by M T McGuire
“That don’t look right,” said Harry, leaning over him.
“Nope. It’s fine, absolutely fine. Just a trick of the light,” said The Pan, screwing his handkerchief into a ball and stuffing it swiftly into his pocket. Arnold in the skies! Harry thought it was odd, too! That meant he wasn’t cracking up which, though reassuring, didn’t do much to offset the alternative, that his blood was now blue, instead of red. He must be very ill. He wondered if it was terminal. Undoubtedly. Then again, it would hardly make a difference would it? He felt his nose carefully and glowered at the old man.
He was glad to see that an experience of violence, first hand, had finally ruffled the old boy’s air of calm. For a moment he stared at The Pan as if he was Lord Vernon, himself, before excusing himself and leaving rapidly. Good! Now that he’d witnessed how much damage it could cause, perhaps he’d think twice before he blackmailed anyone else!
Chapter 42
The lights of the city twinkled across the dawn sky and, as Lord Vernon watched them, went out, one by one.
The Chosen One had evaded him – which was trying – but his enemies had also failed to locate her, so, using the platinum thimble, he had transported some of General Moteurs’ most reliable troops, with a plentiful supply of his research department’s de-greening pills, to keep an eye on her. He had put other operatives in place undercover in her world to access every scrap of computerised information about her; they had been through her credit card bills, her medical records, everything. The surveillance team had instructions to abduct her, if required, to keep her from ‘unsuitable influences’.
However, it was more of an insurance policy than an expediency. He had confirmed that only he knew of her existence and her whereabouts. She was safe enough where she was for now. In the meantime, he would turn his attention to the Mervinettes.
He had gained some useful information from General Moteurs’ contact and would learn more when he mastered the use of the thimble. Much of the close surveillance work had been done by a very small team which he had led himself, General Moteurs acting as deputy. It had taken patience and application, but now the quality of the data he was gathering was better than he had dared hope. He gazed thoughtfully at the thimble in his palm.
According to the General’s secret source, the gang intended to undertake a bespoke job and steal an artefact used in the Looking. General Moteurs’ man had suggested this might be the one definitive item which would confirm, for sure, the identity of the true Candidate. It wasn’t an item Lord Vernon wanted to see in the public domain.
So he would let them find it for him and then ...
He smiled maliciously. Simple, he would destroy the artefact and nobody could disprove his Candidature. Nothing would stand in the way of his becoming Architrave. Afterwards, of course, he would destroy the Mervinettes. He thought about their driver, an unlikely character; older, possibly even retired by the looks of the surveillance photographs General Moteurs had provided. Well-heeled, too. Lord Vernon had expected someone with reactions that quick to be young and most likely, desperate. No matter. They were all doomed.
And as for the Chosen One ... He licked his lips.
“You will not escape me either,” he said aloud.
Oh yes, he had plans for her, such plans. He couldn’t wait to meet her. It was going to be luscious. He breathed deeply, closing his eyes for a moment to savour his anticipation, and raised the thimble to his eye.
Chapter 43
Ruth got on with her new promotion and her new life, but like a small wrinkle that won’t iron out, her disquiet stayed. It was only natural after such a stressful experience, Lucy reassured her. She didn’t tell anyone else, as her family and friends would only worry. She nearly told Sir Robin Get, but she didn’t, despite the fact he was very easy to talk to. He didn’t judge, either. He simply listened and offered advice from time to time. Although neither of them would admit it, both Ruth and Lucy had begun to regard him as extended family. She wondered if she should have spoken to him, since for all Lucy’s assurance that she would forget about her experience in time, Ruth didn’t.
Three months on and she was having little success conquering her fear, although she was beginning to get used to living with it. One bright, frosty morning, a rare occasion dawned when she and Lucy were leaving for work at the same time. Since they used the same tube line this was always a pleasure. It meant they could gossip all the way in – well, almost. Ruth got off at Farringdon but Lucy carried on to Aldgate. As they headed for the tube, two tall men rounded the corner at the end of their quiet residential street. Ruth stopped abruptly.
“What’s up?” asked Lucy breaking off, mid flow, from a story of Nigel’s exploits with the wine list at a top London restaurant.
“Those guys,” said Ruth, starting to walk again. They crossed the road, while up ahead the two tall men slowed and turned their heads in unison, eyes-right style, to look over at the two girls. They stayed where they were, on the other side of the street and carried on walking.
“See what they’re wearing!” whispered Lucy as they passed. It was pure sci-fi. Dark grey leather tunics with, no? Really? Yes, swords and what appeared to be guns, slung from their belts. Woollen trousers, also in dark grey, with a red stripe down the sides and jackboots. Similar but not the same as the man who’d followed Ruth into that garden. How did they manage a get-up like that on a London street without being arrested? Then again, people probably thought they were on their way to a sci-fi convention, that New Romanticism had made a return or the like.
“Coo,” said Lucy, “is one of them your man?”
“No. Not nearly as sinister, but they’re the same.”
“Wow. I can see why it freaked you out. I’d have left the city and sought witness protection.”
“Yeh right! Witness protection from what?”
“You know what I’m saying.”
