Hell Hath no Fury

by Tim Radley

Three part Tomb Raider story. A figurine of a winged-woman that Lara Croft uncovered in Greece leads to unforseen troubles.

1. Part 1 - Megaera

Hell Hath No Fury Part 1:

Megaera

by Tim Radley

trad50@yahoo.co.uk

Tomb Raider, Lara Croft, her image and likeness are trademark and copyright © of EIDOS Interactive and Core Design. No infringement or challenge to these copyrights is intended.

This story contains violence and strong language.

This is intended to be the first part in a larger three-part story, although I've tried to write it so that it stands as a story in its own right. I really would be extremely grateful to receive any comments or criticism you might have – particularly as to whether it's worth continuing with parts 2 and 3.

* * * * *

Prologue

Redness.

It pulsed and throbbed as if it was alive, distorting the air and the cave walls so that they appeared to bleed.

It wasn't real: simply a twisting of perception. However since, for 99% of people, perception and reality amount to the same thing the distinction was a moot point.

Something moved at the heart of the pulsating redness. A silhouette appeared. It was suggestive of a tall, thin man although no details could yet be seen. There were footsteps too, although they sounded subtly wrong – uneven and dragging: interspersed by a hard, regular tapping sound.

As the silhouette grew larger and more distinct, the ragged footsteps getting louder, shapes and patterns started to form amidst the redness. Gradually they became more defined, coalescing into recognisably images.

There was a woman; lithe and fit, dressed in shorts and a tank top with her long hair pulled back into a single braid. Even tinged blood red it was obvious that she was very beautiful. She was walking through caves, her step careful and measured and her gaze fixed upon the ground in front of her. One hand held a flare, blazing incandescently.

For a time the image just showed her walking. Then she came to an abrupt halt. In front of her was what appeared to be some kind of shrine. With everything bathed in pervasive redness it was difficult to pick out precise details – an archway surmounted by a harsh, angular looking face, gazing downwards: a shelf of carved rock. The woman stopped in front of the shelf of rock and contemplated it for a period. Then she leant forwards and carefully lifted an object from its surface – a slender, graceful looking figurine.

The image fell apart like a reflection in a pool of water someone had just dropped a handful of pebbles into. From its heart stepped the silhouette that had been approaching, now recognisably a man. The redness began to fade.

The man stopped and leant for a moment on the strange looking walking stick he carried. At first glance the expression writ upon his face was a broad, joyous smile – as if everything about the world was good. On a second, closer, deeper look, however, it was obviously something quite different.

He recognised the woman he had just been shown.

He had seen her once before, several months ago now, walking away from him across an airport concourse.

Coincidence could be an unholy thing sometimes.

The redness had faded away entirely now, leaving behind it a cave not entirely dissimilar to the one in the vision. Abruptly the man began walking forward again, limping badly and using the stick to help support his weight.

Behind him was a stone archway surmounted by a harsh, angular looking face, gazing downwards. Beneath it was a carved stone shelf.

It was occupied by something considerably more substantial than a delicate figurine now though.

Something that resembled a pale starfish flopped upon the ground beside the shelf and twitched. The impression of life was illusory however: one last reflexive firing of motor-neurones. Beads of dark, glittering red liquid ran down that pale object in rivulets, dripping from lifeless fingertips to collect slowly into a congealing puddle upon the stone floor.

The man's 'smile' as he continued to walk away broadened, displaying perfect teeth.

Blood is life.

Blood is power.

Blood is divinity.

* * *

The Aegean. So blue and tranquil in the mellow evening light that it didn't seem like it could possibly be real – some kind of elemental archetype of what the sea should look like but in reality never was.

The tide lapped softly against rocky, shingled beaches, a soft breeze stirring the balmy air with the fading of the day. Granite cliffs rose steeply on three sides of a secluded bay, seabirds spiralling overhead. The grass on the clifftops had been baked to golden brown by the prolonged heat of the Grecian summer and the earth was hard and dusty.

Amidst this idyllic setting, overlooking the cliffs and the bay, was a cluster of large khaki tents. A less than colourful circus was one way of describing it, and certainly from the perspective of the local populace it resembled a circus in any number of respects.

About a hundred yards from the tents, roped off and with work wrapped up for the day, was the dig site. Broken walls rose from the ground like the uneven stubs of a giant's teeth, uncovered after millennia long burial. Slowly the outlines of a recognisable temple complex, impressive in its scale, was taking shape where only a few months before there had been nothing except more sun scorched grass and a few oddly regular looking rocks.

Inside one of the tents Professor Nikolas Daskalopulu lent back in his camp chair and let out a prolonged and heartfelt yawn. Immediately this was followed by a frantic pinwheeling of his arms as he struggled to prevent himself tipping over backwards in an undignified heap. A string of Greek curses ensued shortly afterwards as he succeeded in knocking a half full coffee cup from the trestle table, all over his lap.

The curses died out. Today nothing – not even this – would spoil his mood.

At least, he reflected as he gazed ruefully down at his stained and dripping lap, he had managed to miss the computer. And frankly, given the way the swill tasted, this was probably the best place for it. Preferable at least to inside his more than ample stomach.

He leant forward and clicked to send the e-mail he had just finished composing, then powered down the computer. He knew himself and realised that there was no sense in trying to do any further work this evening the way he was feeling. The edgy, Christmas-eve sense of excitement made him clumsy. Much better to wait till morning when he would be calmer.

Am I getting old? There had been a time, and not too long ago at that, when he would have worked right through the night in a state of demi-fever.

Old at forty. Beneath his black moustache a smile split his face. All being well he hoped for at least another forty years.

Bah, I am a young man still. Although he had to concede that beside some of the graduate students he was positively ancient. When did they all start looking like children? I swear they looked older than that in my day. . .

Booming laughter. You are turning into an old man Nikolas.

His gaze happened across the find they had made that afternoon.

The feeling reminded him of the first time he had kissed his childhood sweetheart, Anna. Trembling, sweaty-palmed excitement. Nervousness and eagerness in equal measure. A sweet epiphany of uplifting joy, and the sense that something profound about the world had changed forever.

It had been sealed inside a plastic preservation bag and was still caked in so much dry mud that it was all but impossible to tell what it was at first glance. If you stared at it for some time you began to see the outline of a delicate looking statuette – a vaguely feminine figure, just over a foot in height with what looked like feathered eagle's wings. The visible portions of it were stained the pale green of verdigrissed metal.

Six years.

It was difficult to believe, but it was over six years since he had last seen something similar to this. Ah, Lara, what are you doing today I wonder? And. Are you still as beautiful and reckless as I remember?

She would be over thirty now, he reminded himself. Likely a different woman to the one he still remembered so vividly. Nikolas smiled fondly at the memories that flooded back. He hoped she would respond to his e-mail quickly. Even that he might get to see her again in person.

Perhaps that was the cause of his excitement rather than the artefact they had uncovered.

What the hell was that?

"Cristoph? Julia? Is that you?"

No, he reminded himself. They were down at the village, having a meal and some well-earned drinks with most of the others. He'd promised that he would join them later on.

Calm yourself you old fool. There were any number of different things that could make such a noise, and likely any number of people still around the camp.

The attempt at reassurance didn't do much to slow the sudden pounding in his chest though. There had been something about that noise he hadn't liked. A stealthy, furtive something. Still, no one else seemed unduly worried about it. He forced himself to relax.

You're not turning into an old man Nikolas. You're turning into an old woman.

There was a second sound, very similar to the first. His heart rate went through the roof again.

He reminded himself that there were security guards who would take care of anything out of the ordinary. It was a fact of life that archaeological digs attracted there fair share of weirdoes – people who felt a mystical attachment to the earth and believed that it shouldn't be defiled; others who had watched one too many episodes of the X-Files and saw strange conspiracies round every corner; sundry treasure hunters hoping to make off with the discovery that would make them rich; those who were simply curious. By now he should have become used to it.

Nikolas tried to settle down and failed. Puffing out a breath, he pulled himself to his feet. Better take a look, just to reassure himself. Otherwise he would be worrying about it all evening.

Old woman.

It took several seconds for his eyes to adjust. The sun had fallen below the level of the cliff-tops now and there were deep aisles of shadow between the tents, the light having taken on an almost surreal golden haze.

The only thing he could hear was the wind stirring through the grass and the distant cries of gulls. The camp around him had taken on the feel of a ghost town.

The silence was strange. Somehow eerie.

"Theo?!"

No answer. A frown furrowed Nikolas's sunburnt brow. He knew that Theo for one had stayed behind to catch up on his notes.

"Theo!" Louder this time. He half fancied he could hear an echo. There has to be someone around here.

That quiet, stealthy sound, this time more distinct. It reminded him of a dry cough, or an unpleasant, rasping chuckle. Nikolas froze in his tracks.

"Hello, is there somebody there?" The way his voice wavered betrayed his nervousness.

What alerted him to the presence behind him he didn't know. Nothing more scientific than the prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck.

He turned and saw the black silhouette, emerged from between the tents behind him. "Who. . ?"

Something hit him in the chest. Suddenly Nikolas was lying on his back, flat out on the hard-baked earth. He couldn't breath. It felt as if he'd been pummelled by giant fists, all the wind knocked from his body. His mouth worked, but his lungs refused to take in air.

The silhouette – a figure dressed in military blacks, his brain noted distantly – stepped over him without a backward glance. He was carrying some kind of unpleasant looking submachine-gun.

I've been shot.

Nikolas felt he should have been outraged by the realisation, but he couldn't muster the energy for anything more than distant curiosity. Funny, I always thought it would hurt more. The world had become blurred around the edges and it was all but impossible to concentrate.

The figure stepped inside Nikolas's tent. There was a fleeting surge of outrage. No, keep your hands off her you bastard. He fell back after a brief, futile attempt to stir himself, unable to summon either the energy or the desire.

Then the tent flap fell shut, cutting off his view of anything that happened next.

A soft exhalation. Nikolas's eyes rolled back, gazing ever upwards at the beautiful, satiny blue sky.

* * *

The door closed.

Winston scratched the tip of his nose and let out a slightly disgruntled sigh. What he was supposed to do with this he didn't know.

He took a couple of paces to the side, looking at the object sitting in the middle of the hallway from a slightly different angle. To be absolutely honest he wasn't even sure precisely what it was.

Much as he tried to take an interest, the old butler had never managed to fully appreciate his mistress's defining passion. There was always this nagging little voice saying it was just more old clutter that would need dusting. It left him feeling slightly ashamed of himself. This was, after all, priceless treasure from centuries and millennia past. He ought to be able to appreciate it slightly more than he did.

She could at least have mentioned that it was being delivered.

A fond smile broke across his face. For all the things he had seen Miss Lara grow up to be – intelligent, self-confidant, beautiful, passionate – she could be rather absentminded about every day matters most people would take for granted. Most of the time it was an endearing trait, reminding him forcibly of the mischievous pixie-like little girl he had known. Occasionally though it could become a little wearing.

An ark, he decided at length. Was that the correct word? Certainly, something about the way it looked reminded him slightly of the Ark of the Covenant that had used to sit in the living room.

Whisper it quietly, but Winston had been rather glad when that had been stolen. He'd never felt comfortable around the thing, though if pushed he wouldn't have been able to explain exactly why. Maybe it had just been his imagination, but it had seemed to cast a pall over the entire room. Miss Lara had never appeared to notice, but then she was away in some distant part of the world or other more often than not.

There was an ornate gold box – probably gilded rather than solid – with two long wooden poles arranged on either side for the purposes of carrying the thing. The box was styled in a manner that reminded the butler of a miniature pagoda with a pair of small doors that opened outwards set in the front of it. From the struggles of the two men who had delivered it the thing was damned heavy too.

Buddhist in origin. Perhaps Tibetan. Winston felt obscurely proud of having worked that out. Maybe some of that archaeology business was rubbing off on him after all.

It didn't, however, provide much in the way of inspiration as to what he should do with it.

Best leave it till Miss Lara gets back, he decided at length. At the moment she was away in town – as Winston persisted in thinking of London – having lunch with someone. A man even. In his opinion she didn't do that sort of thing nearly often enough, and she was hardly a child anymore. . . None of your business, he reminded himself firmly.

One thing for certain, he wasn't going to be shifting it on his own. Twenty or thirty years ago maybe. . .

He shook his head. Couldn't be standing around doing nothing all day, could he? It wasn't as though the old house ran itself was it? There were arrangements that needed to be made before he could take the afternoon off. One of his grandnieces was visiting him later on – something to look forward to.

For a moment there was a burning impulse to lean down and try opening those doors to see what was inside. There must be something inside, mustn't there? It couldn't be that heavy on it's own surely.

Winston shook the urge away. No, let Miss Lara take care of that sort of thing. She was the expert in such matters and he didn't want to inadvertently damage anything important. Plus there was the possibility lurking in the back of his mind that this could turn out to be some sort of Asian equivalent to Pandora's Box. Yes, that would be just his luck.

And rampaging hordes of demons would be bound to create no end of mess. . .

Chuckling to himself at the thought, he walked past the strange object and stepped through the front door. Yes, plenty of things that needed to be done for sure.

Part I - Megaera (the Grudging)

"So, how was St. Petersburg?"

Lara felt the colour rising to her cheeks and she was unable to manage an immediate response. She looked away, out of the restaurant's window at the brilliantly sunlit London street, then tried re-arranging the pasta on her plate with her fork. It didn't help the search for an appropriate reply.

"I'd rather not talk about it just now," she eventually managed, feeling her cheeks burning. Or ever, if she had any say on the subject. Those particular weeks of her life were ones she would quite happily see permanently scrubbed clean.

"Ah. I see. Sorry. Sensitive subject I take it."

Who are you calling sensitive? Lara bit back the sharp retort, knowing it was irrational. This wasn't turning out quite the way she'd envisaged.

Emil looked like he was struggling. "You went on holiday to Haiti a while back didn't you? What's it like? It's somewhere I've never been before." Safer ground here surely, his expression seemed to suggest.

"Less relaxing than I'd hoped for." She heard the snap in her voice and felt her blush deepen even more. Another subject she would rather not go into just at the moment.

For a time an uncomfortable silence fell between them. They tried to cover it up by concentrating fixedly on eating and making expressions over how exceptionally delicious the food was. It was fooling nobody.

Strange, Lara thought as some of the edge faded from her discomfiture. Normally conversation between them came naturally and easily, without effort. They enjoyed each other's company on the rare occasions they found time to see each other, and got on well together. As soon as they tried to put some kind of formal structure on it though. . . Called it a date say. Well, it just went straight to hell. Social skills dwindled to nought and everything suddenly became strained and stilted. It just didn't make sense.

She studied him closely as she ate. Tall, muscular, and athletic looking. Head shaven smooth and skin like polished ebony. Smartly dressed in an expensive lightweight suit. Still wearing those glasses he didn't need.

He was definitely a very handsome man. An attractive man. The two weren't necessarily always the same thing.

Admit it girl you do find him attractive.

And her friend. If she looked at it closely she would be forced to admit there were few enough people in this world she could call true, close friends. Emil was definitely one of them. They'd been through a lot together.

Perhaps that was the problem. With friends it became more complicated than the usual, I'm a woman, you're a man, we find each other attractive so lets have sex type thing. There was a lot more at stake.

And when it comes to it I'm crap at long-term relationships. Sad, but true. Casual sex she could just about manage.

"So, did you get up to anything interesting in America?" She tried again. There were only so many times you could say how good the pasta sauce was and be convincing. I mean for Christ's sake we're both adults. This shouldn't be totally beyond us.

Emil opened his mouth, then shut it again with a click. He tried a second time with no more success. "Oh you know. This and that. Nothing special," was what he finally came out with. His expression was distinctly uncomfortable. Another avenue of conversation brutally axe-murdered.

"Okay. That makes it two to one. Should I go for the tie?" Lara's tone was dry.

Suddenly Emil burst out laughing. After a moment she couldn't help but follow suit. She was aware that some of the Italian waiters and their fellow diners were looking at them slightly oddly but couldn't bring herself to care. Upper class darling, not my place to feel embarrassed.

"Christ, we're a right pair," Emil gasped as the laughter subsided.

"That we are," Lara agreed with a smile.

"So, do you think we should talk about the weather? That's supposed to be a safe, traditional English pastime."

"Nice out, isn't it." Lara tried to keep a straight face and failed abysmally. It had been over 30° Celsius every day for the past week. "Well that about covers that topic I think."

"I never asked you how your morning's been."

Lara groaned. "You don't want to know."

Emil was grinning. It made him look very different – younger. "Would that be a genuine 'you don't want to know', or more of a 'I'm going to rant and rave about it at great length for the next half-hour' kind of 'you don't want to know'?"

Lara pursed her lips. "Well probably more of the second kind actually," she admitted, gesturing with her fork. "You know, I always convinced myself in the past that I avoided spending much time at the museum because it was a dull, dry, dusty place populated by uninteresting fuddy-duddy types too caught up in debating minor academic points of little importance to do any sort of real, exciting, hands on archaeology. I've realised over the past couple of days that I've been lying to myself."

"Oh?"

"Yes. The real reason I've stayed away is that crawling around in dank, trap-laden tombs with instant death waiting around every corner is safer, more relaxing and much, much less stressful. I'd compare the place to a warzone, except it's not. It's far more hazardous and nasty than that. I mean there's no Geneva Convention governing conduct for interdepartmental sniping." She gave a mock shudder.

Emil chuckled. "Surely you exaggerate slightly?"

"Umm? You try inadvertently suggesting something that happens to contradict Professor Montgomery Arthurton's latest theory on the interrelationships between early civilisations. After you've spent several hours picking out all the resulting shrapnel then tell me I'm exaggerating."

"Ah." Emil wisely left it at that.

"To top it all off I've just been lectured to by my nominal department head over the obligations of my tenure." She muttered something beneath her breath that didn't sound as though it was particularly flattering. At Emil's blank look she explained: "I'm supposed – the word my so called department head used was 'obligated' – to publish no less than three papers in any given financial year."

An elegant shrug of her shoulders. "I guess I have been a little lax on that front of late. But most of the times I've tried any serious archaeology recently it's just ended up with people trying to shoot me. It's not as though they don't get a great deal out of our association already." She sighed. "Bloody accountant. I suppose I'll just end up doing what half the others sometimes seem to: churn out any old rubbish I should be ashamed to put my name to. As long as they get their three papers a year though, they seem to be happy. It's quantity, not quality that counts nowadays."

"Unlike when you were a lass of course."

Lara laughed. "Oh, don't start that again."

"Seriously though, if you don't like it why do you bother? I mean, it's hardly as though you need it financially anymore is it?"

She made a face. "Listen to me whinge on. Something about that place must be catching. It's not that I don't like it, per se. I've got friends there – a few of them at least – and it keeps me in human contact. And I have to admit that being Lara Croft of the British Museum does have its advantages. It opens doors that would stay shut if I was just plain old Lara Croft."

"One thing you'll never be Lara is plain."

"Emil, you know what I think about cheap and pointless flattery."

"Yes. I was under the impression that you loved it."

They shared another brief laugh. "So what about you then Emil?" Lara finished off the last of her pasta and took a sip from her wineglass.

"Got some time off from the day job," The less said about that particular aspect of his life just now the better. "Moved into a new apartment overlooking the Thames."

Lara let out a low whistle. The price of any property in Central London was extortionate. Anything in view of the river was likely to cost a not very small fortune.

Emil shrugged. "A perk. The job's got to have some. At the moment the whole place smells of paint. I get uncontrollable sneezing fits whenever I spend more than about ten minutes in the place." He grinned. "Still, I'm not going to complain.

"I've visited my mother and my sister. Done all the little jobs that I've been meaning to do but never got round to for the past year. Now I'm at a bit of a loose end. I guess I need to learn how to relax more. The art of doing absolutely nothing comfortably is a much underrated skill."

"So, to paraphrase what you're saying, you ran out of anything better to do, and in a state of desperate boredom decided 'I know, I'll see if Lara wants to come out.'"

"I. . . er. . . I. . ." Emil's mouth worked like that of a beached goldfish.

"Emil, I'm teasing you." Lara smiled, shaking her head.

One of the waiters chose that moment to come and take their now empty plates. "Was the meal to your satisfaction?" His voice had a heavy Italian accent and it sounded like he was repeating a phrase he had learnt by rote.

"Excellent thank you." Emil smiled at him. "My companion commented on how good the sauce was on several occasions."

Lara felt her cheeks colouring again. Thanks a lot Emil.

The waiter just responded with a blank, uncomprehending grin.

There was a dull, reverberating thud. It resonated through the entire structure of the restaurant, the condiment set in the middle of the table falling over with a loud clatter and the chairs beneath them rattling violently. Several bottles fell down from behind the bar and shattered. Lara's fingers dug hard into the tablecloth.

For a couple of heartbeats there was silence, then several dozen car alarms went off at once in the street outside. Where a moment earlier everyone had been shocked speechless, uproar now rose from a score of throats simultaneously.

"What the. . ." Lara cut herself off. It had felt like a mild earth tremor. She'd experienced several of them before on her travels. London wasn't known for its seismic activity though.

As her head turned she noticed clouds of blue-grey smoke billowing from the front of an anonymous looking building further down the street. A number of pedestrians were picking themselves up off the pavement, looking dazed.

A bomb. The so-called "Real" IRA or some other extremist faction intent on wrecking the Good Friday Agreement. That was her next thought. Though what kind of strategic target this particular part of Soho made god alone knew.

One of the pedestrians in particular caught her eye. He was standing around with a dazed, unfocused expression on his face, his eyes seeming to stare at something a million miles away. A line of blood trickled down the side of his neck, staining the collar of his white shirt.

She was perplexed for a moment about why she found the man so interesting. But Emil was staring at him too, so she obviously wasn't alone in her assessment.

In fact Emil was more than just staring. His mouth was hanging open and if he'd been Caucasian you'd have said he'd 'turned ashen' or 'gone as white as sheet'. He looked slightly like somebody who'd just been whacked between the eyeballs with a mallet.

She started to ask him what was the matter but never got that far.

Emil stood up so rapidly he knocked his chair over backwards. "Lara I. . . I've got to go." He wasn't looking at her, his attention still fixed upon that man. "Something's just come up. I'll give you a call. . ." His voice trailed off as he started heading rapidly for the restaurant door.

"Wait!" But Lara was suddenly talking to empty space.

As Emil stepped outside onto the sundrenched pavement the dazed-looking man finally appeared to notice him. The look that crossed his face could best be described as stark, panic-filled horror. An instant later he turned on heel and broke into a staggering, uneven run.

Emil launched himself after the man.

Lara rose to her feet, gazing after the two rapidly departing figures in mounting annoyance. This was not quite what she'd envisaged from a lunch date.

Bugger this.

She started to pursue.

* * *

The doors in the front of the pagoda-like box shifted fractionally, as though something inside was pressing against them. A couple of seconds later they popped open.

For a moment it was difficult to comprehend what was inside. Then it moved.

A human being, contorted beyond what most people would credit was possible. Granted, the volume of the box was just about large enough to hold a small person, although to external appearances they'd need to be dismembered first.

An arm hove into view, slender and flexible, child-like hand opening like a blossoming flower. A second arm appeared, then a head, shoulders and legs, slowly followed by the rest of the torso. It took more than a minute for the figure to extract themselves completely. At the end of it though a woman was standing alone in the middle of the entrance hall of the Croft ancestral home.

Her name was Hsu Yi Wen.

She was a thief, although she preferred to think of herself as an artist – worker of impossible deeds.

A quick glance could leave a person with the impression that this was a child: two-inches under five feet tall; fine-boned and delicate as china porcelain. That impression would be misleading though.

Closer inspection revealed a fragile, feminine beauty. Even then the onlooker was likely to miss the fact that this was a beauty forged from steel, and not in reality so fragile after all.

Hsu Yi was twenty-eight years old. Late of Hong Kong, more recently fled to London ahead of the too-interested Chinese authorities.

For several minutes she stood in place, stretching; working life back into her overstretched and abused muscles and joints. As she swivelled her head back and forth the sound of popping and crackling cartilage could be heard. The expression on her face remained serene, no sign of any pain or discomfort showing.

She took her time. There was no hurry.

Hsu Yi always researched her targets with scrupulous attention to detail. She knew for instance that Lara Croft was working at the British Museum today and wouldn't be back for at least six hours if she stuck to her usual patterns. She also knew that the butler, Winston took Wednesday afternoons off, visiting with members of his family and would not return until tomorrow morning. She knew a lot of other things too.

Of course, nothing in life was guaranteed. Life was chaos after all, and anything could, potentially, happen at any moment. One thing Hsu Yi had come to learn though was that human beings strove to impose order on the chaos.

So you didn't let all the minute possibilities worry you. If you worried you got nervous. If you got nervous you didn't perform to the best of your abilities. If you didn't perform to the best of your abilities you made mistakes. If you made mistakes. . .

Hsu Yi never made mistakes.

No, not quite correct.

Hsu Yi never made mistakes when she was doing a job.

Better.

Finally she appeared to be satisfied that she was physically ready to begin, the worst of the cramps and stiffness worked away. She moved.

It was like watching a wild animal. Swifter, quieter, more aware than any human could normally manage to be. There was a tightly controlled sense of urgency about her. Although it appeared she had a lot of time, she also undoubtedly had a lot of work to do.

* * *

Emil was no longer gaining on the man.

Initially, whilst his target had still appeared dazed and unfocused, it had seemed that the race would be over almost before it began. But the man had quickly found his stride and turned out to have quite a turn of speed. Enough anyway to keep the gap between them at around ten yards.

Emil tried to inject more pace.

Perhaps he started to gain a fraction, but it wasn't fast enough. He could feel his leg muscles beginning to burn, his lungs straining for more and more oxygen by the second. The heat of the sun beating down on the back of his shaven scalp was near unbearable and he could feel the sweat pouring off his body in bucket-loads. Today was a day for lounging in the garden or beside a pool. Not for conducting harebrained sprints through London's streets.

Timothy Hutchings. That was the man's name. He was supposed to have been dead these past five years.

Emil hurdled a pushchair that veered in front of him, ignoring the mother's angry shout. The toddler being pushed along slept through the incident in blissful oblivion. Emil lost another four or five yards of ground.

Once he and Hutchings had worked together, during his time at MI6. To call the man an old friend would be stretching the truth more than a little, but they had on occasion shared a drink over lunch.

Passers by stopped and stared at the two men engaged in headlong flight with a cow-like curiosity. Nobody moved to intervene.

Not that Emil expected them to. It was an ugly truth that a woman could be raped in full view on a crowded tube train and no one would do a thing to try and stop it. Similar incidents had happened in London, Paris and more than one US city. Keep me out of it, it's nothing to do with me was the all too pervasive modern attitude.

Perhaps he should be grateful.

A black man and a white man engaged in a chase. On whose behalf would they intervene? Call it cynical. Call it underestimating his fellow man. Unfortunately it also happened to be the truth.

Hutchings veered without warning down a side street. Emil, caught out, almost overshot. Another few yards were lost.

At least now there was some shade. It came as a blessed relief. He forced himself to dig deeper, and slowly began to draw back some of the lead.

He'd been at Hutchings' funeral and could still recall the forlorn tears of the man's mother. It was an awful thing to believe that you have outlived your only child.

A parked van blocked most of the route ahead of him and Emil felt his shoulders scraping against brickwork as he squoze between it and the wall. Hutchings turned onto another wider, more populated thoroughfare and for a moment disappeared from his field of view.

Burma. Hutchings had died in Burma. Supposedly died. It had been work related of course. Emil had never been in the need-to-know chain so he didn't know exactly what had happened. Whispers had implied that Hutchings' cell had been betrayed by someone. That rebel gunmen, under the impression he was working for the Burmese government, had taken Hutchings down.

Into the sunlight again. He was definitely closing now, though still not quickly. His lungs felt like they were bellows being used to fan the flames of hell. He could feel lactic acid building in his legs, and they were starting to feel as heavy as lead. At least the man he was pursuing now appeared to be suffering somewhat too.

There had been a body for the funeral, Emil recalled. Well, there had been a coffin, he amended. It wasn't necessarily the same thing.

This street was more crowded, making it harder to make headway. At least here his extra bulk and physical power gave him an advantage in barging his way through the masses. The gap between them began to close more rapidly, Emil able to see beads of sweat gleaming on the back of Hutchings' blonde, crew cut head.

It was definitely Hutchings. Emil had a good eye for faces – a necessary skill in the business he was in – and he'd had absolutely no doubt. The reaction when their eyes had met had merely been reinforcement. Recognition followed moments later by what he could only describe as stark terror.

Terror of him.

What the hell had Hutchings – a man supposed to have been dead for five years – been doing standing outside a building that had just exploded? Maybe just coincidence. Everything that happened in life was a coincidence in one way or another, so Emil wasn't blind to the possibility. You just needed to look at other options first.

And why are you chasing him? A question that up to now he hadn't asked. He remembered Lara back at the restaurant with a sharp pang of guilt.

Hutchings' luck ran out. He collided with a man stepping out the front door of an adult video store and was knocked flat on his back.

Emil was going so quickly that he almost ran straight into Hutchings, tripping over the fallen man. He managed to arrest his momentum just in time. As Hutchings struggled to regain his feet Emil grabbed hold of the man's shirt, spinning him round onto his back and pinning him in place beneath his bulk.

For a moment Hutchings made a half-hearted attempt to break free. Then their eyes met. Hutchings fell still.

They held each other's gaze for several seconds as crowds of people flowed around them, trying to ignore what was going on.

Fear. Horrendous, almost soul-destroying fear. That was what Emil saw in Hutchings' washed out hazel-green orbs. A resigned, dreadful hopelessness.

Why is he so afraid?

"Hello Emil. Fancy seeing you here." Hutchings' attempt at a smile cracked and broke apart. Emil could feel the man shaking in his grasp and relaxed his grip a fraction.

"Hutchings. You know that you're supposed to be dead, right?"

A shaky laugh. "Oh, yes. I know. Though I don't think I'm going to have to worry about supposed for much longer. Do you Emil?"

In perplexion. "What? What the hell are you talking about Hutchings?"

Hutchings opened his mouth to reply. No sound came out.

