Hmmm ... there I was, struggling to get to 1500 words and then it wouldn't end ... apologies for being slow...

-ooOoo-

At least the London Borough of Canley's on-going obsession with digging up the roads had gone in his favour for once he mused, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. He'd have struggled to have caught up with her otherwise. Yet, after her initial burst of speed, Max was beginning to think he might have misread the entire situation and he should in fact be back at Sun Hill cranking up the search for Sondra, and now Fleischmann. "Jesus!" he muttered in frustration. Perhaps she wasn't going anywhere special. She certainly wasn't going anywhere in a hurry. He'd been tailing her for over ten minutes now and not once had she come close to breaking the thirty speed limit, not even one amber light chanced. As she turned off the main road into a quiet side street, intermittently lined with bleached and barren looking office buildings and dormant light industrial depots, it was tempting to end this ludicrously slow chase by pulling out and bringing her to a forced halt. But he didn't. He kept his distance, half hoping that she wouldn't recognise the car behind her, half hoping that she would. If she was heading out to meet Georgie, he liked to think that she might have the sense to realise that she was being followed. As they sedately continued, it gave Max time to think, time to conclude he didn't want to pull her over. It was her decision, her choice and as insane as it sounded to him, he trusted her. Not quite enough to let her go alone though, that was unthinkable, but definitely enough to believe in her instinct.

His pulse raced as Millie slowed to a crawl then suddenly turned to the right and out of his sight through open metal gates. He accelerated rapidly, reaching the point of her disappearance within seconds to find that she was still driving slowly towards the abandoned brewery. It was as if she was hunting for a space in a busy car park, even though there were only two other vehicles on the disused site, one of them being Georgie's gold Lexus. The driver's door was flung open indicating that he was already inside the building. The expanse of concrete showed its neglect, grass and weeds flourishing in the cracks. The second derelict site of the day. Max grimly wondered what they would find in this one.

Absorbed in her concentration on the road ahead, Millie didn't notice the blue Vauxhall until it appeared in her wing mirror and slowly drew alongside. For a moment her heart beat wildly with fear, her eyes flitting between the mirror and the building in front of her. What if this was one of the kidnappers? What had she been thinking? Had they been following her all the way from Sun Hill, camouflaged by the other cars on the road? Perhaps this was a trap. Maybe Georgie had been forced to call her. Panic mounted. It was insane to think that she would be able to reason with these people, with this man. Antonov. Her hands, which had stopped shaking a few minutes earlier, started to tremble again. She gripped the steering wheel but the tactic was less successful as her body began to shudder, her breathing quickening. Then it stopped, just for a moment, as she peered a little closer at the mirror, watching the car draw level. Fury replaced fear. How dare he! How fucking dare he do this! The memory of his attitude the night before flared, igniting her renewed anger at his controlling attitude.

Despite what he considered to be his best efforts, frustration took precedence over patience when in a spurt of speed, Max pulled ahead of Millie and brought her to an abrupt halt, only just managing to avoid colliding with his own car. From inside his car Millie's rage was obvious, her eyes instantly narrowing after an initial moment of surprise, her jaw tightly clenched. It was probably fortunate for Max that the seatbelt bore the brunt of her anger. The car door had flown open but she was trapped for several seconds, struggling with the release catch as her fingers fumbled with a confusing mixture of nerves and anger. Eventually however, she managed to free herself of the belt and spring from the car, beginning to make for the building ahead of them. But in the time it had taken for her to get out of the car, Max was already looming.

"What the hell-" she started but Max cut her off and ended the question for her.

"Are you doing?" He grabbed hold of her arm preventing her from escape, his own irritation boiling over in defensive response.

"You've been following me!"

"Of course I've been following you!" he hissed. "You race out of the station with no word, no explanation and you think that I won't notice? That I won't want to know where you're going? Just out of interest, just when did you realise that I was tailing you? I could have been one of Antonov's people for all you knew."

With a flush of embarrassment in her cheeks, Millie chose to ignore his last question, unwilling to acknowledge that she really hadn't been vigilant. Instead she pounced on his other questions. "You can't help it, can you?" Max's lips parted to speak but she cut him off. "Control, it's all about control with you, isn't it? You can't bear-"

This time Max refused to be silenced, refused to let her misinterpret his intentions. "To let you get hurt! What I can't bear is to let you get hurt by going into something that you can't handle, not on your own anyway." She wavered, just a little, in the face of his earnestness and he took the opportunity to press home his case for the defence. "I figured out that you were planning to meet Georgie, I know he gave Roger the slip and left his house. I'm right, aren't I? It was him who rang you."

