Chapter 16: Attack-From-Inactionan attack delivered quickly from a relatively still position without prior action or preparation.

Later that same night Sark congratulated himself on managing to appear sanguine with the muzzle of a Sig Sauer resting between his eyes.

Well, he always had specialised in bored disdain.

Yep, sometimes even the best laid plans of mice, men and Mr. Sark got fucked in the head. And just when it had all been going so well too.

In response to the doors blowing in, Sark's and James' reactions were immediate and indicative. Sark swivelled toward the sound, poised, analysing: well, nothing like blundering amateurs for needlessly announcing their arrival. James leapt six inches out of her seat and shrieked.

Sark immediately clamped a hand over her mouth, holding up one finger of his other hand for silence as he gazed toward the kitchen door, toward the direction of the noise. He risked a quick look at her. Did she think it was the CIA, when he was damn sure it wasn't? Would she scream for help if he took his hand away, thus giving away their position?

He felt the gasps of her breath and the texture of her open mouth beneath the fleshy palm and was unnerved at how immediate the sensations felt to him, he furiously told himself to ignore them. If he was to get them both out of this, he had to focus on the task, to drive his mind forward like a sharp, steel point. Holding her steady, he brought his mouth close to her ear.

"In case you're wondering," he muttered quickly, "that won't be the CIA coming to rescue you. They'd never openly storm a place with a hostage inside, not without trying stealth first. Whoever has just come through those doors is not on your side. I have a lot of enemies in Russia, and as you're with me, so do you. I do hope you understand that Doctor, because I'm going to take my hand away now and if you scream and give away my position, I'm going to abandon you and leave you to them."

Still clamping his hand over her mouth he shifted his head back slightly to stare at her, his cool blue gaze that of a Roman Emperor who had just issued the Imperial Decree.

Would she buy that totally empty threat?

He hoped his gaze gave away nothing of his doubts. It didn't. It hardly ever did. She stared back, seeing instead only his arrogant certainty. She nodded in acquiescence. He removed his hand, she did not scream.

They gazed at each other for some seconds. Her face may have been screwed up in annoyed alarm and his showing only a display of blank arrogance, but each recognised that, for however short a period and however unlikely the prospect, an alliance had just been formed between them against a common foe.

Sark moved to the huge fridge and pressed a hidden switch at the side. The whole thing swung out away from the wall, revealing an ancient secret passageway which had been part of the fabric of the original building.

There had always been spies in the world, even in the eighteenth century.

Sark motioned James ahead of him. On her way in she paused and reached out a hand, ignored a block of sharp knives and instead armed herself with a heavy frying pan she pulled from a hook on the wall. Sark eyed the block of knives she'd neglected. He wasn't surprised at her decision to leave them, in his experience almost all women instinctively hated knives as weapons, there was something of an almost biological imperative about it. The only woman he'd ever met who automatically went for a knife in a fight was Irina – well, Irina and Allison Doren. Sark recalled Allison, the freelance operative he had once worked closely with, Allison had liked knives alright.

Sark reckoned James' selection of a frying pan might have been a slightly comic one, but clocking the blunt instrument he saw it was an effective choice; it was easy to wield and subconsciously she wouldn't see it as an automatically lethal weapon, so she wouldn't be afraid to use it full on. Realising she'd effectively armed herself with a heavy bludgeon, Sark decided to reinforce the point about just whose side she was on.

He bent his mouth to her ear as they moved through the opening, so quiet he was almost breathing his words into her. "Doctor, just to remove any doubt about where your loyalties lie," even as quiet as it was, his voice was almost musical, urbane, conversationally pleasant, but still with a steely edge, "you attack me with that thing and I'll visit so much pain and suffering upon you, they'll set up web-sites about it."

James shivered, moving into the dark, but still whispered back. "Sweet-talker."

They went in, closing over the fridge behind them.

Sark took them through the internal warren of secret passages, moving toward the salon where the noise was coming from. He wanted to find out what was going on. He moved aside a small shield on the wall and looked through a peephole. Seven men, each heavily armed with automatic rifles fitted with silencers.

