“And how is Nappy?”
“Oh, you know, generous, funny, slightly megalomaniacal. Good conversation. I don’t think he likes you calling him Nappy though.”
“But he’s such a charmer. Perhaps you should invite him to Sunshine.” Sunshine was Lord Stiletto’s home. A space station on the edge of the Horse Head nebula.
“Somehow I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
Having finished their coffees, the two friends got up to leave. The waiter brought them their overcoats to guard against the late December air. It was a short though steep walk up to the beautiful church, and the views over Paris, were breathtaking.
It would be unexpected if it became general knowledge, that Miss Ann Thrope didn’t care for heights. This was unfortunate as she was currently suspended from an upper gantry of the Eiffel Tower. The taloned grip holding on to her left wrist was strong, and the eyes that held her attention were somewhat disturbing, being red, smoking, and with slit like pupils that seemed to sear in to her soul.
The New Year fireworks added to the sense of occasion, but any tourist looking up from the Avenue Pierre Loti far below, would have needed binoculars to witness this wonder of Parisian theatre. Miss Thrope met the malevolent stare of an entity, from who knows where. Unblinking she held its gaze whilst the wrist knife appeared like magic in her other hand. Striking simultaneously upwards and sideways, she buried the knife to the hilt in the thick sinewy wrist of the monster. Screaming in rage and agony it opened its claws, releasing the captured hand, which within an instant, had driven a second knife into the alien’s forearm. The creature pulled up and back reeling with the pain, lifting an unruffled Miss Thrope, who gratefully returned to the stability of the ironwork balcony.
Thirteen
Sunshine
Nobody else noticed. Miss Ann Thrope had excused herself for a few minutes, at a dinner party on Sunshine, to visit the bathroom and came back to the table with a decided limp.
Stiletto glanced with concern from his seat at the head of the table, noting the lines of pain etched into her face. Calmly Miss Thrope made her way to her seat, taking a quick sip of wine, before resuming the conversation as if nothing had happened.
Although Miss Thrope had only been missing from dinner for a few minutes, in relative time she had been away for several hours. The ability to make use of bends in the space-time continuum was useful for creating the illusion of an alibi. Not that Miss Thrope would ever have need of one, or would have subjected her friends to the scrutiny.
She hadn’t had to change. Known for her unusual style, Miss Thrope was always dressed impeccably. Shopping was a favourite pastime, and although she had her preferred little boutiques and fashion houses in Milan, Paris and Rome, she also had access to designers and fabrics in many places and times, not usually accessible to the well-dressed dinner guest.
The other dinner she attended was in honour of the Silekian Ambassador, and was held on the bridge of the Silekian Admiral’s flagship. It was always a mystery to Miss Thrope that wherever she went in the universe, military tradition with its elite corps of officers and their dinner rituals, created a pattern that was repeated again and again. It was something she had pondered over her years of activity as an assassin, but she never really got to the bottom of it.
The client was very specific about her requirements. Anyone who could afford Miss Thrope’s massive fee was usually of a kind that knew exactly what they wanted, and was used to having the power, influence, or funds, to achieve it.
Commissions, as Miss Thrope liked to think of them, for were they not truly works of art, fell into two main camps. Those secret, covert assassinations where the victim simply died, apparently of natural causes, or some fluke accident, where no one was any the wiser, or a full in-the-face assassination where the target was publicly eviscerated, or blown up, to the general spectacle of, or making a political statement to, a news-entertainment hungry world.
These second category entanglements were often more difficult in that they required a degree of social theatre whilst at the same time maintaining Miss Thrope’s anonymity. After all, even in the immensity of the ‘Verse, there was only a very small group of individuals who would have knowledge of Miss Thrope’s specialist services, and even fewer, on how to access them.
Miss Thrope always liked to apply the personal touch. If one was simply to leave a small bomb to blow a target up, how would that be distinguished from the act of a gangster. One job she fondly remembered. She had had a pair of false teeth, made to fit perfectly, to replace the target’s own, and switched them in the glass of water in the victim’s bathroom. Miss Thrope had been in the audience at the press conference the following day, when at the appropriate time of his speech, the prime minister’s head had unfortunately exploded on camera.
Miss Thrope awoke from her reverie, glancing down the table at the ambassador. She knew that in a few minutes time, the females would be required to leave the room, whilst the dominant males, would proceed with their rituals of drinking and talking.
The admiral’s bridge, like the officer’s mess, was held to be sacrosanct, although the security was more imagined than actual. Still, there were armed marines positioned around the perimeter. It was an alert marine, who with lightning reflexes, shot Miss Thrope in the leg, seconds after she had taken her long shot down the length of the table.
The pistol had been concealed within the pudding on the table, in front of her. It’s not the sort of thing one can conceal within the folds of a fine silken gown. Breathing calmly, she had leant forward, and pushed her hand firmly into the large mousse before her. Her nearby dining companions gasped with her spontaneous, and insane action, then their pupils dilated, and faces blanched as the beautiful manicured hand withdrew, holding a dangerous looking pudding-smeared pistol. Miss Thrope, in one smooth action, pulled the pistol and shot the ambassador through his left eye.
