. Eaglestone didn’t need her help to defend himself, or his country, but it was easier to stamp out a problem when it was a single locust and before it became a whole swarm.

Those potential disagreements were now in the past as the team had decamped to a holiday cottage in France and had actual tasks to carry out. The current task had them in teams of two, hiking through the countryside and pretending to be tourists. The GPS on her phone beeped to signify they had reached the exact co-ordinates programmed into it. The area was fairly remote, which suited their purposes well enough. They were east of the prison and on a shallow slope facing towards the target.

Red stopped and, with a sigh of relief, removed the rucksack from her back. It was a proper hiker’s bag, constructed to carry everything a self-sufficient person could ever need to survive in the wild. At the moment, what it was carrying was heavily camouflaged by a minor glamour spell, just in case they were stopped by anyone in authority. The glamour wouldn’t fool anyone who took a close interest, but might just get by someone who only opened the top for a quick glance inside. It was a precaution that had so far been unnecessary, which was the kind of precautions Red liked.

Eaglestone slid a similar rucksack off easily, though he also seemed glad to be released from it.

“Man, this crap is heavy,” he complained, but without any real commitment.

“It’s a pretty heavy duty spell,” she told him. That was part of the reason they would be using four of them. A spell big enough to do the whole job on its own would have had to be brought in by truck, making it much harder to place without arousing suspicion.

“Don’t I know it,” he flexed the muscles in his back to relieve some of the cramping he was feeling. Red doubted that Russell would be suffering any trouble with the load, but she didn’t want to think about how Croft was coping. His body could do some amazing (and repulsive) things, but it wasn’t built for carrying heavy spells across open countryside.

“It’s the last one,” she reminded him. “I can dig the hole if you’re too tired.”

“That’ll be the day,” he refused and took out a small camping shovel from the pack.

They were a little way off the hiking path, but not far enough to raise any eyebrows if anyone came across them. There was always a legitimate reason for hikers to be digging a hole in the ground, but the one Eaglestone began to excavate was significantly larger than was usual for that function. Using maps and online satellite imaging, they had selected sites where the ground wasn’t too rocky, so he was able to quickly dig down the required distance. Red removed the jointed support structure from her pack and opened it out, locking the cross struts into place and checking the launching mechanism was fully functional.

Her phone beeped again and she pulled it out of her pocket to glance at it.

“Croft and Russell are done,” she reported.

“They had the easy ones,” Eaglestone complained and tossed the shovel aside. Red handed him the launch support and he eased it down into the hole he had dug. When the feet were set against the bottom of the hole, he pressed them down, firmly into place. Red suppressed a smile. The effort was wasted since the load the launcher was going to carry was going to set it more firmly in place than the man could ever manage. She opened up his rucksack and rolled out the charge. It was spherical and a dull grey in colour. It looked like a particularly large and smooth pebble. Rather than trying to lift it, which she could have done in a pinch, she rolled it across to the edge of the hole, where Eaglestone guided it into place in the launcher assembly. The feet sank an inch further into the ground.

“Are you clear?” Red asked as Eaglestone stepped away.

“I’m clear,” he confirmed.

She spoke the activating words as written on the spell’s casing and the launcher assembly sank even further, but remained stable and upright. She then leaned down and adjusted the levelling knobs on the side of the launcher until the bubble was centred within the black ring, as it needed to be.

“OK, that’s good,” she said and stepped back. Taking some fallen foliage and scraping some moss off nearby trees, she laid it over the top of the launcher. She couldn’t use anything solid enough to impede the shot, so the camouflage wasn’t going to fool anyone who was actively searching for the launcher, but it wasn’t obvious to the casual passer-by, of which there shouldn’t be any.

“And that’s us done,” Eaglestone said with some satisfaction.

“Phase one is complete,” Red agreed. “Now onto phase two.”

“Which is a lot trickier,” he warned.

“Oh ye of little faith,” she chided.

“I have complete faith in the venality of man,” he said as he cleaned off the blade of the shovel and folded down the handle, “but I also had faith in my marriage.”

“When this is over, you’re going to put as much effort into putting things right with Callie as you are into this,” Red told him. “How could she ever resist that?”

“You met Callie, right?” he said, doubtfully.

“Enough to know there’s only one big dude for her, so you just have to be that dude again.”

“You can’t pull off the word ‘dude’,” Eaglestone said, but smiled all the same.

“I could say something really rude to that,” she grinned back at him, “but we should be moseying along.”

“Yeah, and ‘mosey’ is way out of your league.”

They hiked back to the car, the rucksacks so much lighter on their backs that the journey felt half as long as the outward trip. The morning was advancing, so there were more serious hikers and casual strollers about, but nobody looked suspicious or appeared to show any more interest in Red and Eaglestone than anyone else. They stowed their gear and headed off to their next destination.

◆◆◆

The Marie Antoinette Memorial Prison was large enough to have encouraged the founding of a small town to house all the support staff required to operate it. The reason this had not actually happened was simply because the prison’s location was sandwiched between the Loire and Cher rivers, which already had communities both large and small scattered along their lengths. These settlements provided enough in the way of housing and services to make the establishment of a new one unnecessary, though their current sizes could be directly attributed to the presence of the prison. It was easily the largest employer in the area.

The community of Montrichard was one such support community. It boasted its own small chateau, but this one was a true castle of the medieval variety rather than one of the ornate residences of the nobles of France for which the region was famed. The castle provided a good view over the town and the surrounding countryside, but was otherwise hardly noteworthy. The town also possessed a church housing a statue of the Virgin Mary to which people had once made pilgrimage, but that journey was made only by pilgrimage completists these days, and they were a dying breed. Finally, there was a house built directly into the side of cliff. All in all, Montrichard was the a modest place of which the residents were proud and of which nobody else seemed to know anything at all. If you weren’t looking for it, you could easily pass it by without noticing.

As well as the modest landmarks, Montrichard also possessed a rather charming restaurant in the town centre. This was ideally situated for Red and Eaglestone to sit outside and enjoy a light lunch whilst watching the home of their target, waiting for his return. The day was warm and pleasant, so the pair were in no hurry for their quarry to arrive. They were on their second post-lunch drink when one of the infrequent local bus services stopped and disgorged a handful of passengers. Neither Red nor the American reacted as the man they were waiting for climbed off the bus and wandered across the square. They watched him walk past the office de tourisme and stop at the ground floor door leading up to his apartment whilst outwardly not appearing to notice even that the bus had arrived. They waited a further ten minutes before paying their bill and wandering off in the direction of the river. As soon as they were out of sight of the restaurant, they changed direction and worked their way around the town in order to approach the door from another direction. The lock was so perfunctory that Red barely had to take a second to open it and step off the street. She might even have picked the lock faster than the owner of the property had taken with the actual key. Eaglestone closed the door gently behind them, unobtrusively checking that nobody was paying them any attention.

They ascended to the second floor, where Red knocked lightly on the apartment door and stepped back. She wasn’t expecting bullets to come shredding through the wood, but old habits die hard.

“Yes?” The man who opened the door after a short delay was neither tall, nor strongly built. Eaglestone was able to push him back into the flat with little effort. The man stumbled over his own feet and fell flat on his backside.

Red entered the room and immediately disconnected the fixed phone and interweb cables from the socket in the wall.

Eaglestone towered over the fallen and man and threatened him.

“He wants your mobile phone, Mr Clery,” Red translated. Though they were using English for their cover as tourists, she was fluent in French and enjoyed the feel of the language in her mouth. It was as comfortable and pleasant as her mother tongue and certainly a relief after the unfamiliarity of Greek. She didn’t like to rely on translation potions and only did so when necessary. “I’d advise you to give it to him.”

The man on the floor hurriedly extracted an old model phone from his pocket and held it out to Eaglestone, who took it.

“I understand our presence is alarming to you,” Red told the fallen man gently, “but I can assure you we have no intention of hurting you if you remain calm and do not cause us any trouble. Would you like to take a seat somewhere more comfortable?”

She indicated one of the worn armchairs that, along with an equally worn sofa, almost filled the small room. She waited for him to carefully lift himself up from the floor and retreat to the chair before she continued.

“Rather than harm you, Mr Clery, we want to help you. We actually want to help you to help us, it’s true, but your assistance will not go unrewarded.” Red sat down in the armchair opposite him and tried not to show how uncomfortable she found it to be. Eaglestone remained standing, a fact Mr Clery could not fail to notice. “It can’t have been easy for you since your wife left you. She left to joint a cult, didn’t she?”

Mr Clery seemed surprised, and also upset, that Red knew these things about him. He didn’t say so, of course. In fact, he hadn’t said a thing since he had been pushed over, which was not surprising. Having your home invaded can have a detrimental effect on one’s chattiness. Red didn’t like putting the man in fear like this, but it was necessary and, assuming he did what she asked, it would be for a very short time and have a positive outcome.

“That must have been a blow to your dignity. It must also have hit your finances hard, your wife being the significant earner in the household. It doesn’t seem fair, your wife treating you so badly and you having to deal with the consequences. It must have been very hard on your daughter as well.”

Clery’s frightened glance to a small framed photograph on the windowsill spoke volumes to Red about the man. The girl was exactly the leverage to use, and she intended to do so.

“You needn’t worry; we mean her even less harm that we mean you, and I’ve already told you that is no harm at all. I have a proposition to make and then we will leave as quietly as we came and in time for you to go to the school to collect her.”

Unsurprisingly, her words didn’t ease the man’s nerves.

“You see, we know that, in addition to your main job, you are on retainer to provide an emergency service to the prison.”

Around here, she didn’t need to specify which prison. Again, Clery looked startled by the fact she knew this about him.

“To date, you have never been called upon to provide that service. Tomorrow, however, you will be.”

The man physically jumped in his seat.

“Again, there is no need to worry. The prison has seen to it that you will be completely safe. You will answer the summons exactly as you have been retained to do and carry out the job exactly as you should. With one small exception.” Red took her phone out of her pocket and called up a mug shot. “At some point, you will see me and you will see her.”

She showed Clery the photograph. He showed no obvious signs of recognition, which Red was pleased about. If he didn’t know who the woman in the photograph was, he would have no special reason to be unreasonable.

“When you see us, you will say we are not what you know us to be.”

Clery frowned, finally speaking, “I do not understand.”

“Tomorrow, you will,” Red assured him. She wasn’t going to tell him any more than he needed to know. “As recognition of your rendering us this service, your daughter will be given a trust fund large enough to pay her way through any higher learning establishment she chooses. She will be able to attend any school she wishes, including mime school. I understand she is quite a talented child in this area.”

Clery nodded.

“Paris has the finest academy, at the Opera House I believe,” Red said. “What would it feel like to see her perform on the stage there one day? You yourself will, after a few months, receive a job opportunity that pays significantly more than your current job. You will be able to move away and improve your living standards without any suspicion falling upon you. I have put together the terms of the package myself. They are quite generous.”

She waited for some response, but Clery remained quiet, so she continued, “As I see it, Mr Clery, you now have three alternatives. The first is to refuse our offer and keep your mouth tightly shut, in which case nothing at all will change for you, or your daughter. The second is to accept our offer and find your circumstances changed greatly for the better. The third is to betray me, either by warning the prison authorities in advance that something is going to happen tomorrow or by pointing me out when the time comes. This option I would advise strongly against taking. Your daughter will still receive the trust fund for her future, but it will come from an educational scheme set up to benefit orphans. I trust I do not have to elaborate on that any further?”

Clery shook his head quite firmly in response to her question.

“Good,” Red said, standing up quite suddenly. “Then I look forward to seeing you tomorrow and having to pay you a considerable amount of money thereafter. Good day, Mr Clery.”

She strode over to the door and out of the flat. Behind her, Eaglestone tossed Clery his phone. Whilst Red had been talking, he had removed both the battery and sim card. By the time the man had reassembled everything, they would be back at the car and by the time any help he summoned could arrive, they would be well out of town on any one of a dozen different routes.

As swiftly as they entered the man’s life, they were gone again.

“What do you think he’ll do?” Eaglestone asked as they headed west away from the town. Their route back to join the others was necessarily extended by their need to keep a safe distance away from the prison.

“What’s best for his daughter,” she decided. Red had seen in the man’s one glance at the photograph of him and his daughter that the girl was all that mattered to him. That’s why she had made the offer of a better job and more money secondary to the idea of fulfilling the little girl’s dreams. It would be much harder for any parent to resist a better life for their child than a better life for themselves. That glance had told her where his priorities truly lay and she was as certain as she could be as to what the outcome would be. There was still the possibility she was wrong, and that possibility could be enough to land her sharing a cell in the same block as the person they were trying to break out, but she considered it to be a possibility too small to truly consider.

“Would you really kill him?” Eaglestone asked.

“What? Where did that come from?” Red asked, confused.

“He’s a seer, right?”

“Yes.”

“So he knows the truth when he encounters it,” Eaglestone pointed out. “You told him you’d kill him if he ratted us out.”

“No, I didn’t,” she denied.

“Yes you did. I distinctly heard you. I was in the room,” he reminded her.

“I didn’t say I’d kill him. I said his daughter would get the money through a scheme run for orphans and I could certainly make that happen,” she explained. “That’s not a lie. He just doesn’t have to be dead for it to happen.”

“You are one sneaky little woman,” he accused her, as relieved as he was surprised. Red suspected he would have preferred to use some stronger words.

“You’re only just now getting that? Did you really think I would kill him?” The idea both amused and appalled her.

“Shut up,” Eaglestone responded embarrassed.

◆◆◆

Back at the cottage, she walked the trio through the plan a couple more times, though they were well enough versed in it now not to need the extra work. Besides which, their roles in the events of the following day were pretty minor. She was going to be taking all the risks and doing all the hard work. It is possible to hone a knife’s edge to such a sharpness that it breaks as soon as you try to cut anything with it, so Red took the team out to a small crêperie nearby where they could enjoy the good food, a small amount of good wine and the pleasure of each other’s company, purging some of the constant stress that comes with working such a complicated job and the anxiety that naturally accompanies the stress.

“I’ve got to tell you, this is by far the craziest thing I’ve ever been involved in,” Croft announced at one point, though not loudly enough for the comment to reach any of the other diners. There was a birthday party also dining and the people celebrating were making enough noise to cover the conversations of everyone else twice over.

“You say that now, but you don’t know what I need to get her out for,” Red warned them.

“Don’t say that,” Eaglestone objected. “You’re going to damage my calm over here.”

“If you wanted calm, you may have picked the wrong line of work,” Russell pointed out with a laugh.

“There may be something in what you say,” Eaglestone admitted.

Red was pleased with the evening. The men had all settled down with each other and seemed to enjoy being part of the group. Tomorrow was going to be the first big test of that new togetherness and she was the one laying her freedom on the line. If things went wrong, she didn’t think anyone would be coming to break her out. For one thing, she didn’t think anyone else could come up with a plan that had any chance of succeeding. Her own plan was pretty far out there in terms of out-of-the-box thinking and the chances of success were only good because of the sheer effrontery of it and the attention to detail she had lavished upon it. If it all went pear-shaped and she did get caught, it would be up to her to find a way out from the inside, assuming there was one. One thing would be for sure; she would have all the time she needed to find it.

They broke up the festivities early and went straight to bed. Red had trained herself to be able to sleep easily on the night before a job. Hers was a calm that came of long experience. Eaglestone had a lot of experience and she had no worries about his ability to find enough hours of sleep to be fresh and effective the following day. She couldn’t say the same for Croft and Russell, but there wasn’t much they were required do as long as everything went the way it was planned. If things went sideways, all of them would have more than enough to keep themselves busy just getting out safely.

“So, what do you think?” she asked Eaglestone the next morning.

Her look was not that far removed from the Elynore Welby persona she had used back in England. As this was France, she was dressed a little more fashionably, but the hair was still an unflattering mousey colour and cut in a severe bob that did her no favours at all in the beauty stakes, but helped considerably to make her less noteworthy and less memorable. As did the heavy-framed spectacles she wore. They hid much of her face and were ugly enough in their design to pass some of that plainness onto the face behind them. They were secured around her neck by a metal chain. Her cheeks were much more widely freckled than was usually the case and inserts inside her nostrils changed the shape of her nose noticeably, though they were uncomfortable to wear. She did not think anything about the day was going to help her feel comfortable, so that didn’t bother her too much. She carried a shoulder bag with a good marque, but which was a bit larger than was truly chic and she wore the shoulder strap too long for the current fashion. Her belt was a couple of seasons out of date and the brightly coloured headscarf she wore had been a fashion faux pas since the days of the Hollywood starlet ended.

“Not at all like you,” Eaglestone judged.

“That’s good then,” she decided.

Croft had prepared breakfast for them all, which meant he had been out to the local boulangerie and bought croissants to go with their coffee. Red resisted the urge to go over the salient points of the plan one last time. They were at the point where they either knew it or they didn’t. Any new information they pushed into their brains at this point would push something else right out and it would probably be something more important that went than arrived.

As soon as the meal was over, she climbed into the two-seater runabout she had bought as being appropriate to her character and headed out. As she drove towards the prison, she emptied her head of all the planning and all the concerns and all the things that could go wrong. She tuned the radio to a station playing up to date pop songs and opened the windows. The day was dry and bright and having the air rushing past as she drove exactly on the speed limit raised her spirits. The car was a convertible, but she didn’t put the top down for fear of messing up her hairstyle, even under the headscarf. Today was her interview, after all.

◆◆◆

As soon as Red knew she needed Aline Dupont on her crew, she set about locating her, which took all of about five minutes on the interweb. The French media had been full of the fall from grace of the first female Formula Milk Grand Prix World Champion. As well as proving to be a formidable opponent for professional racing drivers on circuits around the world, Dupont had proved to be a formidable opponent for police drivers in the cites outside which those circuits were located. Whenever the high profile festival that was a country’s Formula Milk Grand Prix came into town, Dupont would hook herself up with the less than completely legitimate individuals in the city to provide extra services as a getaway driver for extremely lucrative heists, protecting her identity by wearing helmets with tinted faceplates and baggy overalls that hid her figure.

It hadn’t taken Interpol long to work out the link between these heists and the presence of the Formula Milk teams nearby, but they had laboured under the misapprehension that the culprits were using the Grand Prix races as distractions. It took them a good deal longer to come to the conclusion that someone in Formula Milk itself was directly involved. It had been something of an embarrassment for the detectives working the case when it was revealed at the trial that they had recruited Dupont to be their informant inside the organisation, working to discover who the mysterious driver might be. She had come up with a number of promising leads to other drivers that eventually proved to be useless before the investigators worked out how they were being duped. Her getaway plan had been perfect, using a mini to negotiate the city of Milan’s rooftops and sewers during an immense traffic jam. She was just about to evade the final pursuer and escape the locked down city when a child had chased a ball into the street in front of her and she had been forced to carry out an emergency evasive manoeuvre that left the vehicle dangling over edge of a bridge parapet and the driver unable to move for fear of sending the vehicle plunging into the waterway below. That might not have been the end for her had it not been for the unfortunate fact that she did not know how to swim and therefore had to be rescued from the car by the officers who had been chasing her. There were plans to film the escapade under the name The Milan Job.

The court case had been a big media event, not least because Dupont refused to enter a plea, instruct counsel or speak in her own defence. She was sentenced to a very long stay in prison. The Marie Antoinette Memorial Prison was deemed to be the only correctional facility where she might be prevented from accessing a vehicle and thus absconding. The other countries where she had participated in heists were happy for her crimes in their cities to be merely taken into consideration and thus heaped onto the length of her sentence. By the time she was let out, the only vehicle she would be driving would be a mobility scooter.

◆◆◆

The prison was much more imposing up close than any of the photographs or clips of news footage had suggested. There was no up to date video to examine as the authorities allowed no filming in or near the prison. The best film Red had been able to unearth had been documentary footage from the time of construction included in a civil engineering educational film.

At each of the fences, she stopped and gave her name to whichever guard approached her. They took her identification and checked it against a list on a clipboard. They then contacted the main prison and verified it again. Red was impressed. There were no shortcuts being taken here at all. Once the checks were done, she was waved through the gate and waited for it to be closed behind her before the second gate was opened in front of her. At no point were both gates open at the same time.

After the last of the fences, she drove down a slight incline that dropped her below the level of the wall’s base, making it look even larger and more imposing than it actually was. She couldn’t be absolutely sure whether the land did that naturally or if someone had engineered it that way. Whatever the case, the impact on the first time visitor was very impressive. The prison looked like the most impregnable castle ever built, except there were no window slits to fire arrows through. The walls were featureless apart from the regularly-spaced buttresses. In some places, the surface had started to peel and needed repainting, something she might have been able to use as part of the plan at another time.

She pulled up into the car park in the shadow of the wall and got out of the car. There was a drop in temperature that was either the chill of being so close to the largest concentration of criminal elements in Western Europe or the fact that the sun was being completely blocked out by the huge construction. Whatever the reason, she shivered slightly and pulled her jacket around her a little tighter.

She was being watched by uniformed prison officers from a low building set at the base of the wall on the edge of the car park, so she straightened her back and marched across to them with a renewed sense of purpose and confidence. She noticed she was also being watched by at least half a dozen CCTV cameras that followed her movements. When she reached the building, she presented her identification and letter of invitation to interview.

The Marie Antoinette Memorial Prison, like most other very large penal institutions, suffered from a high turnover of staff and seemed always to be recruiting for new people to fill multiple roles. The status of the prison as beyond maximum security required a high level of vetting for the people who worked there, which often ruled out otherwise appropriate candidates from consideration. To work at the M.A.M.P., you not only had to pass this vetting, but so did your family, your lovers, your friends and anyone with whom you had a more than passing acquaintanceship. A failure of any individual in that group to have a completely spotless record would lead to a rejection of candidacy. The reason for the rejection was rarely given because the police weren’t about to tell you they suspected your third cousin Jacques of being a dealer of powdered demon tusk with links to the organised black market for monster organs. Or whatever other shady stuff your family and friends were up to.

“Good morning, I am Isabelle Marceau, here to interview for the job of internal domestic expenditure analyst,” she announced with a bright smile.

The officer did not return the smile, or even acknowledge that she had spoken at all. His expression was the stony disapproval common to custodial officials the world over. Exactly what it was about her that he disapproved of was not obvious. He took the letter and the identification into the building and immediately got onto the phone for the necessary verification. She noticed several men in fatigues and armed with automatic weapons at the back of the building. They were observing her with the same level of undefined disapproval as the prison officer had.

She leaned back to look up at the top of the wall, towering over her. There were a couple of helmeted figures up there, looking down at her. They were too far away for her to tell if they were wearing the same expression as their ground-level colleagues, but they were certainly giving her the same level of attention. She waved up to them. They did not wave back.

The stern-faced prison officer came back out of the building and presented her with her documents. He also gave her a visitor’s badge, which she affixed to the lapel of her jacket.

“Please follow me,” he said and it was not a request.

He headed for the door set into the wall and she followed him. Another officer fell into step behind her. She looked back, a little surprised and nearly stumbled. Neither man attempted to assist her. When they reached the door, the lead guard announced himself into a panel set into the metal. He and his colleague then inserted keys into the twin locks on the door and turned them together. The locks made heavy sounds as they released. The door was then opened outwards and two more guards checked the new arrivals. They nodded to the officers outside and stepped back to allow Isabelle Marceau to step through. As soon as she was inside, the door closed behind her with a depressingly solid thumping noise. The locks were engaged again and her new escorts moved through to the first internal door, which proved to be the first of three before she was finally through the width of the wall and emerging into the ground floor of what could have been any large company building, judging by the look of the lobby.

There was a metal detector archway just like the ones used at airship ports everywhere. She handed her bag to one of the equally stern security guards who opened it and examined the contents. She reached down to take off her shoes.

“No Madame, that will not be necessary,” a second guard forestalled her.

“Mademoiselle,” she corrected him and followed his gesture to pass through the archway.

The alarm sounded above her and a dozen men came instantly to alert, their hands going to their weapons.

“Ah, no sorry, I know what it is,” Red declared, holding up her hands above her head even though nobody had instructed her to do this. “It is my glasses,” she explained. “The chain. It always sets these things off.”

She stepped back through the archway and pulled the chain over her head, taking off the spectacles and handing them to the guard there. She then groped her way back through the archway, which this time remained silent. Even though she was making a big show of being almost blind, she noticed the guard lift the spectacles up to his own eyes and then pull an astonished expression at the level of magnification given by the lenses. He then passed them around the outside of the archway, where they were handed back to her.

“Thank you so much,” she said gratefully, putting them back on. They automatically removed the magnifying effect, which only activated when they were not being worn by her. “I can barely see a thing without them.”

A woman in a smart business suit that somehow managed to be both severe and fashionable at the same time approached, a tablet computer in her hand. “Mademoiselle Marceau?”

“Yes, that’s me,” Red confirmed. It took her a moment to realise that the other woman was waiting for her to prove that fact. She took the identification out of the bag along with the letter of invitation. She wondered how long it took for all the staff to get into the prison at the start of each shift.

“Yes, that’s you,” the woman confirmed and passed the documents back. “I am Sophie Adjani. I am in charge of the hiring and firing in the prison.”

“You still use firing squads?” Isabelle Marceau asked, shocked, and then realised what the other woman meant. “Oh, sorry, yes, I understand. I’m sorry.”

“It is not unusual for new visitors to find the place a little… disorientating,” Adjani commented with a slight softening of her demeanour, but only a slight softening. “You will please accompany me.”