Well, who'd have thought it, that the remnants of K-Directorate could be so petty? How long since he'd decapitated their organisation - after which it had quickly fallen into warring factions - and they were still sore about it? Some people just didn't know when to quit.

He let James take a look, just so she'd know for sure that the men were not there to help her. Upon seeing the outlaw gang she gave a faint gasp and took a half step back, she was sure alright.

One of the pieces of advice the FBI gave it's agents of which Sark approved was that in the face of conflict, either withdraw or fire. Sark decided to withdraw. He knew who the men were, he could kill them later, and seven was too many to take on right now, particularly with James there.

The passage was lit by the dimmest of lights, the dull beams that broke in through the narrow vertical cracks that demarcated the secret doors that lead off it into rooms. That the light could come through was alarming proof to Sark of just how thin the barrier was between he and the bad guys. He caught James' attention in the near dark and motioned her with a jerk of his head, they moved further down the passage. Sark knew there was an out further along, all they had to do was get to it, quietly leave and boost a car. Sark's sense of humour pre-disposed him to stealing their assailants' own. It would serve them right.

Then came the obstacle to his plans, literally. The suite had been tended well, in as far as those caring for it could see, but its age had betrayed it in covert ways. Part of the ancient crumbling passageway had collapsed and they couldn't get past the blockage or clear it without making enough noise to alert their attackers. That would give away their location, and with the weapons their enemies were carrying Sark calculated an unpleasant likelihood that he and James could simply be gunned down through the walls.

You win some, you lose more.

Sark recalled the old FBI maxim, 'withdraw or fire'. Was there a third option for them? Could they just stay where they were and wait it out? No, they'd left too much evidence of their recent presence in the kitchen, their assailants would know they were in the apartment, and if they couldn't find them then out of sheer frustration they'd just start shooting the place up and bulleting through the walls. They'd be shot then anyway. Okay, so they couldn't withdraw and couldn't hide, so 'fire' it had to be then. He looked down at James, just able to discern her face in the low light. How would she take it? He saw that her mouth was a compressed line as she looked at the impassable barrier before them, it might have been to stop her lips trembling, but it also might have been sheer annoyance. If it was the latter, then he knew just how she felt; he hated it when a perfectly good plan fell apart. She looked up at him and raised her dark, arched brows, her question clear: what now Blond Guy?

Sark considered. He didn't want to use the passageway to go creeping about the suite, as the longer this went on, the worse their chances. Sooner or later, they were going to get caught. Right now, they still had the element of surprise as to their exact location. Okay, time to use it.

He answered James' unspoken question with a sudden, gleeful, ferocity. What were they going to do? "We're going to shoot it out, that's what!" he hissed.

So, part of him hated it when a perfectly good plan fell apart and forced him into a wild, gunslinging improvisation – well, guess what, for the first time he cared to consciously admit it, another part of him fucking loved it!

He was grinning like a buccaneer about to take a navy vessel.

James closed her eyes, a clear expression of: oh shit no. "A shoot out?" she hissed, shaking, "but I've got a frying pan!"

Sark smirked. "Hardly my fault if you Americans never dress appropriately for the occasion."

They shifted down the passageway, back toward the salon.

Sark had a full clip already loaded in his ankle-holstered gun, plus a spare. Fine, but not enough. He doubted the ballistic capacity of his handgun was enough to effectively shoot out through the actual salon walls in the same way as their attackers would be able to shoot in. However, shooting through the slightly rotted wooden panelling of the secret door into the salon was no problem, and he could see where to shoot by using the spy hole in it. If he got the angle right he could get gut-shots to at least three before they knew what was happening or even knew where the shooting was coming from. But three wasn't enough because there were seven of them. Fine. He'd just wait for them to fan out through the suite and pick off whoever was left last in the salon, guarding the exit.