Emil felt his vision flicker, as if a shadow had passed across it. From that instant everything went cold. He could still feel the sun beating down on his back, but it seemed to have lost its ability to impart warmth. Inside a seed of unease sprouted tendrils of fear.

Hutchings' mouth was working like that of a beached goldfish, opening and closing rapidly but with no sound coming out. The man's shaking had become more violent, his head twitching from side to side.

Emil released his hold on the front of Hutchings' shirt, pulling back from him. For a moment he was unable to reconcile what was happening; didn't know what he should do.

Then he caught a vague impression of things – invisible, unseen buzzing things – swarming around Hutchings' head. Things that exuded malice and hunger.

"Hutchings! Snap out of it."

The man appeared to have been overcome by some kind of seizure, his back arching taut, His hands clawed feebly at the air around his head, which thrashed violently from side to side.

Somewhere somebody screamed. A child, stopping and staring, pointing. Not at Hutchings seemingly, but at the air above him.

Good-bye Emil. He never was able to tell if those words were real or simply an invention of his mind.

Then Hutchings was wracked by another convulsion, more powerful than the ones before it. His eyes had rolled back into his head so that only the whites now showed. Suddenly a geyser of blood exploded from his gaping mouth and Emil jumped back in horrified shock.

More screams rang out from all around now.

One last, juddering jolt, Hutchings' legs kicking and thrashing briefly against the pavement. Then he lay still. The front of his shirt was bright red with gore and his eyes stared sightlessly upwards.

Emil could hear himself hyperventilating, scarcely able to comprehend what had happened.

Suddenly the coldness that had enveloped him dissipated and it was again almost overpoweringly hot. He didn't notice – just stared down at Hutchings' body, unable to stir himself from where he knelt.

Neither did he notice the black S-Type Jaguar that pulled rapidly to halt at the curb beside him, or hear its door opening. What the hell just happened? The image of blood geysering from Hutching's gaping mouth was fixed in his mind's eye. What the hell can do that to a man?

Finally the shouting of the person inside the Jaguar penetrated.

"Emil! Get in this car NOW!"

* * *

A child-like hand reached behind the back of the diving board mount, fingers questing across the tiled surface. After a moment they located a tiny catch, almost invisible to the naked eye, and started to feel around its edges.

Yes, this was probably what she wanted.

Without hesitating any longer, Hsu Yi pressed the switch.

There was a soft click, almost imperceptible. Nothing else happened.

Hsu Yi waited a few seconds. Not that she had truly expected to see the results in here, she told herself after any kind of concrete result had failed to materialise.

Shafts of sunlight streamed down through the ornate skylight, though the temperature of the air around her was refreshingly comfortable. She looked around herself again – the swimming pool, surrounded by mosaic covered walls and floor. Black and white marble. Alcoves filled with luxuriant plants. A matching pair of jade feline statues, each with rubies for eyes.

One day I will possess splendours such as this.

There was no envy in that inner voice. Just an assurance that it was meant to be so. She suppressed a fleeting urge to stop and prise the ruby eyes from those jade cats, just as she had suppressed the urges of pocket any number of objects and artefacts that she had known to be worth a small fortune. That wasn't why she was here.

A professional never allowed themselves to be sidetracked from their true purpose.

Now, to find out what that switch had done.

Her footfalls were light and soundless, appearing almost to glide across the floor without touching it. She walked swiftly through the massive gymnasium, pausing just long enough to check that nothing had changed. The sheer range and amount of equipment in there was staggering, but given what Hsu Yi had learnt about Lara Croft it had not come as a surprise.

She stopped in the short passage leading between the gym and the entrance hall, merging with the shadows as she stood stock-still.

On her way in she had noted the door there, amidst all the oak panelling. There had been no visible door handle and it had refused to budge so much as a millimetre when she tried her shoulder against it. From the feel of it she'd guessed there were thick metal plates beneath the wood.

A search of the surrounding panelling had failed to reveal any kind of hidden mechanism, so she had given up temporarily and moved on.

Part of her had expected to see the door now standing open. But, no. It was still firmly closed.

One delicately arching eyebrow was briefly raised, then lowered. Otherwise her expression remained bland and impassive. Obviously the switch did something else.

Hsu Yi wasn't overly perturbed. To her practised eye the internal and external dimensions of the house didn't quite add up. The place obviously had a secret room or two somewhere in its vast frame. Perhaps the switch had opened one of those.

If so there was a very good chance what she was looking for would be located there.

She didn't see the newly opened alcove right away. Not until she was halfway upstairs and happened to glance back, over her shoulder. Where previously there had been a bookcase there was now a gaping, shadowy opening.

Initially Hsu Yi was disappointed by what she found. Just dark-stained wood panelling. A slight frown briefly marred her beautiful, flawlessly smooth face.

There was no sense in a secret alcove that held nothing. No logic.

Ah-hah. Her searching fingers located another hidden switch. A cautious lady this Ms. Croft. A hidden switch, whose only purpose was to open access to another hidden switch. One might even go as far to use the word paranoid. If one was unaware of what she was trying to hide.

Hsu Yi felt a brief surge of excitement. This had to be what she was looking for. She smothered the feeling ruthlessly. Calm. It doesn't do to – as the English say – count chickens.

Click.

There was a quiet rumbling sort of sound behind her and she turned around. A section of wall directly opposite was in the process of rolling upwards.

A ghost of a smile touched her small, severe lips. This was more like it.

As the section of wall stopped retracting Hsu Yi started to walk cautiously towards the opening that had been revealed. There was some kind of light flickering from inside. Definitely a good chance of this being what she was looking for.

Suddenly the wall dropped back again with a thud, blocking off the opening. The unexpectedness of it made Hsu Yi start. That hint of a smile instantly vanished.

Pressure pad triggers in the floor? Or perhaps, she mused, some kind of invisible beam that she'd inadvertently stepped through. With a fractional shake of her head she turned back to the alcove and tried the switch again.

This time she simply stayed where she was in the alcove and watched as the wall retracted once more. Shortly afterwards it dropped down again, blocking the opening.

Seven seconds.

The door was obviously timed. Hsu Yi studied the distance, factoring in that a person would be starting from an awkward position having just pressed the activation switch. And it was seven seconds until the wall shut entirely. The gap was only large enough for just over six.

Perhaps Lara has her butler open it. Yes, that seemed the only sensible explanation. The switch was designed for use by two people.

You should have made it five seconds Ms. Croft.

Hsu Yi thought she could make it. It would be very tight indeed, and certainly most people would not have been able to. Let us see. . .

This time the moment she pressed the switch she rolled, springing to her feet and launching into a frantic flat-out sprint, feet a blur of motion. Halfway. The wall was starting its descent. A third left. The gap was closing fast. A quarter. She wasn't going to make it. . .

Hsu Yi threw herself forward in a desperate rolling dive, a small involuntary scream emerging from her throat in the expectation of the wall crashing down on top of her. . .

Thud. The wall slammed close.

She'd made it. Three inches to spare. She sucked in deep breaths of air to still her racing heartbeat. Easy.

As she slowly got her breath back she began to look around at her new surroundings.

Something beside her laughed.

* * *

Lara slowed to a halt, watching Emil's back as it dwindled into the distance, hot on the heels of that man.

There was, frankly, no way she was going to be able to keep up with them. At least not dressed the way she was. The knee-length jade-green Indian-silk wrap skirt, sleeveless cream coloured blouse and heeled sandals might look stylish, and they were certainly expensive, but you wouldn't want to do any Olympic-style sprinting in them if you could possibly avoid it.

Lara folded her arms across her chest. Bloody ex-policemen. They see someone running away so they just have to go and chase them.

Part of her wanted to scream aloud in frustration. At Emil. At whoever the hell that man was. At the whole world in general. Just occasionally, every now and again it would be nice if some aspect of her life worked in something approaching a normal manner.

Careful what you wish for.

She realised that she was now standing directly outside the front of the building where the explosion had occurred. Broken glass was strewn across the pavement, glittering like jewels. Wisps of smoke still trailed from the vacant windows.

She couldn't tell what purpose the building served. There were no signs or logos with a company name, or any other indications of its usage. It looked like nothing more than generic office space, possibly even unused.

A frown crossed her face. Now that she looked more closely she could see bars in the window, painted white so they didn't show up very well. And the rather restrained way the glass appeared to have shattered – that suggested it had been reinforced. Rather surprising security measures for your average office.

She pushed the thought aside. All around her car and shop alarms were still going off in a blaring cacophony. In front of her a woman was sprawled on her side on the pavement, clutching her head and looking as if she had no idea where she was, let alone what had happened. Lara dropped to her knees beside her, intent on seeing if she could do anything to help. At least it looked as though the woman had managed to avoid being cut by flying debris.

You'd better be able to come up with a damned good explanation for running off like that Emil.

Just then the front door burst open. Four men emerged in a rush, all of them wearing balaclavas that concealed their faces, and appearing various degrees of smoke blackened. The trailing pair carried pistol grip shotguns. One of the others was carrying a dark green holdall with the fourth man leaning against his shoulder for support and limping.

A robbery then. Not a bombing like she'd assumed. Although that explosion had seemed rather extreme for the purposes of safe cracking.

A white Ford Transit van that had been parked about a hundred metres further up the street screeched to a halt beside the pavement, brakes squealing. The side doors were thrown open by someone inside. As the leading two robbers piled in, a security guard – blood pouring down the side of his face and skin blackened as though with soot – appeared in the doorway, a revolver in hand.

"Halt!" The man's voice was strong and commanding despite his battered appearance.

The only response was that one of the two men armed with shotguns discharged his weapon, blowing a sizeable chunk from the doorframe as the security guard flattened himself.

What kind of a place has gun-toting security guards? In Britain even the police weren't allowed to routinely carry guns.

Lara belatedly noticed that the man who'd shot at the security guard was backing straight towards her and the fallen woman. She tried to move aside but it was too late, and in any case her skirt got in the way. There was a collision.

The man crashed into her, tumbling over backwards and sprawling across the pavement, caught completely unawares. He lost his grip on his shotgun. It bounced and span, landing nearer to Lara than himself.

She would never be quite sure why she did it. Instinctive reaction most likely.

Without thinking she reached down and picked the shotgun up.

Something slammed hard into the side of her head, making her vision spin and dropping her to her hands and knees. The second shotgun-toting armed robber, noticing what she was doing as he came around her blindside, and absently ramming the butt of his own weapon against her skull.

"Naughty girl," he admonished. Lara's ears were ringing so much from the blow that she scarcely heard.

Crack! The security guard, recovering enough to get off a shot from his revolver.

She heard the man who'd just hit her swear vehemently as he felt the bullet pass inches away from his cheek. The other one was in the process of scrabbling frantically back to his feet.

Suddenly, before she could react the man who'd hit her was grabbing hold of her and yanking her to her feet, pulling her back into him as a human shield. He was very strong, able to brush aside her initial feeble struggles. The arm around her was so tight that she could scarcely manage to draw breath. The whole world seemed to be spinning madly before her unfocused gaze.

"Drop the gun or I remove the top of this lady's skull." The hot steel rim of the shotgun barrel pressed into the side of Lara's head. Her gyrating vision stabilised just enough to see the security guard raise one hand placatingly, then lower his gun to the pavement. No you idiot!

She felt the shotgun being removed from the side of her head, then heard its roaring bark. The security guard let out a raw visceral bellow, going doing clutching his leg.

"Would you two stopping arsing about and fucking get in the van!"

The shout came from behind her. Lara used the slight distraction it gave to drive her elbow hard into her assailant's solar plexus. She heard the breath leave his body in a whoosh and felt his grip on her loosen just enough for her to be able to yank herself free. . .

. . .and before she could do anything else the man who had tripped over her to begin with punched her hard in the stomach, doubling her up. Then he picked her up as easily as if she was a rag doll and heaved her bodily through the van's gaping side door. Her knees jarred painfully against metal, and momentarily she was blind in the gloom of the van's interior, her vision struggling to adjust from the brightness outside.

Then the two gunmen were scrambling inside behind her and she heard the door being yanked shut. It went even darker.

As Lara attempted to rise someone's booted foot took her hard on the side of the head. Through the swirling rush of blood in her ears she was vaguely aware of an engine gunning – the van lurching as it pulled away from the curb. Then unconsciousness swallowed her whole.

* * *

Release me.

The voice reverberated inside Hsu Yi's head, powerful and inhuman. She was standing in front of pedestal that came up to about chest height, topped with a glass case resembling a miniature aquarium. It was filled with some kind of liquid that appeared to glow with a soft, pulsating blue light.

Her gaze was captured by the glass case's contents.

A dagger.

Not just any dagger. Perhaps the single most magnificent looking dagger she had ever laid eyes on. No, more. Perhaps the single most magnificent thing.

It tumbled end over end in that bath of bluish liquid like some kind of exquisite perpetual motion toy.

It was Chinese. She knew that instinctively. Like her.

That blade, bright and scintillating, sharper than any razor. That golden dragon's head, perfect in every minute detail. That scale finished hilt and purple gemstone, which caught the light in glittering patterns. . . Suddenly the room around her vanished and she was standing on a snow covered mountain peak, wind swirling all around her. The view went on forever and the sense of exhilaration was simply breathtaking.

The dagger had somehow found its way into her hand.

It was warm, the sensation tingling all the way up the arm that held it. The sense of power was palpable. A voice was speaking inside her head, though it was doing so with images rather than words. Scales and fangs, so bright and strong and beautiful. Flames, warm and hypnotic and so, so inviting. An army of men, racing into battle before her like ants, swarms of arrows filling the air. Heat welling up from inside her belly. . .

Absolute knowledge that she was supreme and indestructible.

She was holding the dagger raised before her in both hands now, its blade angled down, pointing at the centre of her chest. Yes! Yes! Her voice, or someone elses? Without conscious decision the blade was suddenly rushing down towards her. . .

A gasp as it parted the flesh between her breasts, embedding itself to its hilt as easily as if it were parting warm butter. There was no pain. Just power and exhilaration and joyous laughter. A sense of completeness that made her want to weep with the perfection of it. Verdant light exploded all around her. . .

With ragged, gasping breaths Hsu Yi found herself back inside her own body, the room swimming into focus around her. She was shocked to discover herself on her knees before the case containing the dagger, her face so close to it that her breath was clouding on the glass. Her hands gripped its edges so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. She could feel herself trembling violently, beads of sweat running down the side of her face and along her spine.

"No, I am not here for you!" She thrust herself away from the pedestal, disoriented and scared.

Take me. Take me.

The desire to do just that was almost overwhelming. It was an effort to fight it down. Hsu Yi had to stifle a shudder.

What the hell kind of woman was this Lara Croft, to possess such things?

She had of course heard and read a multitude of stories, but she'd dismissed most of them as outlandish rumour or exaggeration. Maybe too quickly.

She forced her attention away from the dagger – no easy task – and looked at the three other, matching pedestals that the room held. They were not exactly comforting either.

Nearest to the dagger was another glass case holding an object that reminded her of a stylised eye. Concentric outer layers rotated ceaselessly around a small, central core that glowed with incandescent golden light. Compared to what she had felt from the dagger she couldn't bring herself to question the impossibility of either the rotation or the glow. At least it hadn't shown any inclination to talk to her. Yet.

Then, behind that in yet another liquid filled case, was what appeared to be a hand made from translucent blue crystal. She had the bizarre and paranoid impression that as soon as her back was turned it would start to wave at her.

Lastly, not inside a glass case this time, there was some kind of golden idol. She would have guessed that it was Incan, or Aztec, or maybe Toltec. Or some other ancient mesoamerican civilisation at least. Beside the other objects on display it appeared almost ordinary.

Except that it was probably worth more than the entire house around her.

That is not what you are here for, Hsu Yi reminded herself for the tenth time. A niggling inner voice asked what harm taking it as well could do. She resolutely ignored it.

The problem was that the object she was looking for nowhere in sight. Take the dagger. You came for the dagger. Don't you remember?

Ahhh! Shut up! It was an effort not to scream aloud.

Okay so it is somewhere else. There was plenty more of the house that she had yet to search.

Except that did not feel right. This was, Hsu Yi instinctively knew, the secret treasure room. The place where Lara Croft stored all of her strangest and most valuable finds. It was in here somewhere. She just had to look.

Slowly she moved around the room's wood panelled walls, searching for any kind of hidden drawers or compartments.

Briefly, as she passed beneath it, she glanced up at the leering T-Rex skull mounted above the fireplace. Some kind of tacky faux hunting trophy? It wasn't even as though it looked at all real. I mean, fresh, yellowing bone? Hsu Yi had seen dinosaur bones before in museums and knew that the fossilised remains were invariably a grey-black sort of colour. A fractional sneer twitched across her lips. She couldn't decide if the thing was a display of hubris or simply delusion.

Minutes passed by agonisingly slowly. All the time there was a maddening whispering, grating through the back of her skull. Suggesting. Enticing. Gnawing at her sanity. Hsu Yi was sure that it emanated from that damned dragon-carved dagger.

She was at the point of admitting defeat – giving up and going on to make what she knew would be a futile search of the rest of the house. Then a section of wall sprang open beneath her touch.

It took her so much by surprise that she jumped back several paces. She couldn't have said exactly what she had done to trigger it.

But you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Another English phrase she wasn't entirely sure she understood.

Initially she was disappointed. Four more artefacts of translucent bluish crystal, akin to that bizarre looking hand in the display case. One of them, she noticed, was carved to look like a lizard. Valuable no doubt, but again not what she was looking for.

After a few moments she found that shelf the objects were set in could be slid backwards. Doing so revealed a space beneath them.

Paydirt.

She almost couldn't see it in the shadows but she knew immediately that she'd found what she was looking for. A tentative hand reached inside and lifted it out, into view.

It was considerably lighter than Hsu Yi had expected, and for a moment doubt flickered through her mind. What if it was a fake – some kind of decoy? How do I tell?

No. She coldly ordered her thoughts quiet. There was no reason for it to be. That dagger – set me free! Set yourself free! – was clearly more valuable; more dangerous. Yet it was openly displayed. This was real.

She studied the object in her hands. Compared with the artefacts around her it was mundane: disappointing even. Yet it was this she had been hired to steal.

And nothing else. The instructions had been quite specific about that part, and she got the impression her client would be most disappointed if he found out otherwise.

A figurine of a naked woman, made from some kind of metal so badly verdigrissed that it was now coloured a pale, blotchy green. Still, despite her state of wear and decay she appeared to be a lithe and graceful figure. There were feathered wings sprouting from her shoulders, remarkably intact all things considered. Yet she was certainly no angel. Completely the wrong time-period for one thing. And angels didn't, as a rule, have eagle's talons instead of hands.

Neither were their expressions usually quite so furious.

One of the three sisters that were collectively known as the Erinyes – amongst the oldest and most mysterious of ancient Greek deities still known. In Roman times they became known as the Furies.

Hsu Yi wondered briefly which of the sisters this was – Megaera, Alecto or Tisiphone. She dismissed the thought as irrelevant with a shrug. That was for her client to worry about. It made no difference to her.

Not even bronze, she mused as she turned it over in her hands. At least not solid bronze. It was far too light for that. What made it so valuable? It puzzled her, she had to admit. On the surface at least she would have said that it was the least valuable object in this room by far. Well, except for that obviously fake T-Rex skull.

Still, some people found value in the strangest of things. It wasn't worth worrying about. All she had to do was finish the job she'd been hired for.

She took a foldaway bag from a pocket and carefully inserted the figurine into it. Then she zipped it shut. Time to go. Lingering would only allow chaos greater opportunity to pull its pranks.

And thieves didn't get paid by the hour.

The dagger called after Hsu Yi as she left.

* * *

"Are you sure you used quite enough explosive there Hicks? Maybe you need to try slightly more next time." A flat, East-Coast American accent containing more than a little sarcasm.

"Yeah Hicks. You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off." A more than passable impersonation of Michael Caine there, though from the underlying accent the speaker was obviously no stereotypical cockney wide-boy bank robber. More Hampshire than Hackney Marshes.

"Ha, bloody ha. You pair of sarky gits," was Stephen Hawking's considered response.

Slowly returning to consciousness, her head pounding, Lara felt herself frown. What the hell was Stephen Hawking doing amid a van full of armed robbers? She could still hear the engine and feel the road surface rumbling beneath the wheels. Every now and again she would be thrown to one side or the other as they rounded a corner.

Her head cleared a fraction. Well obviously it wasn't Stephen Hawking. For one thing it was difficult to imagine the author of 'A Brief History of Time' using the expression, you pair of sarky gits. Somebody else with a computer-generated voice then.

Stephen Hawking, as her brain persisted in labelling him, went on. "I swear that amount of explosives should never have had that effect. There had to have been something else in one of the other boxes. Otherwise it was just impossible. . ."

"Yeah, yeah. Whatever Hicks. Just admit it was a screw up. Jeesh, we could have all been killed." This was another, different American. His voice had a distinctly whiny edge that Lara took an immediate and powerful dislike to.

Lara was now fully conscious. And when it came to it damned uncomfortable.

It felt as though a marching band was pounding its way through her head, and that wasn't even the worst of it. She was lying face down on the floor of the van, several muscles screaming from the position she was in. It took her a moment to realise that her hands were bound behind her back. No, not bound. Handcuffed. The metal was starting to chafe her wrists raw.

As an added delight someone had stuffed a dirty rag into her mouth as a makeshift gag. Every time she inhaled she could taste and smell the fumes from engine oil, meths and god alone knew what else. An attempt to spit it out met with no success.

Part of her started to panic.

Lara fought the feeling down with considerable effort, locking it away in a distant corner of her mind. She could still hear it though, distantly trying to break free.

Whatever way she tried to look at the current situation bright sides were rather thin on the ground. At least I'm still alive being about the best she could come up with.

For Christ's sake Emil!

No, no. Irrational to blame him. Nevertheless, anger felt like an improvement. Stupid bloody sod.

". . .at least your leg wasn't injured," Stephen Hawking was saying. It's Hicks, Lara reminded herself forcibly.

"Hah. What about this blasted ringing in my ears then? If I've got permanent tinnitus I'll. . ." Whiny American. Whining.

"Ladies, ladies. Calm down, please." This was the English would-be Michael Caine impersonator. "We're all friends here, right?"

The whiny American muttered something beneath his breath that Lara didn't catch.

What she needed to do was get her hands out from behind her back. Then maybe she would have something to work with. Lara opened her eyes cautiously, able to see a forest of legs around her and nothing much else. Unfortunately, she concluded, these gentlemen were unlikely to sit around idly while she did so.

"You're all aware of course that we appear to have lost Hutchings. I just mention this in passing." Michael Caine again, his voice dry and sardonic.

"Fuck him." Whiny American, sounding vehement. "He's not one of us, is he? He's the One-Legged Man's pet dog. Let him take care of himself."

"I'm sure the One-Legged Man would just love to hear that assessment." Michael Caine apparently had sardonic down to a fine art. "No, my point was more did anyone see what happened to him? He does after all know who all of us are."

"Took off with this black guy running after him." A fifth voice from someone who'd remained silent up till now. "Looked like something personal to me."

"Fuck". The heartfelt way Whiny said it made it seem as if everything that happened was directed purely at making his life miserable.

"This black guy a cop do you think?" Michael Caine asked.

"Contrary to popular belief Simon, I'm not personally acquainted with every policeman in London." So Michael Caine was called Simon then.

They were talking about Emil and the man he'd chased, Lara realised. She cursed herself silently for being slow on the uptake.

"Look, for once I agree with Travis." This was the American who had first spoken. The non-whiny one. From the authority in his voice and the way everyone else stopped and listened Lara had him down straightaway as the leader of this bunch.

"Fuck Hutchings. He knows how to take care of himself. And even if he's taken he's not going to give us up. If I know one thing it's that you don't ever do anything to cross the One-Legged Man."

Who the hell is this One-Legged Man? Lara could hear the capital letters in the name, and wondered briefly what kind of a mess she'd managed to get herself caught up in. Some kind of crime boss by the sound of it. And belatedly: so Whiny's called Travis.

She wasn't sure if that was a first or a last name.

". . .There are more pertinent questions that need addressing," non-whiny American finished.

"Like what the hell's with sleeping beauty here? That one really sticks out a mile." The fifth man again. She couldn't quite work out his accent. Maybe Australian or South African blurred and softened from living in London for several years.

"Yes Travis, perhaps you'd like to elaborate on that one. Because I'll admit I'm stumped."

Lara got the sense that all eyes had now turned to look at the hapless Travis. He was the one who'd thrown her in the back of the van obviously. Probably the one who'd kicked her in the head too.

I owe you Travis. There was a brief surge of despair as she realised she was not in a position to 'owe' anyone anything.

Calm, girl, calm. She tried pulling against the handcuffs whilst hopefully attention was distracted away from her. There was always the chance that the handcuffs were designed for a man and might have been put on in a bit of hurry, without proper attention to whether they were fully closed.

"Look, she tripped me up and tried to steal my gun." Travis sounded defensive. "What was I supposed to do? Let her? Anyway, it was you who had to go and use her as a human shield Lomax, so don't go giving me any of that holier than thou crap."

No good. All Lara had succeeded in doing was rubbing her wrists a little rawer. Although the handcuffs were slightly loose they weren't loose enough.

"Jesus fucking Christ Travis!" The leader, Lomax, not sounding best pleased. "What the hell were you thinking?"

"Blasphemy like that is never necessary." It was Stephen Hawking – Hicks; Hicks; his name is Hicks – who spoke next. There was a general all round groan.

"You know Hicks, I liked you better before you caught Religion," Lomax commented absently. Religion sounding about equivalent to genital herpes. "Given the rest of our activities I very much doubt that a bit of blasphemy will have much affect on my mortal soul one way or another."

"It is disrespectful. I do not like to hear it."

Lomax grunted neutrally. "I'm waiting Travis."

"What do you want me to say? I'm sorry? I fucked up? If it helps I'll admit it. It was just instinctive." Travis sounded put upon, as though it was really everybody else's fault except his.

"Great," Lomax muttered. "So Travis, what exactly do you propose we do with sleeping beauty here? I'd be very interested to hear any suggestions." There was a weighty pause. "No? Can't think of anything? Didn't think so. Jesus fucking Christ."

Lomax sighed. "Okay Hicks, I'm sorry. That last bit just slipped out. Nothing meant by it."

"It is not me who you need to be apologising to Lomax." Hicks' jarring computer-generated voice. "Incidentally, it may be of interest to note that "sleeping beauty" as you persist in calling her now appears to be awake."

Thanks a lot. Just couldn't keep that to yourself, could you? Lara felt her throat tighten with fear and had to fight down the urge to start struggling hard against the handcuffs.

"Is that right?"

Lara felt a shadow pass over her and a moment later a strong hand firmly grasped hold of her chin and tilted it upwards. Her hair, which had mostly come loose from the bun she'd tied it back in, flopped over her eyes. The man brushed it aside and their gazes locked.

Lomax, the American she presumed. A hard, angular looking face was hovering just a few inches above her. Tanned with short-cropped hair that looked black in the van's hot, gloomy interior. He might have been handsome but what Lara primarily saw was hard. Very hard. She forced herself to meet his deceptively mild looking blue eyes without flinching, or letting any trace of the fear she was undoubtedly feeling show through.

After a moment he chuckled. "You know, you've caused us a lot of trouble lady."

Well pardon me I'm sure. How awfully inconsiderate of me to let myself get kidnapped by you. A brief surge of anger blew away those traces of fear, indignation taking its place. The rag in her mouth prevented her from giving voice to her scorn, so she had to content herself with glaring at him.

Another chuckle. "Like to think of yourself tough and in control, don't you lady?" His voice was quiet, seemingly intended just for her ears and not his partners in crime. "Well maybe you are and maybe you're not." A fractional trace of a smile that disappeared almost instantly. "You should've left that gun alone though. You really should have. Now we're both of us in a difficult situation, yours more difficult than mine. One thing's for certain lady. You cause me even a hint of trouble and you'll regret it. Understand? I'd like you to nod if you do."

After a moment Lara inclined her head in agreement.

"Good." Another smile, gone so quickly she could scarcely be sure it had ever been there. "You behave yourself and you might just get out of this alive."

"What if she was faking?" This, suddenly from Travis. "What if she was awake all along and heard us talking? That means she knows our names."

Lara saw Lomax close his eyes and draw in a deep breath. Whether he knew it or not Travis was obviously trying his boss's patience more than a little.

"What of it Travis?" The Travis part was clearly emphasised. "What precise difference does it make Travis?"

"Hey! You shouldn't be doing that. . ." Travis trailed off as Lomax slowly turned to look at him, gulping.

"Travis." Lomax's voice was quiet – dangerous. "Do you need me to draw you a fucking picture? I'm seriously pissed off with you just now, so take a fucking hint and shut the hell up! Got that? Good."

"I. . ." Wisely Travis managed to cut himself off. "Sorry."

Lomax moved back to his seat and an uncomfortable silence settled in. With it now rendered pointless to try and maintain any pretence of unconsciousness Lara attempted to find a more comfortable position. It quickly became clear though, that, lying face down on the floor of a van with a gag in her mouth and her hands bound behind her back, there were only varying degrees of discomfort. She gave up in case it looked like she was trying to escape and just listened to the sound of the journey.

No police sirens, she noted after a time. And also no indication that that the van was being driven in anything other than a normal manner. It appeared that they were managing to make a completely clean getaway. Not much grounds for optimism there.

How long was I out? She could still hear the distinctive sounds of London streets all around, but London was, needless to say, a big place. Were they north or south of the river? Where were they heading and how long till they got there? What happened then?

Wait and see appeared to be the only viable answer open to her though. Oh good I do so love surprises.

The stifling heat and the vibration of engine and tires were lulling, and despite the discomfort, and the tension Lara started to feel drowsy, her mind wandering off. It came as something of a jolt therefore when they finally came to a halt.

Most of the traffic noises had faded. There was still the sound of cars, but it came from a long distance away. Nearer to it was quiet and peaceful.

Then one of her captors slid the van's side door open and the peace shattered. Baking sunlight streamed down across her back and suddenly everyone was in motion.

"Get up." Lomax's voice. She was given no chance to try and comply as he grabbed hold of her handcuffed wrists and yanked her forcibly up to her knees. Pain stabbed through her shoulders and she felt the handcuffs biting into her flesh, blood starting to flow. A wince twisted her face but the gag in her mouth prevented any expression of indignation.

