Part 3: First Motion

"On a seismogram, the first motion is the direction of ground motion as the P wave arrives at the seismometer. Upward ground motion indicates an expansion in the source region; downward motion indicates a contraction."

Just to avoid any confusion, in the third section of the chapter "Pike" is George Pike from CHERUB, and his father is Dr. Pike from H.I.V.E.

The overnight train steadily rumbled its way north, but Kazakov found himself unable to sleep. Every time he tried, scenes from the Glasshouse played back across his eyelids. (The body on the ground last time had been one of the newly minted agents, who had left for her very first mission last week, who had gained her gray shirt in Siberia during that exercise that had gone so well and then so rapidly wrong, who Furan might have seen , and her partner had stood over her, knife in hand, blank eyes staring directly at Kazakov as Furan clapped him on the shoulder and told him what good children he'd raised.

Kazakov woke in a cold sweat and wished for the ones where he was a cadet again. At least those were a familiar evil.)

Instead, he looked through the records again. He had amassed files on the missing teenagers, in many cases starting with nothing more than school records and juvenile rap sheets and building out. Further research had shown that one of the names on his list had joined a technology-free commune (and seemed quite happy with the choice, by all accounts), but interviews with former friends had revealed a further five people unaccounted for and a few glimpses of a woman who might have been Anastasia and a man who might have been Piotr. Hopefully, the Brands would be able to confirm the involvement of one of the Furans and tell him where they might have established themselves this time.

Just past midnight, as he was halfway through Laura's school files, there was a soft thud on the roof, followed by the near-silent opening of the cabin door, and Kazakov looked up to see a katana pointed at his throat.

"Natalya," he said as calmly as he could manage. "I haven't seen you in a long time."

"Where's the Glasshouse?" she asked. Lit by the glowing purple of her blade, the scar on her cheek looked menacing, and her face looked cold.

"I was hoping you knew." Kazakov sighed, and Natalya lifted the tip of her sword threateningly.

"Try again."

"I've been looking for Furan since I ran into-" was cornered by - "her a few months ago, but there's nothing." Well, there were aliases and shell companies and carefully doctored records pointing at each other in circles, but as for where those records lead, or even solid proof of Anastasia's continued existence… there hadn't even been a clear picture of her face from the airport's CCTV footage.

"Her," Raven said. "You saw Anastasia?" Kazakov nodded, and in the blink of an eye, the katana, no longer glowing, was tucked into a sheath and Natalya had taken the seat across from him. "Where are we headed?"

"Scotland," Kazakov said. "Town called Garelochhead. I have a list of children I think she might have recruited, and a girl from there still has parents-"

"Brand's not one of hers," Natalya said.

"Brand?" Kazakov asked. Natalya, flatly unimpressed, raised her eyebrows.

"Pass me the list," she said. Kazakov did, and she scanned through it, annotating with a red pen as she went. A few minutes later, she handed him the list back; about half the names, including all but one implicated in the complex web of shell companies and fake schools he had uncovered, had been crossed out.

"Are you sure?" Kazakov asked because narrowing the search would only be helpful if done accurately; he did not ask "how do you know this?" because he already knew he did not want to know. Natalya laughed, short and harsh.

"Very."

In the light of early morning, Garelochhead was a beautiful little village, the sort of stereotypically scenic place found on stamps and postcards if you ignored the hulk of a naval base just beyond it. Kazakov wished he was visiting it under better circumstances - or, at least, more useful ones.

"They won't know anything," Natalya said as they walked from the train station to the Brand house, a simple one-story brick structure with a gray sedan (complete with "baby on board" sticker) parked in front.

"We're already here, and the train to Glasgow won't arrive for another hour," Kazakov said. By the time he and Natalya had discussed things and come to an agreement, it had been easier and more time efficient to travel to Garelochhead and get transport back from there than to exit the train early; otherwise, he would have given the Brands up as another failed lead. "No point in wasting the chance." Kazakov walked up to the front door and rapped firmly upon it as Natalya, glancing briefly at the street to ensure no one was walking, disappeared around the side until she was hidden from view by a truly impressive bush. After a minute, there was no response, and Kazakov tried again.

"Yosyp," Natalya said from the side of the house. She beckoned him over, and he came and looked through a gap in the curtains into what was probably the Brands' kitchen. Or, rather, what had been their kitchen, and what was now home to a great quantity of smashed wood and an overturned high chair.

"Well, shit."

Pike's father wasn't a supervillain. Or, at least, while his son had been growing up, Theodore Pike had been an eccentric but moderately respected scientist. He came home at six for dinner every night (though he often went up to his garage lab afterwards) and bought his wife flowers every week and created a strain of thistle that blew apart like dandelions and accidentally set it loose on their village. The last time he had gone home, the place was still dusted with pinkish lavender thorns.

While his son was at university, Theodore Pike's wife died - peacefully and from natural causes - and he had given his son the number of a satellite phone and promptly disappeared off the face of the Earth save for occasional chess matches and a few visits from very inconspicuous men in gray flannel suits.

Soon enough, the visits had nothing to do with Dad at all, but rather the drug ring centered in the school where he'd been teaching - or more specifically, the three teenage spies sent to unmask it. (Well, except for that one time with the Arc de Triomphe - and that other time with the Archimedean death laser, just like the one they had built when Pike was in sixth form but twice as large - and the other other time with the radioactive kiwi.) He kept the satellite phone number in the back of his mind - even called it from burner phones on occasion - and pretended the stares from intelligence agents whose subtlety was outmatched by most of the red shirts were because he was suddenly shockingly handsome and not just the spitting image of his old man.