Millie rubbed at her temple and grimaced, squeezing her tired eyes shut for a moment. His grip on her arm relaxed. It irked that she should feel relieved that he had found her, but there it was. She did. And, more importantly, this probably wasn't the best time to resurrect this particular argument. "He said that Antonov had made contact-"

Just then a noise, the sound of something heavy scraping across a hard floor, came from the otherwise deserted looking building. It was enough to bring their spat into perspective. "Quick," Max ordered and pulled Millie across the yard into the relative safety of what appeared to be one of the entrances to the building, struggling to avoid tripping over the debris littering the floor and blocking the doors from opening. Satisfied that they were hidden well enough, Max peered round the corner. A short but heavy set man with a gun proudly displayed in a holster under his arm strutted from a door further along the building, heading straight towards the two cars. Max cursed himself for not thinking ahead enough to have hidden them from view.

"He'll find us!" Millie whispered hoarsely over his shoulder. "We shouldn't have left the cars there," she went on, failing to even attempt to hide the accusatory note in her voice.

Max pursed his lips. "I know that," he mumbled, trying hard not to rise to the bait and remind her of whose stupid idea this was in the first place. He shuffled back slightly, his feet hampered by something solid on the ground. He tried to kick it away but it was too heavy. Looking down, he saw an ancient fire extinguisher, so old that its once red paint was barely discernable. The footsteps drew nearer as a mobile phone burst into life. For a moment, Max and Millie held their breath, both praying that the sound did not come from them but then a deep, tobacco-damaged voice exclaimed a gruff greeting in what they assumed to be Russian. Millie's hand rested on Max's shoulder, her body pressed into him as together they exhaled with relief. But the relief lasted only a moment as they realised that then man was still closing in on them. Max's feet nudged awkwardly at the extinguisher again, this time it rocked a little giving him an idea. Silently he crouched down and slid his hands around the cylinder heaving it into his arms and pulling himself upright once again. The gruff voice drew ever closer. Millie instinctively backed against the wall and into the shadows. Max followed suit, somewhere among the tension he felt the tentacles of warmth that they were working in complete synchronicity. He glanced over his shoulder and caught her eye. The interruption of their fragile truce from the night before seemed to be over and once again they were allies.

The voice was dangerously close to them now. To Max's terror Millie's features hardened as the cogs in her mind seemed to turn, her gaze shifted beyond him towards the sound of that voice. Somehow he knew what she was going to do but was powerless to prevent her, the object in his hands making restraint impossible without drawing attention to their hiding place. Millie edged past decisively and out into the light. Max understood instinctively what she planned, admiring her bravery and fearing her foolishness in equal measure.

"Excuse me! I wonder if you can help me?" she trilled breathlessly, jogging a few paces to where the man was standing.

Max pondered for a moment whether she had picked up the vulnerable female act from Jessa Bennett, in another place he might have found it strangely enticing, but right now it only made his blood race with anxiety. He tightened his grip on the extinguisher, its weight becoming familiar in his hands, and stepped forward smoothly as she held the other man's attention, his back now turned to Max.

"Eh?" grunted the man in response, phone still pressed to his ear. He muttered something quietly into the handset. "Who are you?"

"Oh, well I'm lost. I'm looking for-"

But Millie didn't get as far as revealing who she was searching for. With all the force he could muster, Max stepped forward again, out of the dark shadow and brought the extinguisher down on to the back of the henchman's head. Displaying surprising grace for such a stout man, he slumped to the ground, seemingly lifeless.

"Cuffs!" demanded Max curtly, doing his best to pull the body back towards the doorway and out of sight. He deliberately stamped on the still speaking mobile phone, rendering it impotent.

"No! I mean, I haven't any with me."

"In the glove box, Millie. Check in the glove box. Quick!" he instructed, dropping down to kneel on the unconscious man, removing the gun and roughly pulling limp arms behind his back.

Millie hesitated for a moment, comprehending the scene in front of her but before Max could repeat his command she ran back to the car and within a few seconds returned with the cuffs, handing them down to him. "We need to hide him," she stated, looking around and concurring that their own hiding place would be the best option. Working together, they heaved the corpulent body into the doorway, and concealing his presence behind discarded timber boarding and an old bin.

"There," exhaled Max in satisfaction while ignoring the twinge in his back. He pressed down a dirty piece of cardboard box onto the man's head with perhaps more aggression than was necessary by way of retaliation for his pain. With the immediate danger over, Max picked up the gun from the ground and slid it into the waistband of his jeans.

Millie watched, her heart beating erractically. Providing a diversion for Max to deal with the threat had been surprisingly easy, she had simply blocked out all thought of risk for the moments that it was necessary and allowed adrenaline to take over. "What are you doing?" she asked as he reached into his pocket for his phone.

"I'm going to call for back-up."

"You can't! Georgie said-"

"Millie, think about it. You want to go in there, right?"

"Yes."

"I understand that. I don't like it, but I do understand. So, if we do, then we need to have someone out here to get us out. This," he pulled the gun from behind his back to illustrate his point, "might not be enough."

"But we can't hang about waiting for them to turn up," she panicked. "I'm not going to wait."