They crossed the open lobby area to a staircase where more guards checked Adjani’s identification and Red’s visitor pass. They then climbed up to the second floor and walked along a corridor past several doors marked with the names of various administrative teams, eventually coming to one denoted as the New Staff Interview Suite. The harsh-edged font gave the location a vaguely threatening aura in keeping with the prison as a whole.

“Please wait in here,” Adjani ordered, opening the door.

Red went inside. The room contained a table, two chairs and a window. A water cooler nestled in one corner. There was nothing else.

“It will not be long,” Adjani assured her with a faint smile. It was the kind of smile that someone who was familiar with the concept of smiling, but never actually indulged in the practice themselves, might have given.

“I am at your service,” Red said and went in.

The door closed behind the other woman. There was no clicking sound from a lock, which was reassuring. Red went to the table and sat down. She knew she was being watched through hidden cameras. How candidates reacted to unusual situations would be one of the things the prison employers would be evaluating. She would normally have simply sat in one of the chairs and waited the unseen watchers out, but that was Lady Red. Isabelle Marceau was not a master thief and so was not comfortable in such a situation. She waited a while and then went to the window to look at the view, which was a view of the boundary wall and not much else. She then drifted to the water cooler and took a drink before moving back to the table.

Eventually, the door opened again to admit her guide, who was ticking things off on her clipboard. She was probably doing so just to see how the interviewee would react. All these small things were designed to throw the applicant off their game and their reactions then told the management more about them than their written answers ever would. Red had found a blog post by an embittered applicant who had passed the process but had then been refused a post for unspecified reasons. He had listed the entire process, albeit for a different job role, and his observations around it. Ms Adjani was following the pattern precisely, but taking longer about it than Red liked. She needed to get to the next phase of testing before the alarms started and she was running out of time.

“Please come this way,” Adjani said after finishing her box ticking.

“I thought this was where the interview was going to be,” Red said as she stood up, showing observation, but also naïveté. She hoped the testers were taking note of her performance.

The other woman shook her head, “We will return here for the actual interview, but there are tests to be carried out first. They will take place elsewhere.”

“Oh, of course,” Red said, as though she had needed it explaining.

She followed the other woman out of the room and hoped their journey wasn’t going to take them too far. It took them just across the hallway, to a room remarkably similar to the one she had just left, but the table was laid out with all the equipment normally found on a working desk.

“On the desk, you will find some papers. They are scenarios, information, data sheets, the kind of things you will encounter in your daily life working in the prison, should you be selected,” the clipboard bearer explained succinctly. “Work out the problems, calculate the values and complete the computer inputting if you please. When you are done, pick up the phone and dial zero.”

“You forgot to tell me the time limit,” Red reminded the woman.

“No, I didn’t. Take as long as you need. We value precision and correctness over speed here,” the woman explained. “Is there anything else you need?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Good. I will leave you to it,” She stepped out of the room again, leaving Red alone once more.

Red sat down at the desk, booted up the computer and turned over the work sheets. They were, as Adjani had explained, detailed scenarios regarding the working life of an internal domestic expenditure analyst. A facility as large as the prison had significant costs for catering, cleaning and laundering services, uniform supplies and the like, even though most of the actual work in these areas was carried out by the inmates themselves under proper supervision. Catering was the obvious exception, since there were some notorious poisoners resident in the prison. The prison’s budget was large but finite, and so a constant watch was kept on all expenditure, looking for ways to save money. The task was considered important enough to employ a small team to monitor it and make suggestions for alternative arrangements to improve the more mundane aspects of the prison’s finances. It was the kind of work Red would only consider undertaking in her most hideous nightmares and even then the inducements required tended to be monstrous in the extreme. Isabelle Marceau, however, attacked the work with, if not enthusiasm, diligence.

The delays in getting this far into both the prison and the recruitment process saved her. She had barely started making calculations around the cost of various supplies of washing detergent when a strident alarm started to sound with enough volume and suddenness that she nearly fell off her seat even though she was expecting it. When she recovered her senses, she took a couple of further seconds to look more surprised and confused than she really was and then reached for the telephone. As she did so, the door opened. Ms Adjani leaned into the room, wearing a confused and frightened expression.

“Ms Marceau, you must stay here. Do not leave this room.”

Red lowered her head slightly so she could look over the top of the lenses of her spectacles and the woman became a man in a prison officer’s uniform.

“What is happening, sir?” she asked, feigning panic. “Is this a drill? I wasn’t told about one.”

“It’s not a drill,” Adjani said. “We don’t know what’s happening, but for your own safety remain in this room. That way we know where you are if we need to find you.”

“Yes sir, I will,” Red promised.

Adjani gave a slightly pained nod at Red’s use of the word sir and then she ducked back out of the room. She presumably had other duties to carry out in the middle of an emergency situation.

Red moved quickly over to the room’s window and looked out. The view here was mainly of the wall on the other side of the building, but some of the recreation area set aside for the female prisoners could be seen. There were prisoners and guards out there, milling around and even starting to fight. Red again looked out over the top of her spectacles and all of the visible figures were now dressed as prison guards. She was too far away to make out faces, but knew they would consist of a small number of features repeated across everyone in the prison. She looked down at herself and saw, without the glasses, that she was also dressed in a prison uniform. With the glasses, her clothes reverted back to the same ones she had put on that morning.

The launchers they had planted in the countryside around the prison had carried out their tasks perfectly, it seemed. At the appropriate time, they had fired their shells in unison. They were too close to the prison for the projectiles to be intercepted, though they would easily have been detected by the prison’s defensive radar system. Once past the prison’s wall, however, they exploded harmlessly, showering the entire jail with a strong glamour. To the unaided eye everyone in the prison now looked exactly like one of a dozen officers who had been foolish enough to wear their uniforms outside of the prison where they could be imaged. Confusion was the immediate outcome, but that confusion had quickly turned to hostility as inmates made the most of the bizarre situation by trying to escape or just launched themselves at the nearest person they assumed to be an actual guard. With everyone looking the same, the authorities were going to have a hell of a time getting the real guards out.

Red turned back to the computer and pulled off her glasses, taking the chain from around her neck. With everything else that was happening in the prison, it was safe to assume nobody was going to be watching the video feed of one job applicant unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Red slipped the ends of the chain from the arms of the glasses and looped it around the computer. As she clipped the ends together, the computer screen changed to a series of views from the prison’s internal CCTV system. The prison’s systems were kept completely separate from those of the outside world, but the chain acted as a wireless connection, giving Eaglestone instant access. Seconds later, the power systems failed and back-up lights flickered into life. The prison possessed anti-magic capabilities that would be able to see through the glamour given enough time to set them up, but without power they would be useless. The authorities would have to switch to other methods.

The spectacles trembled against her ears as she put them back on, informing her that the windows were now unlocked as well. The arms of the spectacles could resonate in a manner that was transmitted directly through the bones of her skull to be translated into sound by the bones in her ears, but she didn’t want to indulge in any conversation that might be examined by the authorities when they got around to the inevitable inquiry into what had happened.

Crossing back to the window, she opened it as far she could. It was blocked from opening too far to prevent inmates from escaping, but Red knew a few tricks about getting her body through spaces even a cat would consider twice. She slipped through the gap with some discomfort, but made it. Once outside, she went up the wall instead of down, climbing up onto the roof. There was a gantry running along the apex of the roof that could be used by sharpshooters in the event of trouble. She ran along it as fast as she could. The garrison of armed police would be sorting themselves out and might decide to make use of the vantage point themselves at any moment.

Her glasses buzzed again, this time to signal that Clery had received a call from the prison. Eaglestone, whilst removing the battery and sim card from Clery’s mobile phone, had installed a one shot monitoring spell. Now that the call had been made, the spell would dissipate harmlessly and, more importantly, untraceably. The prison officials were acting more quickly than Red had counted on, quite in contrast to the time the normal procedures had taken earlier. She needed to move faster herself.

She reached the end of the administration building and launched herself out into space. They had measured the distance between the cell blocks at this point and, whilst the gap was pretty wide, it was within her capabilities. She hit the roof of the other building in a forward roll that cushioned the impact on both herself and the roof. Her information on what the roof was constructed of was sketchy at best and it wouldn’t do to crash straight through into the room below, receiving a couple of broken legs in the process. Two leaps later, she was on the roof of the nearest female cell block. She quickly went over the edge of the roof and dropped down from window sill to window sill until she was safely on the ground. Nobody seemed to have noticed her, which was not surprising considering the confusion and fighting going on all around her. Inmates were taking advantage of the situation to indulge in a spot of total destruction. Anything not bolted down was being used to smash into everything that was bolted down. A large number of things were on fire. The alert siren was howling through one set of loudspeakers whilst another issued a constant stream of shouted commands, all of which were being ignored by the prisoners and guards alike.

Red made her way through the chaos as quickly as she could, scanning the faces for the one she wanted. She kept her distance from anything that looked like trouble, which was tricky because at that moment everything looked like trouble. If anything happened to her glasses, it would be close to impossible to finish the job. They were her only way of identifying Dupont amongst all the other lookalikes. The spectacles vibrated again and this time Red heard Eaglestone’s voice. It felt weird hearing things when no sound had actually passed through her eardrums. She didn’t really like the idea of having voices in her head.

“Block 2 is being closed down,” he said tersely.

They had no way of knowing if Dupont was housed in Block 2, and if she was whether she was currently there, but if she was then Red needed to act quickly. She skirted around the fights and impromptu bonfires and continued to scan the faces for her target. As she rounded the edge of the building, she saw a group of figures who had arranged themselves in a line and were trying to force others back towards the cell block. How they had managed to identify themselves to each other as genuine officers, Red didn’t know, but they moved together as a unit and were effectively penning in the others, slowly moving them back in the direction of one of the cell block exterior doors.

One of the people being herded was Dupont. She had a wild look on her face and a bloody cut across her forehead, but it was definitely her. And she was about to be lost to Red unless she acted quickly.

Without thinking too much about it, Red ran up behind the line of officers and threw herself to the ground, rolling lengthwise into the back of three sets of legs. The owners of the legs were caught unawares and thrown off balance, immediately crashing down onto the ground, creating a hole in the line. The inmates needed no further encouragement and stampeded for the gap, pushing the adjoining officers aside and increasing the size of the breach. Red was forced to scramble aside frantically not to be trampled in the rush. She got back to her feet and cast around for Dupont.

Her arm was caught in a tight grip and she was swung around. The officer was red-faced with fury and lifted up a gloved hand to punch her in the face as hard as he could. Just before the blow landed, someone cannoned into his side and knocked him onto his backside on the ground. A big woman with fewer teeth in her mouth now than when she had been born then gave him a solid kick in the nether regions that left him writhing on the floor and out of the fight.

“Thanks,” Red gasped.

“One good turn deserves another,” the inmate said with a gummy grin and ran off.

Red saw Dupont’s blonde head moving away at speed and ran after her. Dupont was an athlete and kept up a good pace. Red wasn’t sure she was going to be able to catch up with her until a scuffle broke out ahead and the Frenchwoman was forced to change direction, allowing Red to intercept her.

“Aline Dupont,” she said in between deep breaths.

“You know who I am?” the blonde woman asked, surprised. “You can see who I am?”

Red tapped the side of her glasses. “I need you to come with me.”

“Why the hell would I do that?” the other woman demanded with understandable suspicion.

“Because you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in here?” Red offered as a reason.

“You did this?” Dupont realised. She was as smart as Red had been led to believe. “You did this to get me out?”

“I did, but we need to move and we need to do it now,” Red insisted.

“I am moving,” Dupont pointed out.

“In the wrong direction,” Red revealed.

“I don’t trust you,” Dupont said, but slowed down.

“Can’t say I blame you, but what have you got to lose?” Red asked.

Dupont shrugged in the way only the French can and then said, “Lead the way.”

Red changed their direction and headed for a door as close to the administration building as possible, but with fewer people fighting outside it. They edged around the pockets of violence and made it back inside the prison without further altercation. They moved through the interior, which was filled with a lowering blanket of smoke and discarded, shattered furniture. Eaglestone had released the electronic locks on the cell blocks’ interior doors, but had no control over the ones leading into the administration building, which were operated by physical keys. The pair struggled towards one of those.

As they approached, Red said to Dupont, “Act injured.”

“What?”

“You’ve been in a fight, act injured,” Red repeated, placing an arm around the woman to support her.

Quick on the uptake, Dupont wrapped her arm around Red’s shoulders and slumped against her support, dragging her feet and letting her head droop. Red hauled her toward the door. There was a crowd around it, mostly revealed to be genuine officers by Red’s glasses, but with a few prisoners trying to pull off the same trick she was. The outer ring of officers were facing away from the door, ready to deter any attack.

“Injured officer,” Red called as she approached. “We need help here.”

Dupont chose that moment to lose her footing and nearly fell to floor, dragging Red with her. Helping hands reached out and drew them into the group.

“Aren’t they letting us in?” she asked, looking at the closed door.

“They don’t know who are the officers and who’s not,” her nearest neighbour explained.

“So they’re just leaving us out her to fend for ourselves?” Red asked incredulously and then said something very unflattering about the management.

“I know,” the officer agreed sympathetically, “but they told us to stay put because they’ve got a plan.”

“A plan? Oh great,” Red replied sceptically.

“What’s your name?” the officer asked. He was an older man with a bearing that came from time served and experience gained.

“Lavelle,” she immediately responded to his tone of authority, but didn’t say sir because without her glasses she wouldn’t have any way of knowing he was a higher rank.

“Well keep it together Lavelle,” the officer told her. “It’s just like we trained for. Well, nobody trained for this, but… Management’s not going to leave us stranded out here any longer than they have to. We’ve got to trust them like we trust each other. OK?”

“OK,” Red confirmed, keeping an edge of uncertainty in her voice. If there really was an officer Lavelle in the prison, they were going to receive an unfavourable report from this incident.

She had no way of checking the time whilst they waited by the door. None of the officers around her were checking their watches, so she didn’t dare do so herself. They were all focused on watching the cell block for any approaching trouble. They also watched the slowly lowering cloud of smoke, mainly from burning mattresses. Red hoped the smoke wasn’t composed of anything toxic. After what seemed like a slow-moving eternity, there was a banging on the door behind them. Two officers inserted keys and turned them. The door opened slightly to allow a man to slip through.

“Listen up!” he shouted. “We’re going to let you through in small groups. Once on the other side, line up and speak to the people who speak to you. Do not try anything or you will be put down instantly. Do you understand?”

There was a general nodding of heads and the door opened wider to allow the first few people through in a group. Red hefted Dupont into a standing position again and they were pushed through the crowd to the front and then through the doorway into the administration building.

There was a ring of armed police officers around the room. None of them wore prison uniforms and were identifiable individually with or without the help of her spectacles. They had obviously been brought into the prison from outside after the glamour had done its job. They all had their guns at the ready. The weapons were non-lethal, but reportedly very unpleasant and completely debilitating. Each of the two lines of evacuees from inside the prison led up to a single person, one man, one woman. Each of those was flanked by more armed police. Red eased Dupont into the line leading to Clery whilst doing her best not to make it look like that was what she was doing.

One of the people Red knew to be a prisoner reached the head of the line in front of the woman and announced himself to be an officer. The woman shook her head and one of the armed officers shot the prisoner immediately before he, or anyone else, had any chance to react. The inmate slumped to the ground and rolled around in pain, crying out despite his jaw being locked shut by the forces ravaging his body, until he mercifully passed out. It was a mercy for both him and those witnessing the scene. There were non-lethal sidearms that simply rendered people asleep where they were shot, but the prison authorities had apparently chosen ones that made more of a statement about the consequences of inmates acting up. Having seen that happen to someone, it was unlikely you would risk making it happen for yourself. Another prisoner, further down the line, panicked at the sight of his fellow inmate being brought down in such a violent, painful manner and made a break for it. She was shot before she reached the ring of police.

Red kept a tight hold on Dupont to prevent her from trying anything similar, but the other woman seemed remarkably calm through all of this. Then again, she was used to being calm whilst hurtling round a racetrack at a hundred miles per hour. Also someone being shot by non-lethal weapons was, presumably, something she had seen before.

The fallen prisoners were dragged away and the lines started moving again. Moments later, Red and Dupont were standing in front of Clery. According to the background information Red had on the man, he was too strong a seer to be fooled by any glamour, which was why the prison kept him on retainer in the first place. He could see Red and Dupont for who they really were and there was no chance he didn’t remember Red from the previous day’s encounter. This was the moment of truth. Though there had been scary moments earlier in the rescue attempt, none had been more critical than this one. If Clery was too honest to be bribed, if he fancied himself as the hero who stopped Aline Dupont’s escape from the most secure prison in Europe, if he just couldn’t bring himself to betray his employers, or if he was just too scared of the potential consequences to do the wrong thing the game was up and Red would probably end up as Dupont’s cellmate.

Red didn’t hold her breath at the suspense of the moment, though she really wanted to. Instead, she shifted Dupont’s weight on her arm and tried to salute. “Lavelle and Chevalier.”

Clery blinked once and then nodded his head. The guards flanking him fell back and Red helped Dupont past him. To his credit, Clery went straight on to the next person in the line. From somewhere behind Red, there was a crackling sound and a yell of pain.

Once outside the administrative building, it had been Red’s plan to deal with whatever emergency services were there and then slip quietly away to her car. A big man in combat fatigues appeared in front of her to thwart that plan immediately.

“Walking wounded to the coach,” he ordered in clipped tones that seem to be required for military officers.

Red turned slowly in that direction.

“And get a move on, it’s ready to go!” the soldier shouted.

Red sped up and helped Dupont onto the coach. The vehicle was only half full, but as soon as Red lowered Dupont into a spare seat and dropped tiredly into the one across the aisle, another military officer went along the bus and counted heads. Once he got off, the door closed behind him and jolted away. At each of the prison’s external fences, the bus stopped and heads were counted again. Security had been dropped a level, but not that far. Then, they were outside the prison and heading away.

A military nurse stood over Dupont and tried to fix the cut in her forehead as best he could by touch alone. The glamour over her meant he couldn’t see the wound.

“They’ll be able to scrub the spell off at the hospital,” he told her after apologising for making her wince for a third time. “Then this can be treated properly.”

Red wanted to step in and deal with it herself, but she wasn’t supposed to be able to see through the glamour any better than the medic.

“Don’t worry,” Dupont told him. “I’m good. It’s just a scratch.”

“Feels like a bit more than that,” he warned her, “but I guess you’ll survive.”

“I’d better, or I’m going to find a medium who is going to sue you personally,” Dupont said with a wan smile and laid her head tiredly back on the headrest.

The nurse took the hint and moved on.

Red’s patience was at snapping point by the time the coach reached the hospital. This was by far the slowest getaway she had ever participated in and the wait was not good for her nerves. She allowed herself to relax a little once the coach had passed through the final prison gate, but remained alert to the need to make a quick getaway from the getaway vehicle. They were now in open countryside and if there was any sign of trouble, she could hijack the bus quite easily, since most everyone else aboard was injured. Aline Dupont, even with a head wound and at the wheel of a military bus, would be a match for any pursuit. If that failed, they could dump the bus and disappear into the fields or streets, whichever was applicable at the time, before the police closed in on them both. Red liked having room to manoeuvre. Space meant options and options were good things to have.

Their luck held and the coach pulled into the hospital car park without incident. A final headcount was taken and everyone was allowed to disembark into the hands of the waiting doctors and nurses. Red quickly convinced them there was nothing wrong with her, but they insisted on examining Dupont, which meant a trip through the de-spelling shower. This was not standard equipment for a hospital, so it had been hastily rigged up in one of the ambulance garages to the side of the main building. The army were very good at setting up mobile facilities quickly and with very little warning.

With all the activity taking place around the hospital site, it was absurdly easy for the pair of them to become lost on the way and navigate the hospital corridors until they found an emergency exit at the rear. Red took care of the alarm and they slipped out into the streets. Since they were still affected by the glamour and therefore looked like prison guards, potentially the same prison guard, they couldn’t rely on anonymity by blending in with all the other people going about their, presumably lawful, business. That problem was resolved by finding a driver parking his car and convincing him to let Aline drive for a while. A few miles later, the owner was dropped by the roadside far from the nearest mode of communication in a state of confusion. Prison officers weren’t supposed to steal cars.

“So, who are you?” Dupont asked almost as soon as they accelerated away from the dispossessed car owner.

Red was impressed the other woman had been able to hold her curiosity at bay for so long. It was a sure sign of the professionalism she was expecting. “Most of the people I work with call me Lady Red.”

Dupont nodded, apparently unsurprised by the revelation. The name made a lot of things clear and she was smart enough to join the dots and recognise the picture they made without any further assistance. “You want me for a job.”

“Let’s say I have a proposal I want to make to you,” Red amended.

“And if I do not want to hear your proposal?”

“Then we go our separate ways.”

“Looking like this?” Dupont gestured to them both.

Red laughed, “That’ll wear off in an hour or so anyway and you’ll be back to looking like a convict. I’m sure you can score yourself something new to wear. My offer comes complete with a new wardrobe.”

Dupont considered that, but the car remained in motion and heading in the same direction. Eventually, she said, “You need a good driver.”

“It’s going to be a bit more challenging than that,” Red warned her.

The Smash & Grab

Red had expected hot air ballooning to be a quiet affair. In the cold darkness of pre-dawn, it was anything but quiet. Generators were running all around the field, powering fans that forced air into balloon canopies, accompanied by the shouts of the teams carefully husbanding the process. It was a long process as well. They had arrived early to find the field already occupied by other teams, each in their assigned and marked off section. Balloons were being unloaded, unfolded and checked on the ground in the illumination of vehicle headlights or working lights running off the same generators now forcing air into the billowing canopies. All the activity was confined to those individual lonely patches of light. As a woman who quite often worked at night, the scene made her feel quite at home.

A couple of mobile catering vans were supplying hot dogs, bacon rolls, coffee and tea to the balloon crews and their trade only grew as more and more people arrived.

Once the balloons themselves had been checked, the baskets were offloaded from the support vehicles and checked carefully. These ranged from single seater models for a lone traveller to large constructions capable of carrying half a dozen passengers. The cables that connected the baskets to the balloon were coupled into place and again tested to ensure everything was secure. The baskets were then laid on their sides for later. All of the people in the field around them seemed to have done this before many times and went about the process with the confidence of experience.

Fortunately, Dupont had that same confidence and experience. She was the expert here and ordered her companions around accordingly. They had carried out test runs of the process during the past week, but that had been in daylight and without any time pressures.

The inflating balloons were a curious sight, wriggling and undulating along the ground as more and more air was forced into them, ripples flowing across their surfaces in a faintly obscene manner. Their shapes started to emerge as the upper surfaces of the envelopes were forced off the ground. The crews moved around them, helping the process along by shaking out folds and opening up the void inside. Some people even ventured completely inside to help the process along.

Once enough of the cold morning air had been pushed into the balloon to support the opening at what would be the base of the balloon in its normal flying position, the basket gas jets were ignited. These made a roaring, hissing sound like a very angry lion cobra. Red had only come across those rare animals in wildlife programmes on the television. The air trapped inside the balloon was heated and duly expanded, filling out the shape and lifting it into an increasingly upright position. Some of the more unusually-shaped balloons had to be controlled with guide ropes as they came upright due to being inherently less stable than the traditional shape.

With balloons of all shapes and sizes and varieties of support machinery, this process was individual to each of the teams and the balloons rose to readiness at their own pace. As it was still dark, those shapes could only be glimpsed against the faint lightening of the east except when the gas jets sent light as well as heat up into the canopy and illuminated them from the inside. It was a shame there were few onlookers because these internally lit balloons made a spectacle all their own. The first teams to be ready were professional teams with sponsors keen to have their logos and messages seen by as many people as possible. Far too many of those sported beer company logos for Red’s comfort. She could only hope that the crews didn’t partake of their sponsors’ wares before the start of the day.

More and more giant dark shapes took their places in the ranks, the spaces between them filling up more and more rapidly as the teams reached the end of their tasks and the balloons were ready for flight, jostling against each other, keen to take the leap into the sky for the only dawn ascent of the Annual Bristol International Balloon Fiesta.

“All aboard that’s getting aboard,” Aline said from inside the basket of their balloon, carrying out the myriad tiny tasks that comprised getting ready to take off and that only the professional balloonist would understand. “It’s about that time.”

Red helped Croft climb into the balloon and followed him with much more grace and ease.

“Is there a seat belt on this thing?” Croft asked, looking around.

“Not a one,” Aline responded with a grin, but then relented, “but you can clip yourself onto the edge of the basket right there if it makes you feel any safer.”

Croft immediately attached a safety line to the indicated position.

From somewhere on the field, an air horn sounded a lonely cry in the dark. It was answered by a sustained sibilant roar as all the gas burners around them surged into life together. Aline signalled to Eaglestone and Russell, who released the tether lines. At first, nothing happened as the pillar of burning gas writhed up into the balloon’s interior, apart from the heat of it giving Red’s cheeks a pleasant tingle in the chill air, but then she felt the basket shift. It didn’t rise immediately, but started to scrape along the grass as they moved sideways.

“Don’t panic,” Aline said with infinite calm, “that’s quite normal.”

Then there was no more scraping. The basket was clear of the grass and moving sideways freely. The one thing it didn’t seem to be doing was rising. Balloons around them were lifting up into the darkness, their envelopes the only colour to be seen against the dark sky where the gas jets illuminated them from within. Red then realised they were rising with them, though she felt no force or thrust. She had felt the acceleration of every vehicle she had been in, however slight, but with the balloon there didn’t seem to be anything to feel. They were simply rising up. The dawn came more and more into view as they climbed, a bright orange line along the horizon, fading into blue at its very edge. The dark silhouettes of the balloons were stark against that band of light.