That she understood why Ruth had been scared, that she didn’t blame her. It made Ruth smile. It was great to have a friend like Lucy around.
“Yeh,” she said, “I do, and thanks.”
“They’re very pale,” said Lucy. Yes they were. As if they’d been living under a rock all their lives. So pale that when Ruth screwed her eyes up a little they almost appeared to be light green. “Like vampires.”
“Yeh. OK Luce! Don’t feed my warped fantasies; they scare me enough on their own.”
Oops, Lucy, who was only trying to make a joke, now wore a worried frown. Time to lighten things up, “I’ll be sure to keep up my garlic intake.”
They were wearing sunglasses, like the one who had followed her, except they were merely frightening, a little bit creepy perhaps? The other one had been in a class of his own, the sheer malevolence of him had been almost physical.
He was still out there somewhere. Searching for his ‘Chosen One’.
What if he’d sent them to follow her? What if she actually was? That was a bad thought. Time to stop thinking. She kept staring straight ahead, but glanced back as she turned the corner of the street and saw with relief that they were continuing to walk in the opposite direction.
Chapter 44
The Mervinettes spent three months planning their greatest – and in The Pan’s view, dumbest – bank heist. Gradually and meticulously they pieced together the information required over the course of the days and weeks – even that which the old man had already provided (except when it was unobtainable anywhere else) because they didn’t trust him and, as Big Merv said, you can never be too careful. The other robberies stopped except for when the Mervinettes needed more information, or the cash with which to buy it. The Pan had been practising his driving alone, usually by baiting traffic cops, until Gerry the Work Experience Creature from Snurd had arrived a week previously to collect his wheels and his spare keys.
Now here he was, driving Big Merv’s midnight blue MK II into the heart of Grongolia’s capital city, which, with characteristic Grongolian lack of originality, was also called Grong
olia.
“What in The Prophet’s name am I doing here?” he asked himself.
If he could have arranged to have been anywhere else, even being closely questioned by the Resistance, a process often involving pain, inflicted with surgical precision, by experts, he would have done. One hand on the wheel, he ran the gearstick hand through his hair.
“How did I get myself into this?”
“By being an idiot and not paying attention.” Oh no! He didn’t have the time or will for an argument with his Virtual Father right now.
“I know Dad, you don’t need to tell me. I’m wondering if I should have called the old gimmer’s bluff.” His voice tailed off as he remembered how the old man had been able to quote a private conversation between himself and the other three Mervinettes. He was probably listening.
“And as for you, you conniving old git. It’s bad enough you putting us up to this but you’d better not be tuning in right now. A little privacy if you please.”
The Bank of Grongolia was the most heavily guarded public building in the city. Grongolia was the army’s garrison town, home to the Grongolian High Leader and chock-full of Grongles. Non-Grongles were only allowed into the city with special passes, and were most definitely barred from the country’s national bank. Big Merv and his colleagues had got round this technicality by wearing dark glasses and realistic green rubber faces made by a contact in Ning Dang Po’s film studios. They were wearing Grongolian army uniforms and carrying replica weapons, also made by the film studio contact, Grongolian military hardware being unavailable to civilians, let alone non-Grongles. Their false IDs were constructed by an expert forger named Derek and well ... they were all tall enough to pass for small Grongles and built the right way; that is, extensively. Derek had also produced the prerequisite special NGLF (Non-Grongolian Life Form) pass to allow The Pan to gain entry into the city, so he had no need for a disguise other than the one he usually wore.
The bank was in a large square and The Pan dropped his bosses off on the dot of midday, as planned, and drove round the block. Big Merv, Frank and Harry were to go into the vaults under the pretence of opening their ‘own’ safety deposit box, or at least the box belonging to the Grongles on their fake IDs. Once in the vaults they were to open a different box with a stolen key which Big Merv had been given and which he had secreted in the heel of his shoe. They were to remove the contents and walk back out. There were to be no heroics and no other boxes were to be touched, this was a high-class bespoke job. If they succeeded, the heist would take three minutes, if they failed, they wouldn’t come out again.
From behind the protection of the MK II’s bullet-proof, tinted glass, The Pan watched the inhabitants of the city going about their business in the midday sun. It was hot and the heat reflected off the pavements made it doubly warm. His palms were clammy and he was sweating. He had a bad feeling about this job and felt more nervous today than he had ever previously felt before a robbery. This was the Bank of Grongolia, he kept telling himself. His nerves were natural and only to be expected, but despite the gang’s best efforts, it had been planned with the cooperation of too many outsiders for his liking. The old man hadn’t struck him as the type to grass, but these days you could never be sure and the preparations had required input from many ‘suppliers’ outside Big Merv’s routine sphere of influence and trust.
Then there was the actual heist. The Pan knew nobody could waltz into the Bank of Grongolia to carry out a major theft without inside help and he kept asking himself, with growing disquiet, who that inside contact would be. The bank didn’t employ non-Grongolian staff, so the informant would have to be a Grongle. As Grongolia was a police state, most of the proper criminals were part of the Government, working in information retrieval for the secret police. Surely any other criminals would be political. They would be working against the state, for a resistance movement, if there was one. The point was, no-one with a similar background to the Mervinettes, or at least, no-one on their side, would work in the state bank.
