Chapter Eleven
It was almost dawn when the fire brigade finally got the last of the embers to stop glowing. A pall of smoke hung in the air, veiling the early light. Helen sat on an upturned flowerpot, huddled into her coat, while Natalie shoved cups of tea at her, courtesy of a nosy neighbor. Mary Alice stood a little apart, watching grimly as the hoses were turned off and coiled away. The house was outside a village, so the firefighters were on call only, the equivalent of a volunteer squad in the U.S., with smaller vehicles and less manpower. But even a fully equipped brigade couldn’t have saved Benscombe. It was completely engulfed when we called 999, but we held out hope for the first hour—until the roof caved in and took the upper floors with it. Everything collapsed into the cellars with a roar, and that’s when we realized the house was a total loss. We continued to watch as the fire flared up again and again, the exhausted brigade forced to chase down each eruption to keep it from spreading to the gardens and outbuildings. Mary Alice had spent most of the time roaming the perimeter of the property, studying the fire from different angles and poking around the shrubbery while Natalie and I stuck close to Helen, making sure she didn’t go into shock.
Finally, the fire was well and truly extinguished. The packing up took a little while, but the trucks began to leave, one by one, until only a co-responder’s vehicle was left. The owner was a kid who looked barely old enough to have left uni, and he walked the property with a clipboard, making notes to write up a report.
When he was finished, he came to stand by Helen, cocking his head in sympathy.
“I’m very sorry, madam,” he said formally.
“Do you know how it started?” she asked in a hollow voice.
He flushed to the tips of his ears, clearly embarrassed at having to lay blame for the fire. “Well, now. It looks as if some paint pots were stacked up, perhaps a bit of redecorating?”
Helen nodded dully. “I was making over the kitchen.”
“Ah yes. The problem is that paint pots are highly flammable, of course, especially with turps and oily rags and so forth. When it’s all heaped up together, it’s really only a matter of time before the worst happens.”
Helen jerked up her head. “But I—”
I cut her off, pointing to an item I’d spotted in his hand. It was wrapped in a sooty handkerchief, about the size of his palm. “What is that?”
“Oh yes. I found this on the front doorstep. Rather a miracle it survived, but I thought you might like it as a memento,” he said, offering the small bundle to Helen.
She stared at the bundle, making no effort to accept it. I took it from him and slipped it into my pocket. “Thank you. And we’re terribly sorry about the paint pots. So slipshod of us,” I told him with a vague smile.
He nodded. “It is difficult to remember everything with a property of this size. Perhaps something a little more manageable? Maybe a nice, small flat in a housing development?”
He probably thought he meant well, but I wasn’t taking it that way, and I knew Helen wasn’t either. There’s a special tone younger people often get when they’re talking to anyone past fifty, all saccharine condescension. Some older people don’t mind, but it always makes my fingers twitch for a good piece of garrote wire. Helen’s reaction was the same. I grabbed her hand and felt the corded fingers tightened into a fist. “We’ll certainly discuss it,” I promised him.
“Do you ladies have somewhere to go?” he asked.
“We could always try a nice kill shelter since we’re clearly past it,” Mary Alice muttered.
He flushed again, and Natalie stepped forward with a charming smile. “Thank you so much for your time. Yes, we do have somewhere to go. Please don’t let us keep you. You must be absolutely exhausted,” she said, gently leading him towards his vehicle.
He walked with her, obviously happy to be finished with us. We could hear him promising to send a copy of the report when it was complete, calling good-bye as he put his car in gear and headed down the drive. We waved, and I had a little trouble keeping Helen’s middle finger from going up.
“That little prick,” she said as his car turned onto the main road and disappeared from view.
Natalie gave her an admiring look as she joined us. “Did rooming with Billie on the ship expand your vocabulary?”
“No, I just don’t swear unless provoked. And he was provoking the shit out of me,” Helen said.
“I don’t think I can handle this version of Helen,” Mary Alice said.
“We’ve got bigger problems than Helen suddenly becoming fluent in profanity,” I said. My hand had been in my pocket, my fingers exploring the contours of the item wrapped in the handkerchief. I pulled out the bundle and opened it for the others. I already knew what I’d see. Lying on my palm was a small, obsidian wolf identical to the one retrieved from Lilian Flanders’s house.