The basket swayed a little as they rose, a pendulum beneath the balloon itself, but it was not a significant motion and diminished as they climbed. It was at this point Red understood why she had expected ballooning to be quiet pastime. Apart from the constant low hiss of the pilot light above them, the balloon itself produced very little sound. The basket creaked from time to time as the stresses redistributed themselves, but otherwise there were no moving parts to create noise.

As the sun emerged higher above the horizon, the balloons were exhibited in all their glory. They came in all sizes and colours. They also came in a variety of shapes as well as the traditional inverted teardrop. Red could see a lion, a tiger and a bear (oh my) as well as a soft drink bottle, a football, a house, various cartoon characters, even the earth itself. She could not recall when she had seen such a colourful sight in her life.

“Are we heading in the right direction?” she asked, watching the land passing beneath them, receding ever further from them.

“Winds as predicted and within the error of margin,” the French pilot said, relishing the feeling of absolute freedom, something which must have been far more pronounced for her than the others aboard after her spell in prison.

“Is this a good time to mention I’m not great with heights?” Croft asked.

“About ten minutes past the perfect moment,” Aline said cheerfully.

“Fix your attention on a point on the horizon,” Red advised. “That way it doesn’t feel so high.”

It was a technique she used herself when scaling places other people would very sensibly be scared witless by. She had once been surprised in the middle of breaking into the top of one of the world’s tallest buildings by an extreme selfie-taker scaling the telecommunications tower at the very apex of the building. That person had impressed her immensely with his fearlessness until she learned he had died only a few months later when he fell off another inaccessible place. She considered even a million likes on the interweb not worth losing your life for.

Red tapped her ground communicator, “How’s it going down there?”

“We are packed up and on the move,” Russell responded immediately. “Right on time.”

“Let me know when you’re in position,” she ordered.

“The very minute,” he assured her and broke the connection.

“Enjoy it while you can,” Dupont advised. “It’s going to get bumpy later on.”

Red took her at her word. She relaxed and opened herself to the experience. The light breeze was ruffling her hair and filling her lungs with fresh, clean air. Balloons were scattered across the sky all around them. People down on the ground were coming out of their houses, or getting out of their cars, to look up and wave or take pictures for their social media feeds. This wasn’t a sight you got to see every day and they wanted to preserve the memory of it just as much as she did.

“This is amazing,” she told Dupont, exhilarated.

“Nothing quite like it,” the French woman concurred.

“It’s not better than sex,” Croft put in before anyone could think to say it.

“Fair enough,” both women agreed, but it was still a hell of a feeling.

The balloons were drifting apart as they travelled, creating a long dotted tail in the air, slowly thinning out in numbers towards their departure point.

The earpiece in Red’s ear beeped. She focused herself back on the job at hand.

“We’re in position and ready to go,” Russell’s voice told her.

“How are we doing?” she asked the balloonist.

Dupont immediately recognised, and responded to, her work voice,” Five minutes to optimum position.”

“And that’s when you start earning your money,” Croft said softly.

“We all do,” she agreed.

“Five minutes,” Red relayed to the ground crew, “and then fire it up.”

“Right you are. Five minutes,” Russell confirmed.

There was no last minute consideration of backing out. That question had been asked at their last briefing the previous evening. To back out the day before things were due to happen would have been bad enough form, but everyone had been aware of the risks involved and that it had been their last chance to bring up any reservations or concerns with the plan and its delivery. There had been none. Croft hadn’t seemed comfortable, but then Croft never seemed completely comfortable with anything. It was a quality that helped him in his insurance work. Nobody had objected, so the plan had been initiated and they were fast approaching the hard part.

“OK, the package has been accepted,” Russell announced.

The only way out now was to release the trapped heated air above them and bring the balloon to the ground as quickly as they could. There would be more than enough people around them doing just that in the very near future. “Good luck.”

“Just be ready when we need you,” she instructed him.

The first sign of trouble came in the shape of a freshening wind from the north. It brought with it clouds that progressively thickened and grew darker in colour. Somewhere, a flare was fired from one of the balloons, alerting the others to the news that the weather report had turned decidedly unfriendly to transportation without engines. Most of the balloons immediately started to lose altitude as the crews thought better of taking a risk on the storm passing them by and started looking for a landing site. Good flying conditions for a hot air balloon don’t come in wide bands.

“Cowards,” Dupont commented as she worked the balloon controls harder.

“Aline, we want them to land,” Red reminded her.

The pilot just shrugged.

Those crews who didn’t land because of the steadily rising winds chose to do so when the rain started. It lashed down out of the dark sky and ran off the balloons in small rivers. There was nowhere within their own basket to shelter from the water and Red had been most definite in her instruction that no waterproofs were to be brought on board. The forecast was good, so why would they think to have wet weather gear handy? The water on the balloon’s surface cooled the gases inside, so the choice to descend would have been made for them by the forces of physics had they not chosen to make it for themselves.

“I can see the Hall,” Red shouted over the noise of the rain bouncing off the canopy. The Balloon Festival had been conveniently close to the target, enough so to make it the obvious cover, but it had also been far enough away to make navigating to it through a storm a much more risky proposition, which is why Red had needed Dupont’s ballooning skills to raise the odds back in her favour. The first sight of the stately home through the rain had been welcome and not just because it meant they were that much closer to getting safe and dry again. “Can we make it?”

“What did you hire me for?” Dupont asked archly. From her pocket, she took something and threw it up into the gas jets, which were burning constantly now, trying to keep the air in the balloon hot enough to keep them aloft. The object ignited in the flames and burned both more brightly and hotter than the gas jets did alone. The descent of the balloon was halted for a short while, but the swaying and spinning of the basket remained unaffected.

“Anyone mind if I throw up?” Croft asked from his corner of the basket, where he was looking thoroughly wretched. Whether he was really feeling that way or practicing for his upcoming performance, Red couldn’t determine.

“Over the side,” Dupont ordered “Nothing in the balloon.”

Red wasn’t sure it mattered, considering what was going to happen to the balloon in just a short time anyway, but said nothing. There were times when she had been accused of being too much of a perfectionist, criticism which she had not taken well at the time. She had no intention of saying or doing anything to distract the balloonist when her performance needed to be as close to perfect as possible.

The sound of water hitting the canopy turned sharper and heavier suddenly.

“What’s that?” Croft wailed from the edge of the basket, his desire to heave his guts out having been overcome by his desire to know what new threat was trying to end his life prematurely. He yelled as his skin was stung by something much harder than the rain.

“Hail,” Red shouted. “An optional extra.”

“Do you really think we needed it?” he asked a very sensible and pertinent question.

She was saved from answering by another loud burst above as the Frenchwoman launched another object into the gas jets. The effect on their downward trajectory was much more muted this time.

“I could have done without it,” the pilot said, her manner and voice unruffled by the wild pitching of the basket or the severity of the storm.

“And where did you get a localised weather spell anyway?” Croft demanded.

“I know a guy,” was all Red was willing to say.

“He must be an interesting guy,” the pilot suggested.

Red chose not to disabuse her of the notion.

The hall was very close now and Red was glad to see nobody out in the grounds. The weather had surely driven them indoors, as it would have any sane person. To be voluntarily abroad on terra firma in such conditions might have been considered grounds enough for therapy; being about in a hot air balloon was grounds for being locked up for your own good, and possibly that of society as a whole. The lack of people outside meant there would be fewer witnesses to them smashing into the edifice of the local stately home, which was exactly what was supposed to happen. They were short of the target, however, and too low by far. She just hoped they would manage to avoid smashing into one of the old stone statues dotted around all over the place. Those would be expensive to replace.

The gas jets above them bloomed again with added heat, twice in quick succession this time. The result lifted the balloon with a tremendous jerk. The basket cleared the roof of the main building by barely a foot and a weather vane was knocked askew.

“Hold on,” Dupont shouted and the basket dipped and swung to one side in a wide, wild arc. The pilot screamed a battle cry right up to the point where the basket smashed straight into, and through, the windows of the null room.

Red rolled out of the basket as though she had been thrown clear of it by the impact, checking the room for cameras as she did so. Their impactive entry into the room had destroyed one, only the bracket of which remained attached to the wall. There was another one in the far corner, but a quickly thrown projectile took care of it. With all the dust and confusion of their arrival, it would look like a piece of shrapnel from the basket unless someone decided to go through the footage frame by frame.

The room’s door burst open and two security guards rushed in, their guns at the ready.

“Hey! Whoa! What’s with the hardware?” Dupont asked in a shocked and scared voice. She looked pretty impressive with half her face covered in a pretty convincing blood substitute.

“What happened here?” one of the guards demanded.

When he got no immediate response, he advanced on Dupont, raising his gun to the level of his face. He repeated the question, leaving absolutely no doubt that a failure to respond would not be the wise choice.

“We crashed,” Dupont shouted back what she considered to be obvious enough. “There’s a bloody storm outside that came out of nowhere in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“We?” the guard demanded.

“I’ve two passengers,” Dupont said, indicating Red, crouched down by the basket. “Her and…”

The second guard reached down to Red, who cried out fearfully at the contact and shuffled away.

“Hey, can’t you see she’s in shock?” Dupont rushed to Red’s side and all but pushed the guard away. “Not to mention that might be broken arm she’s cradling there.”

It wasn’t a broken arm that Red was cradling, but a device Eaglestone had claimed to be ‘the closest thing there is to a universal signal detector’. The technology, though, could not be miniaturised any further and so it remained a bulky enough item to give them away if it was seen by the security men.

“Where’s the other one?” the guard didn’t pursue Red any further.

“He was over… Oh crap!”

Croft lay unmoving amongst the wreckage of the basket, his limbs splayed out in unnatural poses that human arms and legs are not supposed to be able to achieve. It was clear he had suffered major trauma damage and only the slight rise and fall of his back showed him to be alive at all. The guard looked away and barely restrained the urge to be very, very sick.

“We need an ambulance!” Dupont commanded the security men.

They looked at each other uncertainly.

“Now!” Dupont insisted. She was playing the part beautifully, Red had to admit. It was the role she herself would normally have taken in this staged drama, but hers was the only face in the crew known to the victim and, possibly, his security team, so her role was to play the person suffering from shock and to keep her face hidden as much as possible.

The guard nearest the door holstered his gun and left at a run. Why they didn’t have mobile phones was a question that might bother Red later, since she hadn’t thought to factor that into her planning, but it was possible that being so close to a null room interfered with their reception. It was also possible that Isaacs was paranoid enough not to allow his security team to carry devices that could be tracked, hacked and blown up remotely by the wrong people. Red and her crew were definitely the wrong people.

“Have you got a first aid kit?” Dupont aske the remaining guard.

He was transfixed by the body on the floor, the one with the arms and legs bending in all the wrong directions. It was a gruesome sight, even without any blood or puncture wounds.

“First aid kit!?” Dupont repeated, sticking her own bloody face right into his line of sight. A small pulse of red ran down from the unseen gash above her hairline to wash over her forehead and drip from her eyebrow.

“I’m not supposed to leave here,” the guard said, somewhat helplessly.

The look of utter shock and disbelief on Dupont’s face was enough to persuade him otherwise. The wellbeing of a woman with blood running down her face from a head wound would be prioritised by most people over orders from their boss, especially men, for whom the need to protect the weaker sex was irresistible. There were times when the inherent sexism hard-wired into members of the male gender proved to be useful. Red was not sure the guard would have gone if Dupont had been a man. He turned and hurried out to find the requested item.

Dupont turned and crouched down over Croft’s body, apparently checking his pulse.

“You are faking right?” she asked him in the slightest of whispers.

Croft popped his digit back into its joint so he could give her a thumbs up.

Dupont shuddered at the sight, but told him at normal volume and with unconvincing confidence, “Just hang on in there. You’ll be all right. Help’s on the way.”

Anyone who was not aware of Gerald Croft’s unique ability would have found her confidence unconvincing anyway, because there seemed no way even the world’s best surgeon would be able to help him.

Dupont then crossed the floor back to Red and crouched down a foot or so away. Red cringed away from the sudden intrusion into her space.

“You’re all right,” Dupont told her soothingly. “We’re down and you’re safe.”

The first guard reappeared in the doorway, confirming, “The ambulance is on its way.”

“How long?” Dupont asked, stepping smartly away from Red, who was rocking herself gently in the corner.

“We’re quite far out,” the guard reported, assessing, “Could be fifteen minutes.”

“He might not have fifteen minutes,” she pointed out, indicating Croft’s apparently shattered body.

“What can I do?” the man asked.

“For him, nothing unless you’re a trained paramedic,” Dupont said bluntly. “Are you a trained paramedic?”

He shook his head.

“And I think we’d best leave her to her own devices,” she indicated Red. “At least she’s quiet. Set her off and she could become a screaming mess.”

The second guard arrived back with a green plastic case in his hand. There were sounds of shouting voices coming both along the corridor and up through the broken wall, though those from outside were partly masked by the continuing noise of the storm.

“Keep them out of here,” Dupont instructed sharply. “Send someone out there to keep people from under the basket. The balloon’s still attached and the wind could pull it right out of the wall and drop it on them.”

The newly-arrived guard handed the plastic case to his colleague and went back out into the hall. He started relaying Dupont’s orders immediately, as though they were his own.

“You,” Dupont distracted the guard who remained. “Is there a mirror in here?”

“A mirror?” he asked, confused.

“Don’t think I’m letting you take care of this,” she circled her bloody face with one finger, “with hands like those. Not exactly surgeon quality are they?”

“I guess not,” the guard actually looked abashed by the assumed inadequacy of his hands. It was all Red could do not to smile.

“Then find me a mirror,” Dupont insisted and took the first aid kit from his offending hands.

He went back out of the room and Dupont swept the room’s only desk clear of the items somehow still remaining on it. Several small broken sections of the basket fell to the floor along with the ornate pen set, pretentious blotter and some framed photos. Setting down the kit, she opened it and took out antiseptic wipes, some dressings, bandages and some medical tape.

The guard came back carrying a large mirror in an overly fussy frame. Dupont beckoned him over and showed him where to place it. Since it was a wall-hanging mirror, he had to stand behind it and hold it upright in place. The balloonist then wiped the fake blood off her face as best she was able. There weren’t enough wipes to take care of the job completely, but she was at least able to keep both eyes open all the time now. She placed a dressing over her hair at the location of the assumed wound and wrapped bandages around her head to keep it in place. The tape then secured it. The final result didn’t look like much, but it sufficed, not least because there was no actual wound there.

The ululating sound of an approaching siren reached them through the broken wall. Red shook, startled, and Dupont abandoned her makeshift bandaging to croon softly to her, “There you are, dear. I told you the ambulance was coming. They’ll have you sorted and right as rain in no time.”

Red shuffled uncertainly and Dupont shook her head meaningfully to the guard.

What seemed like a very short time later, there were sounds of approaching footsteps in the corridor outside the room, moving at just less than a run. Two men in bright green and yellow uniforms came into the room, their coats shedding water from the storm outside.

“What do we have?” the bigger of the two men demanded upon entering.

“Shock,” the guard said, pointing to Red, “head wound,” indicating Dupont, “and…” As he gestured to Croft’s location, the guard just shrugged helplessly.

The paramedic immediately attended the latter, having dismissed the other two as much more minor wounds. To his colleague he said, “We’re going to need the body board and full strapping.”

“You’re not thinking of moving him?” the guard asked in surprise. What limited training he had received suggested you didn’t move bodies with potential spinal injuries. Considering what had happened to his arms and legs, spinal injuries were at the very least possible.

“Do I tell you how to throw people out of pubs on a Friday night?” the big paramedic demanded.

The guard said nothing, though he didn’t look happy about the intimation.

“Then don’t tell me how to do my job. Clear the room and give me some space to work.”

The second paramedic returned with a body-shaped piece of plastic boarding. He all but shoved the guard out into the hallway, saying, “Don’t worry, you can keep the door open if you’re worried about the family silver.”

He joined his colleague at Croft’s side and together they manoeuvred him onto the board and his arms and legs into less distressing, but still unnatural, positions. The straps secured him into place.

“Right, back in here,” the smaller paramedic ordered the guard into the room again. The bigger of the medics moved to check over Dupont’s head wound.

She waved him away impatiently. “I’m walking wounded. Take care of her first.”

“You take that end of the board,” the other paramedic instructed the guard. “We’re going to take him up very gently and move him down to the ambo. He’s well out of it, so he’s not going to feel anything, but lets not make things worse than they are, eh?”

The guard and the paramedic lifted the board and body and eased it out of the room.

Eaglestone crouched down beside Red, “How are you doing, honey?”

“Is it done?” she asked, keeping her quaking voice low enough so only he could have heard it.

“If it can be done, it’s done,” he whispered. More loudly, he said, “I need to take you down to the ambulance, sweetheart and get you checked over. Is that OK?”

Red nodded uncertainly and started to stand. Eaglestone reached to assist her, but she shied away from his touch.

“That’s all right. That’s OK,” he crooned softly to her. “Take your time. I’m just here to help.”

“I can help myself,” Dupont said haughtily and strode out of the room, though she swerved a bit along the way.

Red found her feet and meekly followed her, Eaglestone constantly close enough to catch her if she fell.

The ambulance had pulled right up to the nearest doorway, so they were subjected to the storm for only a few seconds as they passed from the building into the back of the vehicle. Red did as she was instructed without complaint, or even seeming to notice.

Russell was giving one the staff members details of the call reference number and telling them not to touch anything because the police weren’t far behind and were going to want to see everything. He added that he wouldn’t be surprise if the air accident people didn’t get themselves involved as well. He commented on how much of a pity it was balloons didn’t carry black box recorders.

As soon as the necessary information was passed, he checked with Eaglestone in the back and then slammed the doors. Jumping into the driver’s seat, he set the siren going and accelerated away with exaggerated gentleness. Speed was of the essence, but bouncing a critically injured man around in the back wasn’t going to help matters.

Red straightened her back and brushed her hair out of her face. She handed Eaglestone the electronic sensing device carefully. Her system was thrumming with the adrenalin that came with an operation, but she wasn’t about to spoil everything by tossing it to him.

“That better have worked,” she warned him, “because I do not want to have to do that again.”

“Do what?” Dupont complained, unwrapping the bandages from around her head and peeling off the blood sachets hidden in her hair. “I did all the work. Who flew the balloon with pinpoint accuracy and who gave the performance of a lifetime in there?”

“The RSC is calling,” Red allowed with a grin. She couldn’t actually refute anything the other woman was saying, but this was a team effort with either everyone carrying out their tasks perfectly or the whole thing unravelling.

Dupont inclined her head to the man on the board, “It was Croft who sold it though. That really is the freakiest thing, man.”

Croft smiled and started to pop his joints back to where they were supposed to be, with sounds nobody in the rear of the ambulance found comfortable.

“How long do you think before they realise they’ve been had?” Eaglestone wondered.

“When the cops don’t show,” Red assessed. “Then they’ll query it with the ambulance service and the hospital and find out nobody knows anything about a call for a balloon crash.”

“Then they’ll call the cops for real, who’ll spend months examining all that equipment we left lodged in the wall, Croft commented from the board, to which he was still strapped.

“None of which can be tracked back to us,” Dupont assured him. “I know my job.”

Red wasn’t so sure - about the police being called, not Dupont knowing what she was doing. Whilst it was true they’d had to break her out of jail, which suggested she hadn’t known her job on at least one occasion, Red knew that particular failure was because of the shortcomings of others, not Dupont herself. The null room was Isaacs’s secret and she didn’t believe he would want the local constabulary’s finest going over the place with a fine-toothed comb. He was sure to have a firm of private investigators on speed dial and it was probably to them that he would turn, rather than the police.

They would follow the clues provided by the balloon (it had an individual reference number stencilled in big letters on the outside of the canopy, after all), but would find only frustrating false identities, closed bank accounts, forged papers and dead ends.

“Right, let’s get this thing dumped and destroyed and see what we know.”

The job was done. All that remained was to see if it had been a success.

The Betrayal

“There’s still nothing on the news,” Croft complained as he entered the room. “Typical isn’t it; the best job I ever pulled and it doesn’t even make the telly.”

“The best job he ever pulled?” Eaglestone said with a disbelieving smile.

“Let him have his lap of honour,” Red allowed tolerantly.

“There’s no honour amongst thieves. I thought you knew that,” he pointed out.

“Would you rat me out, Ralph?” she asked him directly.

“All right, maybe a little honour between certain thieves.”

The lack of news reports confirmed what had been suggested by the presence of the null room in the first place; that whatever Isaacs was up to, he didn’t want anyone, especially the police, interested in it. This meant either it wasn’t legal in and of itself, or the people he was working for didn’t want even legal activity being traced back to them. That certainly played in the crew’s favour.

They were in a spacious flat in north London. All contact with any location used during the planning phase of the balloon heist had been ruthlessly cut. Any investigators would find only the same dead ends there as they had uncovered from the balloon itself. The ambulance had been destroyed in a barn fire four hundred miles, and several police force areas, away from Bristol. With the news blackout on events at the hall, she doubted any connection between that and the burned out vehicle would ever be made, and if it was it wouldn’t be for some time. A computer hack on the ballooning event’s management company, meant all the pilots’ images had been lost along with all other entrants’ information. Every trace that could be removed had been. Traces that couldn’t had been fixed to lead nowhere. It had been carried out methodically and had been built into the planning at every stage. Just because you’d finished the job didn’t mean the job had necessarily finished with you.

That’s why the crew was still together two days after the job’s completion. It was also why, when you had a crew you could trust, you used them every time. Anybody new was only introduced through the personal recommendation of someone you trusted. She’d broken that rule bringing in Dupont and Croft. Their skills were uniquely necessary, however, and their reputations were such that she felt comfortable trusting them. She’d worked with Ralph on and off over the years, enough to trust him with her life. Russell had come with Eileen’s seal of approval and he had carried out everything asked of him both professionally and well. In short, Red thought she might have found the core of a new crew for the future. Now, though, was not the time to broach that subject.

“You know that he’s not doubting your work,” she told Eaglestone. She didn’t have to tell him who she was referring to. Though the others didn’t know who had commissioned the robbery, they knew he existed and they were smart enough to have worked out how well-funded and well connected he was. “He’s just having it double-checked.”

“Which is different from doubting my work how?” he asked, arching his eyebrows.

“Fair point,” she allowed. “It’s just nothing personal. This is important to him.”

“And to you. I can tell. I just can’t imagine why,” Eaglestone commented.

“And I’m not one to tell my secrets,” she riposted. “As well you know.”

“I’m not the one you need to worry about anyway,” Eaglestone told her. “Some of the others are likely to get a bit antsy. There is only so much Webflix you can watch before you go irredeemably insane.”

“As soon as he’s confirmed the identity, the money will be transferred and we can all go our separate ways,” she promised.

“Forever?” he cocked a knowing eyebrow at her.

“I didn’t say that exactly,” she denied. “You know I never force anyone into anything.”

“There’s a seer in France who might disagree with you,” he argued, but lightly.

“Oh come on. I offered the carrot and he snatched it out of my hand. I barely had to mention the stick.”

Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

“That could be the call we’re waiting for right now,” she supposed.

The number was not recognised by the phone, but neither she nor Nico were the kind of people who put important contact details into their phone directories to be discovered by anyone who happened to gain access. The phone itself was for this job only and would be wiped and then destroyed as soon as it was no longer needed. Just another way in which she removed all traces of herself.

“Hello, it’s about time…” she started.

“Shut up and listen,” the person at the other end said urgently through panting breaths. “Because I don’t have time to chat.”

Red recognised the voice immediately, “Eileen?”

“You need to get out now,” Eileen said, ignoring the question. “You’re in trouble and you need to leave.”

“Eileen, what’s going on?” Red demanded to know.

“They took Albert and put him in the hospital,” Eileen told her, the other woman’s voice catching on the last word.

“You can’t go,” Red told her immediately. Though she wanted to reach out and commiserate with the woman on a purely human level over the sudden turn of events, practical considerations remained paramount. “The only reason he’s still alive is in the hope that you’ll be stupid enough to go and visit him.”

“I know that,” Eileen shot back. “I’m not as dumb as I look, you know.”

“Your boyfriend’s in the hospital. Nobody would be expecting you to be thinking straight right now.”

“I’m thinking straight enough to know this is your fault and I shouldn’t have helped you. I was retired until you came back,” Eileen accused her.

“That’s not true and you know it,” Red replied sharply, more to get Eileen’s attention than because the woman’s words had hurt her. “If Albert was taken it’s because he shot his mouth off to the wrong person at the wrong time. Word got back to my mark and Albert paid the price. If anyone should be mad here, it’s me Eileen. I thought if he was with you, he’d know the score, enough to keep his mouth shut anyway.”

From the silence at the other end of the call, it was obvious that Eileen knew Red was right.

“You have somewhere to go?” Red asked her.

“Stop trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” Eileen snapped. “Of course I have somewhere to go.”

“Go there.”

“But Albert…”

“No promises, but I’ll do what I can,” Red promised. “Where is he?”

Eileen relayed the information.

“Now go. And Eileen… thanks for the warning.”

Red hung up. Eaglestone had picked up on the tone of the conversation straight away and called the others into the room. They were all waiting for her to let them know what was going on. It was obvious that something had gone wrong, but what and how bad it was they were waiting to hear.