Okay, so maybe Pike's father was a supervillain, but he was still his dad, the man who had attended all of his son's rugby games and popped a bottle of champagne when his acceptances came in. And there were times when a supervillain could come in handy.

Like, for example, when your coworker got threatened by a completely different supervillain, was worried that she'd attacked your shared charges, and had just discovered his last remaining lead to have been kidnapped.

He and Zara - and Kazakov, in a more circumspect way - had discussed contacting his dad when Kazakov had first come to her, but the risk of exposure was high - and remained so - and both of them thought the chance of Theodore Pike, reclusive mad scientist, having much to do with Anastasia Furan, kidnapper and trainer of child soldiers, low. Now, a low chance was the best they had, and with Furan either escalating to higher-risk targets or tying up loose ends, it was better to take that chance sooner rather than later.

"Hey, Dad," Pike said as the line connected.

"George!" His father said. "I haven't heard from you in months! How are you? The kids still hellions?"

"As they always are," Pike said. "Y'know, it's kinda impressive - I get a new bunch every year, and they're somehow always little hellions." Pike paused and took a deep breath. Now or never. "About them… You know anything about a woman named Furan? Or a place called the Glasshouse?"

A pause, and Pike wondered if he had made a terrible mistake.

"Son," his father said, tone grave, "where'd you hear that name?"

"A colleague," Pike said. "He thinks it's back, and his best leads - a couple named Mary and Andrew Brand, along with their baby - just went missing."

"Brand?" His father sucked in a breath. "Laura's parents?"

"Probably?" Kazakov had talked about the Brands' missing daughter - the entire reason he had been interested in them - and Pike thought he remembered her name was Laura, but he wasn't entirely sure, and even if he was, Laura Brand was a reasonably common name. "What do you know, Dad?"

In their disappearance, the Brands gave Kazakov exactly what he had gone to them for: a lead. As scenic and bustling with tourism as it was, Garelochhead was a small town - small enough in population that Kazakov could piece together a twelve-hour timeframe for when the Brands could have gone missing from a fifteen-minute talk with the town gossip and small enough in area that he could track every car, truck, train, and boat that entered and exited the town over the course of those twelve hours. Most of it had been routine traffic but there had been things out of place - a few unregistered boats; a car with license plates belonging to a vehicle of an entirely different model, color, and weight class; a train ticket taken out under an alias; and, most significantly, a panel van registered to a company whose financial details formed a familiar pattern.

A familiar pattern that went nowhere, of course, just as its previous iterations had found nothing but pseudonyms and smoke and mirrors, but much like a seashell found on a beach, a shell needed a hard structure around its nonexistent innards. The aliases used to register the company were nothing more than names on a list Pike had (somehow) supplied of pseudonyms associated with Furan, but the list of vehicles registered to the firm - and chartered flights bought in the company's name - provided a bearing out of the U.K. and a maximum radius the Brands could have been taken before reaching their final destination or exchanging vehicles.

Natalya had disappeared just as abruptly as she had appeared the night before, but he started receiving emails - sender concealed by a dozen proxy servers - filled with lists of names, some seemingly random and some eerily familiar, sometimes appended with asterisks or the word ELIMINATED.

Pike sent him information, too - yet more names, actual people associated with aliases, occasional missing reports, numbers of bank accounts and stocks and cryptocurrencies (whose precise purpose to Kazakov appeared to be inducing migraines), and, eventually, the technical specifications of a base.

"The Architect says if he designed the Glasshouse, this is it," Pike told him as Kazakov scanned the schematics. No windows and one entrance with three layers of gates between it and the rest of the base - definitely a prison, and likely one underground, but there were no clues as to where. "He says that the materials the client specified are versions meant for extremely cold weather, and the parameters he was given specified up to three feet of ice cover, so the finished place is probably above sixty degrees of latitude. And it was made almost directly on bedrock; if there was any sand or soil cover, it's no more than a couple inches thick."

"Construction schedule?" Kazakov asked. If the Glasshouse was built somewhere with such an extreme latitude - and not merely into a high, secluded mountain - time of year would at least suggest the hemisphere it was in.

"None," Pike said. "He's the Architect, not the Builder."

"And the vents?" Kazakov was no expert on HVAC systems - other than one truly miserable crawl through an access-passage-slash-air-vent back in his army days - but something about the layout of this one seemed… off. Pike winced.

"That's the other thing," he said. "Un- the Architect was told that it would be a prison for the worst of the worst offenders. And that the guards needed a kill switch to prevent any potential escapes."

"Poison gas?"

"Yes. He doesn't know what kind other than it's heavier than air."

"So the guards would most likely live and watch from the upper levels." Kazakov frowned and looked at the blueprint again, hoping to find any more useful information. "Where are the air intakes and outtakes? For a facility this size, they'd likely show on thermal imaging." Pike frowned and looked over the document.

And, two weeks, three pinpoint dots on a thermal satellite image, and a discreet email later, Kazakov stood outside the new and very much unimproved version of his childhood nightmares, rifle in hand.

"Ready, Cossack?" Natalya asked over comms.

"Always, Raven," he replied.

When Kazakov was nineteen, he had run. At twenty-nine, he had come back to find his mission complete - or seeming to be. Now, at forty-one, he would see it through.

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