“Holy shit,” Natalie breathed.
“I knew I hadn’t left those paint cans stacked up together,” Helen said triumphantly. “They were in the shed,” she added, pointing to the outbuilding on the far side of the garden.
“The lock was cut off the shed door,” Mary Alice informed us. She had a surprise hiding in her own pocket—a padlock whose hasp had been clipped neatly in two. “Found it in the shrubbery by the footpath.”
“But who would do this? Lazarov is dead.” Helen turned to me. “He is dead, Billie?”
“Jesus, Helen. I think I’ve been doing this long enough to know when I’ve killed somebody. Yes, he’s dead. I checked—twice.”
“Alright, no need to get testy,” she said in a wounded tone.
I reminded myself she’d had a pretty shitty night and waved her off. “Sorry.”
“Lazarov could have prearranged it,” Natalie ventured.
But I knew better. I shook my head. “He’s got somebody watching his back—and they know he’s dead.” I thought of my initial impressions about Lazarov, the idea that he was soft, maybe too soft to organize Lilian Flanders’s death. Grigory had stressed Pasha’s loner habits, but he’d been drunk as a cross-eyed skunk. What if there had been someone?
I suggested as much to the others.
“Then why burn my house?” Helen demanded. “Why not just kill us outright?”
“They were able to get into the house and pile up the paint cans,” Mary Alice agreed. “It would have been even easier to leave a device on a delay and blow us all to atoms. Why torch the house before we’d even gotten here?”
“Because somebody likes games,” I said grimly. “And we may not be the only players.” I opened my emergency bag and took out a burner. “Time to make the call.”
Natalie shrugged. “I don’t have anybody I need to warn.”
“Minka,” I said. “I think she’s in Bali, and she’s probably safe, but check in with her anyway.”
Minka was a Ukrainian hacker a third our age, a bit of collateral damage I’d brought back from an assassination in Kiev. But she was old beyond her years, and I’d sent her off with an around-the-world ticket to have some adventures. So far she had hiked in Patagonia, spent a few months hanging out with surfers in Cape Town, and had tried twice to summit Kilimanjaro. I’d gotten a postcard at Christmas with a Balinese puppet on the front and a scribbled message on the back. I was surprised at how much I missed her. She’d saved our asses during our last mission, her biggest contribution being the creation of an app called Menopaws. She had populated it with animated cats and features for tracking days since our last periods and hot flashes. At least that’s what it looked like. In reality it had given us a way to message each other without using any of the usual apps—and no male security detail was going to look twice at a Siamese in a beret who wanted to talk about vaginal dryness. I’d asked her to make a few tweaks before she left, and I’d taken other precautions as well. We had been successful on that mission, but we’d also been damned lucky. Lady Luck didn’t always show up when you needed her.
Mary Alice plucked the phone out of Nat’s hand. She swore as she hit the “power” button and punched a series of numbers. “Akiko is going to kill me,” she muttered. Akiko must have answered then because Mary Alice’s voice was practically a purr. “Hey, honey. I’m safe, but I’m going to need you to do something—” She stepped away to finish breaking the news to Akiko that she was going to have to pack up two opinionated cats and head underground.
A few minutes later, Mary Alice returned looking like she’d just gone ten rounds with Holyfield in his prime. She handed me the phone and I keyed in a number. Taverner answered on the first ring, and he was enough of a pro not to bother with the preliminaries. “Where?”
“You know that small painting of an olive tree I hung in the kitchen? Take it down and punch open the plaster behind it. You’ll find a smartphone. Turn it on and look at the homepage.”
I heard the sound of breaking plaster and after a minute a muffled laugh. “It’s an app called Bread Daddy. There’s a dough man waving at me.”
“Open it,” I told him. Bread Daddy had been Minka’s brainchild. She’d used Taverner’s talents in the kitchen as her inspiration. The little dough figure resembled the Pillsbury one, but with a significant addition.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “It’s asking if I have trouble getting my loaf to rise. Does this thing have—Billie, is that a dough penis?”
“Yeah, it’s an erectile-dysfunction tracker,” I told him. “But it has a messaging function. Grab your go-bag and follow the instructions I left in the app. I’ll see you soon.”