“We’re not blown,” she did not make them wait. Every minute could be critical now to their survival and she was responsible for that, “but it’s probably only a matter of time. You need to scatter, and I mean now. Ralph, I want you back in the States straight away, as quick as you can.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” he told her. She knew him well enough to know he would have an exit strategy planned right from the start. “But what do you mean, you have to scatter?”

“I’m going to give you the time you need and also see if there’s a way to negotiate our way out of this,” Red told him.

“And if there’s not?” Croft asked.

“Then there’s a lord who’s going to regret making business personal,” she promised darkly.

“I didn’t sign on for any revenge gig,” Russell objected.

“No you didn’t,” Red agreed, “but you came to me through Eileen. If Isaacs gets to her then where do you think he’ll go next?”

“You make a good point,” Russell subsided.

“Same goes for you, Gilbert. Aline and Ralph, she knows nothing about, so you’re safe unless he gets to one of us three.”

“No,” Dupont said simply. “You got me out of that prison and I am not going to run and hide like some frightened schoolgirl. I’m up for the whole revenge thing.”

“I’m fine with the hiding like a frightened schoolgirl scenario,” Ralph said, “but if you need me, you’ll come calling, right?”

“Totally,” Red promised.

Individually, she gave each of them a location, date and time and then they shook hands and slipped out of the back door until only Eaglestone remained.

“Your way out’s good?” she asked.

“All the way, baby,” he assured her and then embraced her. “You don’t go getting yourself dead girl, you hear me.”

“Not my intention,” she promised him and then pushed him out of the door. Saying goodbye in these circumstances was painful, but she had things she needed to do to give them the best chance of getting away clean. Picking up the phone again, she steadied herself and then dialled the number from memory.

It connected immediately.

“Jeremy, it’s Elynore Welby. We met recently.”

“Elynore? I’m sorry, but this is really not a great time. Can I call you back, maybe in a few days?” Isaacs asked distractedly.

“I hear you’re looking for me and my friends and not being too nice about it,” she said quickly, before he could hang up.

There was a brief silence at the other end of the phone as Isaacs worked through the meaning of her words. She wondered if he wanted to slap his hand against his forehead at how obvious it was when he thought about it. He reacted with admirable speed.

“So, it was you. I suspected, but…” she could hear the frustration in his voice. “That was a very fine performance.”

“My mother always said I’d do well on the stage.”

“And she was right. Are you calling to gloat?”

“I’m willing to talk,” she told him.

“And I’m willing to listen,” he replied and she didn’t believe him for an instant. “Tell me where you are and I’ll send a car.”

Red laughed, “Or a drone strike. I don’t think so. I’ll pick the spot, and the time.”

“Drone strike? You’re being a little overdramatic now, my dear,” he said.

“Everyone’s a critic,” she allowed. “My rules, or you’ll never know what this is all about.”

“I can guess,” he spat back.

“No you can’t, not really,” she assured him. “I’ll be in the Tower of London an hour from now. You can either be there or never see me again.”

She hung up on him and immediately dialled another number from memory.

“Lady Red, this is a fortuitous coincidence,” Nico said by way of greeting.

“No, it’s not. Nothing fortuitous is going down right now. Do you want to tell me what’s happening over there?”

“We have been confirming your friend’s data.”

“That’s a lie and you know better than to lie to me. All right, if we’re going to play that game, I’ll show you mine first. Isaacs knows about me.”

“That is unfortunate,” Nico commented levelly, “and just a little careless of you.”

“No, it’s a lot careless of me, but I’m going to take care of it. So, your turn.”

“Mr Papandreyou has come to the conclusion that you have repaid your debt to him…” Nico started to say, but she was having none of it. For one thing, she didn’t have the time if she was going to make her rendezvous.

“He’s cutting me loose? He’s that scared?” she demanded trying to sneer in order to cover up the shock.

“Isaacs is working directly for one of the highest ranking members of the Russian Mafia,” Nico repeated the information Eaglestone had extracted from his device after its visit to the null room. Actually, he had extracted the details of a single fixed line of communication, one that could only be activated from within the room, but he had then been able to track that back to a Moscow number. A few discreet enquiries had matched the number to one Anton Vasiliev. There were more than enough rumours on the shadier edges of the interweb about Vasiliev’s less than legitimate business dealings if you knew where to look. Eaglestone knew where to look. “Mr Papandreyou is a businessman who has huge assets that would be vulnerable to people whose business tactics were somewhat less restrained than his own.”

“So he gives me this big speech about honour and loyalty and keeps me hanging around for a few months with only a handful of little jobs to keep me interested and then throws me to the wolves the first time things get a little rough?”

“Mr Papandreyou said he knows he can rely upon your discretion when it comes to your arrangement with him and hopes you will survive this development,” Nico said flatly.

“Maybe he shouldn’t hope too much for that,” Red shot back, warning him, “After all, if I survive this, I might just decide to indulge in a few less restrained business practices of my own in his direction.”

“On a personal note, I regret Mr Papandreyou’s decision in this matter,” Nico said. It was the closest she had ever heard him come to criticising his employer. “If there is anything I can do for you, please tell me.”

“For me, no, but there’s an innocent man, well relatively innocent, in hospital…”

“I will arrange to have him moved to a safe location, discreetly,” Nico said immediately. Red was not surprised that she didn’t have to identify the man for him. She gave him the location Eileen had given to her.

“Now I have an appointment I can’t be late for,” she told him and hung up, the action closing down the most recent chapter of her life. She’d miss the Greek villa, but she’d stolen enough money from Papandreyou during the months she was working for him that she wouldn’t have to worry about paying for a place to live elsewhere. It was his own fault if he hadn’t been aware of it.

◆◆◆

Red had chosen the location for her meeting with Isaacs partly because it was nicely public and the sudden appearance of any firearms would lead to the equally sudden appearance of dozens of Metropolitan police officers in full body armour with much larger firearms. She had also chosen it because she would have very little time to get there before the appointed time. This meant she wouldn’t be hanging around waiting for one of Isaacs’s goons to find her and take her out. There was nothing in the flat that needed to be dealt with. Anything connected to the balloon raid had been ruthlessly disposed of. The crew would have abandoned this place by now in normal circumstances, but the delayed response from Papandreyou had left them dangling. Now, she knew why at least.

She quickly changed into something less comfortable, but much more practical, and dropped the keys to the place onto the coffee table before closing the door behind her. As with all her safe houses, the flat was situated close to several transport corridors. She was going into the heart of London, so the roads would be completely impractical at this time of day. She walked quickly to the local Underground station and took the tube to Tower Hill.

It was a bright and sunny day. There were more than enough ordinary tourists exiting from the Underground station for Red to lose herself amongst. The crowds also meant it would be harder to spot anyone showing an undue interest in her. She hadn’t given Isaacs nearly enough time to set up complete surveillance of the area, but she didn’t know the full extent of his capabilities and manpower, so she wasn’t taking any chances. She wandered with the crowd through a small garden and past a sundial, following the pedestrian signs for the Tower, before taking the subway under the main road. This was a good place for an ambush, but she kept hard against the right wall, so she was only open to attack from one side and there were no street musicians or living statues to provide a reason from anyone to stop or congregate. She didn’t think Isaacs would want to kill her before he had spoken to her, but she wasn’t going to risk it.

She emerged back out into the sunshine and turned right in front of the giant wedding marquee that had been erected just outside the castle walls there to cater for private parties. The path led to the rather unsightly open concreted area where tourists could queue on particularly busy days. She strolled across this to the ticket booths, aware of what an easy target she made for any sniper in one of the nearby taller buildings. She weaved in and out of the other sightseers to give them less of a clean shot. The ticket booths were all open and manned and so the queue was agreeably short. She bought the cheapest ticket because on this occasion she wasn’t going to have the opportunity to wander through the Crown Jewels collection and idly consider how she would circumvent the very serious security system in the place. It wouldn’t be easy, she had admitted to herself each previous time.

She took her ticket down to the twin turrets of the Middle Tower (which wasn’t in the middle of anywhere, being situated on one corner of the site) where it was checked by a staff member in a sober dark uniform. She then wandered along to the matching turrets of the Byward Tower, where her ticket was checked again and she was allowed inside.

Without seeming to hurry, she made her way along the pathways to the grassed area south of the White Tower, the central keep that was the most instantly recognisable part of the whole site. Generally, people weren’t allowed on the grass, but with the bright sunshine and general lack of alternative seating available, family groups had encroached and the brightly-uniformed traditional beefeaters seemed in no mood to move them on. Red thought she ought to have been a bit more precise in setting the location for the meet. It was a big site with a lot of people in it. Nearby, a group of actors were performing a free play about the history of the place and the gathered children seemed to be enjoying it.

Despite her reservations about the size of the place, Red spotted Isaacs straight away. He was not easily missed at the best of times. He was strolling around the grassed area with a small terrier on a lead. The tame ravens on the site were looking more than a little disturbed at the dog’s presence, but since their wings were clipped, they couldn’t fly away and settled for glaring at the interloper with undisguised enmity. The dog sniffed away at the grass, completely oblivious to the consternation it was causing.

As she approached, Red sized up the area. There were three beefeaters in the traditionally gaudy red and gold uniforms of The Yeomen Warders of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Members of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary, a full title which absolutely nobody ever used. They seemed to be rather too young and fit-looking for the job. There were also a couple of general site guides nearby who seemed woefully underemployed. Red was both reassured and disappointed by this. Did they really think she wouldn’t immediately spot them? Did they think so lowly of her skills, especially after what she had pulled off at the Isaacs family estate? On the other hand, if this was the best they could do, her chances of getting out of here alive had greatly increased.

“I didn’t think dogs were allowed in here,” she said conversationally as she approached Isaacs. She did so from the front, not wanting there to be any misunderstanding about her intentions.

“Special dispensation,” he said when he recognised her. “I’m on the board of trustees.”

“Of course you are,” Red should have known better than to be surprised.

She was struck again by the handsomeness of his face, most especially those piercing eyes of his, but the expression he was wearing was far from handsome.

“Thank you for coming. It makes things so much easier.”

“Well, you made it necessary when you started hurting people,” she told him a coldly as she could manage.

“As I recall, it was you who started this,” he pointed out and there was nothing cold about the anger in his eyes.

“That was just business. It is a mistake to make it personal.”

“Not making it personal is a luxury I don’t have,” he told her.

“I’m here to negotiate…”

“Negotiate?” he snapped. “You think there’s a way to talk yourself out of this? You smashed up my ancestral home, you invaded my privacy and you made me look bad in the eyes of some very unforgiving people.”

“And took nothing,” Red tried.

“We both know what you took. It’s not something you can give back, now is it? You can’t just say ‘oops, my bad’, hand it back and everything’s all right again. The damage has been done and the only way to put it right is to put you away, permanently. All of you.”

“My crew were just doing a job. If you agree to let them go…”

“You’ll what?” he asked reasonably. “Hand yourself over and come quietly? Sacrifice yourself for your fellow thieves? I don’t think that’s likely. It also doesn’t send a very strong message, does it? Mess with us and we’ll let all but one of you go free? My associates much prefer the idea of mess with us and we’ll kill every last one of you in ways you really won’t enjoy. No, you’re all going to die, slowly and horribly.”

“No conversation?” she asked for the last time.

“No conversation,” he told her flatly.

“Well, you’ve given me your ultimatum and now I’m going to give you mine. Either you walk away from this with no hard feelings or I’m going to be coming for you, and your little dog too.”

“That will be a neat trick, since you’re standing in the middle of one of Britain’s oldest prisons,” Isaacs pointed out.

“I’ve escaped from more secure places than this, and quite recently too,” she told him back and realised instantly she had made a mistake.

“So that was you,” he mused, pouncing on the error. “Aline Dupont was a member of your crew. Thank you for the information. I’m sure you’ll give us the other names, in time.”

“You’re not going to do anything here,” she said confidently. “Too many people to be witnesses, to tell their stories to the press, to recognise you and remember the fact you were talking to me before I got killed.”

“Killed?” he seemed taken aback. “Who said anything about killing you? Yes, that will come in time, but not here. There’s no need to kill you here. After all, the infamous Lady Red, taken prisoner whilst reconnoitring a raid on the Crown Jewels? It’s the stuff of tabloid fever dreams. No, you’ll die in custody, probably trying to escape in some suitably esoteric fashion.”

“In your dreams,” she said defiantly, but wasn’t so sure of herself now.

He smiled triumphantly, “Member of the Board of Trustees, remember. The gates were closed the moment you started to talk to me.”

He must have given a signal of some sort, because the men she had previously identified as being his sudden broke from their characters and ran at her from all directions. She had been prepared for this and launched herself directly at Isaacs. He flinched in the face of her attack, but she rushed straight past him, pulling off her coat as she did so, dropping it on the ground behind her. Because Isaacs was standing in the way, the direction in which Red took off was the one direction the guards hadn’t covered. The closest two tried to converge on her, but she had a head start and dodged at a full sprint through the clusters of people sitting on the grass.

She heard Isaacs shouting at the men and then a yell as one of them stepped on the coat she had abandoned. Its arms wrapped themselves around his legs in response to a entrapment spell woven into the lining. There was an audible thump as he hit the ground. She couldn’t help smiling, but didn’t slow her pace for a second.

People were starting to look in her direction, but she didn’t let that slow her down either. She dashed past the queue of people waiting to go into the White Tower and threw her ticket into the face of the collector. By the time he had registered that the ticket didn’t give her access to that section of the site, she had leaped the turnstile and was into the ground floor. She doubted the men following her were going to be as gentle with the doorman as she had been.

For a while now, the White Tower had served as the museum of arms from the Royal collections. There were personal suits of armour from at least two monarchs and stunning examples of the armourers’ craft across the ages. Sadly, all of these seemed to be securely fixed into place. She cannoned into a figure wearing medieval armour and everything remained exactly where it was supposed to be. Off balance, she stumbled into another mannequin, which remained standing, but the weight of her impact pulled the wooden shield free with the gloved hand still attached. She snatched it up and almost fell over with the weight of it. As the first of the pursuers came into the room, she hurled the shield at him like the American-themed soldier from those stupid superhero movies, the one played by the cute actor. The chasing man yelled and ducked. The man behind him, though, was not as lucky. He instinctively raised his arm to deflect the object and Red heard the bones breaking from across the room. The cry of pain told her he was out of the chase. That was two down and three to go.

She ran up to the next level, looking for a way out. She realised coming into the keep hadn’t been perhaps the smartest strategy. Though it kept the pursuers behind her, she couldn’t be sure of making the exit.

The second level covered the rise of artillery, mainly that of bows and catapults and slingshots. Red rugby-tackled a longbowman and the figure canted over crazily, but did not fall. Cursing health and safety regulations, she snatched the leather hat from his head and looked for something to drop into it. Putting her fist inside instead, she punched the glass of one of the display cases. Cracks ran across it, but it didn’t break, so she punched it again. This time, the weakened glass broke off into dull-edged pieces. Alarms sounded all over the place. Really, she considered, they were way over the top. The Metropolitan Police in New Scotland Yard, half a city away, could probably hear them. She scooped the contents of the case into the bowman’s hat and dropped it to the end of the chin straps, swinging it around her head. As the chasing men edged up over the top of the stairs, she let fly. The assorted crossbow bolts, arrowheads and slingshot balls peppered the area, sending the men diving for cover. Anything wooden was suddenly studded with sharp metal objects.

Red didn’t wait to see if she had hit any of the pursuers with her fusillade, but dashed for the stairs back down the ground level and the exit. She reached the exit door and nipped behind, releasing the bolts that held it open. There was a crescendo of boots clattering down the wooden stairs within and Red swung the door shut as hard as she could. Since it was a door built to withstand an attack from a marauding army, it was solid and heavy and the impact it made when it slammed into a body on the other side sounded appropriately painful. The body in question didn’t make any noise at all.

She didn’t wait to assess the damage she had inflicted, but leaped over the wooden handrail of the exit steps and ran in the direction of the river. This took her back past the grassed area where she had met Isaacs and he was still there, still holding his ridiculous dog. He did not look happy to see her still free and mobile.

“They’re closing all the gates!” he shouted at her as she sped past. “It’s only a matter of time.”

This was not good news to Red’s ears. If all the gates were closed, she would be forced to climb down the exterior walls and cross the, fortunately dry, moat. This would leave her a sitting duck for the security forces that were undoubtedly converging on her. Isaacs hadn’t wanted the police to get involved, but would almost certainly prefer that to her getting away. Her spending a lifetime in jail might be enough to settle the nerves of his Russian mafia bosses and if it wasn’t, he could certainly organise for her to meet an accident whilst confined. Prisons were such dangerous places, after all.

There was still one way out. She sprinted past the Lanthorn Tower and turned right. Tourists scattered right and left as she sped along the walkway towards the Traitors’ Gate, the only entrance onto the site from the river, in times past anyway. There, she threw herself at the outer wall, using her momentum to carry her up the surface almost as much as the hand and foot holds the ancient stonework offered her. Compared to some of the smoother, more modern surfaces she had scaled, the ancient ramparts were like strolling up a set of stairs.

As she rolled over the top of the wall, stone chips flew into the air and something whined into the sky. She hadn’t heard the gunshots, so those chasing her must have been using silenced pistols. Apparently, Isaacs cared less about making a scene in public than she had estimated. That was useful information for the future, assuming she had one. Without stopping to consider the action, she dropped from the other side of the wall into the pool surrounding the Traitors’ Gate, which was no longer directly accessible from the river. The drop was not so great that she had to worry about how deep the water was, but she did not waste time finding out. As soon as she was in the pool, she struck out for the other side and climbed up to the public walkway along the river embankment. Her arrival, soaked to the skin and breathing heavily, caused a certain amount of consternation amongst the members of the public taking a quiet stroll there. This was not the usual sort thing they were used to seeing.

There were shouts from the direction of the gate through which she had entered the site, not long before and at a much more sedate pace than when she had exited. The security guards must have been instructed, after shutting the gate, to patrol outside the walls and apprehend any fleeing women. Having hauled herself wetly out of the waters of the Traitors’ Gate, she wasn’t hard to spot. She turned away from the new pursuers and ran the full length of the walls, dodging between the strollers, until she reached the steps up to the main A100 road, also known as Tower Bridge Road. She then double backed on herself and ran for the bridge itself.

Red had no doubt she was in better physical condition than anyone chasing her. In her line of work, her body was her most important tool and she kept it in tip top shape. Once across the bridge, there were more than enough small side streets to lose herself in. As she approached the first of the central towers that gave the bridge its name, a car went past her well in excess of the posted speed limit. Spotting her, the driver carried out a breathtakingly dangerous handbrake turn, spinning the car back to face her. With no alternative, she broke right and ran into the anachronistic glass and white metal entrance-cum-giftshop that served the bridge tour experience.

Tower Bridge is arguably the single most recognisable landmark in London and one of the most famous in the world. The two central towers, with their connecting walkways, raising central span and the blue and white suspension metalwork are an iconic symbol of the city. There wasn’t a film set in London that didn’t have an aerial shot passing over the bridge, or a river shot passing under the bridge, or possibly a supervillain trying to destroy the bridge. No Victorian thriller was complete without a chase scene through the half-built structure. And now here she was, being chased through the completely built structure. Had she the time to consider the scene, she would have found it surreal. Even as she ran through the interior of the giftshop, she was assaulted by the strange sensation of being a giant passing through a land of tiny bridges, manufactured in just about every medium. The three foot tall chocolate version was especially impressive.

Red didn’t have a ticket to throw at the collector this time, so just ran past her. There was a lift to the upper viewing level, but there was no telling how long she would have to wait for it to arrive and lifts mainly served as small spaces in which to get trapped. She took the narrow staircase instead, the ticket collector’s voice rising angrily up the stairwell after her. Sprinting along the footpaths of the Capital had been tiring enough, but the enclosed space and the tiny steps of the staircase presented a whole new physical challenge. Below her, she heard the collector’s voice again, but it was shouted down by deep male voices that sounded anything other than pleasant. Heavy footsteps started to ascend the staircase behind her.

She reached the viewing level even further ahead of the pursuit than when she had started. The heavy footsteps had fallen behind with every second. The men’s bigger frames, and bigger feet, had proven to be a hindrance on the stairs. The ascent had also taken its toll on their stamina. She was under no illusion, however, that she could get all the way across the walkway before her pursuers arrived and there was absolutely no cover at all in the glass-sided tunnel. She would be gunned down before she reached the exit on the far side. She searched for a staff only door and was quickly rewarded. The door was locked, but Red was through and on her way up more steps in seconds. Behind her, she heard the ping of the lift door and realised the timings had worked against her. Only one man had taken the stairs, so the second one who had emerged from the car on the bridge must have taken the lift, which had arrived almost instantly for him.

There was no set of windows above the two walkways, only one set in the wall of the tower halfway between the two. That presented little problem for Red, who opened it and worked her way across the façade until she could safely drop onto the top of one of the walkways. The breeze was much stronger this high up and the view across the river and the city was stunning, neither of which she had the time to enjoy. Glancing across at the other walkway, she spotted one of the men from the car, glaring at her through the glass. With a smile, she sprinted off across the top of the walkway. The armed man, quickly followed suit. She would reach the other end before him, but there would be no way for her to get back down into the tower on the other side without encountering him. That would almost certainly lead to a struggle, which would be stacked in his favour in terms of strength and weight.

Fortunately, that was not her plan. In terms of fight or flight, Red always preferred the flight option. She hadn’t come all the way up here without having a plan to get back down again. From her belt, she took a small cylinder. Estimating her height above the road, she typed in a number on the small keyboard set into the side. From the end, she pulled a small length of cable with a hook at the end. On reaching the centre of the walkway, she wrapped the cable around a projection that formed part of the City of London coat of arms prominently displayed at the midway point. As she did so, she could make out the sound of helicopter blades above the wind, presumably from a police chopper called in by the Tower of London’s security team. It was approaching from the city centre and it signified that her time was running out. The chopper would be the Metropolitan Police’s first responder, and had presumably been diverted from some other task considering how quickly it had arrived, but it would be followed by a great many others in cars and armoured vehicles, even on bicycles and foot. She needed to get away now. She slipped her hand through a strap at the other end of the cylinder and stepped over the side of the walkway.

At first, she fell free, but then the cable started to spin out of the cylinder, taking her weight and holding her upright. She was careful not to allow any part of her body to come into contact with the unspooling cable. It was thin and moving so quickly it would slice through her arm in a second, which would ruin her day completely, plus that of anyone standing below when she crashed, bloody and armless, onto them. As the number on the digital readout approached the one she had input, the device started to apply the brakes and her progress slowed. She realised she had underestimated the height by a couple of metres and had to manually pay out a bit more cable until she landed softly on the road surface. She pressed a button on the base of the cylinder and the hook at the top retracted, allowing the cable to spin back inside the device.

Now she was back at street level, she could hear sirens approaching from both directions. The police response had really been far quicker than she had expected. Then again, her exit had been longer and more dramatic than planned, which gave them the time to react.

A car pulled up beside her with surprisingly little screeching of brakes or tyres considering the rate of deceleration. The door popped open. Aline Dupont leaned over and shouted, “Get in!”

The road across the bridge was not wide and the drivers caught behind her started to sound their horns in dismay. Dupont exited the car and pointed a gun directly at the driver of the car behind hers. He practically wilted on the spot. That he didn’t expire there and then said good things about the strength of his heart.

“Get in!” Dupont said again, jumping back into the driver’s seat.

With very few options, Red joined her.

The car moved off again at speed and, once off the bridge, was quickly lost in the maze of one-way streets and small alleyways. As soon as they were far enough away to be sure they had evaded any possible pursuit, Dupont slowed down to the speed limit and inched along like everyone else.

“Aline, what are you doing here?” Red asked once they were safe. “I told everyone to leave.”

“You got me out of prison, I kept you out of prison. Now we are equal,” Dupont said with her famously gallic shrug.

Red found it hard to argue with her logic. She herself had an overdeveloped sense of paying back her debts. That was what had got her into this situation in the first place.

“Your meeting did not go so well?” Dupont asked what was, in the circumstances, a completely unnecessary question.

“My meeting did not go at all well,” Red admitted. “How did you know where I would be?”

“I followed you. It was not easy, you are very good,” the other woman said as though this was of no consequence.

“All evidence to the contrary,” Red said. This job had turned into a complete disaster and all because she had chosen to trust an old contact to keep her boyfriend under control. Surely she hadn’t been out of the game for long enough to have become so lax.

“Every chain has its weakest link. Unfortunately, the one in your chain broke,” the driver said philosophically. “The question is not what happened, or why. The question is now, what do we do next?”

“Run and hide,” Red answered.

“And that is what you are going to do?” Dupont asked sceptically.

“Well, I might have another idea or two up my sleeve,” Red allowed.

“You go to Russia to challenge Vasiliev,” Dupont guessed.

“Only he can call Isaacs off,” Red agreed. “Right now, Vasiliev thinks having one of his lieutenants embarrassed is bad for business. I’m going to show him exactly how bad for business it is to piss me off.”

“We are going to show him,” Dupont amended firmly and Red could see it would be impossible to dissuade her.

“We are going to show him,” she surrendered.

The Train Job

“You want us to take on the Russian mafia?” Russell demanded in outright disbelief. “Are you insane?”

“It’s a fine line between madness and genius,” Red suggested, understanding his response completely. It was a conclusion she had come to herself on a couple of occasions even though it was her plan.

“And you are completely on the wrong side of it.”

“How many times have they tried to kill you now?” Red asked, though she knew the answer already.

“Twice,” Russell said.

Red regretted not having the spectacles she had used in the Marie Antoinette Memorial Prison so she could peer over the top of them at him in a significant manner. He got the message from her expression anyway.