She hadn’t allowed for the speed and alertness of the marine, and collapsed to the floor, and rolled under the table. The response was rapid, but when the dinner table was pulled back, the dessert slimed pistol was alone, and the elegant lady was gone.
Fourteen
The Crystal City
Miss Ann Thrope woke up feeling the discord in the air. She reached under her pillow, withdrawing a gun of some sorts, gently rolled over as if in her sleep, and shot the intruder through the quilt.
She had been sleeping in her suite at Jammie’s, and no one entered her inner sanctum until her security system was disabled. She made a call to Beetle Jammie, the current owner and General Manager of Jammie’s, informing him of her breakfast requirements, and arranging for some of his people to take out the trash.
By the time breakfast arrived in her charming dining room overlooking the magical Crystal City and its nebula backdrop, the smoking corpse had been removed, the beautiful carpet looked as if it had just been shipped from Persia, and fresh cotton bedding was in place on the bed. Closing the door of the bedroom she glided over to her wonderful antique table, set for one, and poured coffee into a bone china cup.
Her meeting was scheduled for later. Time and place for her was a somewhat fluid concept, being in the enviable position to travel backwards and forwards in time, and even within and without, parallel universes. Whilst maintaining particular advantages in her specialised line of work, still there were many hidden pitfalls. For the sake of her own temporal stability, and also her sanity, she had to keep a firm grasp on her own sense of time, hence the incredible importance of breakfast. With the many worlds and star systems that she visited with their many differing time structures, her internal clock kept to the standard earth twenty-four-hour time, and to be really precise, Greenwich Mean time. She smiled to herself. As she had archly recounted once at one of Stiletto’s dinners, actually, she didn’t think it was mean at all.
Her appointment was on a small moon in the Dikdak system in the iridium mine where the finest ore, used for the most sought-after iridium blades,
was found.
She arrived early using Stiletto’s spatial virus to avoid detection whilst she made a physical check of the location. It was her amazing attention to detail, and thorough state of preparation, even in the smallest eventuality, that enabled her to pull off the most difficult of engagements. But even with all her preparation, something inevitably, and spontaneously, went wrong.
That was the thought repeating through her head. The nerves in her arms screamed in pain where the cable ties had bitten into the delicate flesh of her wrists, where they held her to the chair. That in itself was worrying. Where in hell, or who in hell, was using simple nylon cable ties?
Cold water soaked her hair and dripped in frozen rivulets down her strained face. Whoever had her, had disabled her neural net with a wet towel, which had been secured to her head with duct tape, wrapped round and round. Her heart beat rapidly as she surveyed her situation. She half expected to see an old car battery, jump leads, pliers, and a Stanley knife, but she didn’t want to lose her grip on reality.
Fifteen
Space
"Can I call you Ann?"
"No, you may not."
The interrogator sighed. It was going to be another one of those days.
She was thinking of that film she liked. The Irish actor in Paris, rescuing his daughter. There is a point where he's chained to a pipe over his head, surrounded by bad guys, at which point Miss Thrope thought, he was screwed.
It felt a bit like that. She breathed in and breathed out. There would be a way.
Sixteen
Sunshine
"So, what happened?"
Miss Thrope was sat in the library sipping a gin and tonic.
"Well, it was the meeting. It turned out the interrogator was the client."
"How ever did he get the drop on you?" asked Stiletto.
"The whole zone was booby trapped with a harmless but fast acting nerve toxin. Undetectable."
"A bit embarrassing though," chided her old friend, "what are you going to do?"
"Well, dear, I've accepted his contract. Then, when I've been paid, I'm giving him an unexpected bonus."
"Ah," guessed Stiletto. "You are going to do the client for free."
"Exactly," smiled Miss Thrope, and arched a brow to draw Stiletto's attention to her empty glass.
Seventeen
Earth - Surrey - Present Day
Miss Thrope silently lifted the latch on the cottage door. She was assaulted with a musty smell and waited while her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Slipping inside, she was surprised to see the silent man sitting on the old sofa with the moonlight from the window reflecting on his spectacle lenses.
"Hello Tim," she said quietly, no sign of her surprise displayed, as if every day at three am, she covertly entered old people's homes, to find them fully dressed and waiting for her. She reached the window with a single step, drawing the curtains, and turned back to switch the light on.
Tim had seen better days. He was in his nineties and still had a good head of white hair. His spectacles were very strong, and his intense magnified eyes watched her calmly as she searched for a clean spot to sit down. There wasn't one. The sofa, once a beautiful red chesterfield, was grey and filthy. Miss Thrope leant over, placed a kiss on his recently shaved cheek, and sat down on the rancid cushion beside him.