“Understood.” There was a second of silence. “You okay?”
“I’m good,” I promised. “But things here have gone off the rails. I’ll fill you in when I see you.”
I hung up without asking how he was. Taverner could have been bleeding out his eyeballs and he wouldn’t have admitted it. But I felt better knowing I’d taken the steps to get him out of the potential firing line.
Nat’s call to Minka was short and possibly unpleasant from the expression on Nat’s face and the muffled squawking I could hear on Minka’s end. When Nat hung up, she shoved the phone back at me.
“How’s Minka?” I asked her.
“Pissed. She was two dates into following the band Ghost on their world tour. But she’s coming.”
A tightness had settled in my chest when I’d seen the wolf. Talking to Taverner had loosened it, and knowing Minka was safe eased it even more. I collected our old phones and dumped them in the well along with the burner. From the bottom of my bag, I dug out a new smartphone, already loaded with the Menopaws app. I always traveled with a spare, and it would be our only source of communication until we rendezvoused with the others.
We climbed into the car and took off. It was a thirty-two-minute drive to the Port of Poole, but I made it in seventeen. We ditched the car, leaving it unlocked in an area frequented by angry young men without much to do. The car would disappear within the hour, I had no doubt.
We used our fake passports to buy tickets on the next ferry to Cherbourg. The ferry runs four times a week, departing at 8:30 in the morning, and we got lucky, rolling up the gangway at 8:28. We headed straight for our cabin, a four-berth box where we spent the next few hours combing through our possessions for anything suspicious—trackers, AirTags, bugs, anything that could give away our locations. When we’d established that the bags were clean, we picked through our clothes, whittling everything down to essentials only. Each of us always carried a spare set of papers and a stack of assorted currencies. We transferred these to our smallest bags. We also packed a few items easily pawned in case we ran into trouble in a place where we couldn’t use cash. I used to carry a belt made of pahlavis I’d picked up in Iran—solid gold and worth a fortune—but it was heavy as a small child, and I finally decided the backache wasn’t worth it. I’d switched to gems instead. I already wore a pair of flawless blue diamond studs, but I’d added a sizable emerald on a long chain that I tucked into my bra.
The one thing we omitted were weapons that might attract attention. No guns or switchblades. Instead, we opted for things that wouldn’t draw anybody’s notice. Helen carried a Swiss Army knife that had been modified to include a few nifty extras, and I always had my favorite slapjack. A saddlemaker in Dallas had run it up for me. It looked just like a leather Bible bookmark except for the William S. Burroughs quote tooled around the side—“No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.” I’d had the saddlemaker fit it with lead shot on one end. It gripped beautifully, and if swung at just the right spot on a temple, it could shatter the skull, driving a piece of bone straight into the middle meningeal artery. Messy, but it made a satisfying crunch. Mary Alice and Helen always carried a few handy odds and ends, and god only knew what was in Natalie’s fanny pack of death. She pulled out a handful of ping-pong balls and a pencil.
“Are you finished with that?” She gestured towards the pork pie Mary Alice had bought at the station.
“Natalie, I told you to get your own,” Mary Alice protested through a mouthful of crumbs.
“Not the pie. The foil,” Natalie said, grabbing it away from her. She borrowed Helen’s Swiss Army knife and set to work, cutting a hole in one ping-pong ball and reducing the others to tiny squares.
“What are you doing?” Helen asked.
“You’ll see.” Natalie was focused, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth.
She stuck the pencil into the hole she’d made in the first ping-pong ball and shaped the foil carefully around it.
“It’s a bong,” Mary Alice said with a frown. “And not a particularly good one,” she warned Natalie. “You are going to poison yourself smoking anything out of that.”
“It is not a bong,” Natalie corrected.
“Then what is it?” Mary Alice demanded.
“Mind your business. And wipe your mouth. You’ve got pork pie on your lip.”
It did look a little like a bong, I decided, but Natalie was in too foul a mood to ask her again. I shrugged at Helen and we let her get on with it.