“All right, three,” he amended grumpily.

“They found you three times? Do you not understand the concept of hiding?” Dupont asked archly.

“I hid,” Eaglestone interrupted in order to forestall any argument that might be brewing. Everyone was on edge and they all had good reason to be. “They burned down my store and my house and I had to move Callie to another state. She does not like Wyoming.”

“Does anyone?” Red asked before turning back to the most recent arrival. “The point is, these people are not going to stop until we are all dead. Everyone is scared of them because they will do things nobody else would even consider.”

“Wyoming,” Eaglestone repeated with a shudder.

Red sympathised, but ignored him. “Nobody messes with them because the cost of doing so is too high. So, that’s what we’re going to do right back to them.”

“We’re going to kill them?” Russell was surprised to say the least.

“No, we’re not going to kill them,” Red said immediately, as shocked that he could think her capable of such a thing as he had been at the initial idea of taking on one of the most powerful crime syndicates in the world. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Well, I’ve been on the run for the past four months,” he reminded her.

“True,” she allowed “No, we’re not going to kill them; we’re going to hit them where it hurts the most.”

Red noticed the look that passed between Russell and Eaglestone.

“I mean in the wallet,” she added.

“Oh,” both men nodded belated understanding.

“Before we get to how, though, a little history lesson.”

Everyone present groaned, either because they had already sat through the history lesson or because they just didn’t like history, or lessons in general. Red did not let that deter her.

“Not very long ago, the Russian mafia was run by a man called Pitrov,” Red ignored their complaints. “He was not a very nice man, to put it politely, but as head of the country’s anti-crime directorate, he was perfectly placed to make sure any criminal activity taking place in the major cities was his criminal activity. Anyone who tried oppose him ended up in jail, or worse. Right up until his death, that is.”

“Someone killed him?” Russell asked, alarmed. There seemed to be a theme developing in this conversation and that theme was violent death, something he preferred to avoid at all costs, especially when it was his violent death.

“More like something,” Red put him right. “Nobody’s quite sure what, but the only thing left behind was his left knee.”

“That’s…” Russell trailed off before deciding helplessly “No, I have no idea what to do with that information.”

“Neither did the police. Nobody in the house where he was attacked remembered a thing by the time the authorities got there, even though the ground floor was completely trashed, which is a very curious fact about the story.”

“More curious than a man being reduced to only his knee?” Russell wondered.

“Must have been a small coffin,” Eaglestone said.

Red tried to pull the discussion back on course, “The police response was considerably delayed, mainly because they were evacuating this place and closing it down.”

“Yeah, why did this place get closed down?” Russell asked, looking out across the tiers of empty seats, the first few rows of which were visible in the light spilling from the stage. That illumination also reached some of the boxes on either side of the auditorium. The back stalls and the circle seats were all lost in a gloom that was even more cavernous than the space he could see. Frankly, that much empty space made him nervous. Assassins could be hiding in that amount of darkness. Of course, then it wouldn’t be empty space, but that was a detail he was willing to let go.

Hooded thugs, presumably employed by Vasiliev had attacked him in the darkness of a car garage in Birmingham. It was one of the buildings damaged in a squid deity attack a while back and was low enough down the priority list not to have been refurbished back to its original condition yet. Then again, its original condition might have had all the lights broken or vandalised by local youths, so he couldn’t be sure about that. A short chase and a leap into the canal had saved him on that occasion, but he had developed an abiding nervousness for the dark and a fear of the diseases present in canal water.

“This used to be the Bolshoi Theatre. Until a bunch of man-eating crystalline spiders as big as buses broke in and brought the house down,” Red revealed with a grin. “They were all captured and taken away, of course, but since then, nobody has been willing to take the chance that there isn’t a whole bunch of giant man-eating crystal spider eggs laid in some dark corner waiting to hatch.”

“There might be eggs here?” Russell’s alarm went up a few notches in intensity.

“There are no eggs here,” Eaglestone reassured him.

“Are you willing to bet your life on that?” Russell demanded.

“No, but I am willing to bet yours,” the American told him and everyone else laughed.

Russell didn’t laugh. “Well, that’s very nice, I must say.”

“Nobody’s betting anyone’s life,” Red said.

“You need to calm down,” Eileen advised.

“Oh that’s rich coming from you, that is,” Russell declared. His temper was starting to rise with everyone taking the mickey out of him. “Considering it’s your fault any of us are here at all.”

“No it’s not,” Red stepped in immediately and spoke with total authority. The last few months had been hard on them all and she didn’t want their feelings boiling over into a fight where they might say something they didn’t mean. Or, more importantly, something they absolutely did mean, but couldn’t walk back from. If things went her way, they would all be working together one more time and would have to rely on each other to watch their backs. She couldn’t afford for there to be any simmering distrust or any outright hatred. “That was Albert. It was his loose lips that sank our ships. Fortunately, we all made it to the lifeboats and now we’re back in a new ship, looking for a new port in this particular storm.”

“I think you pushed that metaphor a bit further than it could manage,” Eaglestone suggested lightly, also trying to take a bit of heat out of the situation.

“Anyway, you don’t see Albert here, do you? He paid a hefty price for his mistake,” Red continued. “I’m not forgiving him, but there’s not a lot I could do to him that Isaacs didn’t already do.”

Russell seemed a little mollified by that news.

“Besides which, Eileen is risking more than any of us here, so show her a little respect, all right?” Red insisted.

Russell didn’t speak, but Red took that to be a good sign and carried on with her briefing. “Now, with Pitrov’s knee given a funeral it couldn’t refuse, there’s been a power vacuum at the top of the pyramid. All of the local wannabes have been jockeying for position to take Pitrov’s place. The current frontrunner is a man named Arkady Vasiliev. He’s another not particularly nice man with a penchant for breaking fingers. Also toes, noses, teeth and any other bone that takes his fancy.”

“Quite the charmer,” Eileen pointed out.

“On the plus side, he’s an equal opportunities torturer, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man, woman, child or dog.”

“Dog?” Russell asked, paling slightly.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Red said. “One advantage we do have with Vasiliev over Pitrov is he doesn’t have the same level of government connections. He’s still connected, but at nowhere near the same levels. He also doesn’t have the smarts, but he makes up for that with ruthlessness. Thanks to Isaacs, he wants us dead, so that’s what we’re going to give to him.”

Russell looked at her suspiciously. The disused theatre was exactly the kind of place that would be perfect for an ambush brought about by, for example, a colleague who had decided to save herself by giving up all her partners in crime to the evil mafia boss.

“Don’t worry,” Red reassured him, understanding his concern. “Vasiliev wouldn’t make that deal. I mean he would make that deal, but he wouldn’t keep it. Anyone who informed to him would go into the same concrete foundation as the rest of us.”

“All for one and one for all,” Eaglestone said, though his grin was a little forced.

“I came here straight from London, with Aline,” Red continued the lecture. She actually enjoyed these moments when she got to lay out the plan for everyone. She realised she enjoyed being the centre of the attention because she spent so much of her working life trying hard not to be noticed at all, especially by the police. She wondered if there might be a little something of the teacher in her and whether that might offer an alternative profession when she was no longer able to scale tall buildings with only a butter knife.

“I gave her no choice,” Dupont said with the inevitable shrug. It was a gesture she had down to a fine art. She was able to convey all manner of levels of disinterest with just her shoulders.

“We started hitting Vasiliev’s operations; just small stuff at first like individual dealers, counterfeiters, fences, corrupt cops. Then we started to go bigger and brought in Ralph, moving onto underground casinos, drug labs and child sex brothels.”

“Some people got hurt in that one,” Eaglestone said grimly.

Dupont nodded her agreement with his sentiment. Russell decided he didn’t want to know any more about that one.

“So right now, Vasiliev is feeling a bit embattled. He knows he’s under attack, but he has no idea by whom. That breeds a certain kind of paranoia amongst the best of men, but amongst criminal underlords… well, it must be driving him insane.”

“So now it’s time to spring the trap, which is why Eileen was brought in and why you’re here,” Red concluded. “You get to throw the first stone that starts the avalanche.”

◆◆◆

One week later, Russell was standing on a windswept bridge in Moscow, watching trains go by on the tracks below. It was the early hours of the morning, which just the lowered the temperature even more and made trainspotting a less than popular pastime. He hadn’t seen a single person out and about for more than an hour and the number of cars on the streets had reduced considerably. He was wrapped in a heavy overcoat with a thick fur hat jammed down over his ears and yet he was still freezing.

“After this, I’m going to Hawaii for a year to thaw my behind out,” he muttered to himself.

“Sounds like a plan,” Dupont’s voice spoke in his ear, reminding him of the device lodged there.

“And this is not a stone,” he complained, deciding not to waste the opportunity, since she had chosen to speak.

“If you cannot handle it, we can delay things until Ralph and Red come back from London,” Dupont said with a lack on inflection that nevertheless said a very great deal.

“I can handle it,” he replied, knowing she was needling him only to give him a bit more determination and strength to do the job at hand. He was annoyed at himself for the fact it was working.

“Good, because the train has just passed me.”

Russell immediately banished thoughts of Hawaii, his complaints, his bottom, Dupont and the cold out of his mind and focused on the job at hand. In truth, it wasn’t that much of a job, but it did require perfect timing. He set himself behind the sizeable chunk of concrete he had previously hauled up onto the balustrade of the bridge and manoeuvred into place on the edge over the tracks. It was just short of the point of balance and would not take much effort to send over.

He heard the approach of the train first through the power lines and the rails, which started to vibrate before he could see the vehicle itself. The sound was eerie in the night. At least the street lights banished the darkness, but now he felt exposed by his visibility and the absence of anyone else around. A passing police patrol could easily take an interest in a man loitering on a bridge over a railway with a large lump of concrete. He suspected, however, that all sensible police officers were writing up reports in centrally heated police stations.

Red had described the train in great detail, but the reality was considerably more impressive than he had been prepared for. Coming from a country where trains were considered as mobile billboards for their operators and so came in a variety of bright colour combinations, Russell felt a genuine impact from the total lack of colour on this train. It was black from front to rear with absolutely no break. Even the windows were tinted black. Making out details of the train as it approached was made nearly impossible by the lack of definition in the low light. It was like a patch of nothing moving along the tracks at a surprisingly fast rate.

Russell had done all the calculations and earlier in the night had slipped down onto the tracks to place a marker the required distance away. Even so, it was almost a matter of instinct. The train thundered towards him and ,at the appropriate moment, he pushed hard against the concrete chunk. Because it was balanced almost on its tipping point anyway, it went over easily, but did so much slower than Russell had expected. He understood this was because his senses were being sped up by the adrenalin being pushed into his system, but it still caused him to panic. The train was going to pass right under him and be long gone before the slowly rotating concrete mass fell the distance between bridge parapet and ground and landed with a wholly useless thump. He was then going to have to explain to Red why the plan had fallen at the first hurdle because of his failure.

The train smashed into the falling masonry, or vice versa depending on your viewpoint, exactly as planned. The windscreen shattered utterly under the impact, though only at the point of the impact itself. The safety glass held elsewhere, cracking crazily but not breaking. Russell hoped Red had been right about on which side of the train drivers sat in Russia and that nobody had decided to take a ride in the other seat tonight.

There was a screech of brakes that went on for some time. The train was very short, but it was heavily reinforced against potential attack and therefore extremely heavy. Its momentum carried it a long way before the brakes finally brought it to a halt. By that time, Dupont had pulled up alongside Russell in a nicely nondescript car and they drove off into the night.

◆◆◆

Red examined the damage to the train’s window at close quarters. She was dressed in the obligatory coveralls, high-vis and hard hat combo favoured by engineers the world over. It was by far the least glamorous outfit she had ever worn, which helped her get into character.

“That is one hell of a mess,” she said with a low whistle, impressed by the amount of damage the concrete projectile had caused in its passage through the bulletproof windscreen. Despite Russell’s fears, there was no blood or any mangled bodily remains amongst the damage wrought within the cab. “What caused it?”

“Section of masonry fell off a bridge,” one of the armed guards, who seemed completely uninterested in the whole repair process, told her.

“Just as the train was passing under? That’s a tough break,” she commented. “Though considering the maintenance regime, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.”

“You’re here to fix it, not to work out the odds,” the guard said and walked away.

“Apparently there are some people on whom your charms are lost,” Eaglestone told her with a smile, snapping his toolbelt around his waist and checking the contents.

“It’s the hard hat,” she complained. “Nobody can look sexy in a hard hat.”

“Depends if they’re wearing anything else,” he suggested, removing a hammer from the belt. “Now let’s get the rest of the glass out of here.”

The rest of the day reminded Red just how much she hated manual labour and why she was in a career requiring she take part in so little of it. Even the fact that it was a necessary part of her planned operation didn’t make the task any more exciting. Together, she and Eaglestone tapped out any of the broken glass shards that might not be firmly held in place and therefore present them with a problem if they decided to fall and slice off any body parts. They then stripped the seals from around what was left and unbolted the fixings that held the windscreen in place. Once free, the remaining glass was pushed out to slide down the nose of the train and fall onto a tarpaulin laid out on the floor to catch it.

They were working in a large locomotive shed where every sound echoed and there were a lot of sounds being made that could echo. They were not the only workers fixing things on the train. Since it was out of commission for a couple of days, someone had decided to give it a complete service. This at least made Ralph and Red just two more workers amongst a host of workers, anonymous in the crowd. High vis gear and a hard hat will make you less visible to most people at the best of times, but when there are a lot people all dressed the same way you become completely invisible.

Eaglestone was doing most of the work, and that suited Red just fine. He was the tech guy and this was a technical installation, much more than the people paying for it knew.

“For what this job’s costing, we could buy our own island and live out our lives in luxury,” he complained as they unwrapped the new windscreen from its protecting layers in the back of the truck. It was pretty spectacular piece of bespoke engineering masquerading as a tinted window.

“Yeah, but it’s money we stole from them, so why worry about it?” she countered. From his expression, she didn’t think she had quite understood the point he was trying to make.

The windscreen came with an equally bespoke handling spell that prevented it from being dropped or violently impacted onto any surface. Using only the appropriate control words, they were able to easily extract it from the back of the lorry, float it into the shed and then up in front of the hole into which it was to be inserted. Gently, they then eased in manually into place and started to rebolt the fixings into place. This was a very sensitive point in the operation. The new windscreen was so much more than the one it was replacing, which had itself been an impressive composite of glass and polycarbonate resin layers wrapped around a single thin anti-magic spell. It had taken a fairly large piece of steel-reinforced concrete dropped from a bridge and impacting at the train’s full speed to penetrate that resistance. This new windscreen had all of that, but also some enhancements that Eaglestone needed to patch into the internal train systems. Anyone passing who happened to know about such things would doubtless ask what he thought he was doing and the game would be up. Since they were supposed to be the only people who knew about such things, Red was hoping nobody would ask and this would not be a problem.

The problem, when it came, arrived outside the train where she was rather than inside where Eaglestone was, lying half inside a control console making the connections he needed. Red was up a ladder at the nose of the train, checking the seals and bolts were all in place and secure. They didn’t want shoddy workmanship causing anyone to take a closer interest in the windscreen. She was also taking the opportunity to polish off any marks she spotted on the glass. It was the technical limit of how she could help. From behind and below her, she heard voices approaching. That, in and of itself, was nothing unusual because people had been walking past the train all day in pursuit of their own repair errands, but one of these voices was known to her and possessed a distinctly non-Russian accent. It was also speaking in English, presumably under the incorrect assumption that lowly Russian manual labourers wouldn’t be able to understand another language. It was also possible that Isaacs considered himself above sullying his pristine brain with a language potion,

“This is utterly ridiculous,” Isaacs was complaining as the voices approached.

Red did not freeze in shock, though shock was certainly what she felt. She continued to carry out her task, but with a little less speed and a lot more concentration. Any tiny mistake could bring the new arrivals’ attention in her direction and if Isaacs saw her face, she did not think the disguise she was sporting would prevent him from recognising her. “Vasiliev’s losing it, bringing me all the way here just to pull a Julius Caesar.”

The other man clearly did not understand the reference, because Isaacs added testily, “You know, keeping his friends close and his enemies closer.”

“And which are you?” the other man asked pointedly, which Red thought was a particularly telling question.

“Well I’m his friend, obviously,” Isaacs responded. “I’m only here at all because he needed someone vaguely reputable to use his dirty money to buy those magic trinkets and then sell them on for legitimate funds. I’m starting to wish I’d never bothered. And now he’s brought me all the way here to babysit his bloody money train because of a couple of attacks on some of his low-level operations.”

“Several attacks and costing him a lot of money,” the other man pointed out. Red chanced a quick glance down and recognised Isaacs instantly, but she did not know the man with him. His purpose, though, was unmistakeable. He was a large man, standing approximately six foot four, and built exclusively out of muscles from what she could see. Had he not been speaking his English with a strong Russian accent, she might have suspected he was Belgian. His head was completely bald and without any hint of five o’clock shadow. He was there either as bodyguard or keeper. He looked eminently capable of carrying out both tasks with equal ease.

“What he considers to be a lot of money,” Isaacs dismissed the concern. “He’s more concerned about losing face in front of the other challengers for Pitrov’s crown. Does Vasiliev know which of them is responsible for the attacks?”

“No,” the big man denied, “but nobody else’s operations have been hit, only his. This cannot be a coincidence. It could be one, it could be all of them.”

“How did I get involved in a turf war inside the bloody Russian mafia?” Isaacs complained and the other man knew well enough that the question was rhetorical. “I detest this bloody country.”

“It is my country,” the other man pointed out, but if there was a threat in his voice it was heavily suppressed. Then again, anything said by a man this big and dangerous-looking came with the threat built in. From him, a request to pass the salt came with the intimation of dire consequences if you chose not to.

“And I meant no disrespect, Pyotr,” Isaacs said, too distracted to even notice. “It’s all the fault of that bloody Lady Red. Any news on the whereabouts of the thieving bitch?”

“No,” the man called Pyotr answered. “She has completely disappeared.”

“Nobody disappears completely,” Isaacs contradicted him. “You are just not looking hard enough. I want her found. I want them all found. I don’t care how long it takes or how many people you have to hurt in the process. They embarrassed me in my own home and I am going to make sure they suffer for that in ways they couldn’t even imagine, and then the world will know not to mess with me.”

Red was shocked, not at the words themselves but at the vitriol with which they were spoken. She could not recall having ever heard such hatred in a person’s voice before, and the nature of her crimes had sometimes left her in a position after the fact to hear everything the victim of said crimes had to say about the unknown thief. On a couple of occasions, she had even been the shoulder on which the unsuspecting victim had cried. Admittedly, they had cried on her shoulder all the way to the insurance company, which replaced everything. The hatred in Isaacs’s voice was absolute and primal. It was completely unreasoning. There was no doubting he meant every word he had said and probably a great deal more. She could not possibly entertain any further doubt that her crew were in danger as long as Isaacs remained undealt with. That made matters more complicated, but the great train Isaacs and his bodyguard were standing only feet away from offered the opportunity.

“We nearly had Russell again,” Pyotr reminded the other man.

“Which is what… three times now that you’ve let him slip through your fingers?” Isaacs demanded, a little petulantly Red thought. After all, the big Russian was in a position to ask how many times Isaacs had let the ringleader slip through his fingers. He, though, remained silent on the subject.

Issacs and Pyotr continued by without stopping, which suited Red well enough. She finished securing the new windscreen in place and buffing the glass until it shone before climbing down the ladder and joining Eaglestone in the cab of the train. She didn’t want to react at all to the conversation she had heard because that would have given away the fact that she had understood it.

“Are you done?” she asked the tech guy, squatting down alongside the open panel out of which his lower half was projecting, the upper half inhabiting the electronics within.

“Just about,” he reported.

“Good, because we need to get everyone together. I’m moving up the timetable.”

◆◆◆

When she said the same thing to the assembled crew that evening, back in the abandoned Bolshoi Theatre, the concerned reaction was exactly as she might have expected.

“Isaacs is here?” Russell focused in on what really concerned him. “In Moscow?”

“In the flesh and a nicely tailored Savile Row suit,” Red confirmed. “He’s also not too happy about it.”

“My heart bleeds for him,” Russell commented.

Red didn’t believe him. “Vasiliev is apparently bringing everyone together so he can keep a closer eye on them.”

“Uneasy lies the head that would bear the Russian mafia crown,” Eaglestone commented.

“And the sound you can hear is that of the Bard turning in his grave,” Eileen commented on his comment.

“Shakespeare belongs to the world,” The American claimed.

“Cultural appropriation at its best, ladies and gentleman,” Eileen replied, but as banter.

“I preferred the early, funny plays, before he got all serious and historical” Russell decided.

“I think this place might be starting to infect everyone,” Dupont suggested, gesturing around the inside of the theatre.

“If that was the case, wouldn’t we all be bouncing around in revealing tights?” Russell wondered.

Red let them have their moment’s distraction, although the idea of seeing Russell in ballet tights was an image she would rather have not been presented with. She had been working them pretty hard for the last few weeks as her initial idea was worked up into a plan which then had to be fashioned into a working action. What she intended was one of the most audacious and complex plans she had ever come up with and that made it one with the highest potential for failure. Failure did not have to be catastrophic, and wasn’t in most cases, but this situation was about securing their lives and just not some ridiculously valuable bauble. She could work in every failsafe she could think of for every eventuality she could imagine, but there would still be something she couldn’t possibly have considered and that would be the one thing that tripped them up.

“The train has become central to Vasiliev’s security thinking since we started taking down his operations,” she brought them back to the matter under consideration. “At the end of each week, it tours the city in the early hours of the morning, picking up the money from all his operations. That all gets taken back to a fortified train shed on the edge of town where it’s counted and then distributed by other means.”

“All his financial eggs in one basket,” Eaglestone commented.

“Exactly,” Red agreed. “But not only would taking the train be a big financial blow to Vasiliev, it would be a huge blow to his credibility as Moscow’s crime lord, possibly even fatal.”

“And Isaacs?” Russell asked.

“His being here gives us an opportunity I don’t want to miss, which is why I’m stepping up the timetable,” Red told them. “If we hustle, we can be ready to go this Friday.”

There was a gaggle of concern, which morphed into discussions about how the final preparations could be made and who needed to do what to allow the others to do what they needed for all of them to be ready to meet the new timetable. Nobody said it couldn’t be done, or challenged Red on the need for the shorter timescale. In a short time, they had become a real crew. Admittedly, it had taken a deadly threat to their very lives to make it happen, but Red was willing to take the victories where she could find them.

She left them to it and made her way up to the roof of the theatre. She always did her best thinking in the open air and the view of the city from up there was pretty amazing. Everything was illuminated and it made Red feel sad that the old building was set apart, languishing in its own personal pool of darkness. It gave them a convenient place to hide out safely with all the space they could possibly need behind the stage, but it was a theatre with a great history. It was a place that was meant to be full of life and song and dance, interval drinks, men and women dressed up to the nines and sniffy critics making supercilious notes in their programmes. When this was over, assuming she made her way out of it alive, she was going to pay for an inch by inch survey of the entire site, proving once and for all that the theatre was free of crystal spider eggs. That might not be enough to bring life back to it, but she would have done her part.

“Penny for them?” Eaglestone asked. The rake of the roof was steep enough to make his approach behind her both cautious and extremely loud. There was no way the big man could ever take her by surprise. “Your thoughts, I mean.”

“A whole penny? That would be robbery.”

“Something for which you are not globally renowned,” he joked, tentatively sitting down beside her at the very edge of the roof. He did not seem to be as confident around heights as she was.

“A fair point,” she admitted.

“Something’s bothering you and we need you on song right now, fully focused, fully present,” the American said gently, but with conviction. “So, whatever it is, you need to let it out, deal with it.”

“You’re my shrink now?” she challenged him.

“Come lie down on my sofa,” he said and then added hurriedly, “in a purely non-sexual way. In a psychiatrist, shrink, therapy way….”

“I got it,” she soothed his concerns. “Callie forever.”

“Yeah, Callie forever.”

They sat together in a companionable silence, watching the life of the city go on beyond the theatre’s pool of solitude. There was a lot of life to be seen, even as the night drew steadily on. Moscow had a reputation for being a dour, grey place, but at night it shone with all the colours of the rainbow and a few others that could only be rendered in neon. It reminded Red a little of Paris, though every city had a pulse she could feel after being there for a few days and each one was different from all the others. Whatever Moscow was, it wasn’t Paris and Paris was the only place she wanted to be when she died. Preferably a long time from tonight.

“Isaacs is Vasiliev’s money launderer,” she said at length. “That’s why he was buying magical artefacts, to launder dirty money into clean funds. I’ve put all our lives in danger and it was all just about money.”

“It’s the Russian mafia; what else would it be about?” Eaglestone queried.

“I know,” she said with a sigh, “but anything less than world domination seems like something of a comedown.”

“You’re acting very weird, you know,” Eaglestone assessed.

“There’s a backstory,” she told him before deciding, “but this is neither the time nor the place to get into it. We’ve got a train to steal and that means a lot of work to do by Friday.”

“Do you think we can do it by Friday?”

“Yeah, we can do it by Friday.”

◆◆◆

“I can’t believe we did it by today,” Russell said, shivering in the early morning cold of Saturday morning. “And I can’t believe we have to do everything in this city in the middle of bloody night in the freezing bloody cold.”

“Do you ever stop complaining?” Dupont asked, irritated. “I’m asking for a friend.”

“No, as a rule I don’t. I also don’t think you have any friends,” he shot back.