A moment later and a second brutal tug on her handcuffs had her up to her feet. Before she could steady herself a powerful shove in the middle of the back propelled her out of the van door. She stumbled as the heel of her sandal twisted beneath her, going down on one knee and knocking half the skin off it on the rough stones that covered the ground. Bastard.

One of the others put a hand on her shoulder and guided her to her feet much more gently than the American had. She found herself face to face with a slightly bizarre looking individual. Stocky and very broad through the shoulders, he was wearing a black woollen hat to cover what she judged to be a completely bald head. He also had a blonde moustache that had been waxed into points either side – it reminded her ever so slightly of Salvador Dali. Yellow tinted sunglasses topped off the weirdness.

He didn't speak so she was unable to match him to any of the voices she'd heard. Though probably not Travis, all things considered.

At her hard glare he looked away, making her feel obscurely guilty. For Christ sake, they're armed robbers and they kidnapped you. You don't have to be polite. Sometimes Lara wondered about herself.

Her gaze took in their surroundings. An expanse of waste ground overlooked by a derelict, graffiti-covered factory. The only sight or sound of other people was a ribbon of motorway about half a mile away – the M25 at a guess. So zero likelihood of anyone seeing them and doing anything.

There were two parked cars waiting, obviously intended to take the robbers on their way once the ditched the van – a black Ford Scorpio and a red Vauxhall Vectra. All well planned out then, though she'd already formed the impression that these weren't a bunch of amateurs on their first job.

"You decided what we're going to do with her yet?" Travis's voice with its ever-present whiny note.

Lara glanced across at him and was slightly surprised by what she saw. Not a petulant weasily looking man like his voice suggested but a lunking great brute with a heavy and permanent looking glower and a haircut straight from US Marine Corps bootcamp.

"Yes. I think I have." Lomax sounded grim. His face, as she turned towards the sound of his voice, was even grimmer.

Their eyes met and Lara felt her legs go weak and start to shake.

He was going to kill her. She could see it plain as day. His right hand reached down to free a handgun from his belt. It was a Beretta 92 series, a disconnected part of her noted absently. Like the ones she sometimes used, though finished in matt black carbon steel. There was probably some kind of irony hidden away there if you looked.

The urge to run was intense.

The only thing that stayed her was the certain knowledge it would prove futile. With her hands secured behind her back, and in these shoes across this ground. . . If she made five yards she could count herself lucky.

She tossed her head back, and tried to appear defiant. Even if they'd removed the gag from her mouth she wouldn't have been able to speak.

I don't want to die.

Just because you faced death from day to day didn't mean that you sought it. Acquaintance with the possibility didn't, when it came to it, make facing it any easier.

Bloody well do something. Don't just stand there. But she couldn't see anything she could do.

The gun was pointed towards her, its barrel a blank, implacable eye.

"I'm sorry. I was going to leave you tied up in the van until either someone came and found you, or you managed to get free on your own." He sounded almost apologetic. "But it wouldn't work. The One-Legged Man would know. He always knows. Nothing like this ever gets past him. Then he'd come and kill you anyway. Us too probably, for screwing up. At least a bullet is quick"

Fuck this One-Legged Man, Lara wanted to scream at him. The trembling in her legs got worse and she struggled to control her breathing. Die with dignity? Who the hell is going to care?

"If it's any consolation I didn't want it this way."

Lara saw in his eyes that he genuinely didn't. But she equally saw that this wasn't the kind of man who'd allow himself not to do something that he deemed necessary merely because he didn't want to do it. And neither would he have trouble killing an unarmed woman. He wouldn't enjoy it. But he would do it.

She stared and waited. And waited. And waited. A miniature eternity passed by.

Then the moment came. She saw the subtle change in his eyes and the tightening of his finger upon the trigger – swallowed heavily.

The man who'd helped her up – the bald-headed one with the odd-looking waxed moustache – stepped between them. He grabbed the barrel of Lomax's Beretta and pushed it to one side.

Lara almost collapsed as pent up tension was released.

"How low are we willing to sink?" She caught him saying quietly, at the edges of her hearing. He was the Englishman – Simon.

For a time the two men just stared into each other's eyes, saying nothing. It was Lomax who looked away first.

"Very well Simon, if that's the way you want it." Lara wasn't sure if she was imagining it or not, but there seemed to be a ghost of relief in Lomax's expression – that he wasn't actually going to have to do it. She felt all of a sudden like she wanted to throw up.

"But remember the saying Simon – if you save a life you take responsibility for that life. That now very much applies here."

Simon simply nodded. "Whatever you want."

"We will have words about this later." Lomax re-holstered his gun and turned away. His attempt to sound ominous didn't quite come off.

Lara became aware of the others, now trying to make out they hadn't been standing around, staring raptly at the little drama that had just unfolded in front of them. There was the one who had to be Hicks – a Frankenstein's monster of scar tissue who looked, from his face, neck and hands, like he had been blown up and sewn back together piece by piece. He was carrying the green holdall she'd seen earlier. The wiry, weather beaten individual with the sandy hair was, by a process of elimination, almost certainly the unnamed Australian/South African she'd heard speaking. Finally, leaning against the van's front door was the driver – a small, slender looking man with wrap-around sunglasses and a receding hairline.

Everybody seemed to remember what they were supposed to be doing at the same time. As the driver began to douse the white van with petrol from a bright red can everybody else started moving for the respective cars.

She felt a hand touch her arm gently and jolted fractionally. It was Simon. His expression looked uncomfortable. "Come on. Sorry, but I can't just leave you here."

Normally her attitude would have been defiant or disdainful. At the moment though she was simply too emotionally drained and let herself be led quietly away.

As she was being helped into the back of the Ford Scorpio the van went up in a whoosh of flame behind her.

* * *

"Would someone like to tell me what the hell is going on?" Emil finally broke the silence. Inside his head the image of Timothy Hutchings spasming and vomiting blood played over and over again.

Neither of the two people he shared the Jaguar with answered right away. He glanced from one to the other. In the drivers seat was Franz, his boss – or to use official company nomenclature, his advisor. A German by birth, Franz was in his mid forties. Heavyset with luxuriant auburn hair and an equally luxuriant moustache he was a distinctive looking individual. And also just about the last person Emil had expected to see today.

The car's other occupant, sitting in the back seat next to him, was a woman. Emil thought she was probably in her fifties, though it was a movie star type of fifties rather than the sort your average mortal experienced. She was very tall – six foot plus was Emil's estimate, though sitting down it was always difficult to tell precisely. She was also very slender – almost supermodelesque – and her sleek jaw-length hair was jet black, without a hint of grey. Dressed in a charcoal suit, he noted that she still had very good legs. In fact, if it wasn't for the expression on her face – like she was being forced to suck the sourest lemon in existence – he would have said she was a very attractive woman and be damned to her age.

"Well?" He prompted when it was apparent that he was going to be ignored.

"Mr. Ngonge." It was the woman who spoke, her accent American – New York if he wasn't mistaken. She didn't sound either friendly or happy. "I hope you realise you've just completely ruined an operation we've spent years trying to set up. An operation of vital importance."

In fact, he decided, she had a voice like etching acid. It took him a few moments to assess the implications of what she was saying.

"Hutchings was one of us then." Emil had to stifle a groan as the realisation dawned on him.

"Well done Mr. Ngonge." Her words dripped with sarcasm. "A pity you couldn't have been quite so astute several minutes ago, isn't it?"

Suddenly Emil felt his temper boiling. Normally he wasn't a man who was quick to anger, but something about the way this woman spoke to him – even looked at him – made his teeth grate. He took a deep breath – counted to ten. It only wound the anger tighter.

"Perhaps you could tell me, precisely, what I was supposed to think, hmh? I see a man who, as far as I know, has been dead for five years, standing in the middle of the street. What's more he's standing directly in front of a building where there's just been an explosion. Factor in that I know Hutchings is, amongst other things, an expert in sabotage. And on top of all that, when he sees me he runs away like all the demons in hell are chasing after him. Given all that what would you have done?"

"I would have stopped and thought." Her tone was frosty.

Emil made an exasperated noise. "Okay. Now you've thought about it. What do you actually fucking do? Assuming that is you're capable of taking any decisive action other than patronising people."

The atmosphere inside the car chilled several very noticeable degrees.

"Emil, try to remain calm, please." Franz's tone was conciliatory. "No one here is blaming you for anything."

"Really? You may not be Franz, but she – I'm sorry I didn't catch your name – certainly seems like she is."

A withering glare and her mouth seemed to tighten even further. Emil got the impression that if it tightened any more it would disappear entirely.

For a time a prickly silence settled in and Emil tried to keep track of where they were going. Inside his head though, images of Hutchings supplanted the images of the streets passing before his gaze – Hutchings, clawing at something invisible that flitted round his head; Hutchings going into violent convulsions on the pavement beneath him. They refused to go away.

"What the hell did that to him? How could he just die like that?" He scarcely realised that he'd spoken aloud, the question more rhetorical than anything else.

He became aware of the woman looking at him; got the distinct impression that she, for one, knew the answer. Before he could say anything though, Franz interrupted. "We'll discuss that later, Emil. That and other things."

And that was that for any conversation. Five minutes later they were pulling up outside a modern looking office block in Docklands, beneath the shadow of Canary Wharf. European headquarters. Emil had only been there a couple of times before. He should though, he reflected, have guessed that this was their destination.

They passed through a bright, clean reception area that could have belonged to just about any corporation on the planet, a blandly attractive receptionist greeting Franz by name. Still none of them said anything, the dominant sound the staccato clicking of the woman's heels.

"Okay, what's all this about Franz?" Emil demanded as the door of the top floor office clicked shut behind them. Floor length windows gave an unbroken view of the Thames and in the distance the London Eye could be glimpsed on the skyline, turning imperceptibly slowly.

Franz's expression was impassive. "Emil, I'd like you to meet Evangeline Stridom – a senior advisor from our American branch over here on assignment." The tall woman favoured him with a wintry little smile.

Emil inclined his head. "An absolute pleasure I'm sure."

"Indeed." After holding his gaze for a few seconds she turned on heel and strode across the room, stopping with her back to them in front of the window, gazing out at the London skyline. "Mr. Ngonge, perhaps you'd care to tell me what you know about a man called Luke Charron."

"Nothing." Emil's response was terse. "Never heard of him." And I'm willing to bet money I don't want to hear about him now.

She grunted in a manner that suggested his ignorance didn't surprise her. He was torn between the urge to slap her or just walk out. Uppity bitch.

"He's the founder and executive chairman of the Charron Corporation. A New York based investment banking and holdings company. At the last count, taking into account his legitimate holdings, he was the 71^st richest man in the United States."

Big deal. Emil kept quiet though, much as part of him dearly wanted to make a cutting reply. He wanted to know what had happened with Hutchings. Not this.

"Although if you add in his earnings from, shall we say, less legitimate sources – arms deals, money laundering, drugs: that sort of thing – he's comfortably inside the top thirty. Maybe top-twenty even." This was Franz in his dry, accentless English. "Of course that is all 'alleged' you understand. Several FBI investigations have shown the man to be completely legitimate, with no involvement in any criminal activity whatsoever."

Which alone should be enough to make anyone very suspicious. Emil tried to appear interested. Maybe that way somebody would get to the point. So much for my bloody holiday.

While Franz was talking Evangeline Stridom used a remote control to bring down blinds across the windows, cutting off the brilliant sunlight and plunging the office into gloom. A projection screen had rolled down one wall, and as Evangeline pressed another button on the remote an image appeared.

It showed a man standing in an office, superficially not unlike the one they occupied now. Behind him was the impressive vista of the Manhattan skyline. He was tall and thin and wore a suit that at Emil's estimate probably cost more than the GDP of several small countries. Black framed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose and he was handsome in an artificial millionaire 'I go to all the best health clubs and have a legion of personal trainers at my beck and call' kind of way. The half smile that the photographer had caught on his lips seemed to suggest hidden depths of humour, charm and intelligence lay beneath the surface. It was probably very carefully posed.

All in all Emil thought, Luke Charron looked very much the stereotype of a go-getting 21^st century businessman. In fact, he didn't quite look real: a hollow waxwork of a man.

"This photograph is taken from a profile that appeared in Time magazine last year."

"Highlighting all the charity work he'd done to help land-mine victims in Angola." Franz interrupted Evangeline's flow. "A regular Princess Diana."

"Though not, I gather, to the extent of having died in a car crash." That would be too much to hope for.

Franz gave a humourless chuckle. "Now that you come to mention it. . ."

"Luke Charron has undergone a few changes since this photograph was taken," Evangeline's voice had a distinct edge. Not someone who appreciated being interrupted, apparently. "Three months ago the chauffer driven limo he was riding in was involved in an incident with a tanker truck in New York."

"An incident?" Emil queried, interested despite himself.

"There was a collision at a road junction. The tanker truck's brakes failed and it hit the back end of Charron's limo. The limo was ripped completely in half and Charron was trapped in the wreckage for more than six hours before he was finally cut free. They had to amputate his right leg below the knee to get him out. He lost an eye too – the piece of metal that took it out came with a millimetre of doing irreparable brain damage. His surgeons claim it was a bona fide miracle that he survived."

Her tone suggested this was a miracle Evangeline Stridom could quite happily have done without.

"The woman he was travelling with was less fortunate. She was decapitated and died instantly. Interestingly both the drivers of the tanker truck and the limo escaped the collision without so much as a scratch."

"I take it," Emil responded after taking a moment to digest what he'd just heard, "that this Luke Charron is one of our old 'friends'?"

By old 'friends', he meant a group that for convenience's sake they called 'the Organisation'. Malandanti. The Shadow Hand. They'd existed for centuries under a hundred different names, always manipulating and poisoning society from the shadows. Along with the rest of the disparate company he was a part of, he'd spent the last few years of his life fighting against their influence.

"Indeed. You could put it that way. Luke Charron is perhaps the most senior one of them that we've ever managed to positively identify. We believe that he is the current head of operations in the Americas. Perhaps even the head guy full stop."

Emil let out a low whistle. "What about the Indian Gentleman?"

Evangeline sneered. "Ah, yes. The Indian Gentleman. Have either of you ever seen the Indian Gentleman? Found a single scrap of concrete evidence that he really exists? Luke Charron is more than just smoke and mirrors. He is real. He is a threat."

Emil glanced sideways at Franz and raised an eyebrow. Franz simply responded with an almost imperceptible shrug.

"You'll forgive me, but none of this at the moment is telling me what Hutchings' involvement in all this was – or what happened to him."

"I'm getting to that," Evangeline snapped. Emil winced inwardly. Ouch.

"Five years ago we recruited Hutchings after he survived an assassination squad in Burma. It was convenient for us that everyone believed he had died back then."

Convenient for his mother too. Emil remembered the distraught, weeping woman from Hutchings' funeral again. Sometimes I think we're just as bad as the other lot. He kept quiet and listened though.

"We've known – or suspected – about Luke Charron for a long time. It was seen as top priority to get someone on the inside and Hutchings fitted the bill perfectly. He did the job extremely successfully – became one of Charron's most trusted 'odd-job' men – and has been an invaluable source of information ever since, helping us counter a number of major operations we'd otherwise have known nothing about.

"Just over a month ago Hutchings informed us that Charron was coming over to Europe. He'd taken a leave of absence as Charron Corporation's chairman, ostensibly to recuperate from the injuries he had suffered, though according to Hutchings he had much more in mind than an extended rest holiday. Up till today though, Hutchings wasn't able to tell us precisely what he was up to. Except that Charron was putting an extraordinary amount of resource into it, and it was obviously extremely important to him."

And given the state that Hutchings had been in when Emil had last seen him, there wasn't going to be any more information forthcoming on that score. He looked from Evangeline to Franz then back again.

"Okay. Okay. I get that. I've royally screwed your plans. I'm sorry. Though how I was supposed to know. . ." He shook his head. No sense treading that path again, however much the idea of a screaming argument with Evangeline obscurely appealed to part of him. "But unless I missed something, that still doesn't begin to explain how the hell that. . . That thing happened. Why Hutchings started vomiting his insides out as soon as I laid a hand on him." A shudder, visions of it flooding to the surface once again, savagely vivid.

Evangeline looked grim. "One thing I've failed to mention up to now is the fact that Luke Charron is a Black Magician."

Emil's stared at her, not sure he'd heard right.

"Sorcerer. Warlock. Necromancer. Bokor. Witch Doctor. Shaman. There are a thousand different names for it depending on the culture. But they all amount to pretty much the same thing. Luke Charron is a practitioner of black magic."

"Black magic?" He could hear the edge of shrillness to his words. Inside he was still seeing Hutchings' last moments over and over. Feeling that unnatural cold. "You're telling me that Hutchings was killed by black magic?" It sounded insane.

"You have a problem accepting that Mr. Ngonge?" Evangeline Stridom raised a delicately arched brow. "Given what you saw?"

"You're damned right I have a problem. Black fucking magic?"

An amused quirk of her lips. "Unless my memory is playing tricks on me I seem to recall reading a report written by you mentioning, amongst other things, a demon. How is this any harder to accept?"

"No, no, no. I made it quite clear in that report that it was not a demon. 'An entity purporting to be a demon' was the phrase I used." Emil found himself shaking his head vehemently. He wondered why he found the idea of 'magic' so. . . well, distressing.

"If you find it easier then try thinking of it as 'psychokinetic' abilities or other unexplained 'science' as opposed to magic." Franz's tone was dry. "Whatever it really is, we have very strong evidence that this Luke Charron is capable of calling upon powers that are, how shall I say, beyond the norm."

Emil started pacing. A sure sign that he was tense and on edge. "Okay. Okay. So Hutchings was killed by. . . magic" The word stuck in his throat. "Fine. I'm not going to argue with you."

"Very good of you I'm sure."

He ignored Evangeline's snide comment. "Does that mean that this Charron guy was actually there the whole time, watching?" Emil tried to cast his mind back, to the crowds of people he had passed whilst chasing Hutchings; all those around them when Hutchings had died. He came up blank though. Apart from the child who had screamed and pointed at the air above Hutchings' head, the only thing he could call to mind was the look in Hutchings' terror filled eyes – the way the man had thrashed and convulsed.

Franz shook his head, his expression showing a hint of weariness. "No. As far as we know Charron doesn't have to be present to trigger. . . what you saw today." He looked away from Emil, seemingly struggling for the correct words.

At length: "You see, Mr. Charron is more than a little paranoid about the loyalty of those closest too him. He makes all his key personnel take some kind of twisted version of. . . communion. That is the best word I can come up with. It binds them inextricably to him. Allows him to own them body and soul. We've both seen this before, Evangeline and I." A shadow passed fleetingly across his face, quickly smoothed away. "Whether it is keyed to a particular set of circumstances – the subject's capture by 'hostile' forces for example – or whether Charron is able to see events from afar we don't know. But he doesn't have to be anywhere nearby."

Emil digested this. "So you knew about this. . . What did you call it? Communion? And you still had Hutchings infiltrate Charron Corporation?"

"We didn't know." There was a snap to Franz's voice. Obviously a sensitive point: it took a lot to stir Franz from his usual equanimity. "We had no idea how successful Hutchings would be, and until he underwent the process we had no idea what it was or what it involved. By then, unfortunately, it was too late. We couldn't extract him without risking setting off the same chain of events you inadvertently managed to."

"Besides," Evangeline put in. "We all know the dangers of this job when we come in – that there may be a time when we have to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good. It was always Hutchings choice, and he has managed to save who knows how many lives over the years by his actions."

It's very fucking easy to talk about that when you're not the one being asked to make the sacrifice. Okay, deep breath. Rationally he accepted what she was saying. The way she said it though made it sound so damned cold.

He shook it off; tried to calm himself. His head was spinning. The whole situation still sounded too crazy. But he had seen Hutchings die. That wasn't open to question.

Emil had developed a hollow, sinking feeling in his gut. "I presume I'm not being told all this simply to satiate my burning curiosity, correct? So I'm guessing that you now want me to retrieve the situation somehow?"

A look from face to face confirmed his suspicion. Bugger.

"Are you volunteering Mr. Ngonge?" Evangeline's lips were twisted in a wry half-smile.

No I bloody well am not. The sinking feeling redoubled though. Volunteer or not he knew he had just been lumbered. He wasn't going to be given a choice. "Care to let me know what Hutchings was doing outside that building? And how come you two were so conveniently on the scene so quickly?"

A pause without any response forthcoming. "So you're not going to tell me? Right?"

"We don't know exactly what Hutchings was doing. He never got the chance to report. The last contact we had with him was. . . rather ambiguous."

So you have two advisors cruising round in a Jag on the off chance of something happening? That didn't make any kind of sense, and Emil knew he wasn't being told something. Hell, he probably wasn't being told lots of somethings. No change there then.

"I hope you don't want me to try and infiltrate Charron Corporation in Hutchings' place? That, to be honest, would seem like an exercise doomed to failure."

Evangeline Stridom smiled grimly. "Indeed Mr. Ngonge. I quite agree. No, the time for subterfuge has passed. Now more decisive action is required. What we want you to do is kill Luke Charron."

* * *

Hsu Yi listened carefully to the footsteps ascending the creaky old wooden staircase. A trace of a frown furrowed her brow. These footsteps were not the ones she had been expecting. They belonged to someone light on their feet – fit and athletic.

Two words that could not be applied to her current client.

She turned away from the grime-encrusted window and stared at the door those footsteps were approaching. A double cross? Someone sent in his stead to complete the transaction? Perhaps someone unconnected entirely. A quick glance down at her watch. The appointed hour would arrive in precisely ten seconds. Too much of a coincidence, surely.

Hsu Yi had arrived an hour before the exchange was due to take place, at this derelict office block in Thames Wharf. It was one of the few nearby buildings that had so far escaped being turned into luxury apartments or an art gallery or something, although judging by the building contractor's sign outside that wouldn't remain the case for long. She'd spent the time scoping the place out – checking entry and exit points, and determining the best possible escape routes. It was not that she expected anything to go wrong; just that in her chosen profession paranoia became a way of life.

The door handle turned. The second hand on her watch ticked over the appointed hour. Briefly Hsu Yi wished that she had for once chosen to go armed. But no, guns were a liability. They gave you the option of doing stupid things.

A woman stood in the doorway. Hsu Yi let out an inaudible breath. It was okay.

"Ah. Ms. Wen. You are here already I see. Excellent." A statement of the blindingly obvious.

Her name was Claudia. That was all Hsu Yi knew. For want of a better description she was her client's 'Personal Assistant'.

Claudia was a large woman – large in a way that was not a euphemism for fat. Beside her Hsu Yi appeared more of a child than ever. Six foot plus, she was broad through the shoulders and impressively muscular – stronger and fitter than the majority of men at a guess – though still attractive in a cold Valkyrie sort of way. Short ice blond hair was slicked back from a flawlessly imperious face and her lithe, sinewy body was clothed in an expensively tailored black trouser suit. She carried a slim leather briefcase.

Westerners tended to regard the Chinese as inscrutable, Hsu Yi was aware. Claudia though, was inscrutability personified. She didn't recall ever seeing an emotion on that glassy smooth face.

She watched the woman pad towards the centre of the room, trying in vain to read something from her body language. Disquiet began to return. This wasn't what had been arranged.

"Do you have the item?"

Hsu Yi started at the unexpectedness of Claudia's voice, so ingrained had the silence become. "Where is your employer? It was agreed that I would hand it only to him."

Not a flicker. "Do you have the item?" Exactly the same question repeated in exactly the same tone as before. Hsu Yi momentarily fancied that Claudia must be some kind of computer, programmed only to respond to specific inputs.

"Yes. I have the item."

"Excellent." The voice that answered her was male. It came from the corner of the room behind her left shoulder. For a moment Hsu Yi thought she was going to suffer heart failure. She heard those distinctive, dragging footsteps interspersed by the tapping of a cane.

How? It is impossible. As she turned to face the source of the voice Hsu Yi could still feel her heart pounding.

The room had been empty save for herself before Claudia had arrived. She was sure of it. There was no cover to hide in, and the only way inside apart from the single door was through the windows behind her – closed, and in any case two stories off the ground. Even she would have had trouble pulling that trick, let alone a man with one artificial leg. Impossible.

But here he was, despite how much her brain tried to protest against it.

Her client.

His smile, as always, sent a shudder up her spine. Not because it was a fake or unpleasant smile; quite the reverse in fact. It was just that somewhere inside she didn't believe that anyone could really be quite so warm; so sincere; so comforting and genuine. Others would probably be charmed by it. On the couple of prior occasions she's met him though, she'd found herself wondering what, exactly, was hidden beneath.

"I knew that you wouldn't let me down Hsu Yi." He was positively beaming at her, radiating happiness.

Hsu Yi's gaze fixed on the scar that bisected his right eyebrow. It extended down until it disappeared behind the dark glasses he wore, continuing on the other side for about an inch down his cheek. She had never seen him without those glasses, but if she was a betting woman she'd have wagered a small fortune that he was missing an eye as well as his right leg below the knee. "Indeed, which I assume was the reason you were willing to pay me so much."

The mega-wattage of that smile was cranked a few notches higher. "I do like to think that all those who do good work for me are well rewarded."

Something about the way he said the word 'rewarded' set alarm bells jangling inside her head. She caught herself from taking a step backwards, towards her planned escape route. It was an effort to keep her face impassive.

"Is that it?" He gestured towards the bag she carried. "May I take a look?"

"Of course." She caught herself from adding Mr. Charron. She wasn't sure if she was supposed to know his name. It wasn't something he'd mentioned to her. "If I could in turn have a look at the payment I'll be receiving."

Luke Charron snapped his fingers. "Claudia, if you would be so kind?"

Claudia laid the briefcase on a rickety looking table and slid it towards Hsu Yi. In turn Hsu Yi passed the black bag she was carrying across to Luke Charron. As it left her hands she had the uncomfortable feeling that she'd just completed a deal with the devil.

"Feel free to count it if you wish," he told her as she opened the briefcase. "I assure you that it's all there, and then some. An expression of my delight at the speed and efficacy of your work."

Hsu Yi grunted noncommittally. A quick visual estimate showed he was telling the truth – there was probably at least twenty percent more than the agreed upon fee. The alarm bells in her head got a little louder. Who voluntarily paid more for something than they were asked? Of course it could just be a sweetener to encourage her to work for him again; a message that Luke Charron treated those who remained loyal to him well. But. . .

"Ah, Megaera, my sweet, grudging love. . ."

The words, breathed beneath his breath, snapped her attention back to him. He was turning that green-stained figurine over and over in his hands.

Something about the way he touched it – the way his expression had subtly altered – gave her a distinctly creepy feeling. It hinted at obsession.

After several more seconds he placed the figurine down on the table, opposite the briefcase. "Well, Hsu Yi? Are you happy that all is as agreed and that a final exchange may take place?"

She was about to nod; to say that yes, everything was acceptable. The words froze, stillborn on her lips.

She saw Claudia reach inside her jacket and pull out a matt-black pistol fitted with a silencer. Everything seemed strangely detached and she couldn't bring herself to react – not even when Claudia levelled the gun directly at her chest.

Four shots, fired in quick succession, no more than muffled phttts. Every one of them found its target. Then she was falling. . . falling. . . life fading in a haze of red and black.

"Hsu Yi? Is everything okay? You don't look well." As the vision faded away she heard Luke Charron's voice, seemingly filled with genuine concern. Then everything around her had returned to normal. A profound shudder passed up the length of her spine.

"Hsu Yi?" Luke Charron was leaning closer to her.

She shook her head in an effort to clear it. "My apologies. The English have a saying 'It was like somebody just walked over my grave'. Do you Americans use it too?"

Luke Charron was smiling again. "Yes. It is an expression I know. Well, I profoundly hope that there are no graves in the near future for anyone in this room. . ."

Hsu Yi had tuned out of what he was saying. It had been a glimpse of the near future, she knew with cold inner certainty. A glimpse of what was going to happen to her as soon as she agreed the deal. It had come from the figurine. Crazy. . . but somehow Hsu Yi was sure of it. You cannot let it fall into Luke Charron's hands.

". . . I was asking whether you agreed upon the exchange."

Hsu Yi almost missed the words but managed a quick, shaky nod. Then she forced a smile. "Everything looks perfectly acceptable to me Mr. Charron." She realised belatedly she had just used his name. It didn't matter anymore. She had to get out of here now.

"Excellent. I may have use for your supreme talents again."

It was an effort to keep her hands from shaking as she closed the briefcase. "I always enjoy working for such a generous client." To her own ears her voice sounded like it was coming from someone else entirely. She watched as his hand reaching for that stolen figurine again.

No. He must not be allowed to!

Where that sudden conviction came from she couldn't have said, but she responded to it instinctively.

Still holding onto the briefcase full of cash, she rolled the length of the table and snatched the figurine from between Luke Charron's closing fingers. Then, before either he or Claudia could react to what had happened, she turned and sprinted for one of the room's windows.

Part of the hour Hsu Yi had spent prior to their arrival had involved her loosening a particular pane of glass from its frame. As she now hit it, it popped free. Both she and it dropped, into the night and the street below.

* * *

"Well, that was something of a surprise," Luke Charron commented mildly.

Outwardly he appeared completely calm, unfazed by the unexpected turn of events. He limped across to the now empty window and gazed down at a small figure dwindling rapidly into the distance. Apparently, from the speed she was moving at, the two-storey drop had left her completely uninjured.

After a few seconds of apparent contemplation he turned to look at Claudia, who had moved to stand at his shoulder. "Would you be a dear and fetch the esteemed Ms. Wen back for me?" His smile was broad. "Good. I do so regret what she's just done."

* * *

"Hey, you're never going to guess who this is!" Travis's eager exclamation broke the silence that had fallen inside the Ford Scorpio. He was in the process of searching through the shoulder bag Lara had been carrying. With everything else that had happened she'd forgotten about it until now.

The response from the others in the car was distinctly underwhelming. Lara herself just groaned inwardly. Just what she needed.

"No takers?" There was an eager expression on Travis's brutal looking face, and for once the whiny note was absent from his voice. "A free beer to anyone who gets it."