There was no need to talk about where we were headed. The first few months after our last mission had been quiet—alarmingly so. I wasn’t used to settling down and not looking over my shoulder. Paranoia is a hard habit to break. So I’d made a few arrangements including finding a dilapidated farmhouse in Sardinia. I’d sent the details on to the others in case they ever needed to lie low for a while, but nobody had used it. I hadn’t seen it myself in more than a year. Sardinia is not far off the beaten track; it sits squarely in the middle of the Mediterranean, after all. It has good transportation links to France, Spain, Italy, and even North Africa if you don’t mind bribing a guy with a fishing boat. And the thing about Sardinia? There is always a bribable guy with a fishing boat.
The trip was uneventful by which I mean nobody bombed, shot at, or otherwise assaulted us. We changed up our appearances with cheap wigs and hats and reversible jackets. We varied how we walked—sometimes in pairs, sometimes singly, so we didn’t stand out as a foursome traveling together. From Cherbourg we took the train to Toulon via Paris. It was a risk sticking with the same mode of transportation for eleven hours, but we were banking on the fact that most travelers leaving England for the Continent would pass through London at some point. We hadn’t, and we’d avoided airports although it meant staring out at the endless grey landscape as it rained all the way south.
In Toulon we changed our appearances again and hopped a ferry to Porto Torres. Ten hours later, we staggered off into dazzling Sardinian sunshine. I led the way to a beater I’d left parked in an illegal garage in the maze of alleys behind the ferry terminal. In seven minutes the narrow stone streets of the port were behind us and we were headed southwest, into the interior and as far from tourists as we could get. The drive was two hours if you didn’t care about being followed. I wound around for twice that amount of time, backtracking and checking for a tail. I stopped once to buy some snacks to throw into the back seat before Natalie started gnawing the upholstery, but apart from that, I kept my foot to the floor. The landscape got progressively more desolate as we made our way south. There are two schools of thought when hiding out: stay in a crowded area and blend in or get to the high country and hold your ground. Both have their uses, but I wanted to see the enemy coming if they managed to find us.
By the time I turned onto the dirt track leading up to the farmhouse, the countryside was deserted as the moon. In the rocky fields, sheep stared balefully at us as we passed. They weren’t fat, fluffy sheep like you see in England. These were skinny, wiry animals, tough little survivors who knew what it took to endure. Like us. Counting transfers, we’d been on the move for more than thirty hours since we’d left Benscombe, and we were stiff as new boots as we unfolded ourselves from the dusty car. I’d parked behind the farmhouse to shield the car from the road, and just as we scrambled out, the back door of the farmhouse swung open.
We might have been exhausted, but good training never dies. Helen and Mary Alice were already on the far side of the car, and Nat and I vaulted over it for cover. Helen’s Swiss Army knife was in her hand, the corkscrew locked into position. I was gripping my slapjack as Natalie applied a lighter to the bottom of her homemade foil bong until it started smoking.
“Do you really think getting stoned is the best course of action right now?” Mary Alice demanded.
“Bite my ass, Mary Alice,” Natalie said cheerfully. She popped her head above the car long enough to hurl the smoking projectile into the open doorway where it sent out a dense black cloud of chemical stench.
A moment later, we heard coughing and a figure emerged from the smoke, waving a white handkerchief. “Jesus Christ, it’s me .”
“Taverner,” I said, pocketing the blackjack. I signaled the others to stand down.
“What was in that thing?” he demanded. “Am I going to die?”
“Just some cut-up ping-pong balls,” Natalie soothed. “It’s mostly for effect.”
“ Mostly? ” He choked a little more.
Helen pecked him on the cheek as Mary Alice thumped his back. “How did you get here so quickly?” Mary Alice asked.
“Quick connection through Sicily,” he told her. “I got here last night.”
Mary Alice stood on tiptoe, peering over his shoulder, and he smiled, understanding what she was really asking.
“Akiko isn’t here yet. Her flight is scheduled to arrive this evening.”
“How was the trip?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Uneventful. No tail.”
I breathed a little easier then in spite of Natalie’s smoke bomb.
“Sorry about that,” Nat said as she went to hug him.
He shrugged. “It’s your own fault if you’ve ruined lunch.”
She lifted her head, sniffing like a dog. “Lunch?”
“Roast lamb. And homemade bread, of course,” he finished. “I never travel anywhere without my sourdough starter.”
Mary Alice looked like she wanted to cry. “Taverner, if Akiko and I ever decide to open our marriage to a platonic third, you’re the one that I want.”