“You are right about that. I don’t have the personality to make people like me,” she admitted. She may have shrugged, but she was wearing a thick overcoat and her slim frame was lost within its folds.

“Friends are overrated anyway,” Russell said, partly to make her feel better about her life choices and partly because he wasn’t overburdened with friends either.

“After this, you and I will make sex,” Dupont offered.

Russell nearly choked on the cold air at the suddenness of her proposal.

“You do not wish to?”

“Er, yes, yes I do,” he hurriedly assured her. “How about I throw in dinner first.”

“It seems unnecessary, but all right,” she agreed.

Red came out of the vehicle alongside which they were standing. It was very similar to the one whose windscreen she had replaced earlier in the week, only without the huge amount of armour and large number of heavily-armed men. Both of these factors were going to be important shortly.

“Eileen’s just reported in from Vasiliev’s HQ,” she told the two others. “The train’s on its way.”

Putting Eileen undercover as a cleaner and general servant in Vasiliev’s employ had been a tricky task, and a dangerous one for Eileen herself. Quite apart from the fact that if she was caught spying on the Russian mob king she would be either be shot or tortured and then shot, she had been forced to take a permanent language potion. The effective rate of permanent language potion use was high, but the small failure rate came with total brain meltdown as a side effect, which tended to put most people off. The monetary cost of buying such a potion was also prohibitively expensive, which put off even more. Eileen had already taken the risk on herself before joining Red in Russia, knowing full well the younger woman would have refused to let her do it had she known about her plan. Eileen felt responsible for their current situation, even despite what Red had said in the theatre about it being Albert’s fault and not her own. She was the one who had trusted Albert and he had broken that trust, albeit unintentionally. It was a mistake Eileen had been determined to put right and so she had seen the risk of the permanent potion as being worth it. The risk of hiding right under Vasiliev’s nose and reporting back on what was happening inside the mob boss’s organisation had been higher, but equally worth taking.

Red hadn’t agreed with Eileen on either count, but since the older woman had already taken the first risk and was set on taking the second, she had acquiesced and just made sure the risk was managed. The report she had just received was to be the absolute last. After tonight, she could send Eileen to safety.

“What are you two talking about anyway?”

“Just coming up with new reasons to make this work,” Russell said enthusiastically. To Dupont, he added, “Are you ready to add train driver to your list of accomplishments?”

“I have already driven trains,” the Frenchwoman told him.

“Of course you have,” Russell said, his enthusiasm not at all dampened. “Let’s go rob a train.”

As he climbed up into the vehicle, Red amended, “Steal a train.”

She then turned to the other woman, “Did you offer him sex after this is all over?” It was a scenario she was not completely unfamiliar with.

“I want him to have something he cannot complain about,” Dupont said and again may have shrugged, but it was impossible to tell.

“Well, aren’t you the confident one?” Red said, impressed.

“There is a saying about pots and kettles,” Dupont pointed out.

“Yes, there is,” Red admitted. “Come on, let’s go.”

Moments later, the wheels of the locomotive started to turn and the train moved slowly forward, picking up speed as it eased out of the siding and onto the main track.

Vasiliev might have been paranoid, which was up for debate since most of the people he knew were out to get him, but he wasn’t completely stupid. The route his money train took was never the same twice in a row. There were only so many permutations to the variation of the route, since there were a finite number of money pickups from fixed locations, but even that number was too high for them to be able to reliably intercept their target by guesswork. This meant the only tactic was to carry out the ambush when the train was on its final approach to its home station and the small army stationed there. Striking so close to Vasiliev’s forces brought its own risks, which Red could have done without, but she was determined to capture the train when it was completely full. Only that was guaranteed to provoke the maximum response from the Russian mafia would-be boss. She had to console herself with the thought that the train wasn’t going to be stopping at any point.

Dupont handled the controls like an expert. Red had provided detailed photographs, of course, but matching those to the real thing took a skill that could not be taught in week. Proficiency came only over many years. Her natural skill bypassed that waiting period satisfactorily.

Red seated herself in the middle carriage of the train and illuminated a bank of television cameras, each showing a station on the Moscow Metro system. There were more than two hundred and twenty stations in all, but Vasiliev’s train visited far fewer than that. It hadn’t taken long to determine which ones and Ralph had set up covert surveillance cameras covering each. She watched as the money train pulled into the first station, where a large bag was handed off to the armed guards on the vehicle by a large number of armed guards on the platform. Red wasn’t sure she had ever seen that many armed guards in a single location. Ever. It would have taken a fully-armed military squad to take the money from them at the point of handover. Vasiliev really wasn’t taking any chances. The train pulled out again as soon as the exchange was made.

Amongst the CCTV camera images, there was a display that plotted all the possible routes the money train could take. As Red entered the details of the station visited, the spiderweb became slightly clearer as the no longer viable routes were removed by the computer.

“He’s starting at the southern end,” she said to Eaglestone, a microphone relaying the information through to Dupont in the driver’s cab.

“Roger that,” Eaglestone responded. “Aline, I’m taking us right, OK?”

“I hear and understand,” the Frenchwoman responded.

“She has no idea about radio etiquette,” the tech man complained, making sure he had switched off his own microphone first.

“She’s just doing it to wind you up,” Red told him.

“You sure about that?” he challenged.

“Fairly sure.”

The American typed something on his keyboard and a short while later the train switched tracks into a new direction.

More pickups were made, all seen by the surveillance cameras. The number of potential return routes continued to reduce. Eaglestone and Dupont continued to communicate and alter the train’s heading and speed as they closed in on their prey like a hawk circling in the sky above an unwary baby rabbit. Admittedly, the baby rabbit in this case was tons of heavily armoured train filled with deadly armaments and trained killers, but the simile still held.

“Derek, how are we looking?” Red asked once the number of lines on the route map had fallen to less than ten.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m looking great,” Russell responded immediately.

“That’s what happens when you promise someone sex after a job,” Red muttered to herself, annoyed.

“What was that?” Eaglestone wondered, having not quite heard her.

“Nothing, and certainly nothing I promised anyone,” Red said quickly, leaving him mystified. “Derek.”

“I have green lights across the board, which I am led to believe means everything is ready,” Russell reported, only slightly more professionally.

Another stop was made by the target locomotive and the tracks on the tabletop display fell to just three, all of which converged at a single point.

“We have a winner,” Eaglestone announced. “Aline, we need to pick up the pace and I’ll have all the points switched before we get there.”

“Eileen reports she is free and clear,” Red reported to the team after a small text message box opened on one of the computer screens. “We’re approaching the point of no return people. Give me a sign.”

“Go,” said Eaglestone immediately, even as he made another adjustment and the train swerved accordingly.

“Good to go,” Russell confirmed.

“I say go,” Dupont made it unanimous.

“All right then,” Red said, allowing her excitement to rise just enough to provide a controlled adrenalin boost. “Let’s do this.”

She felt the train pick up speed beneath her. The display on the screen in front of her zoomed into the final length of track and the contact point towards which they were heading.

“Are you sure about the timing on this?” she asked Eaglestone one last time, knowing full well what the answer would be. This was the point when the other members of the crew took on their individual jobs and she was left with nothing to do, assuming nothing went wrong. If that happened, they would all be looking to her for direction. At this moment, though, she was almost a passenger in her own caper. She would have to learn to give herself a proper job for these times.

“Have I ever been wrong?” he asked, his attention securely locked onto the screens in front of him.

“There was that time in Houston,” she reminded him.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but you cannot hold me responsible for not factoring in a rain of frogs that I wasn’t told about in advance,” he defended himself.

“Did you just ma’am me?”

“Shouldn’t you be doing something about now?” he asked, unwilling to be distracted from the task at hand.

“You would think so, wouldn’t you?”

“We’re coming up on it now,” Eaglestone alerted the driver’s cab. “You should be able to see it any second.”

The train swerved around another bend at a speed that would have been considered inadvisable even taking into account the skill of the driver.

“There it is!” Russell declared excitedly. “I see it.”

Red went forward into the cab. Through the large windscreen, she could see the tunnel down which they travelling, but precious little else. Peering forward into the darkness, she spotted the point at which the lights along the curved walls of the tunnels were being blocked out by another moving shape.

She leaned over toward the driver, “How are we doing?”

“It’s going to be tight,” Dupont said and squeezed a bit more speed out of the train.

Since they were lighter than their target, they were closing fast, but it wasn’t catching the other train that was the concern. There were a couple of manoeuvres that had to be carried out at exact points and if they were missed, the moment would be past and the job would be over. It was highly unlikely they would be given the opportunity to try again.

“I’m in range,” Russell reported, flicking some switches on the control panel in front of him.

“Not yet,” Dupont and Eaglestone said in unison.

“Untwist your knickers,” Russell responded, but he sounded tightly wound himself, a little too excited for Red’s liking. She didn’t have time to replace him at the console, so she just had to trust him to do his job.

“Speak English,” Eaglestone complained.

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Red translated.

“Well why didn’t he just say that?” the American queried.

“I did just say that,” it was Russell’s turn to complain.

“OK, here we go. On a count of three,” Eaglestone cut through the banter, becoming completely business oriented. “One, two, three…”

Russell mashed a button on the console in front on him and two small jets of flame leaped out of the front of the train. They travelled the short distance to the target vehicle in a second and impacted without any appreciable change.

Red grabbed the back of Dupont’s chair as the floor beneath her moved sideways. The whole train swerved from behind Vasiliev’s vehicle onto the track alongside it. Somehow, Dupont kept all the wheels on the rails and even accelerated out of the points, picking up ground on the armoured vehicle.

“If the controllers could see this, they’d be spitting out their dummies,” Russell pointed out. Eaglestone had hacked into the Moscow Metro’s control system and ensured that none of the changes he was making to the points showed up on the master control board in the traffic control centre. This should have been impossible, but he had piggybacked on the same security breach being used by Vasiliev’s inside man to keep the money train off the same board.

“Having kittens,” Red translated for Eaglestone’s benefit. “They’d be having kittens.”

She expected the guards on the other train would be having a pretty similar reaction. As soon as the emitters Russell had fired at them had hit the back of their train, automated alarms would have sprung into action, screaming about the impacts. The initial response would be shock or even panic, but then their training would take over and they would start assessing the threat. Hopefully, everything would be over before they had time to gather their wits and react in violent fashion. The chase train was almost alongside the target train and the critical point was coming up.

There was a series of thumps from the side of the train. Somewhere behind them, a window shattered under the gunfire.

“They’re shooting at us,” Russell declared, outraged by the effrontery of the action.

“OK, so they’re a bit smarter than we expected,” Red said, doing her best to sound unconcerned. “You all right back there Ralph?”

“You mean apart from the fact there are people shooting at me?” he queried.

“Yes, apart from that,” Red agreed.

“Switch the emitters on,” the American instructed as another hail of bullets slammed into the side of the train.

Russell flicked another couple of switches and the alarms in the other train must have gone haywire at the new threat detection because the shooting stopped for a second.

“Okay, hands off,” Eaglestone ordered and Dupont lifted her hands off the controls. They were on a straight stretch of track, so there was no actual danger. Red took her hands off the back of Dupont’s seat. Russell jumped up and took a step away from his own chair.

“Good luck everyone,” Red said.

“Luck?” Russell asked, again much louder than was necessary. “Why do we need luck?”

“We don’t,” Red told him, smiling happily. “It worked.”

“It did?” Russell was unconvinced. He had obviously felt as little as Red had.

She pointed.

He followed the direction of her finger and saw a rack filled with high-powered machine guns. At least that’s what they looked like to Red. Her interest in guns extended to knowing which end the bullets came out of.

“It worked,” Russell cheered. “It bloody worked. We didn’t just rob the train, we stole the bloody train.”

Which is what Red had said to him when he got on board, she recalled but did not mention.

Somewhere in London, one of the underground stations was missing its teleportation system. The important bits anyway. At the exact moment the trains went past the equipment, emitters automatically activated in unison on the rear of both trains, sending a stream of energy pulses (Eaglestone understood what kind, but Red knew better than to risk the hour-long lecture that would have resulted from asking him) along the length of the vehicles. The detectors built into the windscreens used this to identify all the organic matter within each train and its precise location. It then sent that information to the stolen transporters, which moved the identified organic matter an exact distance to the left or to the right as appropriate. At that precise moment, there would be a group of surprised thugs looking out of the other train, wondering why they were shooting at the tunnel wall currently whizzing past them instead of the attacking train. Red hoped none of them had been hanging out of open windows because the ones on the pursuit train hadn’t been open. The thought made her wince. The teleportation equipment detected and recognised items around, and belonging to the identified organic matter by context, but there was no guarantee it was going to recognise that the window should not be there. She had dressed the crew in all natural fibres just in case. She didn’t want them all being transported au naturel.

“Thirty seconds,” warned Eaglestone.

Dupont immediately seized the train controls again. Eaglestone could no longer use the control rig on the pursuit train to hack the points on the rails, but he had placed pre-rigged timers along the route now to do the job instead. They were coming up on the first one, fast. Dupont engaged the brakes and everyone had to hold on tight to avoid being thrown forward into something hard and heavily armoured. Being lighter and faster, the pursuit train shot ahead of them. The driver did not seem to be making any sudden changes, probably because he was wondering what the hell had just happened to him. The other train reached the points ahead of them and lurched back onto the rails directly in front of them. Red had no real affection for the men inside, but that didn’t mean she was going to risk them smashing into an oncoming train. Admittedly, the risk was very low at this time of night, but any collision would involve a lot of innocent people and that was something to be avoided at all costs.

“Twenty seconds,” Eaglestone reported.

“If he puts on his brakes…” Dupont chose not to finish the sentence.

“We’ll smash right through the entire train,” Red did it for her. “Probably.”

The leading train ran over the set of points without any effect, but by the time the second train reached the spot, they were guided off in another direction.

“We did it!” Russell cheered as the other train travelled further and further away.

“Not yet,” Eaglestone warned.

“We are still heading toward Vasiliev,” Dupont reminded him.

Following the point of convergence, there were only a limited number of options for changing the train’s direction and for the first couple of minutes they would be continuing on a heading that took them uncomfortably close to the lair of the would-be underworld kingpin. By now, at least one of the guards on the other train would have recovered enough sense to be making calls on their mobile phone to home base.

“It’s about to get real, people,” Red warned.

The train lumbered along in a way completely unlike the train in which they had set out. The armour made it feel sluggish and heavy and slow by comparison. Dupont was teasing every bit of speed out of it she could, but to Red it felt as though they were barely moving.

“You can take it out of first gear any time you like,” she told Dupont.

“Do you want to drive?” the Frenchwoman shot back.

“Not at all. I just feel the need, the need for…”

“Us to go faster?” Dupont asked, completely ruining the moment.

“That too.”

They emerged from the tunnels onto an overground line. Now that she could see the city moving past, Red had much more of a sense of the speed at which they were travelling. She felt a lot happier about it.

“What’s happening up there?” Russell asked, movement catching his eye.

On a bridge some distance ahead, there were lights converging. Some of them were flashing blue and red.

“Nothing good.”

Russell looked around nervously and then headed to the gun rack Red had pointed out earlier. He started to pull one of the rifles out of it.

“What are you going to do with that?” she asked him out of interest.

“I don’t know. Defend us,” he suggested.

“You do remember that this is the most heavily armoured train in the northern hemisphere, and therefore probably the world, at this moment?”

Having nothing more he could do in the middle carriage, Eaglestone walked into the cab and took in the scene in one glance. “Why’s Derek got a gun?”

“He wants to defend the train,” Red explained.

“It’s armoured,” Eaglestone reminded everyone.

“I just said that,” Red agreed. “I literally just reminded him how bulletproof it is.”

As if to underline her point, the windscreen lit up with a display of pyrotechnics as multiple impacts registered on the glass and struck sparks off the metal all around the front of the train. Dupont didn’t react at all and the train swept under the bridge and out of danger. There were a few impacts to the rear of the train, but apparently most of the shooters hadn’t chosen to run across the bridge to fire at the rear of the departing vehicle.

“They’re moving faster than we expected,” Eaglestone commented once the immediate danger was past.

“Vasiliev knows where we are and which way we’re heading,” Red agreed. “He’ll try to consolidate his forces ahead of us.”

“Unless they decide to drop a tree on the tracks, we’ll be fine,” Eaglestone predicted. “Hell, even if they drop a tree on the tracks it’ll probably not stop this thing.”

They passed under a number of other bridges before they encountered any more resistance. They were travelling too fast for anyone in a car to mount a serious pursuit, even with the city streets so empty. Once the train was past, it was lost to them. However, it was on a slightly looping course out of the city, which meant any of Vasiliev’s people ahead of them or in their immediate vicinity had the chance to pick a spot to try and attack the train as it thundered past. Though it was hardly an ideal situation, they were relying on the protection of the armour to keep them alive. In his paranoia, Vasiliev had overengineered the armour to the point where no small arms fire and very little in the way of medium damage armaments were going to even scratch it. The train was a monster and Vasiliev had forgotten the maxim that before you create a monster you should be certain you can control it. His determination to keep the train safe from attack was now keeping them safe from his attacks. Red imagined the irony of that would be lost on the criminal kingpin even as the situation drove him insane with rage.

“I see trouble ahead,” Russell reported.

“Any moonlight, music, love and romance?” Red queried.

“No, just a bridge will all the lights out.”

“They are quick learners,” Red said appreciatively. By dousing not only their car headlights and police emergency beacons but also the streetlights themselves, the attackers had made themselves invisible to anyone on the train. Unfortunately for them, the total lack of lights where every other bridge was fully-lit immediately warned of their presence.

“Does this thing have any offensive armaments?” Russell asked.

“I find all armaments offensive,” Red commented.

“Machine guns, missiles, swords sticking out of the wheels?” Russell listed.

“Nothing I can see,” Dupont said after checking over the driver’s console.

“I suppose the guards inside were supposed to supply the firepower,” Eaglestone suggested.

“I feel so… helpless,” Russell complained. He had almost used the word impotent, but decided that was a word to stay away from, considering the promise he was on with Dupont.

“You’d feel better outside with a machine gun facing off against two dozen equally armed Russian mafia goons?” Red asked.

“If you put it that way…”

Something exploded on the front of the train, but did so without the usual accompanying thumping report. The whole forward section was turned into a torrent of flame that scorched the bodywork, but fell off the sides harmlessly in their wake. They must have looked really impressive from outside, flames pouring off the front of the cab as though it were effecting orbital re-entry. Dupont ignored the inferno raging on the other side of the glass and kept the train both steady and at full speed.

“What the hell?” Russell asked.

“Did someone just cast a fireball at us?” Red demanded as the fires stuttered and died.

“Looks that way,” Eaglestone said. “They might have been better trying to melt the rails ahead of us.”

“Are you trying to give them ideas?” Russell asked.

“All the comms on the train are down,” Eaglestone said, his face and voice both epitomes of calm. “I checked as soon as we got on here. There are no monitoring devices.”

“That’s a hell of an oversight on someone’s part,” Red considered.

“You can’t expect Vasiliev to think of everything,” the American responded.

Had it been daylight, a dark shadow would have passed over the front of the train, but since dawn was still some way distant it was navigation lights in the sky that gave away the presence of a new arrival.

“Can I just point out what I think may be a hitherto unforeseen flaw on our escape plan?” Russell asked, peering up into the darkness above.

“Vasiliev has a helicopter gunship?” Red guessed.

“Vasiliev has a helicopter gunship!” Russell yelled much more loudly than was required inside the enclosed space. He then asked suspiciously, “Did you know he had a helicopter gunship?”

“Didn’t know exactly,” Red hedged, “but there must be dozens of military bases around Moscow and it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Vasiliev has contacts in the army.”

“You’re lucky it’s not fighter planes,” Eaglestone added.

“Fighter planes?” Russell couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Nobody had said anything about fighter planes.

“Even Vasiliev’s not going to send fighter planes over Moscow,” Red dismissed the notion. “That would cause too many questions, raise too much heat. A helicopter, though…”

Whatever point she was about to make was drowned out by the fusillade of high-calibre bullets striking the front of the train. It sounded like they were inside the drum kit on which the world’s biggest drummer was playing the most frenetic solo ever. This time, even Dupont flinched. Small chips appeared in the glass.

“Well, that’s not good,” Red said when she spotted the damage.

The drumbeat passed over the roof and along the full length of the train as they thundered past the hovering helicopter, bullets raking along the flank of the vehicle.

“It’s holding,” Eaglestone said confidently.

“For how long?” Russell wondered and wandered off into the back of the train.

“Can we take evasive action?” Red asked Dupont.

“We’re on a set of metal rails,” the driver pointed out. “What did you have in mind? I can speed up and slow down and that’s it.”

“The best you can,” Red requested. To Eaglestone, she asked, “How far?”

“Maybe too far,” he estimated. “They got here much faster than we planned on.”

“Vasiliev must have guessed the train was going to get hit sometime and had a plan in place,” Red theorised. The reactions to the train being taken over had all been predictable, but they had also been fast, which suggested a high degree of readiness amongst Vasiliev’s troops.

Another drumbeat raced across the top of the train, this time starting at the rear and moving forward. This meant there was less damage to the windscreen since the angle was too shallow for too many hits. The helicopter was flying low enough for its shape to be visible in the reflection of the city lights all around. The pilot clearly meant business and the train was a large enough target to present few difficulties for the chopper’s targeting systems.

“That’s not going to get annoying any time soon,” Eaglestone’s voice dripped irony.

“Look what I found.”

Red and Eaglestone turned around to find Russell standing in the cabin’s doorway holding the long tubular shape of a shoulder-launched rocket propelled grenade.

“Where did you find that?” Red wondered.

“They’ve got all kinds of goodies back there,” Russell told her with glee.

“Well put it back,” she ordered. “They’re nowhere near getting through the armour.”

There was a heavy thump from outside and the train bucked under them.

“What was that?” Red demanded.

“Rocket,” Dupont told her tersely. “They’re trying to take the rails out from under us.”

She shot Eaglestone a venomous look as though his earlier suggestion had been responsible for this new development.

“OK, that changes things,” Red decided immediately. “See if you can do anything with that.”

“Roger dodger,” Russell said with a grin that fell off his face a second later. “Can we just pretend I didn’t say that?”

“Happy to,” Red agreed.

Russell left the cabin and went into the main body of the train. Eaglestone followed him. Since there was nothing she could do in the cabin, Red trailed after them, arriving just as they hauled open the large door in the side of the carriage. There was a rush of noise and air as it opened. The sound of their passage was much louder than she had imagined

The train rocked again as another explosion landed short of the target.

Russell stuck his head out through the open door and then jerked it back in hurriedly, just avoiding having it removed by a metal gantry that shot past.

“Aline, give us a shout if we’re coming up on obstacles that might damage your future boyfriend,” Red called into the driver’s cab.

“Didn’t call him that,” Aline riposted, “but will do.”

Russell warily looked out of the open door again and then leaned out a bit further. His short hair was being whipped about by the displaced air of their speedy passage. When he came back in, his eyes were streaming with protective tears.

“I can just about see it, but I can’t take a shot at it without taking the front of the train off,” he reported.

“Something, I’d rather you didn’t do,” Red admitted.

“Look out!” Dupont called and the concrete stanchions of a bridge shot past outside. The interval between the warning and the danger itself was disturbingly short.

“How much further out do you need to be?” Eaglestone asked.

“A couple of feet.”

“All right.” Eaglestone went to the edge of the door and set himself firmly in place. Russell understood what the other man was planning straight away and hefted the tube of the grenade launcher onto his shoulder. He switched the weapon on and it emitted a low tone. He then joined Eaglestone, who took a firm hold of the smaller man’s belt.

“You’re not going to let go now?” Russell asked.

“Only if you get smashed to jelly on something,” the bigger man replied.

“That’s reassuring.”

“Aline, anything coming?” Red demanded.

“Give it a second,” the driver called back and a second later some railings raced past. They would have grated Russell down to the waist.

“You’ve got a window… Now!” Dupont reported.

Red slapped Eaglestone’s shoulder and he allowed Russell to lean out of the carriage as far as he could reach.

Russell struggled with the launcher in the wind of the train’s passage, but he managed to bring it to bear. Red thought she heard a change in the tone being emitted by the weapon, but with the roar of the air passing by it was probably wishful thinking. Russell’s finger tightened on the trigger. Another explosion rocked the train just as the rocket leapt out of the tube on Russell’s shoulder. He immediately dropped the used weapon and was hauled back into the carriage by Eaglestone.

Red leaned back so she could see through the train’s windscreen. There were a number of points where the chips had become the epicentre of cracks that were growing in length. They needed to stop the attack quickly or the glass wasn’t going to be able to hold. She was just in time to see the trail of the rocket pass harmlessly over the top of the helicopter, which was tipped over and dropping towards the ground to avoid the missile. The rocket impacted on a tower of indeterminate purpose next to the track and erupted in an impressive ball of flame.

Though he had avoided the grenade, the pilot had reacted too dramatically to the attack and descended too far. One of the helicopter’s skids dropped in amongst a mess of power lines. Had the chopper simply descended and risen vertically, it would have been fine, but it was also lurching forward at the same time. The cables caught and did not immediately snap under the tension suddenly imposed. The helicopter was tipped further forward until the tips of the main rotor blades ploughed into the ground.

“Heads up!” Red yelled as the blades shattered under the impact and flew off in a cloud of metal shrapnel. The front of the train was peppered, but the shredded rotor blades were no match for the protective armour. One shard, however, shot in through the open door in the compartment and embedded itself into the inner wall on the other side of the carriage.