"Go on then Trav, me old pal." This was the Australian/South African, whose name Lara had learned, was Langer, after no stream of guesses was forthcoming. "Don't keep us all in suspense. Who is this lovely lady we've managed to acquire?"

"Only Lara Croft. That's who." He looked disappointed when no major reaction was forthcoming. "You know. Famous millionairess and archaeologist. They did an article about her in The Times Sunday supplement a couple of months ago. Indiana Jane they called her."

Lara stifled a groan. That was an interview she'd really regretted doing. She'd hated the way it had portrayed her and what she did; made it seem like one big joke. Still, it had given some of her colleagues a good laugh. Wouldn't have figured Travis for a Times reader, she mused. He seemed more of a Daily Star sort of person. At least he hasn't mentioned. . .

"The woman who shot Bigfoot. You must've heard of her."

Sigh.

Beside her she heard the Englishman, Simon mutter something under his breath. It sounded like a fervent wish that he'd never woken up this morning. She could relate to the sentiment.

"Yep. I've heard of her." Langer opined after a moment's thought. It was the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

Travis, apparently, still wasn't satisfied. "Jeesh. Don't you guys realise what this means?"

"That not only have we managed to kidnap a woman, we've also managed to kidnap a celebrity?" Simon hazarded. "So the police are going to be stirred up like an ants nest that's had boiling water poured on it when they find out she's missing, and there's no fucking way that the One-Legged Man can possibly miss hearing about this. Lomax will go absolutely ape."

"Aper, anyway," Langer put in. "He's already pretty much ape as it is. Is Aper a word do you think?"

"Fuck it!" Travis by now seemed genuinely annoyed. "You know what the problem is with you English, Simon? You're all a bunch of complete and utter cynics. A nation of people who always see the glass as half empty. You're all going to end up disappearing up your own arseholes if you're not careful. A declining nation of bitter and twisted losers. Makes me sick sometimes."

Lara listened with some interest. The edge to her fear had faded and now there were only the occasional nagging spikes. For one thing Lomax was in the other car. For another she could only manage to stay afraid for so long – it didn't come naturally. Now her thoughts were going over more practical matters – like how she was going to get out of this mess in one piece.

"Do I have to spell it out?" Travis went on.

"Perhaps you do Travis. Perhaps you do." There was a weary, resigned note to Simon's reply.

"She's a fucking millionaire! Hello? Doesn't that mean anything to you?" Travis shook his head, apparently bemoaning the fact that the world had chosen to surround him with idiots. "I'll bet she could be worth more to us than any half-assed job for the One-Legged Man. Way more. Just imagine the possibilities."

Lara saw immediately what Travis was doing. He was trying to make out that his decision to throw her in the back of the van was, in actual fact, inspired rather than cretinously stupid. From the look of it he'd already managed to convince himself.

"I am," Simon stated flatly.

Travis either didn't hear or just plain ignored the lack of enthusiasm. "Her father, Lord Hens. . . Halshing. . . Something bloody stupid beginning with 'H' anyway, is absolutely rolling in it. I'm betting he'd pay an absolutely fortune to get his beautiful, beloved daughter back in one piece."

"Don't count on it." It was out before Lara could stop it. Simon had removed the gag from her mouth a while back, but so far she hadn't said anything, preferring to give the impression she was icily aloof from it all.

Both Simon and Travis turned to look at her, and despite the fact he was driving she could sense Langer's eyes on her in the rear-view mirror.

"My father and I are not exactly on good terms." She pushed down the discomfiture at suddenly being the centre of attention. "In fact if you actually read that article in the Times you'll know that he disowned me." A flash of old pain at that memory. "How much he would be willing to pay to get me back is therefore open to debate."

Travis was already shaking his head, denying. "No. No. That makes it even better. Don't you see?"

Lara raised an eyebrow. Some people when they got hold of an idea were like dogs with a bone. They refused to let go.

"The parental guilt thing." He smiled. It was an 'I'm already counting the money' kind of smile. "You see, the way I figure it is that your old man's got to be feeling pretty guilty somewhere inside about disowning his own daughter. Flesh and blood ties run thick, no matter what, right? I'm betting that this guilt will make him more, not less likely to pay a ransom. Stands to reason, doesn't it?"

Oh Christ. Not only does he read the Times he does cod psychology too. Is there no end to this man's talents?

"We are not kidnappers Travis." Exasperation leaked from Simon's words. Lara got the impression that he wanted to either scream in frustration, or hit Travis, or quite possibly both.

"No? Oh I forgot, we're mercenaries and far too good to be involved in anything tawdry like kidnapping. We just stick to honourable activities like armed robbery and shooting other people for money."

"Kidnapping is a mugs game." Langer opined. "Not something I want to get involved in."

"For fucks sake!"

"Hear me out Travis. Some places in the world kidnapping works. Sardinia and parts of Greece for example it's practically a respectable trade. Other places – and take note Travis, Britain is definitely among them – it's just idiotic. The payouts simply don't justify the risks of getting caught."

Travis sighed. "Well unless it's escaped your notice Langer, we have already kidnapped her. We might as well make some goddamned money from the situation! It's not as if we're a bunch of bungling amateurs, is it?"

"Bottom line Travis." From the way that Simon spoke Lara got the impression that every ounce of patience had been drained from him. "Lomax will not go for it. So whatever the merits of your idea, it's dead. Okay?"

"You can read Lomax's mind can you Simon?"

"Well, ask him if you like. But don't say I didn't warn you."

"When was it that Lomax became god exactly?" Travis sounded furious. Angry silence settled in again.

That had taken place several hours ago. Their eventual destination had turned out to be a farmhouse somewhere in Kent, very secluded with no other dwellings in sight. Simon had guided her through the building to a spare bedroom at the back of the house. Aside from a bed there were no other furnishings – not even a carpet or curtains. Everything was shrouded in a thick layer of dust.

"Okay. I'm going to take your handcuffs off for a moment. Only temporarily I'm afraid." He told her. "I suppose you could try to use it as an opportunity to escape. I might be thinking that in your position I know. I'd advise against it though.

"First off I've got extensive – and I mean extensive – military unarmed combat training. You look like a strong, fit woman Ms. Croft, and from what I know of you, you're very capable. But even if you can somehow put me down you're not going to be able to do it quickly and quietly enough to avoid alerting everybody else in the house. Second, even if you get out of the house it's a long run to safety. A long run against half a dozen armed, highly dangerous and unpleasant men in territory that they know and you don't. Third, although I wouldn't blame you for making the attempt, Lomax definitely would. I won't be able to stop him killing you a second time. Understand?"

"I understand."

She stood motionless as he moved out of view behind her. Curiously, despite the fact that he was obviously a hardened criminal, and as Travis had put it 'a mercenary' who would willingly 'shoot people for money' she felt relative safe around him. Not something she would have said about any of the others in this gang, particularly Lomax or Travis.

Don't let a veneer of politeness blind you, part of her warned. This is still a dangerous man.

She felt the handcuffs come loose. A blessed relief to he chafed wrists.

"Sit down on the bed please, Ms. Croft."

There were no sheets or quilt. Only a bare, dusty old mattress. After a moment's hesitation she obeyed.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to handcuff you to the bedhead." He told her. "This place wasn't set up with the expectation of having guests. Hopefully it should at least be more comfortable than having your wrists bound behind your back."

Lara acquiesced quietly. His assessment of her chances of overpowering him and getting past the others was, she suspected, unfortunately accurate. Then, without saying anything else, he left her on her own.

Alone, seconds ticked by like minutes. The room was stiflingly hot and the dust in the air just made it worse. Intermittently she could hear voices raised in argument, mainly Travis, Lomax and Simon, though with an occasional comment from Hicks's extremely distinctive artificial voice. Mostly what they were saying eluded her, but she did manage to pick out her own name being mentioned on several occasions.

Lara spent about an hour examining the handcuff and bedhead to see if she could manage to find a way of getting it loose. Unfortunately the bedhead was made of brass rather than wood, and an experimental tug suggested that the welds holding it together would prove stronger than the flesh on her wrists.

Her next idea was one of the pins she'd used to hold her hair up in a bun. A quick check showed her that they'd all fallen out though. Every single one. Not fair, part of her wanted to protest. Surely this contravenes the rules about heroines in jeopardy. She managed a fractional smile at the thought. Never mind the actual practicalities of picking a handcuff lock with a hairpin. . .

In the end she just lay back and attempted to relax, staring up at the ceiling and practising a variety of breathing exercises and meditation routines.

At one point Simon returned, carrying a pitcher of water and an empty glass. He didn't say anything and the expression on his face was grim. Lara simply watched as he poured some water into the glass and put both it and the pitcher down beside the bed within her reach, then turned and walked out again without so much as looking at her. Things were obviously not going well for him.

After a moment Lara picked up the glass. The sight of it brought the growing thirst she'd been trying to ignore starkly into focus. She took a sip from it. Iced. Surprisingly considerate. When she'd drunk what she wanted she lay back and resumed meditating.

Gradually afternoon faded into evening, the light softening and the edge of the heat fading somewhat. Would anyone have noticed her absence yet? Would anyone be looking for her?

It was Winston's afternoon off, and in any case he would still assume she was at the museum. Even if she were gone for several days he probably wouldn't get unduly worried. She'd gone off somewhere or other on the spur of the moment on numerous occasions in the past.

What about Emil then? Well, presuming he wasn't still chasing after that man he'd probably assume that she'd gone off in huff at him running out on her. Bloody men. Again she doubted he'd start to become worried by her absence for at least a couple of days. Maybe not even then.

No, her best hope was that someone had noticed her being bundled into the back of that van. The security guard for instance. The police would certainly have taken a large-scale interest in the explosion and robbery, and if they knew a hostage was taken that interest would be even more urgent. By now, she guessed, they would have found the burnt out van. There, though the problems started. How did they get from the van to this farmhouse in Kent? Not quickly, Lara was forced to conclude. Not unless they got amazingly lucky, or these men had done something incredibly stupid to leave a trail.

So, looks like I'm on my own.

Evening ticked on into night, light fading to leave her in darkness. Somewhere outside she could hear an owl. Occasionally voices from inside the farmhouse reached her, though now they seemed more measured, the arguments resolved.

She was almost dozing off when the door finally opened again. Simon of course – the others, thankfully seemed content to ignore her. She blinked against the brightness of the light he turned on, the naked bulb flickering and humming.

"Thought you might want some food." He said simply. "Nothing fancy I'm afraid. Beans on toast was the best I could manage to drum up. Not what you're used to I'm sure."

Lara accepted the plate silently, doing nothing to disabuse him of that notion. When left to survive off her own cooking she tended to eat beans on toast as often than not. It was a personal favourite of hers.

As she looked up at him she blinked. Still the black woollen hat, those yellow tinted glasses and that odd looking waxed moustache, but now there was something new. "You're aware that you seem to have a rat on your shoulder I presume?"

It was white with pink eyes, appearing almost as large as a small cat. And from the look of it, it was perfectly content with its current perch. Its nose twitched at Lara.

"Ah, yes Captain Harrison." A fractional smile touched Simon's lips and he reached up to stoke the rat behind the ears. The rat seemed to revel in the attention it was getting.

"Captain Harrison?" Lara failed to keep the incredulity out of her voice.

"Named after my commanding officer in the Gulf," He explained.

"Ah. I see" That explanation just made it seem even more ludicrously surreal though. "I'm sure the Captain would be touched by the tribute," she said carefully.

Simon chuckled. "Or something. I tend to think that the poor rat got the worst end of that particular deal."

"You know, I could do this a whole lot easier if I had both hands free," Lara told him after she finished the first mouthful of the beans on toast.

"Yes, I'm sure you could. Never mind, you're a resourceful woman. You'll manage." He turned to leave.

"Wait."

Simon paused in the middle of turning the door handle, glancing back at Lara.. There was a cautious, questioning look in his eyes. "What is it?"

"Would you stay with my while I eat?"

"Why?"

Lara shrugged. "I just thought it would be nice to have someone to talk to."

He frowned and there was a hint of suspicion in his expression. "If you're thinking of trying anything. . ."

"What, like knocking you unconscious with this plate, taking the handcuff keys from your body then doing a runner into the night before anyone notices? You mean that sort of thing?"

"Well put like that, I guess it does sound a little unlikely." After a moment's pause he turned from the door, moving a rickety looking chair out from the corner of the room and sitting on it. Lara watched him as she ate several more mouthfuls of the beans. He looked distinctly ill at ease, although the rat on his shoulder appeared quite comfortable.

"So, you served in the Gulf then?" Lara said at length. The chair beneath him looked much too small, possibly designed for a child. His heavyset bulk dwarfed it. "Royal Marines?" She hazarded.

A tiny grimace, which she almost missed. "Special Air Service."

Bloody hell. Lara let out a low whistle. The rat started washing its face with its paws.

"You're wondering how I came to sink to this, aren't you? I mean serving Queen and country in the finest elite fighting force on the planet, to armed robbery and kidnapping with the hard-of-thinking like Travis."

Lara shrugged. "A lot of years. A lot of water passed under the bridge. We all change. I'm hardly in a position to judge you for it."

Simon grunted. "Sometimes, I admit, I really do wonder about it." He shook his head.

"So is Simon your first or last name?" A change of subject was probably in order.

"First." A slight smile, as if he recognised what she was doing. "I know the others all use their last names, but Bulford-North is a little on the unwieldy side, so I'm just Simon."

Simon Bulford-North.

Lara concentrated on eating. She found herself wondering why she'd asked Simon to stay. Certainly there was no plan. It had just been a spur of the moment thing that had slipped out before she'd thought about it. Maybe, she rationalised, making herself seem more human to her captors would make them less inclined to simply shoot her. There was a brief recollection of the look in Lomax's eyes as he held the gun on her. Then again, perhaps I was telling the straight truth. I do just want some company.

"You know, I recognised who you were before Travis said anything about it."

"Oh?" That piqued Lara's curiosity. She looked up from her plate.

"Not right away of course. Difficult to recognise anybody who's lying face down in the back of a van. Something twigged just before Lomax was going to shoot you."

"Ah." She paused. "Was that anything to do with why you intervened?"

He shook is head. "I did it for exactly the reasons I told Lomax. Murdering innocent people isn't what I signed up for. When it comes to it, it isn't what any of us signed up for. Not even Lomax. Though he's never going to admit it, I think he was relieved."

"Well, thank you anyway. I think I prefer my head without bullet perforations."

He grunted – seemed embarrassed by even that oblique praise. For a time silence fell and Lara concentrated on finishing off the beans on toast.

"I've read a couple of your books, you know."

"Really?" Oh God. For some reason Lara always felt ever so slightly uncomfortable when people brought that subject up. "What did you think?" Her tone was carefully bland.

He looked down a moment at the bare floorboards before meeting her gaze again. "Honestly?"

"Please."

"Can't say I liked them much. Sorry, but there it is."

Should I feel offended? She didn't strangely enough. It was actually quite refreshing. Usually people just said how much they'd enjoyed them, but she'd never been wholly convinced. It seemed like a politeness thing, like commenting on how much you liked someone's new hairstyle, even if you secretly thought it was absolutely ghastly. "What didn't you like, if I can ask?"

He looked even more embarrassed. "You're not offended are you?"

Lets see I've been kidnapped, narrowly escaped getting shot dead, and now I'm sitting handcuffed to a bed in a farmhouse somewhere in Kent. And you're worried that you not liking my books might cause offence. Part of her wanted to laugh at the absurdity, but she simply shook her head.

"Well I'm not saying they weren't well written, or anything like that. It's just that, for me there's one important thing that all travel writing has got to have, which yours just didn't. Authenticity. You made a lot of what you wrote up, didn't you?"

Lara simply raised an eyebrow; held his gaze.

"Well, didn't you? I mean, er. . . some of it. That couldn't have really happened, right?"

She wondered briefly what his opinion would be if she'd written all that had actually happened in her career, rather than just the bits that seemed vaguely believable. She supposed that she was guilty of what he was saying – being economical with the truth. Just not quite in the way that he supposed.

"To be honest," she said at length, "I never really had much in the way of literary aspirations. I'm afraid I was always in it for the money. Not the art."

"Money? I thought you were a millionaire."

Lara made a face. "Like I told Travis, my father disowned me. Cut off all my allowances. There was a time a few years back now when my finances got pretty tight, and my writing was about the only thing that allowed me to keep travelling. It's changed a bit now, but I keep on doing it, on and off." She shrugged.

"So how does one manage to get disowned exactly? I'm having difficulty imaging it at the moment."

A slightly sad half-smile crossed Lara's face. "You wouldn't if you knew me better. I can be a difficult person sometimes. My father and I didn't see to eye on a number of issues. My career choice and his plans for my wedding being foremost among them. Things got a little heated between us." She stopped – really didn't have any desire to go into it any further with someone who was, however he acted, one of her kidnappers.

"So, no literary pretensions yourself Simon? I thought it was becoming something of a tradition."

A wry chuckle. "You're referring to Mr. McNab. Bravo Two Zero and that crap, I take it? No, I think I'll spare the world my pathetic ramblings thank you." He paused. "I knew him in passing you did know? Overbearing asshole with an inflated opinion of himself."

Lara watched the rat – Captain Harrison – as it suddenly decided to crawl across the back of Simon's bull-neck and switch to his other shoulder. It's long, naked pink tail twitched back and forth, and from the way it looked at her she would swear it was laughing.

"You'll pardon me for asking, but why a rat?"

"You're not one of these people who hate rats are you?" Simon asked, idly reaching up to stroke Captain Harrison.

Lara shrugged. "I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other to be honest." Although she had in the past encountered – and disposed of – some pretty unpleasant specimens of that particular species. Ones that made even Captain Harrison seem small.

"People have a lot of unfounded prejudices about rats. They're actually very intelligent animals. Much more so than either dogs or cats. They're affectionate, sociable creatures and contrary to popular belief there also pretty hygienic."

"But still, not most peoples first choice as a pet."

"Mine neither," Simon admitted slightly ruefully. I'd never have bought him on my own. "Captain Harrison here was originally a joke. I'd just split up with my long-term girlfriend a few years back. A messy, unpleasant sort of business. One of my friends thought I needed a replacement, so I didn't feel lonely. We've been together longer than I was with my girlfriend now, and as an added bonus the rat doesn't yell and throw things at me."

A touching story.

"You finished that?" Simon nodded towards her now empty plate.

At that moment the bedroom door opened. Lomax. His gaze swept quickly across Lara without ever meeting her eyes. She felt he her jaw click shut, and the words that had been on her lips died.

"So this is where you've got to Simon. What are you doing?" His voice was perceptibly cold.

"Making sure our guest gets fed. No one else is going to do it."

Lomax grunted. "Well you're needed. Now." He turned and left, the door slamming behind him.

Simon stood up and took her plate. "Don't mind him. He's been under a lot of stress recently. He'd really not that bad once you get to know him."

"I'm sure." As people who've nearly killed me go, he's probably just great.

Then she was left alone again.

* * *

"What the hell are you doing?" Emil somewhat belatedly noticed that his newly acquired partner was in the process of pouring something on the windowsills of his apartment. She'd already completed the first one and had moved on to the second.

Some kind of crystalline white powder, he noticed as he rushed across the room. "Hey, I've only just painted those things." Well to be absolutely accurate, paid someone else to paint them. But same difference.

She looked up at him, expression bland. Her name was Joanna Ironheart and she was Evangeline Stridom's protégé. Also, in Emil's opinion, positive proof that a sense of humour bypass operation was now a realistic surgical procedure. "Relax. This will not in any way damage your precious paint." Then she continued pouring.

"What is it?" He demanded. The urge to scream or bang his head repeatedly against the window was strong. What have I done to deserve this?

"Salt."

"Salt?"

"That is correct, yes. I found it in a cupboard in your kitchen. Surprisingly well stocked for a single man."

"Okay." Emil tried, not quite successfully, to remain calm. "One question springs to mind. Why the. . ." He caught himself. "Why are you pouring salt along all my windowsills?"

"Protection." Her tone contained mild surprise, as if it should have been obvious, even to a small child.

"Protection?"

"You know that you have a habit of repeating what I say right after I've said it? Please don't. I find it annoying."

Emil turned away from her so she couldn't see the snarl that passed across his face. He could feel his back teeth grinding together; took a deep breath and tried to relax. "Okay, this might well be an idiotic question Ms. Ironheart, but please humour me. What sort of protection does salt from my kitchen give when poured across my windowsills?"

"Joanna. Since we are going to be working together you should call me Joanna."

"Okay then. Joanna." He looked at her. She was, he supposed, in a purely physical sense, an extremely attractive woman; tall, slim athletic looking with short-cropped dark hair; a flawlessly serene looking face. Something about her appearance made Emil think she had at least a touch of Native American blood in her. It was just that what he'd so far seen of her personality drove him completely up the wall. Cloned in Evangeline Stridom's image, he thought unkindly. Though she'd probably see that as the highest form of compliment.

"To answer your question, the protection is against Luke Charron. Potentially you exposed yourself to his gaze this afternoon. This should keep it away for now."

Ah yes. Luke Charron. The supposed black magician.

The man they were meant to kill.

To start with Emil had been outraged by the suggestion. He was not anyone's pet assassin. He would not kill to order, just because it was convenient for his superiors. What did they think he was?

Then he had stopped and thought about it.

When it came to it, what he was being ordered to do now was no different to what he had done numerous times in the past. It was merely the phrasing that was different. Always before he had 'countered threats', 'dealt with situations' or 'solved problems'. Euphemisms that more often than not meant 'kill this person'.

It rankled though. With the layers of nicety stripped away it made him feel dirty and used – ultimately no different to those he worked against.

I have to get out of this while I still can. A vow he'd made and broken several times in the past. Now though he was more serious about it. While I still have something left I can call a soul.

So would he kill Luke Charron?

I'll deal with it as it comes. If I have to kill him I'll kill him. If I don't I won't.

Assassin. Whore. But refusing was hardly a better alternative. Evangeline. Fucking bitch.

Joanna Ironheart, he thought slightly enviously, didn't appear to be plagued by any kind of similar doubts. Oh to be young and full of self-confidence and zeal again.

"So salt works does it? That throwing a pinch of it over your shoulder stuff isn't just a bunch of superstitious old claptrap?"

She sniffed. He got the distinct impression that she thought he should already know all this. He also got the feeling that she didn't have a very high opinion of him, and given a choice in the matter, would have preferred not to be working with him. The feeling was mutual. "As I understand it the elementals he is able to control cannot pass across it voluntarily. It should prevent him from eavesdropping on us – or taking any other more drastic action."

Elementals? A slight shudder. Were those – for example – strange, invisible things that buzzed around a man's head just before he started vomiting up blood?

Joanna had moved on to the third window. If I want any seasoning in my food it looks like I'm going to have to order take-away. "Is it just salt then? I'm, not going to run into cloves of garlic hanging from my lampshades am I?"

A sigh of ill-concealed exasperation. "First, that's vampires. Second, it's the garlic flowers, not the cloves that are effective. Third, you don't seem to be taking this altogether seriously. I'd have thought that seeing a man die this afternoon would have been enough to focus your mind."

He glared at her. "Believe me, I'm taking that perfectly seriously. It's just that this 'magic' business is, how shall I put it, slightly beyond the range of my experience. I must have missed the magic 101 lessons everyone else seems to have taken."

"Ah, so you're a sceptic. You don't believe this is really possible eh? You think we're all deluded – that there has to be another more rational explanation for all this?" She stood facing him, hands on hips.

"Well I don't know if I'd put it quite like that. . ." Though to be honest it was fairly close. "It's just that I've learned to be cautious about accepting something as fact just because someone tells me it's so."

For a time they just stared at each other.

"Okay then, how does Luke Charron do this magic? It might help me accept it if I could at least get a handle on that. I presume there's more to it than waving your hands about and mouthing a few magic words."

Joanna looked away and muttered something. "Blood."

"Blood?" He echoed. "Okay, okay. Sorry."

"Blood, violence and suffering." She looked back at him, her expression bleak. "If you've ever been anywhere where something truly horrendous has occurred, and you have the slightest degree of sensitivity, you will feel it. A miasma hanging on the air. A tainted residue that won't go away, no matter what you do to get rid of it. That is the power that Luke Charron taps into to work his 'magic'."

Emil was quiet. He had been a policeman once. Had witnessed firsthand several crime scenes that were utterly appalling – seen things he would never be able to forget. He had to admit that there was something to what Joanna said – a sense of horror that seemed to cling to the air – and those places were never quite the same again.

But that was down to human reaction to knowing what had happened, surely? In a strange way people wanted to think that human suffering left an imprint behind – that it wasn't irrelevant to the world around them and had absolutely no effect. To those who didn't know what had occurred there, these places were the same as anywhere else. Right?

"You are not convinced." It was a statement rather than a question. She turned away from him again, resuming with the salt pouring. It startled him slightly when she spoke again. "Do you know about the events that took place at the Penitentiary New Mexico, nearly nineteen years ago now?"

Emil recollected something vaguely. "Riots right? I remember hearing something about this. Some of the prisoners set up execution squads and murdered a large number of their fellow inmates. Mainly sex offenders and those they labelled snitches." He wondered what the hell this had to do with Luke Charron and black magic. It seemed an odd change of subject.

"In essence. Though that doesn't even begin to describe it." Joanna paused as she moved onto the last window. He sensed a kind of reticence – tightly reined in emotion. "One of the prison guards I met summed it up best. 'For one night hell was a place on Earth, and that place was right here'."

Emil opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it.

"You see, all the 'at risk' prisoners at penitentiary New Mexico – as you say that's mainly sex offenders and those that have informed to get reduced sentences, but also a few that used to be involved in law enforcement, plus those who for one reason or other just wouldn't survive in the general prison populace – were kept in a separate cellblock, isolated from their fellow inmates. A focal point for their hatred."

Joanna stopped pouring the salt, still only half done, and stared out of the window. She appeared to having difficulty going on, and Emil got the impression that what she was telling him was somehow very personal to her.

"Once the riots started everyone knew that that particular cellblock was going to become a target, so it was completely locked down. Sealed tight. That should have been that. The prisoners inside should have been safe, sealed in their cells and untouchable until control of the situation was regained."

"But obviously they weren't."

She shook her head. "No. By a nasty quirk of fate there were building contractors working in another section of the prison at the time of the riots. They'd packed up work for the day and gone home, leaving their tools on site."

Emil felt a clenching sensation in his gut. He had a good idea what happened next.

"The tools left behind included blow-torches, sledgehammers, electric saws, a pneumatic drill. Around about twenty men, all of them with grudges against those in the 'at risk' block, took those tools and decided to get themselves a little payback.

"They broke into the cellblock with the pneumatic drill. Then they used use the blowtorches to open up the cells one at a time. The prisoners inside were dragged out and tortured to death in the most horrendous ways you could possibly imagine. Things were done that night you wouldn't believe a person was capable of doing to a fellow human being. It went on and on, for over eight hours in total, the death squad moving systematically and remorselessly from cell to cell until every single one of the original inmates was dead." Joanna's voice wavered fractionally. "Those in the last cells had to wait those eight hours, trapped with no possibility of escape, listening to what was happening to their fellow prisoners – listening to the death squad's taunts – knowing what was going to happen to them all too soon."

Emil didn't say anything. He could hear the tightly controlled anger and emotion there. He still didn't see how this had anything to do with the subject in hand, but sensed it would be extremely tactless to comment.

"One of the victims was a boy of seventeen with the mental age of an eleven year old. He was serving a six-month sentence for shoplifting, and had been relocated to the 'at risk' block because the week previously he'd been gang-raped in the prison showers."

Someone she knew? He wondered. A relative perhaps?

"There is good circumstantial evidence that Luke Charron instigated all of this, simply so he could use the 'energies' that were unleashed by the violence and suffering to perform some kind of ritual."

"Hang on a second. . ."

She cut him off. "I know what you're going to say. It's sounds crazy I know. People are quite capable of doing highly unpleasant things to other people without any intervention from outside powers. It happens all the time.

"This is different though." Joanna took a deep breath.

"Three years ago I interviewed one of the men who was part of the death squad that night. He was dying of Hodgkinson's lymphoma, and he didn't have anything to lose by telling me what he knew. I was expecting to meet a monster, but what I found was a pathetic, broken man. Okay maybe that was down to his illness, but maybe not.

"He told me that he went along with the death squad that night to kill a man who'd testified against him at his trial – got him lumbered with a sentence of 376 years for drugs related offences. Nothing else. Halfway along though, when they were in the middle of breaking into the cellblock, he says he felt something change. That it was like someone else took over, and from then on it was as if he was watching everything that happened through someone else's eyes – able to see what he was doing but not alter it in any way. While he was talking to me he broke down and cried – a hardened, brutal criminal of forty years."

Apparently she caught the look of doubt in his eyes. "Yes, you could put it down to a dying man trying to rationalise his guilt, but. . . I did some checking, and you know what I found? Of those twenty odd men who were suspected of taking part in the death squad that night five have committed suicide. Another nine have suffered profound mental breakdowns and are now permanently institutionalised. Three more, when released from prison, flipped out completely and went on rampages before being shot dead by police. Tell me that those are normal, explainable statistics."

He couldn't. But he also hadn't heard anything convinced about black magic either.

Emil turned away from her and stalked into the kitchen, pouring himself a glass of water. Not because he wanted a drink. Just because he was uncomfortable standing around doing nothing in Joanna's presence. He felt like an intruder in his own flat.

When he returned Joanna had apparently finished with the salt, and was in the process of unpacking. First thing out of the bag she'd been carrying was a monstrous looking handgun mounted with an optical sight. He could glimpse other weaponry below it. "You're aware that we have gun laws in this country."

"Yes. Ridiculous nannyish things. Shows that your government obviously doesn't trust the general populace. How are you supposed to defend yourself?"

"At least we don't have children settling arguments at school by shooting each other."

"That was supposed to be a joke."

"Ah." He hadn't heard any change of tone or anything else to indicate.

"Probably not a very good joke I'll admit. I'm told I'm not very good at that sort of thing." There was a hint of a smile when she looked round at him, though it vanished quickly.

He hid his surprise. Maybe he'd misjudged her slightly. Beneath that exterior there might just be a human being lurking after all. "So we're just going to go in and shoot him. Simple as that?"