Members of the political underworld had no scruples and considered themselves above real, honourable bank robbers like the Mervinettes. They would see Big Merv and his gang as expendable scum. What better way to deflect attention away from recovering the loot than handing over K’Barth’s most wanted gang of robbers?
He was marginally reassured by the fact he had the thimble with him, although there were so many checkpoints that he had hidden it in his boot, tucked under his instep, in case he was asked to get out of the MK II and searched. That was another worry. He’d driven through all those checkpoints without being stopped. That was enough to make The Pan nervous, on its own. It wasn’t natural. There was the timing too; midday, high noon, the perfect time for a gunfight if you wanted to stage a theatrical showdown, pocket the loot and pretend nothing had gone missing. Too many omens and too much theatre. It had to be a trap. The only question was exactly when it was going to be sprung. He turned up the air conditioning.
The Grongles, for some strange reason best known to themselves, drove on the wrong side of the road, measured their distances in some archaic unit long since abandoned by everyone else, and had a different highway code to the rest of the world. The Pan had spent several days learning to convert distances from Grongolian to K’Barthan units of measure, and reading and re-reading their highway code from cover to cover.
However, he was still nervous and he felt out of place driving on a different side of the street. He hadn’t seen anyone behind them but he was sure they were being shadowed as soon as they entered the city. He realised that his paranoia about being followed had mushroomed since his encounters with the old man. Maybe it was nerves, or perhaps it was normal to tail foreigners in Grongolia – after all, they were driving a snurd from K’Barth which, though not unusual, was distinctive. K’Barthan snurds were considered the best available and the MK II was the type of snurd the flasher, higher-ranking officers in the Grongolian army might bring back from a tour of duty there. A class staff vehicle to suitably impress the Grongolian ladies.
“Not that there appear to be any,” said The Pan, to himself. His visual radar was always finely tuned but the Grongolian streets were depressingly devoid of any form of female distraction. He supposed they were all kept locked away somewhere. He wondered if that was why the Grongles were all so bad tempered and prone to violence.
The three minutes were up and he was turning back into the square. Big Merv, Frank and Harry, still disguised as Grongolian army officers, were waiting for him. No klaxons were sounding, no shots being fired, no notice being taken. Nothing had gone wrong. Something always went wrong. Usually the Mervinettes spilled out onto the street in a hail of bullets and wailing alarms and leapt dashingly into the snurd with Big Merv shouting ‘Drive!’ just as the Grongolian police arrived. It was all part and parcel of the glamour.
“The public loves a snurd chase,” Big Merv would say.
It wasn’t natural. Once they were safe inside, The Pan scrutinised his passengers carefully. Yes, they were definitely Big Merv, Harry and Frank. As the snurd left the suburbs of the city they pulled their rubber Grongle faces over their heads and relaxed but The Pan didn’t. This had been too easy. He smelt a rat. He checked behind him, there was still no visual evidence but his belief that they were being followed hadn’t abated.
They soon left the city behind as – choosing small, less-frequented roads – The Pan headed to the coast. He’d memorised the relevant sections of a Grongolian road atlas and now, as he drove, he could picture the map in his mind’s eye and imagine the MK II as a small red dot moving slowly across the page, towards the sea.
Every mile he put between himself and the Bank of Grongolia was a head start.
In The Pan’s view, that meant the closer they got to the coast, the more relaxed he should have been.
“Hmm, so why isn’t that happening?” he muttered. Instead of relaxing he was experiencing an unaccountable feeling of foreboding and it was getting wor
se, not better.
“What’s wrong?” growled Merv, next to him. “You’re mooning away like a great girl.”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie to me you moron. Talk, or shut it!”
“Nothing yet,” The Pan corrected himself, “I’m still thinking it through.”
“I ain’t comfortable with you doing any of that thinking malarkey unless you’re gonna share it with us, right boys?”
“Yeh,” said Frank and Harry in unison from the back.
“I appreciate that,” said The Pan.
“Then get a move on.”
No pressure then. Was this a hunch? It was certainly a strange sensation. Almost supernatural in that he couldn’t explain it properly. His spine tingled, the little hairs were standing up on the back of his neck and though the air in the snurd was warm enough, goose bumps were rising on his arms. As if he’d walked into somewhere very cold – like a meat safe.
He was experiencing the same sense of foreboding that comes of watching too many horror movies, late into the night. The feeling you get when that logical, sensible part of your brain, the bit which guides you in moments of abject fear, has been bypassed.
He scanned the horizon behind him. No, nothing unusual there.
In front? No, still nothing, but the feeling persisted. It was a long way from the city of Grongolia to the coast, a good six hours drive on the roads, and they were using the roads rather than flying, to keep a low profile. They were being watched, The Pan was sure, the Grongles were anticipating their every move and waiting for the best, most effective moment to trap them.
A premonition then? Possibly. The Pan wasn’t superstitious.
He racked his brains to try and think of anything he might have seen, anything, no matter how innocuous or tiny, which might help him make sense of the way he felt. No, he was doing this wrong. The why was academic, the most important question was how to react.