I had several problems to solve, but the most pressing was that without Aleksandr Gavrikov rustling around in my brain, I’d lost my ability to retreat effectively. Time was, I could turn on the supersonic flight powers and be in Zimbabwe by now, all worries about Scottish police in my rearview.
Without Gavrikov, though…I was a sitting duck for patrols like this. Well, maybe not exactly like this, but certainly any patrols that came armed would have a better chance of bringing me low now that I was as close to powerless as I’d been since that time I’d been gassed with a drug that suppressed metahuman abilities.
Taking short breaths to calm myself, I started back up the hillside toward the road. I’d taken the other cop’s gear and tossed it aside after cuffing them both around the tree in their undershirts and boxers. “I miss undressing a man for the fun of it,” I said aloud, again forgetting that I had no audience for my brilliant wisecracks now. Which was a shame, because the edification of a laugh track in your life almost made me understand why stupid sitcoms put them in.
Honestly, though, there were a lot of things in my life that I missed at this stage of the game, having been an international fugitive for however many months (like seven or eight, but who was counting other than the news channels?). Being able to have breakfast with friends. Sitting in my living room, watching TV without worrying someone was going to come bursting in to arrest me. Sleeping at night without having paranoid dreams about waking up in a jail cell—or not at all.
My feet crunched the dewy grass as I came up on the road next to the police car. It was another shoe-sized car, like all of them over here seemed to be. I missed pickup trucks, and SUVs, and the glorious American cars that stated plainly that if you didn’t get the hell out of the road, we would run you over and you would die, instead of suffering a tragic injury to your big toe where it scraped the bumper.
I missed home, I realized for the zillionth time as I opened the wrong door to the police car, and had to circle around to the driver’s side. Someone came by at about twenty miles an hour, and I waved to them as I turned my head away, trying to make sure they couldn’t see my face. They kept going, which I hoped meant that I’d succeeded as I slid into the driver’s side, which was, because it was the bass-ackward UK, on the wrong damned side of the car.
It started up with a choking sputter, sounding a little like I’d turned on an RC car, and I sighed again, deciding it would be best to avoid getting in any high-speed chases. I scoured the car quickly, and found no joy in the form of hidden handguns or the like. I hadn’t expected to, but I still found it unfortunate, because I’d had one last night, but it had gotten lost somewhere in my fight with Rose.
Rose.
Here was a name that stirred questions and provided no damned answers. I was so tangled that even thinking about that red-headed bitch made me want to throw every thought of feminist cooperation and empowerment back in someone’s face along with a hard damned slap, the sort that wouldn’t just rattle their head but bust it clean off.
Rose had played my friend and fan better than anyone I’d ever seen do it before. There was something about people that shone through, that hint of malice you could see when you looked in their eyes.
There had been none of that for my pale, red-headed “friend.” I’d taken her power at face value, ignored the fact that I couldn’t read her mind because the story she presented seemed oh-so-logical, and because she’d taken a bullet for me. That was a commitment to the art of deception I’d never been prepared for. People who wanted to trick me usually kept their plans simpler.
Rose, though—she’d gone for the gold. She’d stayed by my side long past a time when she had ample opportunity to kill me without resistance. She could have snuffed me in my sleep, multiple times. She had enough power she could have turned me into free-floating atoms any one of a hundred times I turned my back on her.
But she didn’t. She didn’t even give me a sour look, nor a kick in the duff, not even a cross word…until she was ready to end the charade.
Shit, that was some deep planning. It bespoke of a hostility that was almost otherworldly in origin, the kind of white-hot hate and scary levels of self-discipline that I hadn’t seen outside of…well, Mom, I guess.
And Rose was a succubus.
“Shit,” I said under my breath, lowering my head. She was Scottish-born—if her story to me could be trusted, which…I guess it couldn’t. So maybe she wasn’t Scottish at all. She’d said that her meta powers came from her drifter father, but now I had to doubt that, too. I’d thought she was young, younger than me, but now every single thing she told me about herself was thrown into doubt. Her name might not even have been Rose, for all I knew. It could have been Frito Bandito.
But probably not that. I’d given this Rose problem some thought while contemplating the underaxle of a truck last night, and the number of conclusions I’d come to was roughly zero. All I had was that she hated me enough to run the longest con of all the long cons I could remember, short of maybe Sovereign or Old Man Winter, and all in order—in her words (if they could be trusted)—to “know me.”
Why the hell would she want to know me?
Who the hell was this girl?
And, I wondered, not nearly the last of the questions I had, but the one bubbling most fiercely in my upset, rumbling, hungry stomach…What was she doing right now?
5.
I drove along a scenic Scottish road, and by scenic I meant mostly covered in trees with the occasional overlook of a lake, or loch, I suppose they called it, because when you’re at the northern rump end of a country, why not just call things whatever the hell you want?
The sun was barely visible through a thin string of clouds, shining down on the loch like it was going to be a quasi-beautiful day for everyone but those of us being actively pursued by law enforcement. I stole glances at the sparkling loch while driving and trying to orient myself, because I had no idea where the hell I was and even less idea of where I was going, save for, “the hell outta here,” and as quickly as it could be arranged.
Fortunately, I had an idea about that, and was debating how best to execute said idea. I had stolen a cell phone from one of the cops I’d mugged (yeah, I mugged them, let’s be honest about what happened), several, actually, both personal and work ones, and luckily a couple of them were smartphones. I was under no illusions about how long I could actually hold onto them; I planned to get the info I needed and ditch them into the nearest loch as soon as I could find a scenic overlook that would allow me to pull off and do some web browsing.
I found it about a half mile ahead, a little paved area that was fenced to keep anyone from tumbling their ass down the hill and into the water, and nosed the car into a parking space and shifted the little go kart into park, phone already in hand. I dialed a number from memory, one that was international, to a burner phone that would have to be, well, burned, after this call.
“This is Fritz,” a male voice answered on the other end of the line. He spoke in a thick accent, Germanic in style, though I’d never heard him speak German.
“You’re not keeping banker’s hours today, Mr. Fritz,” I said. Truth was, he never kept bankers’ hours, even though he was, in fact, a banker. My banker, in fact, in cozy Liechtenstein.
“Ms—” he started.
“No need for names,” I said coolly. I wasn’t sure how sophisticated the Brit version of the NSA was, but they were probably monitoring cell phone calls for my voice, and I didn’t need a name tagged to go along with it. That would just speed up the ID process.
Fortunately, being a banker to the wealthy and somewhat criminal, Fritz caught on quickly. “I understand you’ve had a spot of trouble.”