"Simple as that," she agreed. He detected a hollow note to her voice.

"You know that this has the potential of blowing up the faces of our little group? This isn't some nobody who won't be missed. If Luke Charron is murdered or disappears it will be investigated relentlessly, and I think our influence will only cover it up so far."

"Which is why we've got to do it perfectly." Joanna's voice was flat. "Seriously, I don't think anyone's under any illusions about this. We all know what happens if it goes wrong. But the situation gives us no choice."

Yeah, since I managed to kill Hutchings. To all intents of purposes. He walked over to the window. "Since we've know about him for so long, why have we never tried to kill him before?"

"As long as Hutchings was still alive it was convenient to have one of them we knew about. Someone who we could, to an extent, keep an eye on." There was something in the way she spoke that suggested to Emil that if it had been entirely down to her Luke Charron would have stopped breathing long ago. "Besides, who says we haven't tried to kill him."

"Oh?"

"On one occasion an Israeli sniper – one of the very best in the world at that particular job – calmly and precisely shot the man standing right next to him through the head. On another, a bomb linked to the ignition of his car failed to go off until he had driven twenty miles, parked, and walked a safe distance away from it."

Shit. So they were proposing to shoot a man capable of dodging bullets and car bombs then. I am going to fucking retire. I swear it.

Joanna was in the process of counting out ammo boxes and appeared to have forgotten about him. Muttering beneath his breath, he went back into the kitchen, picking up the phone and rapidly dialling the number of Lara Croft's Surrey home.

"Come on. Come on. Pick up," he muttered beneath his breath as he listened to the ringing.

Sure enough, once again, the voice mail kicked in after the fourth ring. Lara Croft's cool, business-like upper-class English accent asking him to please leave a message after the tone; she'd get back to him as soon as she was able to. Strangely sexy, but not what he wanted to hear. He hung up. He'd already left one message, appropriately grovelling in tone.

She was probably furious with him.

No shit Sherlock. Lets see, you run out on her in the middle of a date leaving her stranded. Based upon your previous experiences with women, how exactly do you think she's feeling about you just now?

Damn. He'd be lucky if she wanted to talk to him ever again.

Well at least she was well out of this crap. That was some consolation.

* * *

It was with great reluctance that Hsu Yi dumped the briefcase full of money. On its own it would be enough to set her up for life. She would never have to work again unless she wanted to. But. . .

She wouldn't live long enough to have a choice about working again if she kept it. If she kept the money Luke Charron would trace it, and she would be dead. She knew this with absolute conviction.

What the hell have you just done?

The answer: something so utterly stupid that it was probably going to destroy her. She had reneged on a deal. Worse, she had stolen from one of her clients. In one brief moment of madness she had ruined the reputation that it taken her years to construct.

If I ring Mr. Charron and tell him where he can retrieve his money. . . No, it was already far, far too late for that. Unless she was also prepared to give up the figurine. . .

No!

The strength of the inner voice startled her – almost made her think it didn't come from within herself at all. Its vehemence didn't seem quite rational.

Already the strength of the vision she'd experienced was fading, and she was beginning to doubt its veracity. Neither Luke Charron nor Claudia had made any kind of overt threat against her. Everything had been going smoothly in fact. Why the hell had she run?

Because if you hadn't you'd be dead by now!

But would she? As it was she had stolen a lot of money from a potentially very dangerous man, and he wasn't likely to be pleased about it.

She passed a waste bin standing on the pavement and shoved the briefcase unceremoniously inside. Someone was going to have a very lucky morning when they found it. Then she redoubled her pace.

I should dump this blasted statue too. Throw the damned thing into the Thames. That was probably why the Croft woman had kept it hidden away; it was cursed to bring whoever touched it ill luck.

Why the hell did I have to go and take the statue as well? She just couldn't fathom it. If she'd only left it in Luke Charron's hands everything would have been okay, the deal completed. Sure, she'd have left in a somewhat unconventional manner, but put that down to overdramatisation. She wouldn't be in the horrible situation she was now.

Leaving it in his possession would have been indefensible.

Oh yes, how exactly? She demanded of that inner voice. It's not as if it's key parts for the triggering mechanism of a nuclear device. Or Hanta virus cultures. Or anything else dangerous for that matter. It's just a bloody antique, and a pretty sad looking one at that.

But no, she couldn't just throw it away. Not now. At the moment it was the only bargaining chip she had left.

* * *

Lara didn't stir from her sleep until a meaty hand clamped down across her mouth.

Then her eyes snapped open instantly. She became aware of a huge weight pinning her to the mattress, making it difficult to breathe let alone move. The sound of protest she instinctively made was muffled to inaudibility. Desperately she started to twist: to try and throw the smothering weight off.

Something hit her in the side of the head with stunning force and for a moment she went limp. "Ah, ah, girly. None of that."

Travis.

The sound of blood rushing in her ears and the way her head seemed to gyrate made it difficult to focus. His face was a few inches above hers and she could smell beer on his breath. Finally it sunk in what was happening.

As her heart started to race with tightly controlled fear she tried to bite the hand covering her mouth. A second powerful blow to the side of her skull sent her spinning down to the border realms of consciousness.

"Fucking stuck up English cow! Try anything like that again and I'll snap you in half. Understand me?" Distantly she could feel a hand pawing aggressively at her right breast, heavy fingers gouging. She tried to struggle but her body would only respond feebly.

"Ah, so you like that do you? Thought you would."

No I bloody well don't! She could hear the leering grin in his words without needing to see it on his face.

"You know, you've caused me a shitload of trouble? Made me look bad in front of the others. I should hate you for that. But hey, I'm a reasonable sort of guy. I'm not the sort to hold a grudge. Besides, you're about to make it all up to me. And then some."

He's going to rape me. The realisation finally penetrated through the clouds inside her head and enabled her to focus. She drove her knee up as forcefully as she could manage towards his groin, bringing her free hand round and clawing at his face.

Her knee only managed to connect with the upper portion of his thigh and his hand caught her wrist before it reached its target. He shook her violently, brutally strong. "What did I tell you about struggling?"

Lara said nothing, hiding a flinch as the bones of her wrist ground together. He punched her in the stomach this time, knocking the wind from her body.

"Today has not been a good day, and I am going to have my due." The words came out somewhere between a hiss and a growl. The hand not occupied with trying to crush her wrist started to grope its way down her body, its touch making her flesh crawl. "You know what we got after all that fucking trouble? After nearly getting blown up by Hicks's incompetence? One pathetic, mouldy old statue." A pause. "And you into the bargain. Well not all bad then, I guess." He chuckled unpleasantly.

"You know what Lara? Do you mind if I call you Lara? No. Good. I think we should be on first name terms, given how intimate we're going to get." Another chuckle.

His questing hand pushed beneath the hem of her skirt, forcing it upwards. Desperately she clamped her thighs together, worms of fear crawling unchecked through her guts. She couldn't break his grip. He was too strong, and two-hundred and fifty odd pounds of mostly muscle crushing down on top of her didn't allow her any kind of leverage. Panic bubbled dangerously close to the surface.

"I've always wanted to fuck a celebrity. Okay, so in my fantasies it was more a movie actress or a pop star – I always thought that Jennifer Lopez was nice. Real good looking. But you're pretty famous. People have heard of you anyways. So I figure hey, you'll do. And damn, you're hot looking. Every bit as good Jennifer. Hell, even your breasts are real – and much better than Jennifer's are. The way I figure, you might as well try to enjoy it. It's goin' to be the last piece of action you're going to see."

Muffled laughter. "Yeah, that's right. Lomax has decided you've got to go, see. A bit of a shame, but there you have it. He's goin' to make that English poof, Simon, do it for interrupting him. Heck I'm sure your gonna just love this. Having a real man for once in your life. Even if it is the last time ever. Damn I'm gonna love getting a piece of snooty upperclass English ass. . ."

Lara scarcely heard this rambling discourse. All her focus was on the hand that had now finished bunching her skirt up around her waist and was clawing clumsily at her underwear. Belatedly she realised he was no longer covering her mouth. There were other people in the house. . .

She cried out as loudly as her lungs would allow.

With other people that reaction would have been immediate and instinctive, but to Lara it didn't come naturally. She'd always been self-reliant, and in her experience making noise in an emergency usually made things worse rather than better.

"You fucking bitch. . ." Travis released his hold on her wrist and tried to cut off the racket.

Big mistake. Seeing one slight chink of an opportunity she struck at it as hard and fast as she could manage. Travis let out a high-pitched shriek as a finger gouged claw-like into his eye-socket. The shriek changed to a low, agonised groan as her knee connected solidly with his groin.

Suddenly the crushing weight was lifting off her as Travis scrabbled desperately backwards. "Aagh! You bitch. You complete fucking bitch! My eye! Aagh! You've put my fucking eye out. I'm going to fucking kill you. Make you hurt so fucking bad. . . ooph"

Lara's foot caught him hard in the midriff, doubling him up. She yanked against the handcuff holding her to the bed, her heart pounding out of control with surging fear and adrenaline. Of course it didn't give.

Damn. Damn. Damn. She had to put him down, and quickly. Like this, as soon as he forgot about his eye, she was as good as helpless against him, nowhere to run and no way of evading him. With his greater strength and weight he could simply tear her apart. Perhaps literally.

Her next kick caught Travis on the hip, but it probably did more damage to her foot than to him.

"You're going to regret the day you ever. . ."

Before Lara found out precisely what she was going to regret the bedroom flew open with a crash and the light came on, it's sudden brilliance dazzling. Travis was slammed backwards so hard that it made the wall shake, flakes of plaster tumbling to the bare floorboards in a snow-like cascade.

"What the hell is going on here?" Simon, looking like a bizarre but very bad-tempered pit bull.

"She's fucking gouged my eye out!" Travis was bent over, clutching his face.

Simon's gaze slowly took in the scene. Lara's skirt was still pushed up around her waist and as his eyes touched her she felt a burning sense of shame, hastening to brush it down and cover herself.

"Good for her." He said at length. "Now get out before I do something you'll very much regret." There was a quiet certainty in his voice more intimidating than any shouting or posturing would have been

"O-oh yeah?" Travis quickly covered up the slight stutter. "You go ahead and try you fucking faggot. I'll kick your ass so hard it comes out your pug-ugly face."

"Well, in that case Travis it seems like we have a date. Shall we step outside? I wouldn't want to get bloodstains everywhere."

"I-I-I. . . Don't think I bloody wouldn't. I'd take you any day of the week. Jesus Christ, my fucking eye!" He departed with the air of a bully who knows he's over matched and wants nothing to do with it, but is also desperately trying to save face.

When he was gone, the door slamming behind his back, Simon turned his gaze back to Lara. "You okay?"

She could feel herself shaking – had to keep a tight grip on herself to keep it under control. What she wanted to do was curl up into a ball and for the whole world to just go away and leave her alone. She couldn't remember feeling this helpless; this shaken; this demeaned.

"I've probably had better days." To her own ears her voice seemed to come from a million miles away, belonging to a completely different person. It contained no trace of what she was feeling inside.

Simon grunted. "I'd better stay for now I think. As soon as Travis realises you haven't in actual fact gouged his eyeball out he'll likely be back, looking to pick up where he left off."

"I didn't gouge his eye out? Pity." Lara's voice was edged with acid. "You could just take these handcuffs off and let me handle it. I wouldn't want to disturb your beauty sleep or anything."

He held her gaze with his – saw the sudden hardness that had formed there. "You know that Travis, with his pride hurt and looking for revenge, can be a very dangerous man."

She didn't so much as blink, never mind look away.

"Okay, look at it another way. Travis is Lomax's cousin. It's the only reason I can fathom for him putting up with the whiny good for nothing bastard. But you know what they say. Blood is thicker than water. In this case much, much thicker." His fractional smile died. "My point is though, if you kill Travis then Lomax will kill you. And believe me, Lomax is an entirely different kettle of fish to his idiot cousin."

Lara had already worked that one out. This time though, she did look away. "Is what Travis told me true?"

"I don't know. What did Travis tell you?"

She looked back at him so she could gauge his reaction to her words. "That Lomax has decided I'm going to have to die anyway. And you're the one who's going to kill me."

Simon sighed. "Lomax sometimes says things in the heat of the moment he doesn't mean. He's not a bad man, despite what you may have seen of him so far. Give him time to cool down so he's thinking a bit more calmly. He'll change his mind."

"And if he doesn't?"

"Well I'm not going to kill you whatever he says. If that ends our friendship, so be it. But I'm not a murderer."

Somehow it wasn't that much of a comfort.

"Do you want me to turn the light off?"

"No. I don't think I'm going to be doing any sleeping just right now."

"In that case, do you mind if I do some work."

"Be my guest." Lara's tone was indifferent.

A few moments later he returned with a thick sheaf of papers, sat down and began to work his way through them, occasionally scribbling something on one or other sheet with a pen. After a few minutes of this Lara found herself watching him with some curiosity. As far as she'd been aware paperwork wasn't a major part of an armed robber's life. Not that she'd actually met many to find out one way or another of course.

Simon seemed to feel her gaze upon him and looked up. "If you're wondering, I act as our jolly little group's accountant. I deal with our finances, contracts and anything of legal nature that might come up."

"Ah."

For a time silence fell, except for, occasionally, the sound of Simon's pen scrawling across paper. Lara tried to lie back on the bed and relax. To calm herself, and slow her breathing and heart rate, which were still a fraction too fast. It was difficult. The remnants of fear, shame and helplessness were hard to put aside.

Come on girl, get a hold of yourself. You've faced down worse than lowlife scum like Travis. Much, much worse and many times. It shouldn't be affecting you like this.

But the truth was, it had affected her. For one of the few times in her life she'd felt totally helpless. If Simon hadn't arrived when he had done, she didn't like to think what would have happened.

She felt beaten up inside, her confidence and self-esteem battered and bruised. But she also felt angry. Very, very angry. It was better than the other feelings so she grasped hold of it.

"This One-Legged Man I've heard you people mention several times. Who is he?" Lara suddenly had a desire to know what the hell this was all about.

Simon looked up at her. For a moment he didn't answer, but then seemed to come to the conclusion that it couldn't hurt. "The man who's employing us for this current job. An American, I think. He's called the One-Legged Man on account of. . ."

"Having only one leg?" Lara hazarded. "Yes very informative. Thank you."

Simon shrugged. "None of us know much about him, except Lomax, who has worked for him on a couple of occasions before I gather. And possibly Hicks," he added after a moment's thought. "Neither of them are much for sharing, except from what I've gleaned he's a real bogeyman figure. Nastiest of the nasty and ruthless as hell. If you cross him then you're as good as dead. Simple as that. But the rewards for doing your job well are high. Very high." He scratched his nose.

"It was Langer who stuck him with the One-Legged Man moniker. After the one-armed man from the Fugitive I think. You know, the one who really murdered Richard Kimble's wife? It seemed kind of appropriate, so we've all taken to calling him that. I doubt he'd appreciate hearing it to his face, but there you go. If I were you I'd forget all about him and hope he never gets to hear about you."

As far as Lara was concerned he still sounded very much like her first guess: some kind of underworld Godfather figure. She had come into contact with that type before on a couple of occasions, and she had always been the only one to walk away.

And if necessary it will be that way again. Though at the moment her only goal was to get out of the current situation alive.

Okay, try another tack. "I'm slightly curious as to what that place was you robbed. It looked like just another set of offices."

Again he paused before responding. "Why do you want to know?"

She shrugged. "As I said, just curious. It's one of my flaws. Anyone who knows me will tell you. I guess it doesn't really matter. It's not as though I can actually do anything with the information, is it?"

"A security firm," He said at length. "They hold a large number of safety deposit boxes belonging to a number of very exclusive clients."

Interesting. "Hence the explosion? You didn't have a key?"

He grunted. "That was weird. Extremely bloody weird. When it comes to controlled explosions Hicks is about as good at it as it gets. Normally I'd trust him to blow a wart off the end of my nose." He shook his head. "Heck I know a bit about explosives myself, and I know the amount Hicks used simply couldn't have caused that size of an explosion. We were damned lucky we weren't all killed. Like he says there must have been something else in one of those other boxes."

And what you got for your troubles was, to quote Travis 'one pathetic, mouldy old statue'. Lara drew in a breath. Forget about it. It's none of your concern. What you've got to worry about is getting out of this mess in one piece. What they stole, why they stole it and who they stole it for matters precisely nothing. You don't care.

But what she'd told Simon had been the truth. Curiosity drove her at the most inappropriate and inopportune moments. It had gotten her into all kinds of trouble in the past. But not this time. Not this time, do you hear?

More silence. The memories of Travis's pawing hands – of the helplessness she'd felt – crept inexorably back, finding chinks in the armour she'd wrapped herself no matter how much she tried to push them aside.

"So," she said eventually when the quiet had grown unbearable. "Your group don't strike me as the average bunch of armed robbers."

"And what would you expect a bunch armed robbers to be like?" There was a trace of humour showing in his eyes. "To be fair we're much worse than that. Mercenaries, as Travis said, is the most accurate term to describe us. Not a particularly honourable profession."

She saw a brief flash emotion cross his face. Regret perhaps? It was quickly gone. "Though I lost any claims to honour a long time ago. We specialise in retrieving items for people by whatever means necessary. It's rarely anything as clean and simple as today's bit of armed robbery. And even that managed to turn into a right mess."

Me, she thought, though he didn't say it directly. Well I certainly didn't want any of this. Lunch with Emil seemed like it had happened in a different lifetime. "How did you manage to get involved? No offence, but you don't seem to fit with the likes of Travis and Lomax."

He chuckled. "You mean what's a nice bloke like me doing in a job like this?"

"Something like that."

"For starters I'm not a nice bloke. Don't let the polite exterior fool you. As Travis might put it, that's just my inherent anal retentive Englishness showing through."

In Lara's experience mere politeness didn't usually stretch to saving a person twice, once from being shot and once from being raped.

"To answer your question though, I met Lomax shortly after the gulf war. He was a veteran like me, and at the time we thought a lot alike. We were two very disillusioned people you could say. Disillusioned with our respective governments and disillusioned with the world in general. We became friends quickly. I like to think we still are friends, though Lomax might have a different interpretation if you asked him right now."

Lara sincerely doubted whether Lomax would answer any question she put to him.

"Anyway, we agreed to start out in business together – put our respective skills to the cause of making some money rather than serving our countries. If that sounds contemptible – well, maybe it is. But back then I was strongly of the feeling that my country had taken more from me than it had ever deserved in the first place. Hicks came into the venture with Lomax, and the others joined over time. Strange as it may seem to you in your current position, we're almost considered respectable as far as our particular line of work goes."

"So here you are."

"Here I am," he agreed.

Suddenly, as he turned a page, a paperclip shot off the papers Simon was working through, landing about a foot away from the bed. Lara felt a sudden surge of excitement. If she could get it before he noticed. . . She started to stretch out a bare foot.

But no, he'd seen. He tutted to himself beneath his breath, getting up and dropping to his knees beside the bed to retrieve it. If he noticed Lara's quickly aborted movement towards it, he gave no sign.

As he was standing up again something dropped from his pocket; something small and shiny.

Lara waited for him to turn around and pick it up. He didn't though – didn't appear to have even noticed. She hadn't been able to tell precisely what the object had been, but. . . Quick as she could she stretched out and snagged the object between her toes.

A key. A very small key, like you would use for a pair of handcuffs. Suddenly her heart was pounding. Surely he couldn't have failed to notice. Surely he couldn't be so careless. She drew he foot back on to the bed, the key still clutched between her toes.

Simon sat down again and resumed going through the papers. His expression was completely bland.

Lara felt sure what she'd just done must have been written all over her in the equivalent of foot high letters. He gave absolutely no indication of suspicion though, and as the minutes ticked by she gradually began to relax a little.

Now all she needed to do was get rid of him for a few minutes.

* * *

Luke Charron stood in front of the window in his lavish penthouse office and practised smiling.

Outward appearances, he had learned from a young age, were of paramount importance. As long as you showed the world a convincing face then it would let you get away with murder. Sometimes quite literally.

As a child he had quickly come to the conclusion that allowing his true feelings to show was a bad thing. It got him into trouble, and those around him were alienated by it. They got suspicious and mistrustful, or just plain angry. So he had learned to put on the mask.

A convincing smile. A few charming words. Those same people who had earlier chastised him were totally won over. What a pleasant, charming young man. What a good example. I wish my son was as polite and well behaved. Nothing inside had to change one iota, and as long as your actions were circumspect, no one would ever look any deeper.

When it came to it most people were idiots.

And so, every day, alone he practised – a ritual that had become ingrained. Not just manipulating the corners of his mouth to turn upward. That was the smallest and least significant part. No, a true smile must consume the entire face. It must shine from the eyes. Though that last, had of late, since the accident, been difficult.

Inside he boiled.

Someone was laughing at him – a hard yet feminine voice, filled with mirth at his discomfiture. At last he could tolerate it no more, the smile dying as he span round. "Laugh now while you can, bitch. You won't be laughing for much longer."

There was no one else in the room with him. On a shelf there was a figurine – a female figure of green-stained metal – similar, but not quite identical to the one that had, just an hour earlier, slipped through his fingers. It appeared to be this that he was addressing.

Swiftly he reasserted control, that beneficent smile reappearing. The contrast of the transformation was quite unnerving. He limped across the room.

Pain flared from the stump of his amputated leg where it rubbed against his prosthetic limb. He had been on his feet a lot today – far more than his doctors would have advised. But what do they know? Self-serving incompetents the lot of them.

Pain. Luke Charron had been in near constant pain since the car crash: sharp fiery agony, or dull, constant aching that refused to go away. Always somewhere close, waiting to dig its claws in.

Most would have seen it as an affliction. Not him though. Pain, like blood, was power. Even if that pain was his own.

Since the accident – and the unceasing pain – his powers had increased two-fold. What had first seemed a curse had in fact proved to be a blessing. He had taken it as a sign; a gift from his dark mistress.

Now was the time.

There were other unexpected benefits to losing a leg too. People trusted a man with one leg. They tended to treat him with sympathy. This is a man who has suffered, he could see them thinking. This is not a man that I need fear. To some that would grate, but not Luke Charron. Every advantage was there to be exploited to the full. Bargaining suddenly became a whole lot easier – after all, who wanted to deny anything to a disabled man?

Every business leader should have a limb amputated. They'd reap the benefits. He laughed aloud. It was a bubbling, infectious laugh filled with warmth and good humour. Laughter was almost as important as a smile.

The eye was harder to reconcile. It meant he could no longer shoot a pistol accurately – something that he had previously found relaxing. Still, he had plenty of other people who were more than capable of doing any required shooting for him. Worse though, it reduced the impact of his smile. So much of a smile was in the eyes, and unfortunately people tended to find a glass eye unnerving.

Megaera, you will not run from me. He picked up the figurine from the shelf, turning it over in his hands. Your sister will soon be joining us, my dear.

No response. The figurine was a dead object in his hands, so light that it had to be hollow. He knew it – what it embodied anyway – heard him though.

After a few seconds he placed the figurine back down. The blood of Uranus, spilled to earth when his son, Chronus, castrated him. The blood of the divine. Power beyond imagining.

It would belong to him.

A knock on the door.

"Enter Claudia." Nothing mystical about that knowledge – he knew of only one person who would disturb him at this hour. Besides, he recognised the knock. "You have news?"

She walked in a brisk no nonsense manner across the office and laid a black briefcase down on a desk. "I recovered the money, Luke. She dumped it in a bin. Unfortunately our treacherous thief was not to be found. I have diverted all available manpower to hunt her down. . . but she is likely to prove elusive."

Luke. He was a progressive employer, on first name terms with all his staff. One big, happy family. He smiled, "Is the money all there?"

"Down to the last bank note."

"A pity." Externally he was so calm he could have been discussing tomorrow's weather forecast. Inside he raged. "It would have been so much easier if she'd given in to temptation."

If a person held something that belonged to him then he would be able track them down. No matter where they tried to run.

And do other things as well.

"I feel that I should apologise." As ever Claudia showed no emotion, either in face or voice.

Luke Charron raised one eyebrow. "How so?"

"It was I who recommended Ms. Wen to you. From all that I was able to find out about her she was supposed to be supremely reliable. Quite simply the best available for hire. Obviously I was mistaken."

"Do not trouble yourself. No blame attaches to you. I approved the selection because I believed it to be perfectly correct." He waved the matter away. If he had attached blame to Claudia, he would already be in need of a new PA. "And the manner in which she performed her task suggests her abilities were not overstated. I do not believe it was her original intention to betray me."

"Perhaps. But she seems to have betrayed us nevertheless."

"Hmmh. Megaera spoke to her," He mused aloud. "I heard her voice quite distinctly. I had not expected her to be able to do that. She should, by all reckoning, have still been dormant. Perhaps I should speak with the esteemed Ms. Croft after all, and ask her what exactly she did to the statue whilst it was in her possession."

"I thought you had decided that Ms. Croft should be left out of this if at all possible?" Claudia reminded.

"Yes, yes. But circumstances do change, and we should not restrict ourselves unnecessarily. No matter, it is probably not important just at the moment." Another smile. "But matters are, unfortunately, complicated. Hsu Yi did not choose to betray us entirely of her own volition, and possibly she is not acting under her own volition even now. I think I may need to take more drastic action to prevent the situation escalating."

Claudia's expression remained as impassive as ever. "We do have some slightly better news however. I was contacted by Mr. Lomax, who claims to have the remaining artefact. I have arranged for a pick-up to be made tomorrow."

"Ah. I know I can always count on Mr. Lomax."

"He made no mention of Hutchings, incidentally."

"Really? Well I won't read too much into that. I strongly suspect that he has no idea what happened to Hutchings, which is why he remained silent on the matter. Doesn't like to appear ignorant does our Mr. Lomax. A pity about Hutchings really. It is always useful to have a spy you know about in your midst. Now I'll have to be on the alert for spies I don't know about."

If Claudia felt any surprise at the offhand revelation that Hutchings was a traitor she didn't let it show.

Luke Charron pursed his lips, apparently deep in thought. "I think that I'll need you to fetch me a vessel Claudia. Could you do that for me? I would be most appreciative."

She inclined her head. This cryptically worded request was something she had fulfilled on numerous occasions in the past. "A Mr. Rogers from our IT department is working late at the moment. He is a loner with no immediate family or close friends. His department head is due to fire him in the next week for downloading pornography off the Internet during working hours."

"Excellent, excellent. Yes, Mr. Rogers sounds perfect for what I have in mind." Luke Charron turned and limped back across the office to the window, gazing out at the myriad of lights that made up London's nighttime skyline – deceptively beautiful and peaceful. "Please bring him up here for a little chat."

* * *

"Why does this require two of us?" The question had been nagging at Emil for some time now.

Whatever way he tried to figure it, it only seemed to make what they were doing more risky – doubled the chances of getting caught. Okay, so halfway up the side of an office block, after midnight in a window-cleaning rig probably wasn't the best time to mention it, but still. . .

Joanna's face was concealed beneath a black silk mask, but he could tell enough of her feelings from her voice. "Because it is harder for Luke Charron to cloud the minds of two distinct individuals than it is for him to do just one."

Fine. Really glad I asked.

The rig reached the top of the building and stopped. Emil could feel it swaying subtly back and forth, tugged by the breeze that had sprung up. Boards creaked quietly beneath his feet and the noise of traffic seemed to come from a very long way off indeed. Good job I'm not afraid of heights. A glance down at the street, sixteen stories below. Though if I spend much more time hanging around up here I could definitely start developing a strong dislike of them.

He boosted himself up onto the roof after Joanna. There were a thousand doubts, circling like vultures inside his head. They hadn't prepared enough. They should put this off at least a couple more days. It was all happening too fast. What the hell would Luke Charron be doing in his office after midnight? This was going to blow up spectacularly in their faces. . .

Oh shut up and get on with it. As he was sure Joanna wouldn't hesitate in telling him.

They moved swiftly across the rooftop, Joanna in the lead. Around them ventilation units hummed quietly to themselves. Moonlight from the clear sky, along with all the myriad lights of the city around them, made it seem much too bright for comfort – much too exposed.

At the top of one of the two main elevator shafts they stopped. Joanna wasted no time or words in prising open a panel surrounded by yellow and black hazard markers, revealing a nest of wires beneath. She produced a palm-top computer from a pocket on her belt – a rather more advanced model than they sold at Dixon's – plus a pair of wire cutters, then went to work.

Emil watched her for a moment – calm efficiency in action – then got on with his own job. A maintenance cover lifted free with a tortured squeal, revealing a shaft of pitch darkness below. Quickly he secured a nylon rope in place and began to lower it into the elevator shaft.

The thought of descending into that black maw made his stomach knot. But it should be okay. The computer Joanna was attaching should allow them to control the lift. Theoretically. There were a lot of variables. Climbing down with a still operational lift though. . . Stop bloody worrying.

"Okay?"

Emil nodded. He flicked on the nightvision goggles he was wearing and the world around him turned to shades of green. The effect always disturbed him slightly. Everything became somehow unreal and detached, as if he was playing a computer game rather than participating directly in events. Then, with a deep breath, he dropped into the hole.

There was a horrible moment when the inherent claustrophobia he'd never quite successfully managed to overcome kicked in. The green tainted walls appeared to bend inwards and he felt a sudden tightness around his chest that made it impossible to breathe. . . Gasping, he pushed the feeling aside and continued down the rope. Nothing he hadn't experienced before.

Around him were a forest of girders, counterweights and braided steel cables as thick as his wrist. Everything stank of grease and dust. Below his dangling feet was nothing but gaping darkness. He concentrated fixedly on keeping going at a steady rate. Above him he was dimly aware of Joanna starting down after him.

A set of counterweights beside him clanked loudly. Suddenly one of the cables next to him was moving, the sound of machinery whirring to life.

Shit.

The counterweights slid down smoothly past him. Which, logically, meant that a lift was coming up. Up this shaft he was climbing down.

Cursing beneath his breath he redoubled the pace of his descent. A glance down showed nothing but blackness still, but that cable seemed to be moving awfully quickly. . .

He drew level with the first set of lift doors, his heart thudding as he swung across to it. At first, as he inserted his fingers into the crack down the middle and heaved, nothing happened. Then the doors opened all in a rush and he tumbled through, falling onto his hands and knees on the carpeted floor beyond.