Max set his jaw firmly at her determination to entirely disregard the rules of safety although he hadn't really expected any other reaction from her. Without breaking eye contact, he hit speed dial. "Tommy? It's Max. I'm at the old brewery yard on Harpsden Road with Millie ... yeah, she's okay. We think Fleischmann might be inside. With Antonov. Possibly Sondra Brown as well…. Yeah, I know. Look, we need a Trojan unit here, tell them to keep it quiet though, I don't know what we're dealing with yet." Millie watched keenly and his lips contorted into a small smile and a curt laugh escaped. "Yeah, alright, I'll try not to … oh, you'd better let Manson know, he'll want to be in on this …thanks." Max disconnected the call and after switching it to silent, shoved it back into his pocket. He eyed her beadily. "You stay with me and do what I say." Millie opened her mouth to argue. "No! You've got to trust me on this. I want to get Sondra back as much as you do. Please Millie, trust me."

Millie nodded mutely, deciding it was by far the easier option to give way. Silently she followed him as he tracked along the side of the building to another doorway further up the building, from where the fat man had emerged only minutes earlier. He turned back for a moment, taking some comfort from her grimly sober expression that she wasn't feeling quite so gung-ho any more.

-oo-

Taking refuge behind a pile of pallets, the scene inside the building shook Millie. Georgie stood, a solitary figure in the centre of a cavernous space, staring blankly around him. Somehow it felt like an execution in the making.

"I see the years have been kind to you, Georgie." An accented voice cut into the silence. Georgie's head jerked towards where it came from, in the far corner of the cellar. "Thirty years, or is it thirty one?"

"Where's Sondra?" Georgie demanded sharply.

"She's perfectly safe. I would never do anything to harm Sondra. You know that." The voice was chillingly cool. Georgie's however was acutely distressed.

"How do I know that? After what you did to my girl-"

"That was regrettable, I admit. Although, you must also admit that you played your part, you are not entirely blameless."

"Bastard! You murdered my daughter!" The childless father howled into the barren room, his pain reverberating against every surface.

"And you took away my life!" the faceless voice cried back with equal pain before regaining its former composure. "All those years, Georgie, sixteen years in Siberia, while you lived in comfort and luxury with your family and friends. Living the life that I should have had. The life I was going to have with Sondra. So you have lost your child? A child that I should also have had."

"I had no choice. I did what I had to. You would have done the same, to protect the people you loved."

The voice chuckled coldly. "I thought I was one of those people. Remember the old days, Gerogie. The old days. I used to think about them all the time. Now, not so much. It took a long time but I decided that I should think of my future instead. And now, here we are."

Max listened, clutching Millie's hand, to the exchange between two men who had lost everything. The cold venom of the disembodied voice worried him. This was a man with little conscience and a twisted perspective view of his own history. He would never admit it, but Max was terrified, not for himself of course, but for Millie. For what she was hearing and for what could happen to her. He should send her away, to wait outside for back up, but that was well over ten minutes away and frankly he didn't trust her to stay put for that long. Besides, he couldn't see the current situation inside the building lasting that long. Georgie was unstable and Antonov, he felt sure that there could be no doubt now this was Antonov, was on a whole other level of madness. He still found it hard to feel any kind of sympathy for Georgie, but despite everything the man was important to Millie and her family. If he could provide enough distraction, it was possible that Georgie could be persuaded to be brought behind the relative safety of the stack of pallets. A sudden movement in the far corner, beyond where Georgie stood, caught Max's eye. It was probable that Antonov had no idea they were there. The henchman, bodyguard, whatever he was hadn't had the chance to report their presence, which gave Max an advantage, albeit slight. He just had to hope that Antonov didn't want Georgie dead just yet.

A strangled whimper behind him attracted his attention. Turning, Max squeezed Millie's hand reassuringly and gave her a little smile, hoping to coax the same from her, but she couldn't reciprocate. Worry and fear were etched deeply into her brow and her bottom lip was quivering so much she had to bite down hard to stop it.

"It's going to be okay. Stay here. I'll get him," he whispered. Millie nodded and sniffed, she wanted to believe every word. She wanted him to believe she had complete faith in him so that he could focus and not make a mistake. Reluctantly she pulled her hand free, letting him go, watching her fingers separate from his. Max flexed his fingers around the hand gun in his other hand. Not the type of weapon he was used to using, it was almost like driving an automatic car after having always driven a manual, he mused abstractly. Shifting his mind back into gear, he took a quick look over his shoulder, then back to Millie for a fortifying kiss and tucking a few stray strands of hair behind her ear before stepping out from behind the filthy pallets that had been their source of safety.

Out of her sight, Millie listened intently to his quiet footsteps, straining to hear any other noises that would warn him of danger. Two shots rang out echoing off the bare walls of the derelict brewery basement. Between them, the sickening sound of a body falling to the ground with a lifeless dull thud.

A/N Just in case anyone hasn't realised, the last few paragraphs bring us back to the beginning … never thought it would take 38 chapters & over 100k words to get here!