As he waited to make his move, he felt James hunker down behind him, trying to get as much cover as she could in the passageway. Sark turned his head toward her – his gaze cool blue and his brows arching gold - and nodded approvingly. It was unspoken between them that she should not surface until absolutely necessary.

The men started to fan out, four moved on but there were three remaining, showing no signs of leaving. Sark had hoped for better odds, but then … Sark got lucky. The men became too confident and began casually and carelessly swinging their weapons about at waist height, their sense of alertness and danger dulling. One of them came prowling near the secret door itself. Sark saw that he was an easy kill and was heavily armed with weapons which he could then appropriate, and so that's what he did.

He fired up through the door, catching the man at an angle under the jaw, with the bullet shrieking up through his head and out the other side. Death was instant. So was Sark's arrival into the salon, crashing through the door and slamming two bullets into a guard diagonally opposite him. The third man was so stunned that he didn't even manage to get his gun up before Sark had sent him flying backward with a bullet to the chest. Sark knew from the dynamics of the impact that the man was wearing Kevlar, and so clipped him in the head as he flew backward. The man died, but not before his finger jerked convulsively on the trigger of his gun, jammed there, and his twitching body traced an entire magazine of automatic firepower, one thousand rounds, at random into the room.

The place detonated in an explosion of red silk, shattered furniture and blasted plaster.

Fucking shit!

A string of profanities broke loose inside Sark's head as he dived backward into the passageway, crashing against James and yanking the body of the dead guard over them as added protection against the bullets which ripped and ricocheted about. He was aware of James behind him, frying pan dropped, curled up into a ball like a small hedgehog, hands over her ears, eyes scrunched shut, mouth wide open in a soundless scream. Sark knew that it wasn't the danger that had her stricken so much as the noise. Even with the automatic's silencer in play, in the confined space the percussive drum-role of bullets was deafening. For a civilian it would be a horrifying experience. Hell, for him it was pretty bad. He felt her body jolt and judder under him in an uncontrollable reaction to each and every round that whumped into the walls. He admired her for not actually screaming. His mind snapped back away from her as his list of internal profanities ended with a note to self.

Think we just lost the element of surprise there Sarkey!

Two of the remaining four men came running in through a far door, and Sark was instantly up on his feet. Using the dead man as body armour he levelled his Glock and shot one: straight to the head, the man's body spinning wildly away. The other man saw where Sark's shot had come from and levelled his weapon at waist height, firing madly. Sark shoved his Glock down the back of his sweats and wrestled with the corpse's automatic machine gun. From behind the cover of the dead man he pointed the weapon in the direction of the man in the far doorway and squeezed the trigger. The stunning spray of concentrated fire obliterated his opponent.

Time to get out of that passageway.

He tossed the corpse aside but kept the commandeered weapon and raced to the far doorway where the two others had come in. He pointed the muzzle of the gun round the door jamb and let rip. Dropping low he took a quick peek round it. Good. One more down. Time to leave.

Backing toward the exit he kept the machine gun trained on the inner door, loosing off short, randomly spaced bursts of suppressing fire. He jerked his head toward James, clearly seen still bunching up in the passageway, as though if she could just make herself that little bit smaller she'd somehow disappear completely.

"James!" he roared at her, "get out now!"

She didn't move, too petrified and possibly too deafened by the firepower to hear him.

Still moving backwards he gave off punching bullets at the far doorway just long enough to snatch the Glock from out the small of his back and slam a bullet into the wall above her head, to jerk her out of her frozen terror.

His voice roared louder than any gunfire. "I said – fucking move!"

Another one of his bullets shot over her head and got her running - jerking, stumbling, but running. She even had the presence of mind to pick up the dropped frying pan.

Knowing she was making for the exit, Sark pocketed the Glock down the back of his sweats again and got both hands on the machinegun, firing off further rounds at the potential source of danger as he skipped, still barefoot, back toward the door.

And then it all went pear-shaped.

