Simon Green - Ghost of a Chance

“I love it when you talk dirty,” said Erik. And his tongue shot out to lick the tip of her nose.

Natasha dropped him onto his feet and backed quickly away, rubbing hard at her nose with the back of her hand. Erik readjusted his shirt and sniggered loudly.

“You’re big and strong and scary, and I love you for it, Natasha dear, but always remember . . . I’m as dangerous as you are.”

“You think you can threaten me, you little worm?” said Natasha, glaring at him from a safe distance.

“Heh-heh,” said Eric. “Save the sweet talk for another time. We have work to do here, remember?”

Natasha gave him her best dismissive sniff, and he ignored it with magnificent disdain. He eased over to the closed ticket barriers, produced a length of wire from somewhere about his person, and stuck it into the gate mechanism. He jiggled the wire for a moment, and the barriers sprang smartly open. Erik made his piece of wire disappear with a somewhat overdone conjurer’s gesture, then stood back and indicated for Natasha to go through ahead of him. On anyone else it would have been a charming gesture, but on Erik it looked sleazy and opportunistic. Natasha stuck her aristocratic nose in the air and stalked right past him. Erik considered goosing her as she passed but decided that on the whole he rather preferred having his testicles where they were. He glided through the barriers after her, and they both stopped at the top of the frozen escalator, looking down the motionless steps. Erik moved in close beside Natasha, and she made a point of moving away. The light was very bright, the silence very deep, and down below, nothing moved at all.

“JC, Melody, and Happy are down there,” Natasha announced coolly. “I can feel them. Already hard at work, the industrious little souls. I do hope they turn up something interesting. If only so we can have the fun of taking it away from them.”

“We’re not only here for the haunting,” Erik reminded her diffidently. “We’re here for them. Oh, I have been looking forward to this. They think they’re so smart, so good . . . I’ll show them what smart really is. Can I kill the girl? I’d really like to kill the girl. I have a brand-new really unpleasant technique I’ve been dying to try out on someone.”

“JC is our main target,” said Natasha. “He goes first. He’s the dangerous one. Ever since he took charge of this team, they’ve enjoyed success after success. And we can’t have that, can we? Their progress threatens the Project’s intentions. So JC has to die. Once he’s been taken care of, we can amuse ourselves with the junkie telepath and the girl geek.”

“Vivienne MacAbre seemed very impressed with the whole team,” ventured Erik. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen her so . . . vehement before.”

“I felt the threats and menaces were quite unnecessary,” Natasha said primly. “I am an experienced field agent. I mean, Come back with their heads or don’t bother coming back ? When have we ever needed threats to motivate us? When have we ever failed the Project?”

“Vivienne scares me,” said Erik. “I like that in a woman.”

Natasha gave him her best withering glance, but he didn’t care. He was already thinking about things she didn’t like to think about.

Vivienne MacAbre was the current Head of the Crowley Project. That wasn’t her real name, of course. In the kinds of circles Project people moved, to know the true name of a thing was to have power over it. Vivienne was a tall, willowy woman in her early forties, with olive skin and dark ethnic features, and a great mane of curly dark hair. Of Greek origin, supposedly, though of course no-one knew anything for sure. She became the current Head of the Project in the usual way, by assassinating her predecessor. If you couldn’t protect yourself from your own underlings, you weren’t fit to be Head of the Project . . . Which have always believed very firmly in survival of the fittest. Certainly no-one had tried to assassinate Vivienne since she became Head. Though Natasha did sometimes allow herself to dream a little, of what might be possible in the future . . . as long as she was careful to only dream such things a safe distance away from Project Headquarters, in its bland anonymous tower block in the middle of London.

People were always very cautious about what they said or thought around Vivienne MacAbre. Because those who weren’t had a disturbing tendency to disappear. Sometimes right in front of people.

At the briefing, Natasha and Erik had sat stiffly to attention on hard-backed chairs, while Vivienne gave them the terms of their mission in her usual calm and subtly chilling voice. Apparently something important was happening down in Oxford Circus Tube Station, and the Crowley Project wanted it. Whatever it was. So Natasha and Erik were tasked with the destruction of JC and his team and the retrieval of anything of interest the team might have uncovered. Both Natasha and Erik got the distinct impression there was rather more to the situation than that; but they knew better than to ask questions. The Crowley Project operated on a very strict Need To Know basis. And as Natasha said to Erik afterwards, safely outside Vivienne MacAbre’s office, whatever was going on at Oxford Circus, it couldn’t be that important, or the Carnacki Institute would have sent one of their A teams. JC and his people were good, but they barely qualified as a B team.

Natasha and Erik stood at the top of the unmoving escalator, considering the still-life scene before them. The intensity of the silence and the stillness intrigued them. They looked at each other. Natasha smiled suddenly at Erik.

“I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours. What marvellous toys did you bring with you this time, you awful little man?”

Erik smiled smugly in return and fished in the bulging pockets of his jacket. He avoided Natasha’s eyes. Moments like this were the nearest they ever got to a real relationship, and they made him nervous. He produced with a flourish a 375 Magnum pistol so big it shouldn’t even have fitted into his pocket. He considered trying the famous monologue from Dirty Harry but knew he didn’t have the voice to bring it off successfully.

“How typical,” Natasha murmured sweetly. “A big gun for a small man. It’s all about compensation, you know.”

“How typical of a woman,” countered Erik, “to think it’s always about size.”

He put the Magnum away and produced from his other pocket a piece of yellowed bone, barely three inches long. Carved deep into the bone were strange, curving patterns that seemed to seethe and swirl if you looked at them long enough.

“Aboriginal pointing bone,” said Erik proudly. “And not just any bone—carved from the thigh-bone of the great naval explorer and map-maker, Captain Cook himself. Soaked for three years in the semen of a dozen hanged men, the first transported convicts to be hanged in Australia. I could point this at an elephant, and it would drop dead on the spot.”

“They don’t have elephants in the London Underground,” said Natasha, crushingly.

“They might have,” said Erik. “You don’t know. You never travel on the Tube.”

The next object out of his pockets was a flat metal box with two steel horns protruding. Natasha looked at it, then at Erik.

“Taser,” he said proudly. “Of my own design. Press the button, and this little box will produce actual lightning bolts. If my pointing bone doesn’t finish off the elephant, I can fry it with this.”

“What is this sudden obsession with elephants?” said Natasha. “It’s not more compensation, is it?”

Erik didn’t deign to answer. The last object out of his pockets was a simple monocle. He showed it to Natasha but made no attempt actually to screw it into his eye.