Eaglestone hurriedly closed the door, but not before Red saw the helicopter impact on the ground in a crumpling mess. At least there was no explosion. If they were quick enough, the crew ought to be able to get out alive. Red didn’t let that worry her too much, considering they had been intent to killing everyone in the train only moments earlier.

“Good job, you two,” she congratulated the men.

“Wasn’t exactly as planned, but I’ll take it,” Russell said, out of breath from the exertions.

“We’re coming up on the tunnel. Someone give me hand with the DMS,” Dupont called from the cab.

The Dead Man Switch is a safety device that automatically slows down and stops a train if the driver doesn’t use the controls for a set period of time or distance. In the case of the money train, Dupont had to keep pressure on the speed pedal. If the pressure remained too constant, an alarm would sound and she would have to release the pressure a little and then reapply it.

Red went back into the cab and asked, “Where is it?”

“Thigh pocket, right side.”

Red reached down and released the button holding the relevant pocket of Dupont’s coveralls closed. From the pocket, she extracted a device that was an assembly of expandable tubes.

“Take the wheel,” Dupont ordered, even though the wheel was really a handle and a set of buttons.

The driver accepted the tubular assembly from Red and snapped it open with a practised flick of her wrist. She then slipped into place under the console, one end holding the drive pedal down and the other expanding to set itself firmly against the underside of the instrument panel. Two other legs created lateral stability. In the centre of the main strut was a small sound-activated motor that would retract and extend the tube in response to the warning signal. Dupont then took another device out of her other thigh pocket and used it to lock the drive handle in place and free Red’s hand from the control.

The dead man switch effectively bypassed, they both went back into the main carriage. Eaglestone reopened the side door. The scene rushing by was lighter in terms of the density of buildings. They were much lower in height and not as crammed together as the train rumbled past them towards the edge of the city.

“It’s nearly time,” Red warned. “Everyone grab a bag.”

They all hefted one of the duffel-bag sized sacks stuffed to the top with wads of notes. Eaglestone was big enough to lift two, one in each hand.

“Show off,” Red accused him.

The continuous roar of air rushing past the train was added to by a more distant, but louder and more ominous sound.

“What was that?” Russell asked, unhappy that they might be facing another obstacle so close to the end.

Red checked for oncoming objects that could rip her head off and then peered up into the sky. There were two sets of blinking lights up there in the dark.

“Remember those fighter jets we spoke about…”

“Really?”

“They won’t fire inside the city limits,” Red reiterated. “The collateral damage would bring the entire military and political authorities down on Vasiliev, and not in a fun, playful way.”

The helicopter gunship had been a much more precise method of attack, able to match the train’s speed and direction and keep its destruction within a highly localised area. There would no doubt be some noise complaints directed at the police from people whose sleep had been disturbed and the rail companies might have to repair some trackside damage, not to mention clear up a broken helicopter, but a full-on assault from the jet fighters was impractical where the buildings were tall and would cause widespread damage where they were not. Red was certain they would hold off the attack until the train was in an open area, which it would be just beyond the tunnel they were rapidly approaching.

It was time to leave.

“Everybody line up, it’s time to go,” she ordered and they stood just inside the open door, facing the direction of travel.

The roar from outside suddenly escalated as they rushed into the expected tunnel. Red kept watching the walls, waiting for the small red and green LED lights she and Russell had set up in the tunnel three nights ago and which she had checked again the previous day.

“Go!” Red yelled and Dupont stepped smartly off the train, clutching her money bag to her waist.

Russell was next up an he was the one Red was most concerned about. Jumping off a fast moving train was nobody’s idea of a sensible thing to do, and he was the one she felt most likely to baulk at the last minute with the walls rushing past, the wind battering at him and the sound of their passage assaulting his ears.

“Go!” she ordered, ready to push him if necessary, but he jumped as quickly and confidently as Dupont had gone.

Eaglestone stepped up without hesitation, “See you on the ground, Red.”

He jumped without having to be told. Red stepped up to the edge of the carriage, looked for the lights and stepped out into the void.

The void turned out to be a very short one. There was a moment’s falling and then she impacted onto a fabric surface. The sheet was anchored around the edge by cables that ran over pulleys connected to a central braking system. As she hit the surface, the cables ran out, the fabric folding around her but also slowing her down and bringing her to a complete and safe stop inches above the ground and just before slamming into the tunnel wall. Compared to the teleporter that had placed them on the train in the first place, it was a very low tech method of departure, but it had worked and that was the only thing that mattered. Red always preferred simple solutions because there was less to go catastrophically wrong.

She struggled up out of the enfolding cloth, the cables being automatically wound back in to make her task easier, and looked anxiously along the tunnel for any sign of the others. It was too dark to see anything for sure, but she could hear some movement, so at least one of them had come through the departure alive.

She turned to watch the rear lights of the train receding away. It was a long tunnel, which was exactly why she had chosen it as their point of departure, and they were at about the mid-point. It would be a few more seconds before the train emerged again into the open.

“Everyone’s here and everyone’s OK,” Eaglestone said from behind her, sounding a little bit winded. He was the heaviest of them all and so the landing apparatus had been forced to work harder to arrest his descent, making the impact all the harder for him.

“All right, let’s go,” she said and lifted up her bag out of the catcher’s fabric grip.

They started to walk back along the tunnel, but had gone only a few paces when there was a heavy booming sound behind them and a tremor they could feel through the soles of their shoes. They turned again to look in the direction of the train. It was no longer dark at that end of the tunnel. A ball of orange flame was expanding outwards, lighting up the night.

“Whoa, they didn’t wait at all,” Eaglestone commented in a low voice.

Some of the inferno raged back into the tunnel and was funnelled back towards them by the pressure wave of the explosion. For a moment, Red thought they might be in trouble as hot air smelling of explosives and scorched metal rushed past them, making her skin tingle with the heat, but the expansion stopped short of them and then receded, leaving behind a few small fires where something flammable had been ignited and increasing amounts of thick, black smoke.

“Come on,” she said and hurried back down the tunnel, determinedly not thinking about what would have happened had they not planned to leave the train at this point. Sometimes, having planned for a dangerous contingency didn’t reduce the emotional impact when the contingency arose.

“I think we really pissed someone off,” Russell said when the pair reached him.

He was standing with Dupont alongside a quartet of motorbikes built for on and off-road travel. They both had their helmets already in place and their bags of money strapped to the back of their bikes. Red and Eaglestone quickly followed their example, though it took the American longer and his load of two bags looked distinctly unsafe once it was lashed into place.

“OK, lets’s go,” Red kick-started her bike and was pleased that the engine caught first time.

All of the motorbikes started immediately and Red led the way back down the tunnel. The headlights had been masked to provide a minimal amount of light to see by, so she didn’t push the bike’s speed. At the end of the tunnel, she slowed to check the scene. Everything was quiet, including the distant wreck of the helicopter gunship. She led the crew out of the tunnel and across the tracks away from the downed chopper. When they reached the edge of the site, she gunned the engine and took the bike up the embankment to the level of the road. The hole she had cut in the fence there had not been fixed, and was unlikely to be fixed for some time, so they were able to pass through and onto the road beyond.

They followed the road around and over the tunnel. She was glad that they were at this end of it because she wasn’t sure she would have been able to resist stopping to look at the destruction of the train on the way past.

They quickly made their way back into the city, stopping once to remove the coverings from the bikes’ headlights when they had served their purpose and just looked suspicious in normal circumstances. They used smaller roads and side streets, merging with the increasing traffic and obeying all the traffic laws, spreading out to make themselves less obviously together.

By the time they reached the theatre, dawn was beginning to break over the city skyline.

The Kidnapping

Vasiliev was holding court in a heavily fortified compound in the south of the city. It had once been a prison, but most of it had been bulldozed into the ground to make way for an urban renewal housing scheme that then never happened. As a result, the remaining grey buildings stood alone in the middle of a wasteland of rubble. It was like a scene out of an alien invasion film, the last outpost of humanity standing against the marauding bug monsters. Except nobody would make that movie now the city had fallen victim to actual marauding bug monsters of gem quality crystal. Sometimes reality can be a whole lot stranger than fiction. The walls of the prison had been destroyed, but the compound was surrounded by a double row of tall fences, fashioned out of barbed wire and through which deadly levels of electricity ran. Armed guards patrolled in plain sight because there was nobody about to see them and complain. They were accompanied by dogs that looked eager to be ripping something apart, preferably something with arms and legs and a worried look on its face. Drones patrolled the area above the complex.

Red took one look at the place and decided, “Nope, I’ve done a prison already this year. I’m not going to repeat myself.”

“Vasiliev’s pulling in all the other mob heads,” Eaglestone commented as another black limousine crossed the wasteland of broken jail cells up to the gate, where it paused whilst the identities of everyone inside were checked. It was then allowed to pass through the fences into the compound, where it was surrounded by armed men until the passengers got out and entered the building. As welcomes go, it was on the cooler side of cordial. There had been a constant flow of these vehicles throughout the day. They arrived and the passengers went into the building. They didn’t always come out again.

“Once he’s done with all of those, he’ll move onto his own lieutenants,” Red surmised. “It’s like a scene from The Godfather.”

“Yeah, the one with the horse’s head,” Russell agreed.

Red turned away from the screen to look at him. They were watching the scene from the chorus dressing room of the Bolshoi Theatre. The image was being sent by a remote viewing spell cast in one of the buildings overlooking the demolished prison site. The spell was set to its most extreme zoom in order for them to be able to see what was happening.

“I see a big building, dogs, guards, razor wire fences and armed drones,” she pointed out. “How do you get from that to a horse’s head in the bed?”

“Those guys are going in there to swear fealty to Vasiliev,” Russell explained. “They have no idea what revenge he will take on those that say no, such as a horse’s head in their bed.”

Red considered this for a second, “OK, I can see that. The point is, we’re not going into the horse’s head. And that’s a sentence I never thought I’d say. Vasiliev’s not the target anyway.”

“He’s not?” Dupont queried. As usual, she was standing at the back of the group, watching them watching the scene. Red considered it to an unnecessarily creepy habit. She ignored the inconvenient truth that she did exactly the same thing when watching her victims, sizing up how to carry out a job. In a way, she was doing that right now, watching the events at the compound from a distance.

“Vasiliev is callous and vicious and deadly, but he understands power and money and that makes him weak in those particular areas. In just a short time, we’ve taken him down from King of Moscow to hiding out in the abandoned hinterland. Vasiliev’s a dealer and he’ll make a deal with us. No, our problem remains Isaacs.”

She flicked off the remote viewer with a gesture.

“He’s locked up in Vasiliev’s town house with all the other high-ranking members of the organisation. There are more guards in there than outside that prison,” Russell reminded them.

“Which leaves us only one moment of opportunity.” Red turned to Eaglestone, “Do we still have that high-vis gear from the train garage?”

◆◆◆

“I can still help,” Eileen objected again.

She and Red were standing on a tarmac runway outside the city, which was both a cold and exposed place to be, so Red didn’t want to have another long debate with her. The thick coat she was wearing was doing a good job of keeping the cold wind getting to Red, but occasional gusts still managed to get up underneath the hem. The fashionable boots she was wearing were proving to be rather less successful at protecting her toes against frostbite. Eileen’s nose was moving up through shades of red that became increasing more alarming with each minute.

“All that’s left is contact work and they know your face,” Red reiterated the same argument she had used at least four times already, an argument Eileen knew and understood, but still stubbornly fought against. “You’re the only one of us they’ve seen.”

“Isaacs knows you,” the older woman pointed out, running through the same practised argument.

“And he won’t have any idea it’s me. Trust me on that,” Red promised her. Impulsively, she gave the woman a hug. “I get it. I really do. You want to be here right to the end, part of the team, doing your bit, flying the flag, but the truth is your bit is done and flying the flag just puts you at risk, which puts us at risk. Don’t worry, you’re still part of the team, whether you’re here or safe somewhere else. You just did the most dangerous thing any of us had to do…”

“Serving meals and cleaning house?” Eileen dismissed the thought.

“Serving meals in the belly of the beast, which is where the beast would want his meals to go, I suppose, but that’s not the point. The point is you risked your life every day in that place. You have nothing to prove. Albert really wasn’t your fault. To be honest, Albert wasn’t really Albert’s fault. I should have been more careful. It’s not a mistake I’m about to repeat by letting you stay.”

“I can’t go home,” the older woman complained.

“You’re not going home.” Red indicated the privately-chartered jet standing idly on the tarmac, waiting for its passenger to climb aboard so it could be on its way. “You’re going somewhere much warmer. When the job’s done, we’ll come and join you and share a margarita on the beach. Lots of margaritas on the beach. You know what, we’ll drink the whole place dry.”

Eileen smiled despite herself. “You know the way to an old madam’s heart.”

“You were never that,” Red said and then corrected herself swiftly, “Well, you were that, but you were never just that. You can get a head start on the drinking in the plane, but don’t get smashed and start harassing the pretty boys in the flight crew. There are rules about that sort of thing now.”

She tried to help Eileen onto the steps, but the older woman just batted away her hands, making it very clear she could manage a few steps on her own. Considering she had only recently been undercover in the lair of Moscow’s crime kingpin, Red had no doubts on that score.

As the co-pilot pulled up the stairs behind his only passenger, there being no flight attendant for the same reason of low passenger numbers, Red turned and walked back to the car. It was the only man-made object in the whole place, apart from the stretch of concrete that was the reason they were there. Nobody logged flights in and out of this airstrip and questions were not asked by Moscow flight controllers when planes popped up on their screens in this vicinity. For this lack of inquisitiveness and record-keeping, they received regular bonuses to top up a salary that was significantly below that of their counterparts in the western world. She wondered what Vasiliev would think about his quarries escaping through his very own engineered blind spot. She doubted he would see the irony.

The small jet taxied to the end of the runway and Red watched as it turned and accelerated down the concrete strip and eased its way smoothly up into the leaden grey sky. As the wheels parted company with the ground, she felt a weight lift off her heart as well. She felt sadness, relief, anger and determination all mixed up inside her. Eileen was too old to have to rush around the world, seeking sanctuary from a deadly threat. All she had done was to supply Red with Russell’s name and a few places to lie low, for heaven’s sake, and now she was on the run for her life. It was wrong, it was shocking, it was… ignoble. Somehow, the last word fit the best. It was an ignoble situation brought about by the actions of a supposedly noble man. Well, it was time to deal with that.

Red got back into the car and turned the heater up high, directing the flow of warm air down to her icy feet. She wouldn’t be at all surprised if she’d got chilblains.

◆◆◆

Red didn’t know which was worse, the noise or the pollution or the high-vis jacket, which was proving to be much more uncomfortable to wear than she remembered, possibly because she had been wearing it for longer. The whole situation in which she found herself was a nightmare, even though it was one which she herself had engineered. There are some things that are far better at the conception stage than when you’re standing in the middle of the finished article. In this case, the finished article was chaos. She would have liked to think of it as organised chaos, but soon had to admit that whatever amount of organisation had been put into setting the scene had soon been lost.

Another frustrated motorist leaned out of his car as it inched past and delivered a string of curses that was both steeped in the mythology of his native region and deeply insulting. Red made a mental note of the registration plate number so she could pay him back ten times over at a later date. Unfortunately, there were so many on her mental clipboard by this point that the ones at the bottom were starting to fall off to make way for new ones at the top.

To be fair to the drivers of short patience, she was standing in the middle of one of the main city thoroughfares with a Stop/Go board that seemed to mainly be turned to STOP. This was causing a major traffic jam the poor residents of the city could have sorely done without at the end of a working day. In the morning rush hour (in which nobody ever rushed, so why the name? Now was not the time for such conjectures, so she pulled her mind back to the matter at hand) the citizens might have been a bit more forgiving, since the unavoidable delay would mean they had fewer hours to work until knocking off time, but it was now well past knocking off time and the delay was keeping them from their homes, their families, their dinners, their lovers, their television shows and whatever other diversions they had planned for the evening. As a result, their famously unforgiving natures were made even more unforgiving when a set of unannounced roadworks appeared to slow progress down to a standstill. All it would take for the simmering tension to break into all out war was for a distracted driver to rear end the car ahead.

Red wondered how the real road menders dealt with scenes like this every day, especially when they were doing it for low wages and even lower prospects. Considering the state of the roads in the city, these travellers ought to be thankful for any work being done to improve things rather than be abusive.

“My God, this place could give Los Angeles a run for its money on a bad day,” Eaglestone sidled up to say, observing the near gridlock that one small section of roadworks had brought into being in almost no time at all.

He noticed the nearly-murderous glares he was getting from some of the nearest drivers and sidled away again. Apparently, workers not working was exactly the kind of spark that could ignite the pile of barely-repressed frustrations and turn it into a fiery death pall of rioting commuters. This was something that could not be said of Britain, where she had regularly seen large groups of road workers apparently on long-term coffee breaks.

Fortunately, Red didn’t think the situation was going to last much longer. Dupont was tailing the target car and providing regular updates on the lack of progress they were making. The racing driver’s frustration at the jam must have been greater even than that of the regular commuters. After all, she was used to going very, very fast, even when not on a racetrack. Sitting in traffic with the engine barely ticking over and the progress measured in metres per minute was not something her temperament was naturally built for.

Another problem appeared from amongst the stalled traffic in the white and blue shape of a Moscow police motorcycle. It wove its way through the other vehicles, its lack of speed making it appear unsteady as it approached. It was an unwelcome, but not entirely unexpected sight. A blockage of this proportion was always going to attract attention from those tasked with keeping the roads open and running. The highway authorities travelled in maintenance lorries and wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near for quite a while, but the traffic police were always going to show up sooner or later. Red had been hoping for later.

The cop pulled his bike out of the turgid flow of traffic and parked up behind the works lorry that Red had liberated from the main parking area for such vehicles. That had been a simple job with almost no chance of being caught. People had been moving in and out of the works facility without being checked, identified only by their marked coveralls and ID badges that were missing as often as they were in evidence. He pulled the bike up onto its parking stand and stepped off before flipping up his helmet visor to reveal a face that was young and cleanly shaved. He slotted a pair of sunglasses into place. They were of mirrored variety, which marked him out as someone who watched too many American movies, leading him to think they made him look cool rather than psychotic. He checked the lorry’s licence plate and then spoke into the radio microphone at his shoulder, no doubt checking the lorry was what it purported to be.

Red watched all this whilst looking like she was paying him no attention, continuing to work the Stop/Go board and occasionally making faces at the kids in the slowly passing cars. Even more occasionally, she made gestures of an entirely different nature to drivers who rolled down their windows to complain. The police officer received a response from the radio and started to walk along the side of the lorry more purposefully. He checked the back to see what kind of equipment it was carrying. He was being annoyingly thorough. Red signalled for Russell to take over her duties and moved to intercept the cop alongside the cab of the lorry.

“Is there a problem officer? Beyond the obvious,” she indicated the slow-moving traffic.

“That has yet to be established,” the officer said, looking around at the visible pair of workers. “We have no record of any roadworks scheduled here.”

“That’s because this isn’t a scheduled job,” Red explained. She hoped her language potion was going to be able to handle any specialised terms her role as road maintenance technician was going to require. She tried to keep the language she was using as simple as possible. “A sewer pipe broke over there. It’s been leaking for some time, undermining the road’s integrity and causing cracking. There’s a good chance the whole thing will collapse if something’s not done quickly. I have the worksheet here.”

She opened the door into the cab and took a clipboard off the seat. Attached to it, protected under a waterproof cover, was a sheaf of official-looking documents. There had already been some in the cab when she took the lorry, but Russell and Eaglestone had fabricated new copies with the desired information filled into the relevant places on the forms. They ought to be good enough to fool someone who didn’t deal with them all the time. Unfortunately, a traffic cop was exactly the type of person who might be familiar with them.

“We weren’t informed,” the officer insisted, leafing through the pages in a cursory manner at odds with the way he had examined the lorry itself.

“You know how that goes. The paperwork’s probably somewhere between my boss and your boss with one of the hundred or so other people who have to sign it off along the way,” Red complained. “In the meantime, we have to get on with the job.”

The police officer didn’t look convinced. Out of the corner of her eye, Red noticed Eaglestone picking up a long handled wrench from amongst the tools they had stationed at the side of the road for the sake of verisimilitude and secrete it about his person. The wrench wouldn’t be able break through the cop’s helmet with a single blow, but it could do some serious damage elsewhere if he was forced to use it.

“Maybe I should take a look,” the police officer decided.

Red stood to one side, “Be my guest, but I hope you didn’t eat any time recently. That’s a live sewer down there. The smell is like nothing you would believe. That’s why I’m up here on board duty. It’s the most boring job in the world, but it beats working in that stuff, retching all the time. That’s the kind of smell you are never going to get out of your uniform.”

The police officer hesitated. Red knew he was weighing up whether the need to verify the situation was worth the risk of throwing up by the side of the road. What he was looking at was slightly unusual, but not unheard of. Every bureaucracy in the world had lags in communication and the Russians were not immune to that.

“Look, I understand we’re here without the relevant authorisations having come through yet, but if you’re going to make me put everything back on the lorry and wait until they give you the sign off then we’re going to be here a lot longer sorting out the collapsed road, I promise you that. So how about you do us both a favour?” Red took a small wad of folded notes out of the pocket of her coveralls. She couldn’t see the policeman’s eyes behind those stupid mirrored sunglasses, but she could tell from the way the rest of his expression changed that his eyes had just lit up with interest.

The culture of bribery was endemic in Russia, as it was in many countries. You couldn’t really call it corruption; it was simply the way things got done. Everyone at the lower levels was looking for ways to augment their paltry income and the traffic cops were no exception. They wouldn’t turn a blind eye to out and out law breaking, but they were willing to take your fine in cash at the roadside rather than fill out all the paperwork and have you pay through the courts. The court process cost both the driver and the state more and the cop got nothing out of it at all. The police officer hesitated and Red wondered if she had miscalculated the amount. If she offered him too much, he would become even more suspicious than he currently was. Too little and she would be both insulting him and giving away the fact that she was not a native Muscovite, for whom this sort of thing was second nature.

A car eased by and the frustrated driver sounded his horn long and hard, drowning out his shouting, which was unlikely to consist of kind words and best wishes. The traffic cop’s face hardened. Like the road workers, he was used to receiving a less than enthusiastic welcome from commuters, but he could do something about it. He took the offered money and said quickly that they should fix the problem and get out of the way as soon as possible. He then all but ran back to his bike, putting the sunglasses away in his jacket’s breast pocket as he went. The visor went back down, the bike came off its stand and the blue and red lights started to flash as he forced his way back out into the traffic in pursuit of the ill-mannered driver. Russell had smartly turned the board to GO, so there would be at least some pursuit before he caught up with the unlucky motorist, who was probably going to have every inch of his vehicle inspected and a large number of fines racked up. It doesn’t pay to piss off a Moscow traffic cop.

“That looked like fun. Didn’t do much for my blood pressure though,” Russell commented as he handed control of the board back to Red.

“Tell me about it,” Red agreed with a heartfelt sigh of relief. She added to Eaglestone, “And what were you going to do with that wrench?”

“Pretty much whatever I had to,” the American responded, but at least had the decency to look abashed about it.

Red triggered her earpiece, “Aline, how are you doing?”

“I am in the middle of the world’s largest piece of deliberate vehicular flow sabotage, how do you think I am doing?” Dupont’s voice replied. She didn’t even attempt to mask the exasperation in her voice.

“Thank you for sharing, but do you have something more useful to report?” Red was tempted to turn the board to STOP just to inflict some more emotional pain on the other woman for the sheer hell of it, but decided the entertainment that would have brought did not outweigh the effects of the unprofessionalism. They were here to do a job, no to enjoy themselves. If they could do both, that was fine, but the job always had to come first, even when the stakes were lower than the lives of her crew. Not to mention her own life.

“A couple of minutes out, unless you decide to impede the flow some more just to annoy me.”

Red wondered if the Frenchwoman had any latent telepathic abilities and decided they were just very similar people, strong-willed and smart women in a men’s world of questionable morals and even more questionable actions. She knew that, for most people, the questions had already been answered, and not favourably, but that just showed they did not live in her world.

“We’ll be ready,” she confirmed and signalled to Eaglestone.

The big American opened a crate lying amongst the other equipment unloaded from the lorry and extracted a blocky device. It was basically a cube with handles on both sides and a polished flat disc attached at the front. From the rear, a cable snaked out. This, Eaglestone hooked up to the generator powering the warning signs erected in advance of the works site. Having done so, he tested the device, squeezing the triggers built into both of the handles. Apart from a hum, nothing appeared to happen. Red had seen him test the device against an armoured car she had boosted when the guards left it securely locked on the street outside a jewellery store whilst they went in to make the first money collection of the day. The vehicle wasn’t as heavily armoured as Vasiliev’s train had been, but it had the strongest bulletproof windows on the market, which would be at least as strong as the ones on the target car Dupont was trailing. The pad was placed hard against the window and the device triggered. The pad vibrated through a pattern of frequencies and amplitudes until it found the right configuration that caused the glass to shatter. It effectively shook the window out of existence. It was, however, large, bulky and hard to hide, which was why the whole roadworks masquerade had been initiated. Eaglestone gave her the thumbs up.

“I can see you,” Dupont’s voice informed her.

Red turned the board to STOP and looked up the street. She picked out the car Dupont was driving some way distant and used that as a reference point to locate the target vehicle. It was a long, low sedan in black with tinted windows. It might have been designed to provide the passengers with anonymity, but it stood out amongst the other cars like a shark amongst minnows.