From behind him he heard the heavy reverberating thwang of metal against bone and had half turned to catch what was happening when he was slammed in the back by a rifle butt and was sent sprawling forward. The machine gun was ripped out of his hands and the Glock from his back as he fell. He was jerked back round to face – the muzzle of a Sig Sauer resting between his eyes.

The man who held the gun failed to keep back a blink of surprise. "Mr. Sark?" There was a pause as the speaker collected himself. "Mr. Sark, what a surprise to see you,particularly as I'd hoped that you were already long dead. Who would ever have thought that you would have returned to Russia?" The man cocked his head slightly to one side, and grinned to himself. "You know, sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men do come out right?" He spoke English – it was strange, no-one ever thought Sark was Russian.

Sark took a few seconds before replying, so he could overcome the adrenalin pumping through his system and force his voice to remain perfectly neutral, in fact to sound even bored.

"Actually I was thinking something like that myself."

Sark took in the scene. Apart from the man holding a gun to his head, there was another one standing and a further one down on the floor. In his peripheral vision he could see that the fallen man's head had a bloody split where James had whacked him unconscious with the frying pan. Sark just knew that in her head James had already termed him 'Frying Pan Guy'.

Seeing Frying Pan Guy laid flat out on the floor Sark surprised himself by feeling a bizarre glow of pride – terrified and stunned as she might have been, James had still gotten back in the game. He saw that James herself was held upright and struggling by the second man. She kicked him and was stilled by a smack to the face so hard it left her half dazed. Sark's gaze flicked a message straight into the eyes of the man who'd slapped her: I'm going to kill you for that.

The man staggered backward and tightened his grip on James.

Sark felt the remaining man from the original seven come running up behind him and stop at an angle from him, slightly to the rear and off to the right. Sark had no doubt that under other circumstances the man would have been beating on him with a rifle butt or just plain shooting him, but it was as though he felt held in check – unsure of whether he could interfere with whatever his boss currently had planned. His boss was evidently the man holding Sark at gunpoint.

"Don't you remember me, Mr. Sark?"

Christ, Sark wondered, why did these minor league players always feel compelled to come over all James Bond Bad Guy and talk it to death? Did he remember him? Of course he fucking didn't! He left losers like this in his wake!

"Not really, I only bother with the First XI."

The man didn't get the joke. Sark didn't expect him to, he obviously couldn't have had the benefit of an English Public School education. He was probably some junior lieutenant from the now shattered K-Directorate who was trying to carve out some turf and make a name for himself.

"How did you know we were here?" Sark genuinely wanted to know.

The man laughed. "I didn't. That car you stole was one of mine. It was being used to courier drugs and had a significant consignment of coke in the trunk, so it was tagged."

Sark blinked. Oh fucking great. No wonder he'd thought it would be a good car for criminal endeavour – it was a car for criminal endeavour!

The man continued speaking. "We just followed the signal. We found the car but not the thief, so we went back over the path of the tracking to where we'd detected a stop in the journey and came here. So what can I say Mr. Sark, but - "

"Oh will you puhleeze just shut the fuck up?" James Dodgson's accented shriek cut the air. "What you can say is you were lucky you ass-hat!" The man's gaze didn't leave Sark's but went blank for a second and his face slackened slightly, stunned at James' rant. Sark wondered, now where had he seen that pussy-lashed look on a tough guy's face before? Oh yes, on the faces of his entire crew back in Switzerland. Sark compressed a grin; half-dazed was evidently not nearly good enough to shut James Dodgson up. "So quit standing there making like you're actually any good at this show-down crap, fuck-nuts," she howled on, "and if you've got a freakin' game-plan, then get to it!"

The man with the gun looked at Sark, dumbstruck, but then made a swallowing recovery. "Charming. But she's hardly your type, eh Sark? A little lacking in style?"

Don't tell me what my 'type' is arsehole

Sark's thoughts were interrupted.