Tim was smartly dressed, with a nicely knotted tie which Miss Thrope admired, but his shirt was stained and the tie ancient. A military uniform with medals hung on a hanger from the open door behind, and photographs of a dead princess lined the walls.
"So, Tim," enquired Miss Thrope, "what on earth is going on?"
"You're on a job aren't you," he replied.
"Yes," she admitted, slightly embarrassed. "Why didn't you call?"
"Look at me," he said.
She held the hand of the old warrior looking all the while into his steady eyes. "I'll return the fee," she said, a single tear appearing on her cheek.
"I'd rather you didn't" he said, marginally increasing the strength of his weak grip in her hand as she slid the blade into place. His eyes closed and his old hand went cold in hers.
Eighteen
London - The Savoy
"Did you ever break a contract?"
"Only once. The friend in your amusing anecdote. He was the target."
Stiletto blanched, despite their friendship. Still he maintained his customary sangfroid. “Gregory?” he said in a whisper.
"It was a last-minute job, just helping an old friend, Caroline.”
“The girl with the red hair,” he interrupted. “She saved my life on more than one occasion. In the end she was my friend too.”
“It was there at the museum in Cambridge. We had had supper together the night before. She had got mixed up with some very bad company, and they were going to relieve someone of the package you mentioned. Caroline asked me to remove one of the players. I was concealed until the last moment. Imagine my surprise when I saw you were involved. I'm afraid it probably cost your friend a kidney."
"Thank you, that was kind of you. You know he almost died?"
"Oh, don't be so melodramatic. You obviously had the situation under control."
"They got him in the end though. Bad business," said Stiletto putting his empty pipe between his teeth.
Miss Thrope calmly held his gaze as she raised her glass, "Absent friends."
Nineteen
Earth - Amsterdam - 2059
The problem with the future was computed predicted outcomes or CPO's. Everything was predicted, including social and group behaviour.
Social background, schooling, even junk food and musical tastes were monitored by The Corp, as the ruling elite had come to be known. It had all begun at the beginning of the 21st century when the whole world started giving itself to social information gathering programmes.
Initially, outcomes were used by the profilers of the secrets and the ads, but with time they were developed to predict how individuals and groups would evolve. That's how The Corp knew about the Fivxj group. They monitored their social traffic and their algorithm recognised trouble. Incendiary trouble.
It all started at a concert at the Amsterdam Jazz and Blues festival back in 2017. That's when the touch paper was lit, the actors came to the stage, the chemistry began.
There was the old chestnut about the German dictator. If you knew in advance how he would turn out, would you remove him from history and potentially save millions?
Now in the age of The Corp, most ambiguity had been removed. But rather than a problem, the Fivxj group was seen as a resource, a saviour.
Fortunately, the art of CPO's wasn't restricted to The Corp. There were rebel groups, sophisticated operators, who developed their own cutting-edge technology and weren't afraid to use it.
Miss Thrope's brief was clear. Go back to that March evening in 2017 and eliminate the threat to future generations.
“Like removing a few rogue cells before the tumour develops,” explained the client.
The Axel club was packed. There were a surprising mix of age groups, mostly young, but plenty of more mature concert goers, so Miss Thrope blended in perfectly. There were several hundred people crammed into the small space. A stage at the end of the room and a long bar down the side. She remembered last time she had been here, in Amsterdam to see one of her favourite Jazz musicians, she had called in to the club after the gig. That was before the smoking bans. She remembered the heavy choking air filling the dense club with its misty haze. So much better now, but the clarity wouldn’t assist her task. She paid no attention to the band on the stage. The Fivxj group didn’t exist yet, she was here for anonymous unconnected individuals. There were nineteen in all, mostly in their early twenties. It was quite a challenge.
Next day the tabloids had a field day. Banner headlines,
Club Tragedy.
Dangerous Recreational Drugs.
Rogue Batch.
There were even questions in Parliament, and a city mourned. S
omewhere in the upper echelons of The Corp a response was formulated, and an order given.
Twenty
Space
The CEO of the Corp didn't even have a name. Long ago it became a given truth that power was everything, and true power lay hidden like the slime clinging on the underbelly of an ancient rock.
The assassin had taken away their future. The CEO made a call.
Twenty-One
Space
The failure of the Weasel and his team, whilst disappointing, had created quite a degree of intelligence about Miss Thrope and her habits. They had followed her around the planet, hacking into the primitive 21st century satellite systems to aid their surveillance. She popped up in favourite restaurants and boutiques, always in what would be considered to be beautiful places.
The CEO had seen her type before. Living as he did in a world of control and profit, he misunderstood ambience for decadence, and quality for extravagance. Unfortunately for Miss Thrope, his own blinkered and prejudiced viewpoint was tempered by the wisdom to retain trusted advisors, who understood Miss Thrope a whole lot better. Still, he ruminated, the Rodents had never managed to locate any kind of home base, before they became careless and were eliminated.
Twenty-Two
Space
Assassin: Ann Thrope Series Book 1 Page 3