The lift stopped its ascent, safely several floors below them.

As he was pulling himself to his feet Joanna calmly swung through the opening and landed beside him. Unhurriedly she unhitched herself from the rope. Emil couldn't see her expression as she looked at him, but he could tell what it was. One eyebrow raised in a kind of offhand curiosity, as if to ask what all the fuss was about.

"I thought," he said through gritted teeth. "You said 'okay'."

A shrug. "The computer wasn't working. I judged there was little in the way of risk and it wasn't worth wasting time on it. We were never in any danger."

Emil turned away, indulging inside his head a momentary fantasy about throwing her down the open lift shaft. Never any bloody danger?

The reception area the lift shaft emerged onto was dark and deserted, as to be expected at this hour. There was no sound or other sign of anyone present, but obviously – from the lift – there was at least one other person in the building. Emil pulled the handgun he was carrying – a .45 calibre Heckler & Koch Mark 23 pistol with in built suppressor. In the corner of his vision he could see Joanna doing the same.

In silence they started down the corridor leading towards Luke Charron's suite of offices. Joanna ghosted into the lead. Although it had never been discussed, she seemed to have implicitly assumed that she was in charge. Emil hadn't so far felt like arguing about it.

Apparently, as well as offices, Luke Charron had living quarters up ahead. Something that struck Emil as taking the concept of living for your work just a little too far.

As the door at the end of the corridor neared Emil started to feel the tension growing exponentially with each forward step. Part of it stemmed from the fact that, when he reached it, he was going to be required to kill a man he had never met before in cold blood.

But there was something else too.

A nagging prickling sensation. An ominous sense of foreboding that threatened to blossom into full-blown terror – like the claustrophobia he'd experienced inside the lift shaft, only far, far worse.

Suddenly the idea that they were facing a real life black magician no longer felt quite so ludicrous as before. It is all very well laughing at nightmares in the daylight, but when you actually have to face them in the darkness. . . Then it is suddenly very different.

Then they were there. Standing in front of the ogre's lair. No turning back.

Joanna cautiously reached out with a gloved hand and tried the handle. Locked. Emil felt obscurely gratified to see a trace of tension in her posture – a slight flaw in her poise.

As she went to work on the lock with a set of skeleton keys Emil turned to face back down the corridor, covering her against any surprise visitors.

Seconds accumulated into minutes.

What the hell is she messing about at? He could feel his palms sweating, the nervousness and tension mounting even further. Finally there was an almost inaudible click and the doors swung open.

His heart leapt to his throat and he levelled his gun. Beyond the door a wall of blackness seemed to bulge outwards. . .

Anticlimax. Nothing happened.

The wall of blackness dissipated, no more than a figment of his overactive imagination. It felt a bit like steeling yourself to storm the gates of hell, only to find everyone was out on a daytrip when you finally plucked up the courage to do so.

He let out the deep breath he'd unconsciously been holding. Ahead of him Joanna darted forward in a low crouch. He followed cautiously, gun sweeping to cover her.

The office was larger than his apartment, covering two floors with a balcony level around three sides and several doors leading off it. A single vast window giving a spectacular view of the city dominated the fourth wall.

Silhouetted in front of this stood a solitary figure. A tall, slender man who leant on a walking stick.

Emil froze in his tracks.

Something wasn't right. The man was standing with his back to them, completely motionless, giving no sign that he was aware of their entry. Yet he couldn't have failed to notice. Unless he had lost his hearing as well as a leg and an eye.

And probably not even then.

As he saw Joanna aim her gun at the back of the man's head a strange scent tickled at Emil's nostrils. Some kind of herbal incense, burnt to cover up. . . something far less pleasant. Suddenly he realised one of the things that was so wrong about the figure in front of him. It wasn't breathing.

"No!" He started to call to Joanna.

Too late. She pulled the trigger at about the 'N'.

A perfect shot. There was a quiet, insignificant sounding phttt and the back of the man's head seemed to disintegrate. An arc of blood and brain tissue spurted across the window and he collapsed in an ungainly heap, like a puppet with his strings cut.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Finally hearing his shout, Joanna turned to look at him.

"It's the wrong fucking man!" He hissed at her, sensing the silent question. Able to move again as time resumed normal operation, he hurried across to the fallen figure's side.

The back of its skull was gone. Blood was spreading out across the deep pile carpet in a pattern that resembled a psychologist's inkblot test. Whatever the hell the gun Joanna carried was, it obviously packed one hell of a punch. Never had Emil seen anyone quite so thoroughly dead.

He reached out a hand to touch the corpse's shoulder. It flopped over, onto its back like a beached fish.

"Jesus Christ!"

Emil scrambled back from the body in shock. He could feel himself hyperventilating, adrenaline pumping hard through his veins. No way had a single bullet done that.

Joanna leant across the body to get a better look at it. His initial reaction was to scream at her to get back, but he caught it, gradually getting a grip on himself. Part of him marvelled at how cool and detached she was, faced with such a horror story of wrecked human flesh.

"That's not Luke Charron I take it?"

"No." Her voice was flat. "Sadly not. This is what he calls a vessel – a channelling point used to focus powerful magicks."

A channelling point? To Emil it looked like the man had been half eaten by piranhas. The worst thing was that from the look of it, he'd still been alive when that happened.

A nasty thought occurred to him. Luke Charron could still be here, now waiting for them. Watching them.

He turned away from Joanna and the mutilated corpse, his gaze quickly scanning the balcony level and the closed doors leading off it. There was no sign of anybody home, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. He headed quickly for the stairs.

Not like I'm trying to put as much distance between myself and that. . . thing as I can. Not at all.

"It looks like he was attempting a summoning," Joanna was saying, icily calm. "Attracting and binding elementals to do his bidding."

Elementals. That word again. "You mean like the things that supposedly killed Hutchings?" He paused halfway up the stairs, glancing quickly back.

She shook her head. "No. From the look of things these are much worse. Capable of stripping flesh from the bone. Really nasty, powerful, hungry ones. He obviously wants something quite badly to take such a risk."

Emil grunted; was about to continue up the stairs.

"There's always a danger with. . .Ugh." Whatever Joanna was going to say was cut off as, without warning, the corpse's hand shot out, fingers closing tightly round her throat.

She didn't appear to be able to break the grip, straining violently, trying to prise the fingers free as they dug remorselessly into her flesh. Her face began to turn slowly purple.

Hell. Not pausing to think about what he was seeing, Emil started back towards her.

The corpse's back arched violently, in the throes of a powerful convulsion. Suddenly twin beams of hellish red luminance shot from its eye sockets at the ceiling, a horrendous screeching, hissing sound emerging from it. It sounded like a pressure cooker on the point of exploding. The remaining flesh clothing the thing started to dissolve, rising from it in a cloud of reddish vapour.

Joanna's struggles grew weaker as the vapour enveloped her. The fingers kept on gouging into her throat and nothing she did weakened their grip in the slightest. She remembered the gun at her waist; tried to reach for it. . . Strange perfume filled her head, making it difficult to concentrate or co-ordinate. Consciousness began to ebb.

Emil sprinted forwards. The clouds of vapour were so thick now that Joanna was nothing more than an indistinct, weakly struggling form at its heart. More and more shafts of infernal radiance burst from the corpse with every passing instant, and the vapour began to glow, becoming painful to look at. He wasn't going to get to her in time. . .

Phttt. The bullet struck the corpse's elbow joint. Joanna's vision faded in a sea of redness. She forced herself to squeeze off a second shot, though she could scarcely feel the gun in her hands, then she pulled backwards with all the strength left to her.

Something gave with a sickening wet tearing sound. Suddenly Joanna was staggering backwards, gargling, wretching noises coming from her throat. Strong arms caught her as her body gave up and collapsed. Consciousness went.

Emil dragged her back from the glowing cloud, muscles straining with urgency. The mass of vapour was blindingly bright now and heat was pouring off it, furnace-like in its intensity. The corpse at its heart was invisible – perhaps even disintegrated entirely. The pitch of the screeching sound had risen almost beyond the range of his hearing.

He had to get her away from it. Hell, he had to get himself away from it.

With a surge of effort he lifted Joanna's limp form up, over his shoulder. Then he began to run, as fast as he could manage with his burden.

There was a surge of incandescent brightness at the heart of the glowing cloud. It pulsed outwards, expanding rapidly, getting brighter and brighter. Hotter and hotter. Emil felt a blast of scalding wind hit his back, a thunderous wailing roar filling his ears. . .

The explosion ripped right through the office with devastating force. The wall of glass shattered into thousands of razor sharp fragments, falling to the streets below in a deadly, glittering cascade. The brilliant flash of bloody red light could be seen for miles.

* * *

Sitting in the back of a silver BMW 7-series being driven through the London streets by Claudia, Luke Charron smiled broadly.

In his minds eye he saw the explosion that ripped through his office subside into billowing clouds of black smoke and the occasional flickering tongue of orange flame. Very impressive – all the energies of a tortured death concentrated and focused in a single incredibly violent direction. More spectacular than he could have imagined. It was not something he had attempted before, but on the evidence of this he would definitely be trying it again.

He chuckled: a kid who'd just discovered a new toy. So much for the two would be assassins.

Strange how luck turned out. What you thought at the time to be incredibly bad fortune later turning out to be blinding good luck. And of course vice-versa.

Take today. If Hsu Yi hadn't stolen Megaera from his grasp he wouldn't have been forced to call upon the Hrizu to hunt her down. And if he hadn't called upon them, he wouldn't have been granted that vision. And therefore he wouldn't have known anything about the assassination attempt. So in a strange way Hsu Yi could be said to have saved his life.

A delicious irony he couldn't help but appreciate. He'd have to thank her. Or what was left of her, once the Hrizu had finished with her.

The chuckle bubbled over into full-scale laughter.

* * *

Lara inserted the key into the lock of the handcuffs and turned. There was a soft click, and they fell open. A brief surge of exultation followed, which she quickly fought down. This was only the first, and by far the simplest step to getting free. Still, it felt good to be rid of the things.

She found herself holding her breath – waiting for the door to burst open and Simon to say ha-ha, caught you. Irrational. Nobody could have heard that small noise from outside the room. But whatever she told herself, she couldn't quite escape the paranoid notion that Simon knew she had the key. That this was all some kind of test or trick.

A deep breath. She forced herself to move.

Outside the sky was definitely brightening along the eastern horizon, and the first notes of birdsong were starting up, ready to serenade the approaching dawn. A glance at her watch showed it was getting on for 4:00am. She felt a spike of urgency. Not much time at all

Simon had been difficult to get rid of. He'd shown a remarkable ability to ignore a hint.

Lara hesitated a moment over whether to take her shoes. In the end she bent and picked them up, despite the fact that they were horrendously impractical. She didn't put them on. For the moment she was better off barefoot – faster and above all quieter.

Then, holding her breath, she turned the door handle.

She half expected to come face to face with Simon, waiting silently in the hallway – watching for her to make a move. Or worse, Travis, out for revenge and looking to pick up where he'd left off earlier.

To her vast relief there was no one there. Of course there bloody isn't. Stop being so jumpy.

She crept along the hall, carefully testing each step for creaking floorboards or anything else that might give her away. Everything around was washed out in darkness and shadows and she could only pick the faintest silhouettes of her surroundings. Everyday objects took on strangely ominous proportions

Through a slightly ajar door she heard the sound of someone snoring. She didn't pause to find out who.

A door at the end of the hall squealed alarmingly as she started to open it. Lara froze, heart thudding. No one instantly sprang from his room to demand what was going on though, and she forced herself calm. When adrenaline was flowing sounds seemed much louder and intrusive than they actually were, she reminded herself.

Steeling herself, she opened the door quickly. After all, I'm still handcuffed to the bed. Supposedly. Anyone hearing the door would probably just assume it was one of his companions, perhaps going to relieve himself. If, on the other hand, she'd tried to open it slowly the drawn out sound might make a listener suspicious. They might come and see exactly who was trying to sneak about at this hour.

To her night-adjusted eyes the living room was positively bright by comparison with the hall. She paused to quickly check of all of the chairs and other deep pools of shadow, where someone could, conceivably be lurking – waiting.

Nobody. Strangely it just made the creeping sense of paranoia worse.

Her gaze happened across a low coffee table and stopped. A green holdall. Exactly the same as the one she'd seen Hicks carrying after the raid. Exactly the same bag in fact. She stared at it.

What the hell are you doing? Without making a conscious decision to do so she found herself crossing the room towards it.

No Lara, don't even think about it!

Ignoring that inner protesting voice, feeling almost compelled, she picked up the bag.

There was something inside it, definitely. It was too heavy to be empty. Whatever it was though, was quite light and certainly rather small. Whether it was what had been stolen – one pathetic, mouldy old statue – she couldn't tell. She started to unzip the bag.

Dammit. This is insane. Lara stopped with the zip halfway open. What you should be doing is concentrating on getting out of here as fast as you can. Not messing around with bags full of stolen property.

She did the zip up again. Thank you.

Before she could put it down something else lying on the table caught her eye. A set of car keys. They belonged to the Vauxhall Vectra. After a moment's internal debate she scooped them up. It would make getting away much easier if she drove.

Now put the bag down and get out of here.

Lara hesitated.

If you take the bag they'll come after you. They'll have to. If you leave it they won't – it wouldn't be worth their while.

Very true. But something made her reluctant to let go of it. Call it an urge. That same strange compulsion that had made her pick it up in the first place. It might be something important, she told herself.

It might also get her killed. And it was certainly going to get her into a lot of trouble – even more than it had already at any rate. Inside though, her mind was made up, in defiance of all logic and what she knew to be sensible.

Call it a public service. Returning stolen property.

That was a lie, and she knew it.

Holdall still in hand, Lara quit dithering and moved. It would be just great if she was caught standing around debating the matter with herself. Just perfect.

Out the front door without looking back. Strange, but deciding to take the bag seemed to give her back a measure of the self-confidence and decisiveness that the day's events had done so much to erode.

Half the sky was now a brighter shade of blue and dawn was obviously only a short time away. Although at the moment the temperature was still relatively cool it was apparent that it was going to be another scorchingly hot day.

Lara hurried across to the parked Vectra, ignoring the mild discomfort of sharp gravel beneath the soles of her feet. Open the door quickly; the holdall thrown onto the front passenger seat; then start the engine. That was sure to attract the attention of someone back in the farmhouse, but with luck it was now too late. She pulled away, forcing herself to take it nice and easy. No sense in doing anything stupid that could possibly risk a stall.

A last glance back, via the rear-view mirror. Something jolted inside her chest. Although she couldn't be certain, she thought she saw a figure standing in one of the ground floor windows. A figure that, perhaps, wore glasses and had a moustache, with something resting on his shoulder. Simply standing calmly by and watching.

Then she was too far away and it was impossible to tell whether it was anything more than a figment of her imagination.

* * *

Hsu Yi ran for her life. Perhaps she also ran for her soul.

What it was she ran from she didn't know. Except that it scared her more than anything she'd previously encountered in her life. And she'd encountered some pretty scary things.

Luke Charron. It had come from him, whatever it was. Something sent by that grinning devil-man to take back the figurine she'd snatched from him. Gnawing certainty filled her, and she came back to how he had seemed to appear out of nowhere at their meeting. What the hell was he?

It had come for her at Clapham Common station.

She'd been walking across the deserted platform as the sky brightened visibly overhead. A sense had been growing within her for the past few minutes that she was being followed. That something malevolent was stalking her. She had glanced repeatedly over her shoulder, always convinced that she would see someone there, but there had never been anything except empty streets.

Paranoid. She was letting her anxiety over what had happened to her this night play tricks on her imagination.

Then there had been a noise, like the rustling of a strong gust of wind. Except that the air was almost totally still.

Spinning round, her heart thudding wildly, she'd glimpsed a distortion halfway down the platform: a blurring pattern in the air resembling heat haze, yet clearly not. It had seemed to cackle at her with a thousand distinct yet inaudible voices. A feeling of hunger – of lust – projected towards her, so strong it had felt like a palpable, physical presence.

Then, whatever it was, the distortion had surged directly at her.

At that moment the feeling of terror had been bowel loosening. Unreasoning panic froze her to the spot.

As the distortion rolled over them a flock of pigeons roosting in the rafters were startled awake, a multitude of wings fluttering in a panic-filled cacophony. Small bodies exploded in puffs of feathers, and a fine mist of dark, oily blood began to fall like rain.

More and more pigeons exploded – a bloody avian massacre from which nothing escaped. The distortion got nearer and nearer, progress inexorable. Only when a spray of pigeon blood hit her directly in the face had Hsu Yi's paralysis broken.

Turning, she'd sprinted as fast as she could, the distortion so close on her heels that she 'd expected it to roll over and consume her with every passing second. Its multitude of voices had filled her head, chittering maddeningly, crying out for more blood.

A train had been in the process of pulling into the station. Ahead of her the platform had rapidly been coming to an end. With no time to think about it Hsu Yi acted purely on instinct and dived inside the nearest carriage.

The sliding doors had slid shut, between her and the distortion, cutting off its path.

As the train pulled away she'd sank down onto her haunches, sucking in great lungfuls of air. She'd been able to feel herself shaking with relief; hear herself sobbing with the release of pent up tension.

It hadn't been over though. Not by a long shot.

Eventually, as some of the immediacy of the fear had begun to fade, she'd pulled herself back to her feet, still able to feel herself trembling.

The carriage had been all but deserted. Down one end of it there was a man with a hand span of sunburnt beer gut showing between the bottom of his too-tight t-shirt and the top of his jeans. His head was lolled back and his mouth open wide, rhythmic snoring at a similar pitch to a badly maintained chainsaw coming out. At the opposite end, as far from this individual as it was possible to get, was a small, very old looking black man with wispy white hair and a wizened walnut of a face.

He'd stared at Hsu Yi, expression blank.

She'd been staring back at him, her breath still coming too quickly, when the tap came on the window beside her. It made her start violently, panic surging again.

Initially it hadn't appeared that there was anything there – just the early morning suburban vista of south London, passing by the window in a high speed blur.

Hsu Yi had started to relax again – to curse her jumpiness – when the tapping sound repeated. This second time it had been accompanied by a horribly familiar cacophony of gibberish voices, echoing inside her head.

Gasping in shock, she'd taken off again, running full pelt down the centre of the carriage. Outside the window, alongside the moving train, she'd been all too aware of that thing, whatever the hell it was, moving parallel to her.

The next carriage had been all but deserted too, the only occupants a young couple, perhaps coming home after a night's clubbing. The woman – or girl – was asleep with her head on her companion's shoulder. Hsu Yi tore past them without a second glance, able to hear the panicked gasping of her own breathing as she ran.

Outside the distortion had kept pace with her, step for step, tapping intermittently on the windows and cackling.

Throwing a wild, wide-eyed glance behind her as she barged through the doors to the next carriage, Hsu Yi then managed to run straight into the chest of a ticket inspector.

She'd bounced off him, the wind knocked from her body in a whoosh as she fell over backwards. Leaning over her, expression showing a mixture of weary annoyance and concern, there'd been a rotund, well-fed looking black man.

"What you in such a hurry for there, miss?" His voice was a deep bass rumble.

She hadn't been able to form words amidst her panic, her mouth goldfishing. Her gaze had travelled further down the carriage, over the man's shoulder.

One of the windows was open.

Horror surging she'd felt the thing charge for the opening.

"Hey, calm down, calm down. I'm not gonna hurt you." The man must have seen the fear on her face, but he'd misinterpreted the cause. "Here, let me help you up." So saying, he'd extended his hand – forced a reassuring smile onto his face.

It had squeezed its way through the gap, a blurring, furiously shifting pattern of air.

Surely he must sense it. Surely he must sense it. The thought had echoed inside Hsu Yi's head as she scrabbled backwards, away from it. The hunger pouring off it was like the heat from a furnace.

"Hey. Hey. . ." He'd started.

"Look out!" Hsu Yi's warning came out almost as a scream. The distorted pattern of air rushed forward, along the carriage. A discarded newspaper flapped up in the wake of its passage, as though pulled by a powerful gust of wind.

The ticket inspector had finally seemed to catch on that something was amiss, turning to face the oncoming threat as Hsu Yi had backed into the doors separating the carriages behind her.

"What the. . ." He'd just had time to start. Then the distortion had hit him.

Before she turned and ran Hsu Yi had caught a glimpse of him being span around like a dervish – as if he'd been sucked into the heart of a raging vortex. All of a sudden a coin-sized chunk of flesh had disappeared from his cheek, a mist of blood spraying in the air. . .

She'd seen no more, although his dreadful screams echoed after her. Inside she damned herself as a coward, each rending cry of pain another barb driven into her soul. What could I have done except get myself killed too?

As she'd sprinted towards them the couple she'd passed earlier had started from their seat wide-eyed, both at the sight of her and the horrifying sounds that had trailed after her.

Run!" She'd screamed at them, but hadn't paused to see if they'd taken any notice. Behind her the screaming had faded, loosing strength and fading behind the sound of the moving train.

As the train had slowed, pulling into the next station, there had still been no sign of pursuit. The distortion – Hrizu: the word appeared in her head out of nowhere, and what it meant she had no idea – was apparently still too caught up in its feast.

She'd pounded on the door release before the train had even fully stopped, every moment of delay driving her frantic. Then she'd darted onto the platform, running for the stairs leading up to the street level. There had been a moment, as the train started to pull away behind her, when she dared hope that she had managed to make good her escape. Then that horribly familiar hissing cacophony of voices had reached her ears, and, out of the corner of her eye as she'd thrown a panicked look over her shoulder, she'd seen an unmistakable flicker of movement.

Now, in front of her, an automated ticket barrier loomed. She hurdled it without breaking stride, trying desperately to force a few extra fractions of speed from her limbs as she sprinted across the station concourse. Behind her she could sense it, coming after her, an inexorably juggernaut that would never stop until it had its prey.

Her.

Bursting through the doors and onto the street, Hsu Yi paused a moment, looking for any means escape. Her breath came in ragged, terrified bursts.

There was a line of gold showing between the buildings on the eastern horizon – the onset of dawn. Would the sunlight save her? Drive that thing back to whatever circle of hell it originated from?

No. Sunlight will not save you from the Hrizu. That voice definitely wasn't her own.

In front of her was a parked mini-cab, its engine idling. Feeling the thing – the Hrizu – closing in fast she dashed towards it, opening the back door and throwing herself inside.

"Drive!" Her yell was hoarse – borderline hysterical.

The driver – an Asian man with a thick moustache and a disinterested gaze – just looked round at her slowly. He was in the middle of rolling a cigarette. "What's your hurry, lady?"

"Just fucking drive!" Shit. Bloody imbecile.

"Hey, no need for. . ." He started. Too late.

As the Hrizu came in through the window she went for the door on the other side of the cab. She heard the driver cry out; saw the garish explosion of blood that sprayed across the inside of the windscreen. Then she was off and running again, legs pounding across the tarmac, arms pumping.

As it feasted on the Taxi-driver it seemed to be laughing at her – assuring her that, yes, she would be next.

You can't escape you know.

Shut up.

She was heading towards a bunch of warehouses, storage yards and dilapidated office blocks that had built up around the station and the railway line. Behind her she was aware of the Hrizu finishing its impromptu meal, starting in pursuit of her again almost lazily – a cat toying with a mouse.

It can catch you anytime it wants to. It can move as fast as a train, remember?

She rounded a corner, forcing herself to ignore that inner voice. Ahead of her the access road stopped in a chain link fence, the gate in the middle of it padlocked shut. Beyond it was a freight yard. No time to turn back now.

The only reason you've lived as long as you have is that it enjoys the taste of your fear.

She threw herself at the fence, hands snagging the top of it. Swinging her legs up she dropped quickly over the other side, landing in a crouch on the hard baked earth. With scarcely a pause she was off and running again, although now the beginnings of a stitch was forming in her side – sharp nagging pain that would grow and grow as long as she kept running.

Think of it as foreplay. Postponing the small pleasure you could have now for the much larger pleasure you know will come later.

Around her were piles of metal freight containers, stacked on top of each other to form towering, shadow-filled canyons – maze-like in their complexity. Mini showers of gravel flew up behind her with each step. She could feel her pursuer closing inexorably – hear its multitude of gibberish voices rising in a dreadful cacophony – hunger more powerful than ever, strengthened rather than satiated by its impromptu feasting.

She tried to go even faster, but there was nothing more left in the tank. The gap kept on closing. Why are you telling me this?

Because I can save you.

Hsu Yi threw an involuntary glance over her shoulder, almost imagining she could feel it breathing down her neck. As she hurled over a pile of rusting girders she missed her step, stumbling. Sharp pain flared as gravel tore into her knees and the palms of her hands. Oh God. Oh God.

Grimacing she forced herself to her feet. Terror flashed, threatening to rage out of control. Inside she new that the slip had been as good as fatal, but she kept on going – wouldn't give up. Not now. Not ever. Breath coming in wheezing gasps, pain knifing into the side of her ribcage, she broke into a run again.

How? She demanded of that inner voice. Who are you?

Who I am doesn't matter. Anyway, you know who I am.

The figurine. Megaera, Luke Charron had called her. The Jealous One. The Grudging.

What do you want for saving me? Nothing in life was free.

Hsu Yi rounded a corner and found only a dead end ahead of her, three sides boxed in by containers. Nowhere more to run. Nowhere to hide. What do you want? It was a cry of despair.

The same as what everyone wants, in their hearts. I want freedom. If you set me free I can save you.

Bravery was a fallacy. If you were seen as brave it just meant you'd never been sufficiently scared yet. As the thing – the Hrizu – closed in she felt something inside herself whither. Honour had no meaning beside such fear.

Okay. Okay. Whatever you want! Just don't let it eat me! She had regressed to a terrified child, afraid of the monsters that lurk in the darkness, willing to agree to anything.

Take me out of the bag you carry and hold me in your hands. Coolly commanding that voice. Coolly furious.

Hsu Yi's hands shook violently as she tried to get the zip open. Tears streamed unnoticed down her cheeks. The Hrizu, cackling to itself in darkly triumphant glee, rounded the corner as the bag fell away. She grasped the tarnished figurine tightly – desperately.

Now hold me out toward it.

She obeyed the voice's authority purely on instinct, thrusting the figurine towards the rapidly approaching doom.

The distortion wave rolled onwards regardless, a twisting mass like a swarm of a thousand invisible winged maggots. As it touched her and the outstretched statuette Hsu Yi heard herself screaming. . .

There was a flare of brilliant light. The figurine exploded violently into a thousand pieces.

Shards of shrapnel should have ripped Hsu Yi's hands – her face and her body – to shreds. They didn't. Instead they simply vanished into her flesh, without leaving so much as a mark behind.

The light subsided.

There was no sign of the Hrizu. The air was calm and clear, without a trace of disturbance. The only sound was a suggestion of a fading wail that might have only been overactive imagination. Hsu Yi collapsed limply onto her hands and knees.

She stayed like that for a long time, shudders periodically wracking her shoulders. Eventually even the shudders ceased. Then something indefinable changed.

Eventually her head tilted back, her fringe falling aside from where it had been concealing her face. A ray of dawn sunlight flashed as it touched her eyes, showing irises that were now strange, inhuman disks of copper. Her lips curved up at the corners, though you would be hard pressed to call the expression a smile.

Then Megaera stood up, reflexively attempting to flex her wings. For the first time in millennia she walked free.

* * *

Lara walked along a deserted corridor in the back offices of the British Museum. The only sound was the soft clicking of the heels of her shoes, and the early morning half-light leant everything a strange unreal sheen. Surroundings that should have been familiar appeared eerie and alien – as if she was walking in a dream.

As she reached her office door she realised that she was unconsciously holding her breath. Looking for ghosts in the shadows dear?

It didn't seem particularly funny though.

She hadn't been home yet. It felt like too much of a risk. Her newly acquired 'friends' might be there already, waiting for the chance to renew acquaintances. Of course, they could also have been waiting here. . . but if you let yourself second-guess all your actions you'd never get out of bed in the morning.

I should have gone straight to the police.

Perhaps, but that felt too much like an admission that she wasn't in control.

Well girl, I'll let you in on something,, you're not.

She wanted some time to think though – to find out how things stood and weigh up what to do. Then she would go to the police. Probably. Possibly. If she deemed it necessary.

She dumped the green holdall on her antique desk.

Apart from that desk the office looked unused. There was an accumulation of dusk in the corners she hadn't bothered to clean up yet, and a general lack of the everyday clutter that suggested occupancy. During the past year she hadn't made more than occasional use of the place.

Without any of her usual grace she slumped into one of the chairs and sighed. After a moment she leaned forward, elbows on the desk, holding her head in her hands.

Stop feeling so bloody sorry for yourself. You've had worse days.

Oh?

She went through a quick list. Strangely it made her feel better, though it probably should have been depressing that she could come up with so many instances so quickly. A fleeting smile quirked across her lips. At least no Egyptian temples had collapsed on top her today.

Her gaze alighted on the phone. She'd already tried calling Winston, to alert him to the possible danger, before she remembered he wouldn't be in until later in the morning. She'd also tried Emil's number, but had only got his voice mail.

Lara resisted the momentary temptation to phone either of them again. It wasn't quite six o'clock yet. Most sensible people would probably still be in bed and not very appreciative about being woken up. Instead she leant back and turned on a rather outdated looking radio – morbidly curious about whether what had happened yesterday had managed to make the news.

A travel update. Presented by the kind of manicly cheerful person who shouldn't be allowed at this time of day. The sort of person she instinctively had the urge to slap.

Lara let her thoughts drift, tuning the babbling from the radio out of her head. After a time she started to stand up, intent on getting a coffee – something to take the edge off the tiredness that had crept up on her.

She paused as her gaze settled on the holdall – still hadn't gotten around to looking inside it. Well what are you waiting for? No point stealing something if you're not even going to have a look and see what it is you've stolen, is there?

She opened the zip with more than a hint of trepidation, although she couldn't quite pinpoint its source. Then she saw what the holdall contained.

Her eyes went wide. She froze. Her first thought was that she must be imagining things – interpreting the evidence of her eyes wrongly. But no, it remained the same however she looked at it.