"Points for style?" James screeched, outraged. "What d'ya think this is, competition ballroom dancing?" James heaved against her captor. From the corner of his eye Sark saw that the man holding her was beginning to look almost panicked. Sark grinned openly. Diverted by James' verbal attack the men about him were losing their lock on the situation, they were taking their attention off him. James was back in the game alright. "Sark?" she continued, rasping out her words, struggling in her captor's grasp, "just in case there's any doubt whatsoever in your mind on this issue, I totally give you permission to whack these fuckers!"

So Sark did.

In the next instance of condensed action the dichotomy between his blatant youth and his controlled demeanour stunned even her.

He fought with short, intense movements, no effort wasted, nothing telegraphed in advance or unnecessarily extended. He used blunt, compressed, immensely powerful and rapid moves designed to snap limbs and break joints with the maximum speed. His was an economic brutality.

His left hand had whipped up in an arc, knocking the gun away from his face and gripping the man's wrist in the same action, and then he twisted. There was a horrible grinding and clicking noise as all three joints in the man's arm – wrist, elbow and shoulder - were instantly locked against each other and dislocated. His opponent didn't even have time to squeeze off a round before his limp, agonised arm dropped the gun. Sark flexed down and coolly caught the falling weapon in mid air with his free right hand and then swivelled up in the same movement to slam two bullets into the head of the man standing next to him. He tossed aside the man he was holding and strode down on James' captor, stopping three feet away from him with Sark's outstretched arm covering the rest of the distance, levelling the gun straight into the other man's face.

Less than three seconds had passed since Sark had made his first move.

Doctor James Dodgson, and the man who held her, were each as stunned as the other.

Sark's face was a blank mask as he unblinkingly stared over James' head into the eyes of the man holding her. James hardly dared look a him – he was an utterly terrifying sight to behold - she was white faced, and her hammering heart was practically jumping up into her throat. She was held by the man behind her and, for the moment, being rescued by the man in front of her, but the man in front if her was by far and away the more petrifying of the two. She could barely swallow. Sark at full-throttle was both horrifying and magnificent in equal measure.

The man holding her reacted: he physically jerked James up off the ground and held her in front of him, her face obscuring his head. She was body armour. Sark gave a flicker of annoyance, he couldn't shoot the bastard now or he'd give James powder burns, concussion or worse. James knew it too and from the advantage of her suddenly increased height she recovered herself and shoved a hand behind her back, caught her captor's crotch, and with a grimace of rage twisted his balls. The man screamed and dropped her immediately so that she crashed to the floor. Realising his mistake he looked up, terrified, at Sark.

"Told you I'd kill you," announced Sark lightly in his native Russian as he shot him.

He turned to see the man who'd earlier held a gun to his head agonisingly trying to reach for another weapon. Sark took two strides back to him and swivelled, smashing the heel of his bare foot down hard, backward, into the prone man's ribs. The ribs crunched.

Behind him he heard James give a hiss of involuntary sympathy for the floored man. Sark reflected that unlike him she had a fully functioning conscience, and now that the remainder of their enemies were reduced to helplessness, it was beginning to re-assert itself. He was relieved when the man spoke in Russian. Sark knew James wouldn't understand a word if he started begging.

"I didn't know you did partnerships Sark." The man hissed in pain and anger, jerking his head to indicate James.

Anger 'eh? Well, at least here was someone who understood that there came a moment when a transgression had gone so far that there was no point in grovelling, because forgiveness was never on the cards. Now that the point had come for him, he wasn't going to beg. A small part of Sark almost respected him for it. A small part. And only almost.

"I don't ordinarily." Sark answered smoothly in his native tongue, utterly unintelligible to James. "But the WWF have introduced a new speciality – Tag Team Sarcasm - so I buddied up with the best."

He shot the man point blank in the face.

He felt rather than heard James' body give a shocked, spontaneous jerk of sympathy when the bullet smashed home. He looked over his shoulder at her, she was still on the floor, gamely trying to get up but physically too shaky to do it. She'd been through a lot and she was flooded with adrenalin, and now that the immediate danger was passed and the adrenalin had no-where to go, the body's typical reaction took over: she began to shake uncontrollably. Sark let her. It was a perfectly average human reaction, nothing to be startled at or ashamed of, it was one he didn't get only because he'd been trained out of it. He never stopped to wonder if he didn't get it because he'd never been a perfectly average human being to begin with.