Red released the traffic again and watched Dupont ease her way through the traffic until she was right behind, but one lane beside, the target. Both vehicles approached. Red assessed the driver of the target car and hoped she wouldn’t have to get into a fight with him. He had the look of a man who was used to physical altercations and had a few marks to suggest he didn’t always win them, but won enough not to have any more serious wounds. There would doubtlessly be more of the same in the back of the car with the main passenger.

“OK people, here we go,” Red said and turned the board back to STOP just as car ahead of the target approached her.

She was not surprised when first car drove past the sign anyway; that had been happening all the time since she had set it up. There was also a chance the driver of the target vehicle would follow it, but that was much less likely. Instead, it slowed to a halt alongside her.

Eaglestone was about to come forward with the window breaker when something unexpected happened. The window rolled smoothly down into the door and the driver beckoned her over. Though momentarily startled by this, Red went across to the car. She leaned her hands on the car door and bent down to speak to the man.

“What’s going on here?” the driver asked, unknowingly echoing the concerns of the traffic cop. He would probably not have been pleased to know his mind worked the same way as a police officer.

“Broken sewer pipe with potential subsidence risk,” Red told him, sticking with the chosen cover story. “There were diversion signs back there.”

She nodded back in the direction from which the cars had come, knowing full well that there were actually no diversion signs, but counting on the driver not having been paying enough attention to realise that.

“I’m not taking any diversions, not today,” the driver told her.

“Why?” Red asked innocently before turning excited and curious, improvising as best she could. “Have you got someone famous back there? I bet you have! Who is it?”

She stuck her head inside the window to try and get a look in the back, but then edged it back out again. The barrel of a silenced pistol pressed at her nose. As soon as she was clear, the window rose again and the gun disappeared back inside.

“Now,” Red ordered and Russell triggered a remote control unit that locked the car’s doors and switched off the ignition.

The driver looked surprised and tried to unlock the doors, but the buttons inside the car had been effectively neutralised. He thought about using the gun on the windows, but remembered that the glass was bulletproof in both directions. Red bent down again and waved cheekily to the man. She then pointed down. The driver followed the direction of her signal and his eyes widened as he saw the small metal pellet she had dropped unnoticed into the footwell when he had been pushing his gun in her face.

Russell pressed another button on the remote control and one end of the pellet popped out. There was no coloured smoke or hissing sound to mark the expulsion of the gas. Those would have been affectations simply to increase the drama of the event and there was no room in the pellet to provide for them. The driver coughed twice and collapsed in his seat. Red left it another few seconds for the gas to reach the passengers in the back. She then signalled Dupont forward.

There was another car alongside the targeted vehicle, belonging to an innocent member of the public. Dupont didn’t let that bother her at all. She moved up behind it until she made contact. Before an irate Muscovite could emerge to remonstrate with her, she revved up the engine and drove the car forward, pushing the other vehicle out of the way. Red ran around the armoured sedan and signalled Russell to release the locks. She opened the door and waited a few seconds for any gunfire, of which there was none. It was unlikely that anyone in the car would have been equipped with gas masks, but it never paid to make assumptions when dealing with gunmen. That led to big holes in your chest. Red risked a quick glance inside to confirm all the men there were as unconscious as the driver.

Both Russell and Eaglestone abandoned their equipment and came around to join her. They hauled a blocking goon out of the way and pulled their real target out of the car, dumping him straight into the back of Dupont’s vehicle and following him inside. Red jumped into the front passenger seat and as soon as the doors were closed, Dupont hit the accelerator and the car surged away, leaving a large number of bemused road users in their wake. Red wondered how long it would take them to realise what had happened and how long before someone called the police. She also wondered how many would just decide that if the workers had departed, they no longer needed to obey the Stop/Go board.

◆◆◆

“He’s awake,” Eaglestone told Red through her earpiece.

She acknowledged the notification, but did nothing else straight away. Better to give her captive time to wonder where he was and what he was doing there. Lady Red had never been caught by the police of any country, or any international agency, but she had hired some ex-detectives to try and get information out of her so she could study their techniques in case she ever messed up badly enough to end up in custody. True, one agent of U.N.D.E.A.D. had managed to track her down at the arse end of the world, but he had cheated and, anyway, he still hadn’t been able to capture her. It was time to put some of that training to work.

When she decided the time was right, she strode out onto the false balcony with a dramatic gesture.

“Jeremy, oh Jeremy, wherefore art though, Jeremy?” she emoted to the rows and rows of empty seats she couldn’t even see with the stage lights on full. She looked down at the centre of the stage. “Oh, there you are. I see you now. Hang on a minute.”

Instead of taking the rickety stairs behind the scenery, she hopped over the edge of the balcony and scaled down the plywood masquerading as the walls of a country house, complete with fake ivy. She dropped lightly onto the stage boards and walked across to the man, who was seated on a metal-framed chair which was itself bolted into the wood of the stage.

“Now, if you’re sitting comfortably we can begin,” she announced and then looked at him with an appraising frown. “You know, you don’t look particularly comfortable.” She checked the leather straps that held his ankles tight against the tubular metal legs and the similar ones keeping his wrists firmly locked to the armrests. “It can’t be these, because they’ve been adjusted by an expert. Oh, I know! It must be this.”

She reached out and pulled the gag from his mouth.

“That must be better, yes?”

Isaacs glared at her, but couldn’t resist the need to stretch his jaw muscles in various directions to work out some of the tensions that came with having your mouth jammed partly open for a long period of time.

“You’re dead,” he said, despite all the evidence to the contrary standing right in front of him.

“It would seem that rumours of my death have been somewhat exaggerated,” she couldn’t resist telling him, even though she hated herself just a little bit for being so obvious.

“You got off the train before it was blown up,” he surmised, which was really just stating the obvious. “It must have been whilst the train was in the tunnel.”

Red clapped her hands lightly in recognition of his quick wittedness, “Give the man a cigar. No wait, don’t; this place hasn’t been health and safety certified.”

“Where the hell are we anyway?” he demanded to know.

Red decided there was no harm in telling him. Eaglestone had swept him from head to foot and back again twice and was certain that there were no monitoring devices or spells hidden about his person.

“This is the Bolshoi Theatre.”

His eyes widened slightly at the news, “But that’s crystal spider infested.”

“No, it’s not,” she contradicted him, with just a little impatience that he was credulous enough to have fallen for the same rumour as everyone else. “And even if it were, that still wouldn’t be your biggest problem.”

“That would be you, would it?” he sneered, obviously trying to get a rise out of her to re-establish some sort of control, if not dominance.

She gave him a little curtsey by way of agreement.

“I can see why you’re a thief. I take back what I said about you being an actress. You’re definitely no Juliet.”

“A woman who killed herself over a man? I quite agree. I’m not like her at all,” Red refused to take the bait. “You’re right, I’m a thief, but you’re a money launderer, which is sort of like the remoras that live off the bugs infesting the shark. That makes you a bit of a sucker. What, not even a pity laugh?” She pouted in mock disappointment.

“Oh God,” Isaacs moaned and rolled his eyes. “Are you going to make me sit here through your whole performance?”

“It’s terrible I know.” Her sympathy was as mock as her disappointment. “This whole scene is unconscionably similar to a supervillain monologuing to the secret agent in the final act, telling him everything he needs to know so he can escape with the atomic laser beam generator hidden in his cufflinks and foil the whole plan. I suppose we can put it down to the fact of being on this historic stage bringing out the ham in me.”

She paused for a second.

“And now I’m craving bacon for some reason.”

“This is ridiculous!” Isaacs shouted, his frustration partly born out of fear. After all, Red presumed, it wasn’t possible to be kidnapped from one of the most heavily-guarded mob organisations in the criminal world by someone you had personally tried to have killed and not give in to a little bit of fear, was it?

“Isn’t it just?” she surprised him by agreeing with him. “And to think it’s all your fault.”

“My fault?” the confined man almost spluttered on his indignation. It was the sort of thing the British aristocracy did rather well. “You robbed me.”

“Yes, I did, as a piece of business. As I tried to explain to you at the Tower of London… and I haven’t forgotten that – I ripped a perfectly good pair of jeans… it was just business. You’re the one who decided to get all personal and huffy about it, forcing me to get all huffy back. And I think I’ve proven that I can be a whole more huffy than you.”

They glared at each other for a moment and then a crafty look crossed the restrained man’s face. It was fleeting, but Red saw it and became more wary. Isaacs clearly thought he had something that might give him the upper hand.

“This was a mistake, bringing me here.”

“Really? Do tell,” Red offered.

“You were dead and free, but now you’ve gone and revealed yourself as being alive and well. Vasiliev’s never going to stop looking for you now,” he smiled confidently at her.

“Vasiliev is only going to know we’re alive if you’re alive to tell him,” she argued.

“Foolish woman. You’re not going to kill me. You don’t have the balls for it,” he declared.

“Interesting point,” she allowed, “but then I’m a woman, so of course I don’t have the balls for it. By the way, fun fact, whilst you were unconscious I took a look and you don’t have the balls either.”

Isaacs looked momentarily discomfited by her assertion.

“You are right, though. I’m not going to kill you. You see, I believe violence is what you turn to when you’ve run out of intelligent ideas and I am so much more intelligent than your friend Vasiliev, or you for that matter. Do you know what this is?”

From a prop table stationed nearby, she lifted a small red loop of plastic. She tossed it to him and, though his hands were tied to the chair, her shot was accurate enough that he was able to instinctively catch it. He looked down at it and Red saw recognition in his face.

“That’s right, it’s one of the seals Vasiliev’s people put on their money bags and now, thanks to your clever catch there, it has your fingerprints and DNA all over it.”

Isaacs dropped the item immediately, which didn’t bother Red. She shook out a small evidence bag and scooped the plastic tag off the floor without touching it, sealing it inside.

“This particular seal, and two others which were carelessly left in a warehouse on the east side of the city, come from bags that were on the train. The hijacked train. The hijacked train you were responsible for. This one will probably show up in your car, somewhere only a full search would find it. This will obviously corroborate the rumour on the streets that Vasiliev is being set up by one of his own, a foreigner, a Brit. Admittedly, it’s a rumour I started, but it’s already gaining traction and will reach Vasiliev’s ear soon enough. I don’t need to kill you, because he certainly will.”

“You bitch,” Isaacs cursed.

“You see? There you go again, making it all personal, and not a little misogynistic I might add. I never was quite sure whether it was being robbed that bothered you so much or whether it was being robbed by a woman.”

She gave him a moment to think about that, but not long enough for him to speak. She was aware she was shamefully grandstanding and understood now why otherwise bright criminal masterminds couldn’t resist the chance to gloat when the opportunity arose. She was not gloating herself, but she needed Isaacs to understand the whole picture so he could see his place within it and act accordingly. There was no other way to achieve that and if she had to do it, she may as well have some fun with it.

“So, we’re going to keep you here for a day or two, just to make sure Vasiliev has come to the conclusions we want him to and then we’re going to let you go. Now you might want to take your chances with Vasiliev and hope you can talk your way back into his good graces, but honestly, which is the more likely scenario, that someone within his own organisation has been working to bring him down or a dead thief has come back to life and brought his organisation to its knees in just a few months?”

She could read in his appalled expression which story he thought the Russian mob leader was going to believe, not least because that one had evidence to back it up whilst the other was based solely on his own disgraced word.

She leaned close to him so he could read the glee in her face as she said, “I think you’re going to be on the run for the rest of your life, always looking over your shoulder and never knowing if you’re safe. That should be enough to keep you from coming after me and mine.”

Epilogue As Epilogue - Paris

“Do you have any last request?”

It was some months since she had left Moscow, but Red had known this day would come and was not surprised. She hadn’t gone out of her way to stay beneath the radar. In fact, she had made sure she was on it, but in a subtle, not very good at hiding way. This was going to be the last act in the saga, one way or another. Her preferred option involved her walking out of the place alive and well. The chances of that being the successful option were not looking favourable.

“No chance to make a deal?” Red asked. “No small talk? Just wham, bang, thank you dead ma’am?”

“You have nothing that Mr Vasiliev wants to make a deal with,” the big Russian said.

Red thought for a moment, though she didn’t need to. She already knew what her last request would be. “I want to say goodbye to my pet.”

Pyotr thought about the request too, and then nodded. She did not suspect him to be a man known for his sparkling after-dinner repartee. His conversation with Isaacs in the train shed had been evidence enough of that. He no doubt considered her request as being too sentimental for words.

“Baby, come here,” Red called in a sing-song voice.

From behind the couch, a long, low shape slunk, keeping its belly close to the floor, its ears flattened against the top of its head. It was clearly frightened by the armed men storming about the place. It was probably picking up fear vibes from its mistress as well.

“What the hell is that?” one of the guards by the door demanded.

“Ugliest thing I ever saw,” the other agreed.

“Hush, you’ll hurt his feelings,” Red said softly, running one soothing hand over the creature’s head. “You’re beautiful, aren’t you baby?”

Pyotr regarded her as though she had lost all semblance of sanity, but there never was any accounting for taste. People loved cats with no fur and dogs that seemed to be made of nothing but fur.

The big man shook his head and raised his gun once more. The two men by the door did the same thing.

“Ready,” the Russian said. “Aim…”

“Fire,” Red finished the sentence for him.

Sparks exploded at the very end of her pet’s tail. They ran quickly up the creature’s spine even as the men were transfixed with surprise. The sparks reached the head and the animal roared, but instead of sound it roared fire. The gout of flames took Pyotr straight in the chest, knocking him three paces backward. The inferno flowed around him and fell upon the men either side of the door like a living thing. They barely had time to scream before they were turned into pillars of fire, immolated before they could even think about looking for a fire extinguisher.

Red heard the sound of feet approaching down the apartment’s corridor, but their owners were beaten back by the heat and flames and decided instead to make a hasty retreat out of the building. The smell of charred human flesh may have had something to do with their decision.

In the wake of the eruption, the apartment was a mess. The walls and ceiling were charred and small fires still burned in some places. In others, wood fittings had blistered and twisted under the intense heat. Patches of plaster had melted and were dripping onto the floor. Some glass decorations had simply evaporated.

“I am not getting my security deposit back,” Red decided.

Pyotr remained standing, which surprised Red, but not entirely. She picked up the gun she had laid on the coffee table and aimed at the big Russian’s chest. As the flames started to diminish, she fired. The first shot whined off its target and shattered a large vase. Red didn’t mind too much; the vase had come with the flat and she hadn’t been that fond of it. Her second bullet deflected less severely and shredded a copy of the complete works of Janet Austen. That did annoy Red because it was a first edition and very hard to come by. Someone’s private library was going to have to be raided amongst her first few personal outings to replace it.

The third bullet hit Pyotr in the shoulder and he grunted with the pain. His own gun fell from a hand that could no longer grip it and landed on the floor with a thud even the thick, though now slightly singed, carpet couldn’t muffle. She put another bullet in his leg and the big man fell onto his side with another grunt. The carpet didn’t even attempt to muffle that impact.

“A general anti-harm spell,” Red commented as she rose from the sofa and crossed the room to kick the man’s gun far enough away that it no longer presented a threat. “Wow, you must be one strong son of Mother Russia to even be able to walk with one of those things. And it was a pretty powerful one as well; took three bullets and a full on firestorm to penetrate that thing. Colour me impressed.”

She walked back to the creature by the sofa and stroked its head, paying special attention to caress it behind the ears. It liked that.

“Who’s a good boy, then?” she asked it in the voice reserved for people speaking to babies and dogs. “Yes, you are. You’re my good boy. Yes, you are.”

The creature preened visibly under the praise.

“What is it?” Pyotr asked through teeth gritted with the pain from his shoulder and his leg. He couldn’t decide which wound to hold and so was bleeding profusely on the carpet from both.

“He is called Iggy,” Red told him proudly, “and he doesn’t take kindly to being called ugly. He’s my fire elemental. I saved him from a wildlife reserve.” She turned her attention back to the creature, “Where that nasty man Ward left you, didn’t he? Yes, he did. Yes, he did. But mummy came and got you, didn’t she? Because you didn’t like those other fire elementals, did you? No. They were wild and mean and not at all sweet like you. They wouldn’t let poor Iggy play in any of their elemental games, would they? No they wouldn’t.”

She abandoned the fire elemental and went back to the injured man, squatting down so he could see her from his uncomfortable position.

“Now I know you’re not one for chit chat, so we’ll get down to it, shall we?” she said, absently waving the gun she was still holding in her hand in the direction of his face. He winced, expecting the end to come. She caught the motion and rolled her eyes, “Oh, I’m not going to kill you. That would just be wasteful. And because I’m not going to kill you, that means you personally will be in my debt. Don’t worry, though, because it’ll only be a small debt for a small life. The French police will be here any second and the ambulances won’t be far behind them. They’ll be able to patch you up before you bleed out. I, of course, will be long gone.”

The man on the floor seemed to zone out for a moment, either from the pain or the blood loss. She gave him a hard tap from the gun on the side of his head to get his attention back.

“Now listen carefully, because we’re getting to the important bit. What happened to Vasiliev’s interests was purely business. Your boss needs to understand that, because if I could do all that to him in just a few months when I was being all professional, just think what I could do if I was to get all emotional and personal about it and to dedicate my whole life to making his a misery. He sent you here to make a statement. Well, I have a statement for you to take back to him. You only found me because I allowed you to and only because I wanted you to take this message back to him. You won’t find me again. If I get so much as a hint that you’re looking for me or any one of my crew, I will burn down every single one of Vasiliev’s operations, and I mean that both figuratively and literally. You’ve seen I have the capability.”

Pyotr’s pained, but clear, eyes glanced over at the fire elemental. It chose that moment to growl and small flames ran from tooth to tooth inside its mouth.

“So please, be a stranger. One more thing, you stop with the children right now. If you deal one more drug to a kid, put one more girl in a brothel, sell one more boy into slavery, I will ensure that each and every one of you says hello to my little friend.”

She straightened up.

“It’s a bit of a long-winded message, I know, and I can see you’re about to pass out from the pain and the blood loss, but I think you’ve got the gist of it. Just remember that I’m watching. I’m always watching. Oh, and if he could get someone to reopen the Bolshoi Theatre, I’d take that as a sign of good faith.”

She whistled to the fire elemental and walked out of the ruined room. Iggy trotted after her.

The sound of distant sirens reached her as she exited the building. She smiled, knowing she would be far enough away by the time they arrived. She was free again. This was the first day of the rest of her life.

Lady Red was back.

The end

(for now at least)

The Whys and Wherefores

I must admit to being a fan of the old-fashioned caper movie. Whether it’s OCEAN’S EIGHT through THIRTEEN, Cary Grant in CHARADE, Cary Grant again in TO CATCH A THIEF, Michael Caine in THE ITALIAN JOB, either of the two THOMAS CROWN AFFAIRs or HOW TO STEAL A MILLION with Audrey Hepburn, there’s just something about the gentleman thief that has always appealed to my imagination. In reality, of course, thieves are not gentlemen, but this is a book set in the U.N.D.E.A.D. universe, which means reality has very little to do with it. There’s just something about the time-honoured story of the intricate planning of the heist, the gathering together of the team of oddballs (because well-adjusted people just don’t do this sort of thing), the immaculate carrying out of the plan and the inevitable moment where it all seems to have gone horribly awry. There’s a saying that crime never pays, but another saying that crime sells. Either way, this is the closest I think I will ever come to writing a proper crime novel.

One of the other things I’m fond of is kick-ass heroines. And I’m not just referring to the heroines that actually kick ass, such as BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, BLACK WIDOW, Selene from the UNDERWORLD series of films and WONDER WOMAN (the Gal Gadot rather than Lynda Carter version). I’m also referring to smart, capable, determined women set on succeeding on their own terms. Since I grew up with science fiction, there were many such female characters to be impressed by, such as Sarah Jane Smith in DOCTOR WHO (a journalist and one of the few companions who could keep up with the Time Lord), Jenna and Calli from BLAKE’S SEVEN (just as good as the men of the crew and possibly the most honest of the lot), Jaime Sommers (THE BIONIC WOMAN, enough said), Purdey from the NEW AVENGERS (a pretty, female version of John Steed), the entire female cast of the rebooted BATTLESTAR GALACTICA show (most of whom also actually kicked ass) and, whisper it, Lady Penelope Creighton Ward who risked everything the THUNDERBIRDS did, but without the super spacecraft (and now that I think of it, may well have subconsciously given Agent Ward, the MAN FROM U.N.D.E.A.D., his name).

These, and so many others, were (and are) strong characters in their own right and good role models for any growing girl out there. Not perfect, but confident and capable of driving the narrative on their own. Lady Red is a testament to all of those kick-ass women I spent time with in my youth and continue to revisit even now. There are more stories featuring strong women than ever before (KILLING EVE is positively littered with the creatures, for heaven’s sake) and not before time.

Lady Red was a supporting character invented for a MAN FROM U.N.D.E.A.D. story and there was no intention on my part to bring her back, let alone give her a story all of her own. BETTER RED THAN DEAD came out of nowhere, fully formed and determined to be written before anything else could be continued. In a way, Lady Red hijacked my brain, in same the way she hijacked the train in the story. I only hope this doesn’t mean it’s going to be blown up any minute now. This is just my way of saying that this book is probably not the kicking off point for a new franchise. That said, Red forced her way into my head once, so who is to say she won’t do it again, like the kick-ass heroine she is.

Darren Humphries 2020

About The Author

About The Author

Darren Humphries is English and is forging his way through his fifth decade.

He is, therefore, a child of the Star Wars era with a corresponding love of science fiction, brought about by repeated science fiction movie seasons on BBC2 and, of course, Doctor Who.

As well as being a TV and film science fiction addict since birth (apparently) he had been writing stories she he learned to write, possible spurred on when someone gave him a prize when he was about six years old

In later years, he has produced a number of science fiction/ fantasy/ horror novels, all of which are now available on Kindle through Amazon.

Despite all this, he is fairly normal. Well, he thinks so anyway.

He is widowed has two children and needs to pay the mortgage.

The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.

The United Nations Department for the Enforcement and Apprehension of Demons is the first, last and only line of defence against the supernatural threats trying to break into a world where magic and technology are uneasy bedfellows.

The Curious Case Of The Kidnapped Chemist

Agent Ward is an agent of U.N.D.E.A.D. and he has just been given the case of a lifetime. Not only is he working with a fabulously gorgeous woman, but he is going up against sirens, strippers, sphinxes and giant snake demons in search of an apparently unimportant chemistry researcher.

Still, it could be worse - he might have to use the teleportation system and end up in Egypt again.

Zombie Apocalypse Now

Someone is raising the dead, literally. There are zombie assassins in Parliament and zombie hordes running riot in Hull. Agent Ward, the Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. is assigned to find out why this is happening and who is responsible. It's a case that will take him from the dinosaur plateaus of Brazil to mountain castles in Bavaria and from exclusive London clubs into the swampy heart of Voodoo itself; Haiti.

This sequel to "The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - The Curious Case Of The Kidnapped Chemist" unearths more crazy characters, bizarre situations, close shaves and tight escapes than before.

Do Dragons Dream Of Burning Sheep?

In his third adventure, Agent Ward of UNDEAD travels the globe to track down a deadly threat. From Russia to Spain to Mexico to ... um ... High Wycombe he faces off against giant wyrms, forest spirits and perhaps the greatest danger that he has ever encountered.

And we didn't even mention the Valkyries.

One Small Step

Agent Ward is out of this world (literally) in this fourth book in the Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. series. He's facing the biggest threat ever and his most personal challenge, not to mention shapechangers with a lingerie fetish, imps that just won't keep still and giant howler demons.

The race to save reality as he knows it is on and he just might be out of time.

Who Went Out In The Cold

The United Nations Department for the Enforcement and Apprehension of Demons is the first, last and only line of defence against the supernatural threats trying to break into a world where magic and technology are uneasy bedfellows.

And MISTER Ward is no longer a part of it.

Disgraced, dismissed and without the protection of the Agency's resources, Ward finds himself targeted and on the run, which doesn't make it the most convenient time for him to uncover one of the largest conspiracies against life, liberty and the human way.

More action, more globe-trotting adventure, more unfeasibly large explosions and more thousand-eyed multi-tentacled squid deities than ever before.

Not to mention a fire elemental called Iggy.

Cry Havoc And Let Slip

Reinstated to the Agency, Ward is out for revenge on the creatures who killed his girlfriend and on the trail of the late Director's soul, which those same creatures stole. His immediate task is to retrieve a book from a library, a simple enough task in most cases. Unfortunately for Ward, the library is as unusual as the book and an entire mysterious island of monsters and menaces lie between him and his prize.

With just a small squad of the best Agency troops and one mission specialist to back him up, he's once again relying on his wits to take down one of the largest threats he's ever faced.

The world could be in serious trouble.

Penny Kilkenny Saves The Day

When Penny Kilkenny is manipulated into attending the reunion of her year at the Madame Schopenhauer School for Exceptional Young Women, she could not possibly have imagined the dangers that she would face there - dangers that will test the very limit of her resilience and resourcefulness.

This spin off novel takes a new look at the world of the Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. and takes one of the most popular characters from those books on a thrill ride all her own.

It's a different kind of magic.

Taking The Tube To The Outer Limits

Here, common objects like eggs, books, mobile phones, walls and even Lego bricks take on an otherworldly, and sometimes sinister, aspect. Travel to the future and to the past to find that things are not quite how you expected them to be. Skirt the fringe worlds of fantasy, science fiction and horror. Watch as police officers, businessmen, journalists and private detectives encounter fates they could not have foreseen.

Oh, and take cover as The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. returns in his latest short adventure.