Hands shaking fractionally, Lara lifted the object out of the bag and held it up to the light. She could feel both her breathing and heartbeat going to fast. Surely it can't be. . ?

But it was. A figurine of verdigrissed metal depicting a graceful winged woman, eerily familiar.

A horde of old half-forgotten memories flooded back. . .

Interlude - The Shrine (1994)

"Where are you creeping off to in such a hurry?"

Lara jolted in surprise at the unexpected voice behind her, spinning round to face it. Instinctively, before she registered who the voice belonged to, her hands went for the matching pair of pistols that hung at her hips.

"Oh, it's you Dasky. You should be careful, sneaking up on a girl like that. It could be detrimental to your continued good health." After a couple of heartbeats she lowered the twin stainless steel Brownings from in front of his face. There was still a hint of wariness in her eyes though.

Nikolas Daskalopulu started breathing again as the momentary danger of being shot passed. "A little jumpy today, eh Lara?"

"No." A fleeting smile, quickly gone. "If I was jumpy I'd have shot you."

Nikolas grinned uneasily. He could never quite tell when Lara was joking or serious. Probably the nuances of English humour escaped him. "Well I'm glad you're not feeling jumpy then."

"So am I. Bullets can be quite expensive you know. I'd have hated to have wasted one unnecessarily."

"Er, yes." He took an involuntarily step backwards from her. There were times when he found himself wondering whether his colleague was altogether sane. She was certainly very different to anyone else he had ever known.

He looked her up and down. She was dressed in tight khaki shorts and a light grey tank top – pretty much her usual attire when it came to it. Strong, lithe sun-bronzed limbs gleamed in the late afternoon sunlight and her burnished chestnut hair – pulled back in a single long braid as it always was – seemed to shine.

Of course most of the time he was altogether more aware of her undoubted femaleness than her mental state. . . A truly spectacular looking woman, and no mistake. Sometimes he half imagined that she was a reincarnation of some Olympian goddess – Elektra perhaps. Certainly the fierceness was there.

As Nikolas met her gaze again he saw from the tolerant amusement there that she was very aware of the scrutiny – and also very used to experiencing it from men. He felt a momentary flash of shame. I'm not like that. Really.

"So Dasky, don't you have pottery fragments in urgent need of cataloguing or something?"

In other words get lost, you're not wanted. He decided not to take the hint. She was the one trying to sneak off somewhere after all. Not him. "You know, you didn't answer my question."

"Question?" Lara quirked one eyebrow.

"Where are you going?"

"I have a question of my own for you Dasky. Why are you following me?" She looked around at their surroundings, bringing a hand up to shade her eyes. To Nikolas it seemed like she expected to see someone else – and that somebody wasn't, from the look of it, a friend.

There was no one in sight though – just rugged, rocky hills that weren't quite large enough to be called mountains, their slopes covered in loose scree and dense blankets of gnarled shrubbery. There could, he supposed, be someone using that undergrowth as cover, but rather them than him. He recalled the sharpness of their thorns rather more clearly than he would wish.

In fact everything looked calm and peaceful to his eyes, possessed of a desolate kind of beauty that was quite inspiring. There was no sign of the hand of man and it was almost possible to believe that they were the only two people on earth at that particular moment in time. Certainly there was no indication that there was a sizable camp of archaeologists less than a mile away from this spot.

"Because you are acting suspiciously Lara. Sneaking off in the evening on your own while the others' backs are turned, trying to be stealthy. You're up to something, and I'll wager that Professor Stephenson would not be pleased with you if he found out about it."

"My, my Dasky. Haven't we developed an overactive imagine of late." Lara finished scanning the horizon before looking back at him, fixing him with those penetrating brown eyes of hers in a manner that made him feel slightly uncomfortable. "If you must know I'm going for a walk. I do it every evening at about this time. I enjoy a bit of solitude – the chance to be alone with my thoughts. Without any interruptions."

That last was another hint, obviously. Nikolas again decided to ignore it. "Do you always take a pair of guns along when you go for a walk then?"

"As a matter of fact, Dasky I do. You can never be too careful if you're a poor defenceless woman out on her own."

Nikolas tried to reconcile the words 'poor' and 'defenceless' with the Lara Croft that was standing in front of him, graceful and poised – and, he added to himself, dangerous. He found the task to be beyond the scope of his imagination. "Oh, come on. You don't expect me to believe that do you? You won't find anything more dangerous out here than a lynx."

"I'm generally more worried about predators of the two-legged variety." So saying she turned her back on him and started walking, loose stone crunching beneath the soles of her walking boots. "Bye, bye Dasky. See you back in camp in a few hours."

For a moment he just watched her – the hypnotic sway of her hips – as she strode briskly down the slope away from. You're not getting away from me that easily.

"Wait up." He could feel sweat trickling down his face as he started after her, having to scurry in an undignified manner in an effort to catch up.

Lara ignored him – didn't so much as glance back.

Damn. He could feel himself becoming breathless as he continued after her, struggling to keep pace. Not as fit as you should be are you Nikolas? Too many hearty meals and not enough exercise. She certainly put him to shame.

"Lara!" He implored.

"You still here Dasky?" She finally took pity on him, stopping again and turning to face him, hands on hips. "Didn't you get the message? I would very much prefer to be left alone."

He stared at her face – cool, beautiful, a hint of annoyance showing through to the surface. "Okay, okay," he said quickly. "You tell me what you're really up to. Where you're really going, and I'll stop bothering you." A part of him was feeling ever so slightly offended by all this. Am I really such bad company?

She simply snorted and started to turn away again.

"You're looking for something aren't you?"

For several seconds he thought she was going to ignore him – just keep on walking. Then she stopped and looked back at him again. "And what would make you think that?"

Ah-hah, so he'd hit the nail on the head then. There was a brief surge of excitement, which he tried hard to hide. "I've heard about you, Lara Croft. You have quite a reputation."

She grunted. "Well I wouldn't believe everything I hear in that regard Dasky." After a moment, as if impelled by curiosity, she added: "What precisely have you heard?"

He chose carefully. Some of it wasn't altogether flattering, so no need to mention that just now. "That you're extremely . . . unconventional. Daring even. And you've made a number of startling discoveries because of that . . . unconventionality."

A hint of a smile. He saw that she knew precisely how much of an edited version that was and was amused by it. "I think you forgot the bit about me being an unscrupulous grave robber. Along with some other particularly choice items."

"Well I don't believe everything I hear." He grinned, echoing Lara's earlier phrase.

"So what do you want, Dasky?" She fixed him with that penetrating gaze again and it felt for a moment like she was looking right into his soul.

"I want in," he blurted.

She blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Oh, I don't mean I want any part of what you find or anything. That's all your work and nothing to do with me. No I just want to go along with you. To be there when you find whatever it is you're looking for. To see it uncovered." He was rambling, caught up in a sense of almost childlike excitement and adventure.

Somewhere inside a sensible part of him tried to protest. What about your training Nikolas? You know this isn't how proper archaeology is done. He ignored it. You couldn't always let sensible rule your life.

Lara was immediately shaking her head. "Uh-huh. No way. You've got no idea what you're asking. This isn't some kind of game you know." She appeared to think twice about that last statement and amended: "At least it's not the kind of safe, cosy game you can decide you've had enough of and don't want to play anymore. This is dangerous and it can get you killed."

He felt a brief crushing sense of disappointment at the expression of absolute denial he saw on her face. He pushed it aside. You're not going to give up so easily are you? You're not going to let her think you're just some child she can tell what to do? "So I was right then. You admit you are looking for something."

Her lips compressed into a moue.

Ah-hah, got you there haven't I?

"If you don't let me come along I'll tell Stephenson what you're up to. He won't like it, and when he lets them know I doubt the British Museum will like it much either. You're not doing this for the museum are you?"

She sighed. "You know Dasky, nobody likes a snitch. Besides, you've got no idea what I'm actually doing."

"Please Lara. Let me come along."

This isn't a bloody picnic you know." There was open exasperation in Lara's voice now.

"I realise that."

She muttered something beneath her breath that he didn't quite catch. He got the definite impression that it wasn't anything complimentary though. "Very well." It was said with ill grace. "If you can manage to keep up." A rather pointed glance down at his inexorably expanding waistline.

"I managed okay up to now didn't I? You didn't even see me until I called out to you."

"I was concentrating on something else," she responded a touch defensively. He saw that he'd managed to at least score a point with her though. However grudging it might be. "Okay Dasky, come along if that's what you want. But you do everything I tell you, right away without question. And you absolutely do not touch anything unless I tell you it's okay. Is that clear?"

"As crystal." Nikolas Daskalopulu was suddenly grinning, unable to contain the excitement he was feeling.

Lara simply shook her head in resignation and started walking again.

* * *

After the two figures – beautiful, poised, athletic Englishwoman and shorter, slightly rotund looking moustachioed Greek man – had disappeared from view a section of the dense blanket of shrubbery moved and began to rustle. A few seconds later and a man rose into view.

For a time he stood, motionless and silent, gazing in the direction in which they had just departed. His dark eyes were brooding and unreadable. Then a wide smile split across his black-bearded face, teeth glinting in the sunlight in a manner that was strangely malevolent. Hungry even.

A low chuckle welled up from the back of the man's throat. Lara, Lara. So you've found yourself a puppy dog.

A quick check of the pair of magnums he carried, and he started after them.

* * *

"So what is it we're looking for anyway?" Nikolas's Greek-accented English was noticeably ragged from the effects of exertion, his face ruddy and slick with sweat.

Lara had been setting a pretty punishing pace over the rugged ground and even she was starting to feel it now. She stopped abruptly in her tracks and Nikolas almost crashed straight into her back, caught unawares. She looked around again, scanning the horizon through 360 degrees. Nothing. Again.

Perhaps she was being too cautious. But she had been warned that certain others might show an interest. And certain others might very well mean him.

Your being paranoid dear – he's halfway around the world from here probably. He's not going to show up everywhere you do. This isn't the movies. Still, despite the lack of evidence she had the nagging feeling that she was being watched.

"You've heard of the Erinyes I presume?" Finally she responded to Nikolas's question. She'd reached the conclusion that if they were being followed whoever it was was too good to give away any sign.

"The Erinyes?" She saw the surprise in his expression and hid a smile. "Yes, yes. I've heard of them. . . Of course."

Lara simply raised one eyebrow and left the silence for him to fill.

"The Daughters of the Night they're sometimes called. The three goddesses of revenge. Megaera, Alecto and Tisiphone. Among the oldest and most enigmatic deities of ancient Greece. Supposedly they were formed as droplets of blood fell to earth from the wounds of Uranus, castrated by his son, the titan Chronus. Their attention was brought down on murderers, perjurers, those guilty of ingratitude or disrespect – or simply those who had managed to in some way offend the gods. And once you had their attention. . ." A hand drawn in a swift line across his throat. "Well, you were as good as done for. They pursued you remorselessly until you were driven mad and died. Homer and Euripides both refer to them as I recall." He shrugged. "Does that satisfy you? I have not, I confess, really studied them. That was really dredging the dark recesses of my memory."

"It'll do. For now." She was distracted by something in the corner of her vision. Movement? Yes, she saw a few seconds later. But only a Hyrax – a large rodent-like mammal of the same family as the rabbit. A quiet exhalation of relief. Get a grip girl. If you keep looking over your shoulder for him your entire life it'll drive you insane.

Like her own personal Fury. The irony of that didn't escape her.

"Well?" She noticed a hint of impatience in Nikolas's voice. "What do the Erinyes have to do with what you're looking for? I can't recall any great faith being built around them. They're more your 'be good or the bogeyman will get you' types that you see in just about every culture on the planet."

From what Lara had discovered they appeared to be rather more than that, but she didn't bother to correct him.

Standing still like this, exposed, was starting to make her feel a touch uncomfortable. She started walking again, hiding a smile at Nikolas's stifled groan. "Somewhere around here is supposed to be one of the spots where Uranus's blood fell to earth."

"Supposed?"

"To be more precise, there's a cave, about a mile away from here. Now, now Dasky, don't groan. It was you who asked to come along I recall. Demanded in fact. And this is really nothing more than a gentle stroll."

"My name is Nikolas. Or Nick. Why do you persist in calling me Dasky?"

She'd been wondering when that would manage to provoke a response. As soon as his feet started hurting it seemed. "Because I know it annoys you."

He muttered something she didn't quite catch. "And why would you want to annoy such a nice, kind-hearted gentleman as myself? How would you like it if I started calling you Crofty?"

She gave an elegant shrug of her shoulders. "I've been called a lot worse things in my time."

"So what are we expecting to find when we reach this cave then?"

Another shrug. "Honestly? I don't know. A shrine of some sort, my research has led me to believe, though that is such a vague term it can mean just about anything. Perhaps there'll be nothing. On the other hand there could be something spectacular."

"Though you tend to believe that latter of the two possibilities," Nikolas reasoned.

"Who can say? I'm sure you know as well as I do that it's best not to go in with fixed idea of what you're going to find. Reality has a habit of throwing up surprises. One way or another."

"But you are looking for something specific I take it," he persisted.

"Perhaps," was her somewhat enigmatic response.

By the time they reached the cave the valley was deep in shadow, refreshingly cool compared with the heat of the rest of the day.

"Is that it?" Nikolas said after they'd stood, contemplating it for several minutes. She could hear the edge of disappointment in his voice.

"Yes. That is, as you put it, it." In truth Lara thought, it didn't look like much – an almost invisible opening at the foot of a bluff of reddish coloured rock. From this angle it appeared to be half-choked with scree and definitely not large enough to admit a human standing upright.

"You would expect something slightly more impressive for what amounts to the birthplace of a god."

An echo of Lara's thoughts twenty-four hours earlier when she had first looked upon the cave entrance. "If it looked outwardly spectacular people would have uncovered the place years ago, wouldn't they Dask-Nikolas? Trust me, it's the place I'm looking for."

She started down the slope, booted feet knocking mini-cascades of scree loose to tumble ahead of her. Up close they found that the cave had been considerably larger at some point in the past – ten or fifteen feet tall at least and even wider than that. That was before the scree slope had subsided though, all but blocking the entrance off.

Lara pulled one of her Browning HP35 pistol's as she peered into the darkness. The air around her was dry and dusty, tickling her nose and the back of her throat. "It's an ideal den for a family of lynxes," she explained before he could voice the question. "Although they're not individually all that dangerous a mother with cubs could be. . . rather demonstrative."

Crouching low, she started inside. "Now remember what I told you. . ."

"I know. I know. Stay behind you. Do exactly what you say. Don't touch anything." He broke into a coughing fit as a cloud of dust hit him in the face.

Lara shot him a glare over her shoulder. His tone had sounded altogether too blasé. "I mean it Nikolas. One slip in here. . . It's likely to get us both killed. You understand that? If you don't think you can handle it then you can wait behind for me here."

"Sorry, sorry." He raised his hands as the coughing fit subsided. "I assure you I won't do anything stupid. I'll be extremely careful."

Lara grunted noncommittally. Sometimes, she thought, merely being careful just wasn't enough.

* * *

The man with the close-cropped black beard crouched down behind a rocky outcropping at the top of the hill, watching the cave entrance. The two lines of footprints leading down the slope in front of him – one set considerably deeper and more ragged than the other – were obviously extremely fresh. Indeed, he estimated that he was at most five minutes behind them.

For the moment he decided to remain where he was.

Lara, dear Lara. Are you looking for me now? A feral grin crossed his face. Oh, I do hope so.

He imagined her standing just inside the cave entrance, concealed by shadow as she gazed up at the hilltop, looking for signs of pursuit, but unable to see anything. The image grew so vivid that he could almost feel her heart fluttering with tightly contained fear. Delicious.

For a moment he felt the urge to charge down the slope, magnums blazing – to put an end to it there and then; fast and brutal and intense.

He suppressed it quickly; a past master of controlling the strange and fierce passions that often roared through him. For one thing she really could be there, looking up at the hilltop, and back-lit by the late evening sunlight he would make a perfect target. For another he judged it was virtually impossible to make any descent quietly – they would know he was coming long before he got there.

No, better to wait, he decided. Let Lara face the traps and dangers that waited beneath the earth. Let Lara recover the artefact. Less work for him to do.

And when she had it he would take it from her. Like he had taken so many other things from her in the past. His grin broadened. Candy from a baby, as the Americans say.

* * *

A few metres inside the cave it was possible to stand fully upright as the scree slide petered out. Lara took a torch from her backpack, its brilliant beam piercing through the darkness. No irate family of lynxes awaited, nor any other form of animal come to that. Which was strange. Wildlife always took full advantage of its surroundings, and this looked like an ideal den spot.

The cave went back further than Lara's torch beam showed, vanishing into gloom, and the air was hot and arid – unlike the dankness she usually associated with underground. At the moment there was no sign of man's hand ever having touched their surroundings, the walls rugged and uneven.

But this is the place. It has to be. There were no other possibilities in the nearby area – something she had confirmed from several evenings of meticulous searching.

Behind her Nikolas had fallen quiet and the only noise was the soft echo of their footsteps.

Something strange. The feeling crept up on her with each forward step until it was impossible to ignore. She couldn't put her finger on precisely what it was, but it was undeniable. Suddenly she could completely understand why nothing had wanted to make this place its home.

Abruptly the ground started to slope steeply down beneath their feet, still with no sign of any end to it. She paused, inexplicably reluctant to go on – heard Nikolas's teeth click sharply behind her. A glance back showed a distinctly uneasy cast to his expression.

"You feel it too, don't you?"

"Feel it?" Definitely. It was in his eyes. Though he didn't want to admit it and appear superstitious; be put to shame by a woman.

"It." She shrugged. "I can't come up with any kind of better description than that. But you know what I mean."

He licked his lips nervously. "I. . ." He began, then stopped. "Looking down there I get this nagging sensation." Another hesitation. "It feels like. . .well like we're about to walk into the mouth of Hades."

"Well in that case you'd better have your fare ready."

He gave her a blank look.

"The boatman, Charon, will only take customers who are able to pay the fare."

His chuckle was more than a little strained.

"Come on, lets get moving." The words were as much for herself as for Nikolas. Her feet felt as if they'd become rooted to the spot.

Despite the downward slope it was increasingly difficult to make forward progress. The air around her seemed to have taken on the consistency of treacle, and the effort of merely putting one foot in front of another became an almighty strain. She could feel the fear – the bubbling undercurrent of panic – but she couldn't say why she felt it.

After several minutes slow progress she realised that Nikolas was no longer with her.

She stopped and looked back. He was ten yards behind, appearing to strain against an invisible wall like an unconvincing mime artist. Sweat was pouring down his face.

"Nikolas." Lara extended a hand towards him. She saw him make one shuddering step closer to her then stop. His shoulders slumped.

Something, she concluded grimly, didn't want them going any further. A little icicle shiver passed up her spine.

"Nikolas," she repeated. If you want this you have to really want it. You can't give up at the first sign of difficulty. Now walk towards me. Just concentrate on getting your leg muscles working. Don't think about anything else."

He managed a single shuddering step. A few seconds later he managed another. Then a third. Then he was walking again, albeit in the manner of a robot from a low budget 1950's sci-fi movie. His face bulged with the stain.

Abruptly something seemed to shatter, the intolerable sense of pressure that had built up vanishing in a single instant. Gasping for breath, Nikolas made it to her side. She could see his limbs shaking.

"Well done," she said simply and meant it.

"What the. . . what the fuck was that?"

Startled slightly, Lara realised she'd never heard Nikolas swear. At least not in English.

What indeed? That was most definitely a very good question, and one she didn't have any nice convenient answers for. Spike pits and giant boulders were all very well, but this. . . this was something else. Suddenly her excitement grew. They were in the right place, no doubt about it.

Not, of course, that she'd had any.

They continued walking again, neither of them saying anything. Periodically flashes of doubt or despair or fear surged up inside her, but she managed to ignore them, recognising that they didn't originate from inside herself. Indeed, they appeared to be associated with particular spots, the feelings vanishing almost immediately each time she forced herself to take another forward step.

Then, abruptly, the walls of the cave opened out around them.

They stopped, this time of their own accord. The quality of the air around them had changed, no longer so tight and hot and dusty. The sounds of their footsteps and their breathing were no longer so loud and closely contained.

A cavern.

Lara's slowly sweeping torch beam hit a pillar. Beside her she felt Nikolas start.

Man made, from the same reddish hued rock as the cave they'd just traversed, it was so broad that Lara's arms would have stretched only halfway around its girth. Carved in the centre of it there was a badly worn stone face. It was this that had made Nikolas jump.

A woman, Lara saw, and not a very friendly looking one either. That much was apparent despite the fact that half of it had crumbled away to dust. Her mouth was stretched open in a scream or a shriek and the one eye that remained intact seemed to glare at them with implacable rage. Carved hair fanned out around that face, its tangled coils resembling a nest of snakes.

Lara lowered the torch beam to the floor between them and the pillar, and very carefully walked towards it.

"Do you know which one she is?" Nikolas asked quietly as she inspected it more closely.

She shook her head. "I'm not certain. If you pushed me I'd guess Megaera, but that's only really from the derivations of a couple of local place names. I couldn't say for sure."

Lara's hand came up to touch the face but she caught herself, not sure what damage her fingertips would do to the crumbly looking stonework. There were other similar pillars around it too, supporting a ceiling about thirty feet above their heads. Several of them had collapsed, along with sections of the ceiling above where they'd stood, now nothing more than forlorn piles of rubble. Others showed deep cracks and fissures, looking like all they required to collapse was someone to breathe on them too hard.

"This place is amazing." Nikolas's awed whisper reached her from several metres off to the left, where he was inspecting another of the pillars.

"Freeze."

The urgency in Lara's voice was such that he obeyed, instantly and without question.

"Now very slowly put your foot down about two feet to the left. Absolutely do not tread on that tile directly in front of you." It was raised several millimetres above the floor surrounding it and looked loose. To her eyes it screamed trap.

Swallowing heavily and almost managing to overbalance in the process, Nikolas did as he was told. "Wha. . ?"

"Just loose," Lara muttered to herself as she knelt down to inspect it. False alarm. She shot him a glare. "What did I tell you earlier?"

He held his hands up. "I didn't touch anything."

"Well also don't wander off. And especially don't tread anywhere I haven't trodden first."

He opened his mouth to say something in protest but bit it back as he caught the look in her eyes. She wasn't in a patient mood.

They made their way across the chamber carefully, Nikolas following meekly in Lara's footsteps though his eyes roved everywhere, peering into the far reaches of the gloom. Around the perimeter of the chamber there were several more openings, similar to the one they had entered by and apparently leading off into further caves. For the moment Lara ignored them though. Her torch beam had shown an archway directly opposite, and she instinctively knew that this was what she wanted. The whole chamber seemed to flow towards it.

It was blocked.

Lara stood and stared at the wall of rubble that barred her path with a slightly hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. Although there were other directions to explore she was sure that what she was looking for lay through here. And from the look of things it would take an entire team of archaeologists several weeks of concerted digging to get through this amount fallen rock.

"Looks like we'll have to try one of those other openings we passed."

Lara didn't bother acknowledging him, instead concentrating on shining the torch beam into every dark recess and crevice. Abruptly she dropped to her knees.

Yes! There was an opening. A small gap at floor level that looked as if it might just be large enough to admit her – at a squeeze. She dropped to her knees in front of it. The torch beam showed that it extended back about fifteen or twenty feet before opening out again.

I can make it.

As long as I don't accidentally disturb anything and bring the whole lot crashing down on top of me.

Part of her quailed at the idea of crawling inside there – the thought of all that loose rock, pressing down, ready to shift and settle with every passing second. . .

Do you want to live forever, girl?

Well no, but being buried alive didn't exactly appeal.

"What are you doing Lara?" She felt Nikolas leaning over her.

"There's a gap all the way to the other side. Just large enough for me to crawl through."

Nikolas muttered something. Then said: "I'm not going to be able to fit."

Lara looked up at him, an amused smile briefly touching her lips as she studied his waistline. "What's the matter Nikolas? Too many Big Mac's of late?"

"Big Mac's? Big Mac's!" The outrage in his voice suggested she had just accused him of a crime on a par with molesting small children or domesticated animals. "I would never defile my body with such corporate American swill. That you could even suggest such a thing. . ."

"Now, now Nikolas. You're echoing." His raised voice bounced crazily off the chamber's walls. With a deep breath Lara came to a decision. No sense hanging about. . . "See you in a little while." She stuck her head inside the gap.

"Wait! You're serious about this?"

She sighed: pulled her head out again. "Yes Nikolas, I am."

"That is insane." The idea of someone crawling into that space seemed to make him queasy. "You have no idea what's waiting for you on the other side. And what happens if it collapses when you're crawling through. Or once you're on the other side? What then."

Lara gazed at his extremely worried looking face. "Then you go and get help. As quickly as you can, if that's okay with you."

"But you could be. . ."

"Killed? Yes, I know. If you want to look at it like that that's what life is: one long list of opportunities to get yourself killed. But you can get killed even if you stay in bed all day. In fact I'm sure you'll find that, statistically speaking, staying in bed all day is much more dangerous than what I'm about to do."

Lara shrugged off her pack, taking out a box of flares, which she shoved into the pockets of her shorts. She tossed the rest to Nikolas, who caught it reflexively. "There's a spare torch in there, so you don't have to stand around waiting in the dark."

"Crazy. Absolutely crazy." He shook his head.

She grinned at him. "I know. But I never claimed to be anything else, did I?" With that Lara started to pull herself forward into the narrow gap again. "Oh, and Nikolas. . ."

"Yes?"

"Remember not to. . ."

"Touch anything? I know. I know." Then her legs disappeared from view.

* * *

"Don't touch anything. Do exactly what I say," Nikolas muttered beneath his breath as he plonked himself down a convenient block of rubble from one of the fallen pillars. Did she think he was still a child? Someone who couldn't be trusted to do anything without someone else looking over his shoulder the whole time?

It was ridiculous. He was eight years her senior; a respected archaeologist to boot. Not some clodding know-nothing student on his first dig. Which was how she was treating him. So, are you going to let yourself be ordered around by some slip of a girl then Nikolas?

Well. . . Hardly a slip of a girl.

Damn, she was beautiful.

Not something you could avoid noticing really. For the first few days he had found her presence on the dig a huge distraction. It was hard to concentrate on the ground in front of you when you were much more interested in the woman working across the way. His work had suffered he was sure, and even now he wasn't what you could call totally relaxed around her.

She was very different from other beautiful women he had known – admittedly not many of them. Then again, he thought, she was also very different full stop.

It almost seemed to him like she viewed her beauty as some kind of irritant – a subtle form of disability rather than an asset, which got in the way and kept her from being what she truly wanted.

He wasn't sure what made him think that. After all she always kept herself well groomed and looking her best – never tried to hide what she was. But it all seemed a bit like how a soldier fresh from bootcamp would maintain their gear and weapons – something that had become so drilled in that it was almost impossible not to do.

His gaze dropped to that minuscule gap in the fallen rock. How long had she been gone? Four or five minutes? More? Less?

A large part of his annoyance, he realised suddenly, stemmed from worry. Worry for her.

How could anyone bring themselves to crawl into that gap? He shuddered to think about it. Even if he hadn't been too large to fit there was nothing he could imagine on this earth that could persuade him to crawl inside that tiny space. Yet she hadn't so much as batted an eyelid. Crazy, like he'd said. Horrible images – of rocky shifting without warning; of being buried alive; trapped – played inside his head.

Falling in love are we Dasky? That name she had called him in an effort to draw a rise. It hadn't honestly displeased him.

No! A little too fast. A little too vehement.

She'll tear your heart in half and discard it on the floor you know. A woman like that will never requite the feelings of a man like you.

I'm not falling in love with her. She has far too objectionable a personality. Who was he arguing with, he wondered?

He looked away from the hole, shining the torch she had left him around, peering at the ruined splendour that surrounded him.

This place truly was amazing. He had meant every bit of what he'd said earlier. That a site like this could remain here, undiscovered in this condition. It almost beggared belief.

Certainly more exciting than cataloguing pottery shards, he admitted to himself with a slight grin. Even if he wasn't allowed to touch anything.

A slight sigh. This was more what he had imagined archaeology to be like as a boy. Exploring and finding spectacular ancient ruins – walking into the unknown and facing untold danger. To see things that no one else alive had ever seen. Not that he was disappointed by the reality of his profession. Quite the opposite in fact: he loved his work with a passion. It was just that. . . well, part of him sometimes wondered what it would have been like to have been born a century earlier, when archaeology really did resemble his boyhood imaginings.

Lara seemed to have managed to find a way of living that reality even today, and he couldn't help but feel slightly envious. Still, the danger part of it would probably get old really fast.

Suddenly he caught a small, stealthy sound right behind him – like a boot scuffing against stone. He started to turn, but felt a cold circle of metal press into the back of his neck and froze.

"Ah-ah, Mr. Puppy Dog. No sudden movements please. I wouldn't want to accidentally blow your head off." The voice had a heavy French accent. Nikolas could hear the scarcely contained laughter in it.

* * *

Lara's head emerged from the other side of the narrow gap and she drew in great gulping breaths of relief.

For all her earlier nonchalance to Nikolas, those last few minutes were not ones she'd care to repeat in a hurry. Every painfully slow inch of the way had been a fight against the urge to panic and even now she could feel the lingering ghost of it, clawing at her with cold fingers.

She prised herself free of the tight, constricting opening and stood up, feeling her leg muscles shaking beneath her. The worst part of it had been that she could hear the rock above her – creaking and whispering constantly, as if debating with itself when it should collapse.

The light of the torch beam showed her that she was covered from head to foot in red dust – her clothes, her limbs, even her hair was choked with it. There were abrasions on her knees and elbows and her breasts hurt – bruised and aching from the tight squeeze.

Damned things. She'd contemplated reductive surgery several times in the past, once even going so far as to arrange an appointment at a clinic before chickening out at the last moment.

Well, you're going to have to make a return trip through there very shortly. Lara gritted her teeth. No problem. No problem at all.

Ahead of her the passage continued, free of any further blockage. She started forward. Too quickly. Not paying the same degree of care and attention to her surroundings as she normally would have in her eagerness to put the fallen rock behind her.

Six or seven paces and she heard a crack like a pistol shot beneath the heel of her boot. Then the floor opened up beneath her.