He weighed up the situation. She wouldn't be able to collect herself for a couple of minutes. Time enough to get outside, deal with anyone there and then get back before she could recover, before she could usefully grab a weapon and plan to escape from him.

Sark ripped a jacket, a baseball cap and a fully loaded machine gun off the nearest body and clawed his way into the clothes as he leapt down the back stairs – four at a time - to the outside. He ignored his barefoot state, he hadn't had the time to grab a pair of shoes that fitted.

He saw the van straight away, regulation black, no windows – must get myself something different next time – with seemingly one man inside, the driver. The silenced weapons and the thick walls of the old palace had muffled any noise of the fire fight. The man was sitting there, actually listening to the radio. Anyone inside the back of the van? Sark didn't think so, but better safe than sorry; he'd had enough of being unexpectedly caught out for one night.

He disregarded the freezing cold cobbles beneath his feet. The chill was such that it would have felt like pain, if he had allowed himself to feel it. He congratulated himself that he was good at not feeling pain, he congratulated himself that he was good at not feeling most things.

He flicked open the back doors and slammed bullets along the van and into the front cabin. The back was empty, but anyone there would have died instantly in the traversing gunfire, the driver died instantly on the receiving end.

Sark merely hoped he hadn't damaged the engine block too much, he'd already half formulated a plan, and if he decided to go with it then he'd need the van later.

He didn't give a thought to the people he'd killed.

Irina had asked him once if killing concerned him.

'Not half as much as dying does.'

He raced back upstairs and found James just where he'd left her.

She'd recovered enough to stop shaking and instead she sat in a slumped, boneless heap on the floor, her back to a wall, breathing shallowly through her open mouth, blowing out gentle breaths to calm herself.

She looked across and saw Sark in the doorway. He looked like a controlled athlete who had just won a match.

She had sat dazed as he had dealt with the van. She still didn't know what had been more alarming, the men who had attacked them or Sark himself. His concise brutality and sheer speed had been terrifying and stunning. She had known she ought to have tried to escape in his absence - logic demanded it - but logic had been a small voice shouting to itself in a far off room in a distant part of her head, and dazed she wasn't even sure if the message was for her anyway.

She had wanted to be sick in Sark's absence, but some sense of pride hadn't let her.

She had no idea what she looked like, but she knew it must have been bad because she saw Sark stop and blink when he saw her, before he carried on into the room.

She was learning that a blink from Sark was a volume from anyone else.

He paused in the middle of the room, looking down at the floor slightly before speaking. "If it helps," he said, indicating the bodies about them, "they were all very bad men. I've no doubt whatsoever they would have killed me, and then very probably have raped you."

"Raped me?" Her voice juddered and stuttered. "You're the pretty one – they'd a killed me and raped you."

Despite that she sounded like a person in shock, Sark's mind calmed. When he'd come back into the room just then and had seen her slumped, open mouthed, closed eyed and ashen faced against the wall, just for a second he had thought something terrible had happened in his absence and that she was dead.

He got his sick, lurching heartbeat back under control.

Some part of his mind shoved the unwanted thought - that she might have to die anyway at the end of all this – into the dark of a mental cupboard.

James had already forgotten about the shooting and the shouting. Unknowingly she had filed the whole thing away in a wallet in her subconscious, labelled: Sark Saved My Life.

A few minutes later her mind had stilled; she had been so shocked by the trauma of the preceding action that all immediate fear had been burned out of her. She wasn't brave, she didn't think, rather she'd simply been driven beyond fear and into someplace else. Her face hurt from where she'd been slapped.

With shoes now on his feet, Sark was moving round the salon, looking up and about at the ruinous damage. The place was an utter mess, but for some reason he found he felt loathe to leave it, for some reason it felt like home. He'd come back to it, he'd fought to hold it, he'd won it, and now he wasn't willing to let it go.

"Suppose we could still stay here," he said, "I suppose it could still do."

She watched him flick at some chipped plaster with his bare foot as he looked unhappily at the mess around him. It really did seem that he was genuinely uncertain about quite what to do next. She sensed something: that almost certainly he went through life leaving a trail of destruction and carnage in his wake, but that he hadn't had much actual experience of being forced to stick around and clean up. He wasn't a man who had to deal with consequences.

"Yeah, sure it could still do," she gasped out shakily, "if it weren't for the dead bodies, sprayed blood and bullet holes."

Sark flicked an exasperated glance at her. Hell, it wasn't his fault that the remnants of K-Directorate had decided to pop round and butch-up! He looked about him. He had to admit it though, the place was a mess. A fine haze of blood and brain matter began to settle on the floor in the corner where he'd given a bullet lobotomy to one of the guards. The smell of blood, death and cordite was beginning to stink the place out.

James crawled on all fours from her position by the wall and shakily sat down on the shattered, wonky-legged remains of what had, until minutes ago, been a perfectly serviceable Louis Quinze chair. She looked around her, trying to take in the mayhem.

If she hadn't seen it herself she wouldn't have believed it. A palatial room reduced from orderly opulence and royal grandeur to a shot up, dust laden, blood spattered hell-hole that wouldn't have gone out of place in a civil war battle-zone - and all done quicker than she could dial out for pizza. And had it taken a squad of storm-troopers, a battalion of tanks and a ton of munitions to do it? No, effectively it had taken just two minutes of Mr. Sark.

She was amazed. Sitting, she raised her arms and watched the plaster dust and motes of ruptured silk that floated in the air settle on her sleeves, like children do with snowflakes. She was still slightly stunned by it all. She heard her voice almost as though someone else was speaking, saying lightly, "Well, guess it's gonna take more than a bottle of kitchen cleanser to clear this mess up."

She was right. Sark knew he was going to have to stop pissing about and take over what was left of K-Directorate if only just to get the place cleaned up and get his hands on a new crew. Besides, he had to impose his authority on the city, he had to engender fear. If 'they' weren't afraid of him 'they' would kill him. Well, there was no time like tonight. Wherever the main nest was, the last thing they'd be expecting was an immediate counter attack. Particularly as they hadn't even known who they were messing with. As far as they were concerned they'd just set out to use overwhelming force against the hapless thief of an opportunistically stolen car. He made up his mind. So then, it was to be an immediate mission. For that he'd need a Handler running recon and surveillance. He looked down at James.

Her messy hair was thick with dust and grime. She sat completely oblivious to him, still letting the motes in the air fall on her like snowflakes, holding her hands up to her face as she appraised the plaster film beginning to coat them. He saw her take a cautious, experimental lick of one finger, evidently just to see what centuries old plaster tasted like. From her expression, the verdict was 'sour'.

Okay, thought Sark, time to administer an intellectual slap. He spoke firmly.

"Doctor. My birthday is Christmas Day 1983. If converted to British standard date numerics, what is my birthday divided by pi to the first four digits, with the result rounded up to the nearest integer?"

He'd simply trundled the words out, with no idea what the answer would be.

She cut a glance sideways in annoyance at his curt tone, she felt as though she were back at school, nevertheless she pursed her lips slightly, working it out and then mentally snapped to and got back on the clock. "Forty seven."

Sark smiled, indulgent with her and pleased with himself. He had no idea if the answer were correct, and it didn't matter if it wasn't, what mattered was that she'd gotten up to speed and worked it out. To engage the enemy effectively tonight he'd needed to rustle up a logical Handler from out of nowhere, and he'd just got one.

James' face screwed up slightly, perplexed, as though she were still mooting something that was taking a little longer to work out than the sum had. She gasped. She turned to him. "Christmas?" she shrieked accusingly. "You bastard! - I knew you were a goddamn Capricorn!"

Sark smirked: a knowing, slithering smile. Yep, she'd do alright.