A stifled cry was startled from her lips and her torch fell from her grasp, tumbling end over end into pitch darkness.

* * *

"W-Who are you?" The tremor in Nikolas's voice gave away the fear he felt as he looked up at the man looming over him.

A chuckle, seemingly of good humour. "You mean dearest Lara hasn't told you about me, Mr. Puppy Dog? I should feel offended I think. I thought the two of us were much, much closer than that." He paused, seeming to consider. "Maybe she didn't want you to feel jealous."

Nikolas just stared up at the man and felt his fear grow. That tanned, darkly handsome face with its shadow of black beard, currently split by a fierce, feral looking grin. Those dark, smouldering, dangerous looking eyes. He couldn't remember ever being in the presence of someone who scared him quite as much as this, simply through the way he stood; by his gestures and expressions. Everything about the man before him screamed of menace.

Not that he was a physical monster.

He was perhaps slightly under six feet tall and lean rather than muscle-bound in build. But there was a tightly coiled energy about him. An air that would have had even those a foot taller and twice his bulk instinctively shying away. This was a caged-tiger of a man. And the lock on the cage door was hanging loose.

Suddenly he gave a low bow. "Pierre Du Pont at your service. Perhaps you have heard of me?"

Nikolas blanched. Yes, he had heard of Pierre Du Point all right.

"Ah, I see that you have." The Frenchman seemed amused. "You shouldn't believe all that you here though Mr. Puppy Dog."

On the evidence of the man in front of him Nikolas had no trouble whatsoever believing every single word of what he'd heard. And more. His gaze dropped to the pair of matt-black carbon steel pistols the Frenchman carried and he felt his gut clench.

Du Pont turned his back on him and bent down, inspecting the small hole Lara had crawled into several minutes ago. It was a perfect opportunity. He could pick up the piece of rubble beside him and bring it smashing down into the back of the man's skull. . .

But no. How could you attack a man like this from behind? What if you failed?

"So dearest Lara went through here did she?" He traced the telltale scuffmarks in the dust. "Always the daring one, Lara. Always so brave and defiant." A low laugh. "Always second best."

Nikolas stared at Du Pont's back. There was an airbrushed picture of a naked blonde on the battered leather jacket he wore. It reminded him of the sort of picture that you saw painted on the side of American Flying Fortresses during World War II.

"W-What do you want with us?"

Pierre Du Pont looked round slowly. "With us?" He fixed Nikolas with a hard look that made him flinch backwards. "I don't want anything with 'us' as you put it. You. You are a momentary amusement who may prove useful as a hostage. Other than that you are nothing to me. No, I am here for exactly the same reason Lara is, as well you know."

Nikolas's confusion must have shown on his face.

"Ah, so she hasn't told you then. Interesting. Perhaps you are not as important to her as I thought, eh Mr. Puppy Dog?"

Nikolas didn't say anything.

"What I want – or rather, what my client has paid me to retrieve – is the immortal remains of one of the Erinyes."

Nikolas blinked in surprise. The immortal remains. . . "So you're nothing more than a mercenary, doing what you're paid for. An errand boy." He tried to look contemptuous rather than plain terrified.

Du Pont merely laughed. "Do not be so sniffy, Mr. Puppy dog. What do you think your good friend Lara is? She is being paid, just like me. She is working for a client, just like me. We are exactly the same, her and I. Except I am better than she is. And I am not hypocrite enough to pretend I am anything other than what I am. She just has nicer breasts than I do, and that fools people into thinking she is a nicer person."

"I think you're full of shit." Attempting to seem more defiant than he really was.

"Is that so?" Du Pont rose from his crouch, took a couple of paces forward and placed the barrel of one of his pistols against Nikolas's temple.

Oh Christ. Nikolas could feel himself shaking like a leaf, cold sweat trickling in rivulets down his body. Part of him wanted to beg; to blabber for forgiveness. Only the certainty that Du Pont despised weaklings kept a veneer of control in place. Why didn't I just keep my big mouth shut?

After several interminable seconds Du Pont removed the gun. "You should remember one thing. At the moment I am god. I can extinguish you like that." Nikolas jumped as the Frenchman snapped his fingers loudly in front of his face. "And I eat puppy dogs like you alive."

Suddenly there was a distant, muffled crash, as of collapsing stone. It came from beyond the blocked archway.

Both of them turned to stare at the small opening. To Nicholas it felt as though a skeletal hand had clenched tight around his heart. No Lara. Please no. . .

"Dear me. It seems Mademoiselle Croft has had a slight accident." Pierre Du Pont gave an indifferent shrug. "Such a shame. I was so looking forward to renewing our acquaintance."

In that moment the terror inside Nikolas crystallised into icy cold hate. When he spoke his voice sounded surprisingly calm. "If I were you I'd very much hope she survived that." She must have done, mustn't she?

"Oh yes Mr. Puppy Dog? And why on earth should I hope that?" The smile he offered Nikolas was half sneer.

"Because it looks very much to me like your shoulders are too broad to fit through that opening. If she's dead you're not going to be able to get what you came for."

* * *

Lara's hands caught hold of an outcropping of rock about six feet down. The breath left her body in a whoosh as she slammed against unforgiving stone and her booted feet scrabbled desperately for grip. As she tried to suck air back into her lungs she felt her fingers start to lose their grip, arm muscles straining.

What lay below her she didn't know. Her torch had broken apart somewhere beneath, its light flickering out to leave her suspended in inky darkness, unable to see a thing. All things considered, finding out first hand probably wouldn't be something she'd enjoy.

One of her feet secured a foothold. She managed to arrest her inexorable slide as some of the weight was taken from her arms. For a time she just clung there, breathing deeply, forcing down the fear and panic welling up within her. Forcing herself to be calm and cool.

Shit. Not to be too delicate about it.

Unless you have experienced it the blackness of a cave is difficult to imagine. The darkest night is bright by comparison, and simply shutting your eyes is not at all the same thing. You have the choice of opening them again.

She was going to have to climb completely blind, she concluded quickly. The flares in her pockets were out of reach, and even if she could get to one she could hardly climb very well whilst holding it.

Six feet, she told herself. Not far at all. All she had to do was remain calm and take it nice and slowly.

Well, what are you waiting for then? The longer she waited, just hanging around, the more tired her arms would get: the harder the climb would be.

Slowly, carefully, she lifted one hand free from the outcropping and felt along the rock face. After a few seconds she located a narrow crevice, feeling along it and testing to see if it was going to hold her weight. Okay, next hand.

Seconds ticked. No other handhold presented itself. She fought the urge to hurry. Finally she located a small protuberance. Not ideal, but enough. Now for your feet.

It went on like that, slowly and systematically. Moving one limb at a time, making sure it was secure, then moving another limb. Climbing upwards by painstaking inches. Eventually – it felt like hours, but was probably only minutes – she reached the lip of the pit she had opened up and pulled herself back onto solid ground.

Okay, that's the one fuck up you're allowed today. Next one kills you.

Lara took one of the flares from her pocket and turned her head aside to shield her eyes from the sudden brilliance as she ignited it. It was several long moments before her eyes adjusted to being able to see again.

Behind her about ten feet of passageway had collapsed – easy enough to jump over if she wanted. Go back or go on? Six flares – that gave her about eighteen minutes of light. All other sources of illumination she had were back with Nikolas, in her pack.

If she was prudent she would go back, return to camp and come here again tomorrow – properly kitted out and alone this time, with nothing to distract her.

But when was I ever prudent? And there was also the nagging knowledge that going back would mean at least three more trips through that narrow, crumbling passageway in the rock fall behind her. Not that it scares me, or anything.

So, nine minutes.

Lara started walking. Each step was precise and measured, exactly the same length as the one before it. She kept a careful count inside her head. If it became necessary she would be able to retrace her path in perfect darkness.

Around her the walls and floor became natural cave again, rough and uneven. A hint of doubt crept in. What if this wasn't the right way? It had, after all, only been guesswork on her part – a feeling. But it was the focal point of the previous chamber, this passageway. It made sense that it should be this way.

What made sense to a modern 20^th century mind didn't necessarily make sense to someone born several millennia earlier however. She knew that very well. You couldn't make these broad assumptions.

Nevertheless, she kept on gong. Best to find out one way or another tonight if possible.

The light from the flare began to flicker and dance madly. Still no sign of anything ahead of her except uniform reddish-stone cave. Sputtering, the light died, plunging her into total darkness once more. Calmly Lara took out flare number two and continued.

Minutes passed. It became strangely lulling, counting out each carefully measured stride, and she had to make a considerable effort to maintain the edge of her concentration.

Then, in front of her, the cave opened up again. She stopped, staring into the darkness ahead of her, but the light from the flare didn't penetrate far enough to make out more than hints. She throttled down the surge of premature excitement, forcing herself to focus on the ground ahead, looking for any signs of traps like the pitfall that had almost claimed her.

It was some kind of grotto. The incandescent light of the flare cast strange moving shadows across the walls. Some of them resembled distorted faces, gazing down at her. Lara dismissed that momentary impression as a figment of overactive imagination.

Over to her left there was a second opening leading away into darkness, but for the moment she ignored it. Her attention was fixed on what lay at the chamber's heart.

An altar, carved from a natural shelf of rock. Faded images were engraved across its surface – eagles wings and snakes and stylised flowers of a type she didn't immediately recognise: other things that were too badly worn to properly make out.

Standing over it was a sweeping archway of stone, surmounted by a carved face – like the one she had seen on the pillar earlier, only in considerably better condition. Those blank stone eyes, gazing blindly down at her were fierce – strangely intimidating – and as she stepped forward she suppressed a slight shiver that had nothing to do with air temperature.

Sitting in the centre of the altar was the object she'd come for.

Lara hadn't known what to expect. She remembered talking about it with David, standing together in the gazebo of his old estate as the sun set, gazing out across the secluded lake and sipping champagne.

David. Her employer. Also her friend. Eighteen years her senior. Almost old enough to be her father.

And her lover.

She hadn't meant for that last part to happen. But she'd worked out by now that life rarely went according to plan. At least not her plan. It wouldn't last; in her experience these things never did. Just for the moment though it was – well nice seemed too anodyne a word.

Lara pushed thoughts of David aside. Later. A figurine, depicting a slender, graceful looking naked woman with wings, made from some sort of badly verdigrissed metal. Neither David nor herself had guessed exactly this, but it couldn't really be anything else.

She leant across the altar to get a closer look; saw that there were traces of some sort of decayed material, both on and around the carved shelf of stone. By the look of it, it was some sort of desiccated vegetable matter. Her imagination conjured up garlands of flowers – lilies, hyacinth, and narcissus – left as offerings, and she almost fancied she could smell a trace of their perfume, lingering in the dusty air. There was nothing of course. Too much time had passed.

There didn't appear to be any way the figurine could be trapped. As far as she could tell the shelf was a seemless block of stone, carved from rock already in place. No possibility of counterweight mechanisms, or anything else to judge from what she saw.

The proof of the pudding, as they say. . .

Lara lifted the figurine from its seat, ready to leap back to safety if anything should happen.

Nothing did.

It was lighter than it looked. Lighter than it should have been, if it were solid. Which meant it had to be hollow. Lara felt her excitement grow, turning the figurine slowly over in her hands. Yes, if it was hollow there couldn't be any doubt. . .

A momentary feeling of strangeness swept over her, similar to what she had felt entering this complex of caves. For a brief disconcerting instant she had the impression that the figurine was laughing at her.

Then the flare flickered once and went out.

* * *

"What is your name, Mr. Puppy Dog?"

Pierre Du Pont and Nikolas Daskalopulu sat facing one another. Nikolas's back was to the archway with its rock fall and its narrow passageway through the stone, and Du Pont's gaze seemed more interested in that than in Nikolas.

It gave Nikolas just a glimmer of hope. Du Pont's actions suggested that he didn't believe that Lara had died in that crash they had had heard, whatever he might say.

"What does it matter to you what my name is?" Nikolas wondered.

Du Pont shrugged. "Very little," he admitted. "But I do like to know the names of those I kill. It seems more courteous that way. Tell me or not. I'm sure you will have some identification on your well fed body that will give me the same information."

Nikolas shuddered. The casual matter-of-factness of the man was absolutely terrifying. For a moment his mouth felt too dry to responded. "N-Nikolas. Professor Nikolas Daskalopulu."

"Ah, a Professor. A learned man. I am humbled by your presence." He inclined his head mockingly, his smile unpleasant – a cat toying with a mouse. "Professor Puppy Dog."

"W-Why do you call me that?"

"Puppy Dog?" Du Pont raised an eyebrow, as if surprised that Nikolas needed to ask. "Because that is what you are. Small and soft and helpless. Innocent of the ways of the world." He displayed his teeth, shark-like.

The anger Nikolas felt at the man's contemptuous dismissal was not enough to overcome his fear. Maybe I'll show you that even a puppy dog has teeth. But it was a hollow thought, and he knew it. Against the man sitting in front of him he was a puppy dog.

"Y-You said you were going to kill me? W-Why wait? What good is a puppy dog to you?"

Du Pont laughed. "You are so eager to die? I thought you would be busy planning some futile last-ditch escape attempt. In answer to your question, I know dear Lara too well to assume that the noise we heard signalled her demise. I will wait a few hours to see if you prove useful as a hostage. After that I'm afraid you will become too much of a burden."

"You're scared to face a girl alone, without the advantage of a hostage? Obviously you are not the same man I had heard about."

Another laugh. "That is supposed to be an insult Professor Puppy Dog? A remarkably unenlightened and sexist attitude for this day and age. In my business you quickly learn that you take whatever advantage you can grab and use it to its fullest extent. So don't try playing to my sense of pride or honour. I murdered both a long time ago."

Du Pont seemed amused rather than offended though, and was apparently in the mood to talk. Nikolas didn't have much choice but to listen.

"Has Lara told you about how the two of us first met? No, no I forget, you said she never mentioned me at all. That grieves me. It really does. After all we've been through. . ."

* * *

Lara heard voices ahead of her and froze.

She was about two-thirds of the way through the narrow tunnel in the fallen rock, in the process of slithering forward on her belly. One of her hands, stretched out in front of her, cradled the figurine carefully, trying to ensure that it came to no harm. The other was being used to help pull herself forwards. No flares, although there was still one left in her pocket. There was, however, just enough light to see the vaguest hint of her surroundings by, filtering through from up ahead.

Two voices. So it wasn't just Nikolas talking to himself.

She cursed silently. Had she misjudged him that badly? Let the guileless enthusiasm of his exterior lull her?

Don't jump to conclusions. At the moment all she could tell was that there were two voices. The words – and the identities of the speakers – were impossible to ascertain.

After several seconds straining in vain to hear, she started to inch ever so slowly forward again. Stealth, with the full the full length of her body pressed against the floor and considerable less than inch of clearance above her, was next to impossible. Hopefully though, the voices would cover up the sounds of her movement. Hopefully.

Damn. It wasn't so much the French accent as the undertone of black, mocking humour that gave him away.

Lara instantly froze again, able to hear her heartbeat thunderously loud in her ears.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise. She'd been watching for him, and part of her had been expecting him to leap out of the woodwork from the moment her flight had landed in Athens. David had warned that 'others' might be after the same prize as them. 'Others' had a nasty habit of turning out to be Pierre Du Pont. With this devil you didn't even have to speak of him.

Expectation doesn't in any way prepare you for being trapped like a rat.

What the hell am I going to do now? Backwards left her with three minutes of useable light, not enough materials to improvise a torch even if she resorted to tearing her clothing into strips, and no way of knowing if the other passageway she'd seen led anywhere in any case. Forwards. Forwards she didn't like to think about. Fish in a barrel didn't even begin to cover it.

Déjà vu all over again.

The last time he'd got the drop on her had been in Brazil.

She remembered feeling quite cheerful at the time. The crystal skull she'd been hired to recover was nestling safely in her pack, and she'd managed to escape the trap infested tunnel complex without so much as a scratch. Granted she'd been a little out of breath from a race against a rather large boulder, but it wasn't any fun if there was no danger.

Best of all though she'd spotted the ambush before she'd walked straight into it, creeping around the side and coming up, unseen, right behind her would be hunter, trusty Browning pistols in hand.

'Afternoon Pierre, fancy meeting you here. Nice day for a jungle stroll isn't it? Although trying to spy on a lady is generally considered bad manners' Oh yes, she'd been full of it. For once she was going to get the better of the bastard and it felt good. Very good. 'Now hand me those pistols. There's a dear.'

The venomous look he'd shot her way as he obeyed only made her feel even better.

That flight of gaudy, jewel bright macaws bursting from the jungle canopy had distracted her for the merest fraction of a second. Plenty enough time for Du Pont to pull the tiny .22 calibre hold-out revolver with its ridiculous looking two-inch barrel from an ankle holster and shoot her through the shoulder however.

She'd taken three steps backwards in numb shock, scarcely comprehending what had happened yet. The third step had taken her over the edge of a ravine with a sheer two-hundred foot drop.

If the fast flowing river hadn't been swollen to twice its normal height by heavy rainfall she'd have been smashed apart on jagged rocks. As it was she barely managed to keep hold of consciousness as she hit.

The time in the water was a blur. All she could remember was raging brown, sediment heavy water all around her – throbbing agony from her shoulder.

Eventually she'd been washed up onto a muddy riverbank, coughing her lungs out and too weak to move. The bullet wound felt as if it was on fire. How long she'd lain there like that she didn't know.

As the shadow loomed over her, she'd only been able to lash out ineffectually and had heard his laughter, resounding in her ears. She felt strong hands going through her pack, lifting the crystal skull out. Then she was rolled unceremoniously over onto her back.

Du Pont grasped hold of her chin, tilting her face up towards his. He'd leaned so close that she'd been able to smell his breath, and it seemed like he'd been chewing cloves. 'Once again we meet, Lady Lara. And once again I have the best of you.' Oh, so mocking. 'You should have learned by now that there is nothing you possess that I cannot take away from you. For now I choose to leave you with your life. Though I will take that too, when it suits me.' Then he'd kissed her, his tongue invading her mouth. For a moment she'd been too surprised to react.

He'd pulled back, laughing, just before her teeth clashed shut. Then he'd shoved her back down in the mud again and walked away.

She'd groped for her pistols in the holsters at her hips, so furious that she wouldn't have hesitated over shooting him in the back. The pistols, though, were lost in the river.

Although the surgeon had done a good job and there was hardly any scarring she could still feel that bullet wound if she thought about it. Worse, she could still feel that kiss.

The second voice was Nikolas. Lara hadn't been able to tell for sure up to now. Her first thought was relief that he was still alive. "What are you doing?" She heard him say. The raw fear in his voice was clearly audible, and her second thought was that he hadn't betrayed her after all.

Then she heard footsteps – a light padding tread – coming towards her.

Oh shit! She tried to reach the pistols belted around her waist but the passageway was much too narrow to allow that. Inwardly she cursed herself for an idiot. She should have been carrying one of them when she'd entered the tunnel.

An unpleasantly familiar bearded face popped into view about five feet ahead of her, upside down from her perspective. It leered at her. "Everything okay there Lara? I haven't caught you in a tight spot have I?"

"Very droll Pierre. I see you still have that wonderful sense of humour." She tried to hide the dread that rose up inside her. One of those ugly black magnums Du Pont always carried was pointed straight at her face and in the current situation it was literally more difficult to miss her than to hit.

"Pass me the. . ." He hesitated a moment, apparently checking out exactly what she did have. "Figurine you have there. If you would be so kind."

"Do you think I'm stupid? If I pass you the figurine what's to stop you just shooting me?"

He grinned. "Absolutely nothing. But of course there's also absolutely nothing to stop me shooting you now and then taking the figurine anyway. Is there?"

"Let me get out of here. Then I'll hand you the figurine. That sound fair?"

The grin turned into a sigh. "Lara, I am not a patient man. Besides, why would I want to shoot you? When it comes to it I would much rather fuck you." A broad leer. "Why do we have to be enemies Lara? It would be so much better for us to be friends, working together rather than trying to kill each other. We would be unstoppable, you and I, don't you think? And I'm sure we would make fabulous lovers. I think our problem is that we are both too much alike. Too much pride and not enough sense." He laughed.

As he spoke Lara took the opportunity to slither another few inches nearer the exit and Du Pont. She was very aware of the rock around her creaking and grumbling, little cascades of dust falling periodically on her back.

We are nothing alike, you bastard. "If those are the alternatives on offer Pierre, I'd really much rather you went ahead and shot me. At least then I wouldn't have to listen to you spouting such garbage."

Du Pont's expression went suddenly cold, all hint of humour disappearing from his eyes. "You know what your problem is Lara?"

"I'm quite sure that you're going to tell me Pierre. Isn't that what 'friends' are for?" Another few inches closer to him.

"You're too damned arrogant So self-satisfied, with that smug British sense of superiority of yours. You think you're so much better than everybody else." She saw his grip shift on the magnum, his finger tightening fractionally on the trigger. The bullet would go straight through the middle of her face. "The figurine. Now. Otherwise I'll get to see if your brains are the same colour as an honest Frenchman's."

Lara recognised the finality in his voice. Any more attempts at bluffing or stalling would earn her a bullet, it said. "Take it then."

"Push it towards me." Du Pont's arm, reaching inside the gap came up about a foot short.

"If it topples it'll be damaged."

Du Pont grunted. "Then crawl forward. And be quick. My trigger finger is developing an itch."

"Thank you."

Lara felt a surge of anguish as he took it from her fingers – felt the urge to grip the figurine tightly. But it was too late, already gone from her grasp.

Then his face and the magnum disappeared as he stood up, and all Lara could see were his booted feet and denim-clad legs. She felt her gut clench – started crawling forward as fast as she could. Now that the figurine was gone she was as good as naked.

"Since you love these ruins so much," Du Pont was saying, "These dusty underground places, with their traps and treasures, and their crumbling dead, I think it only fitting that you should remain down here always. Don't you?"

Suddenly his foot lashed out, kicking at the tight packed stone of the tunnel opening. Chunks of rock fell free and the rain of dust falling upon Lara intensified. A second kick, and more rock fell loose.

Lara could hear the stone around her creaking and groaning, and knew that a couple of more solid connections by Du Pont would send the whole lot – tons of it – crashing down on top of her.

She pulled herself forward desperately, abrading the skin from her already grazed knees and elbows. Her hands reached ahead to grab the edge of the opening and give herself better purchase.

"Ahhh!" Lara's right hand exploded in blinding pain as Du Pont's boot connected with it, and she drew it back quickly, overcome by a coughing fit as she accidentally inhaled the rock dust in the air around her.

Du Pont's leg drew back for a fourth kick.

The blow never landed.

Sitting forgotten, Nikolas had finally – when he saw that Du Pont intended to bury Lara alive – managed to overcome the paralysing terror that filled him at the thought of trying to stand up to the man. The full weight of his not inconsiderable frame landed on Pierre Du Pont's back.

Lara heard her French rival swear and saw him stagger backwards from the opening. He didn't go down though. Then there was a deafening roar, resounding in her ears. Du Pont's Magnum going off.

Nikolas. The thought left her numb. Debris was falling all around her in thick clouds now, making it difficult breath or see. I'm going to kill the bastard. That thought kept her driving forwards through the last few feet, ignoring the throbbing pain of her injured hand. This time Du Pont wasn't going to walk away.

Coughing and spluttering she pulled free of the opening.

Nikolas wasn't dead. The two men were still locked together in struggle. Du Pont's pistol had gone off unintentionally when Nikolas had grabbed him and the bullet had flown wide. As she watched though, Du Pont caught Nikolas with a clubbing blow to the face.

The Greek archaeologist staggered backwards, nose broken and flowering blood. As he collapsed to the floor Du Pont kicked him savagely in the gut.

As the Frenchman drew back for a second, possibly fatal blow, Lara drew her pistol and fired. Without time to set herself and still fighting down coughing fits from the dust she'd inhaled, her aim was off. She only managed to graze his upper arm, the bullet going on to slam into one of the cracked pillars.

It was enough to distract him from Nikolas however.

As she fired again he darted for cover. This bullet missed too, kicking up splinters of stone from the floor. Then he was gone from the circle of light cast by Nikolas's fallen torch, vanished into the shadows and the mass of other pillars.

Lara's gaze searched for signs of movement, but there was nothing to be seen. The only sounds she could hear came from Nikolas – a low, pain-filled groaning as he clutched at his stomach. Du Pont had vanished.

He'd dropped the figurine when Nikolas had jumped him. It was lying, toppled over onto its side on the floor between her and Nikolas. She started towards it.

A low chuckle came from somewhere to her left.

Lara threw herself flat, feeling the heat and draft of the bullets passing inches above her back. They slammed into the rubble filled archway behind her, and with a great roar the passage she'd been inside just a few seconds earlier collapsed.

Both pistols in hand now, she returned fire at the spot where the muzzle flash from Du Pont's magnums had momentarily lit up. All she managed to hit was another badly cracked pillar that looked on the verge of collapse itself.

Silence again. She scurried quickly out of the circle of light. If she stayed where she was, she'd be a sitting a duck. A bullet chased after the sound of her footsteps but only found empty air.

Lara again returned fire at the spot where the bullet had come from. Again failed to hit Du Pont.

Another low laugh. "Just like old times hey, Lara? Cat and mouse."

She caught herself from firing towards where the voice had come from, knowing from experience that Du Pont was already gone. Her spare clips were still in her pack, back somewhere near Nikolas. The only ammo she had immediate access to was that already inside her guns. The Frenchman, she was sure, didn't have the same limitations.

This time though Du Pont, I'm the cat and you're the mouse.

"I wonder, Lara." This time, as expected, his voice came from a completely different spot. "What would you do to stop me putting a bullet in your new boyfriend's more than ample gut?"

She froze, in the process of creeping silently round to get a better angle on where Du Pont's voice was coming from. A glance back showed her Nikolas, sitting up now, propped against one of the pillars. He was horrendously exposed – a target the Frenchman could hardly fail to hit.

In sudden decision Lara rose from her position, sprinting towards the point she had heard the Frenchman's voice coming from and deliberately making as much noise as she could. "Du Pont!"

Bullets filled the air around her in a buzzing storm. The only things that kept her from being perforated was the darkness and the speed she was moving. Still, several of them came mightily close.

She rolled forward, behind the cover of another of the pillars just as another volley pumped right into it. Then deceptive calm fell.

A glance showed her that Nikolas was gone from the circle of light from the fallen torch. She stifled a sigh of relief.

For a time everything went still. Lara could hear her own breathing, loud and ragged in her ears, and beside her the pillar was groaning.

The pillar was groaning?

Du Pont's bullets, obviously weakening its already fragile structural integrity. From the sound of it, it was going to come crashing down at any second. She strongly suspected she didn't want to be crouching down beside the thing when it did.

A faint scuffing sound came from near where the last burst of gunfire had originated from. Du Pont on the move again.

Instead of launching into another no doubt futile attack, Lara actually holstered one of her pistols instead. She drew the one remaining flare from her pocket and weighed it up for a moment. If she misjudged his position. . . If that noise had just been a trick to lure her out. . .

If. If. If.

Bottom line was that Du Pont was a master of this particular game. He'd been playing it for years, and he didn't lose.

So she needed to alter the rules.

With a deep breath she lit the flare, its brilliance blinding. Immediately she lobbed it in a slow, high arc through the air towards where she had heard the tiny scuffing sound.

Shots rang out, but they were aimed at the flare rather than her, and went well wide.

Lara popped up out of cover, the one pistol held steady in both hands.

Du Pont was right there, a wavering silhouette in the flickering flare light. His magnums were aimed several feet to one side, at the position where the flare had landed. For an instant their eyes locked together. Du Point bared his teeth at her in a smile-come-snarl. His guns swung like lightning back round towards her.

She shot him.

The bullet ripped into the top of his thigh. In the chaos of a combat situation you always, always aim low. That's what she'd been taught.

Lara heard his grunt of pain – saw the spurt of blood, almost black in the gloom – as he collapsed, sprawling on his back, yards from the nearest cover. Steadying herself, focusing coldly on the task in hand, she carefully aimed the second, killing shot.

Beside and above her there was a horrendously loud, screeching crack.

Instinctively she dove full length, unable to see whether the bullet she loosed struck its target. A huge chunk of rock crashed down, hitting exactly the spot where she'd just been crouching, making the ground shake.

More rock fell all around Lara as she scrambled desperately backwards, a chunk the size of her fist slamming hard into her thigh and deadening her leg. Then the entire pillar was toppling in a thunderous avalanche of stone, right between her and Du Pont.

She pulled herself to her feet, limping badly, choking clouds of dust rising all around her. A further great chunk of rock broke from the ceiling, crashing to the floor about ten feet to the left. She could hear several other pillars around her creaking and groaning, as if they too were going to collapse at any second in sympathy.

"Nikolas!" Lara hurried towards the circle of torchlight where her backpack and the figurine had fallen. An intermittent series of crashes rang out behind her, more rock continuing to break loose.

A shadow moved in the periphery of her vision as she was pulling her backpack on.

"Bloody hell." Lara jerked her pistol to one side, letting out an explosive breath of relief. "Don't sneak up on me like that." She scooped the torch up.

Just then another of the pillars gave way, toppling sideways with an ear splitting roar. The entire ceiling started to fall in.

"I think," Lara said, grabbing hold of Nikolas's elbow. "That running would be a very good idea."

* * *

Wheezing for breath like a ninety-year old with a collapsed lung, Nikolas stumbled to a halt, falling to his hands and knees on the scree-covered slope. Behind them there was a final muted rumbling crash, followed by gaping silence.

"Sorry. . . can't. . . go. . .on."

Lara took pity on the rotund archaeologist and stopped, sitting down on the slope beside him as he gasped for air. She still had one of her pistols drawn, and watched the cave entrance carefully. There was no sign of anyone following them though.

After a while she reached behind herself and took the figurine she'd recovered from her pack, holding it up before her so that it caught the last of the fading sunlight.

"So tell me Lara." Nikolas seemed finally to have recovered his breath. "Is every day like this with you?"

"Oh no." She shook her head absently, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. "Sometimes it actually gets quite exciting."

Not quite knowing why, she lay back on the slope and started laughing.

End of Part 1