“I’m good,” I promised. “But things here have gone off the rails. I’ll fill you in when I see you.”
I hung up without asking how he was. Taverner could have been bleeding out his eyeballs and he wouldn’t have admitted it. But I felt better knowing I’d taken the steps to get him out of the potential firing line.
Nat’s call to Minka was short and possibly unpleasant from the expression on Nat’s face and the muffled squawking I could hear on Minka’s end. When Nat hung up, she shoved the phone back at me.
“How’s Minka?” I asked her.
“Pissed. She was two dates into following the band Ghost on their world tour. But she’s coming.”
A tightness had settled in my chest when I’d seen the wolf. Talking to Taverner had loosened it, and knowing Minka was safe eased it even more. I collected our old phones and dumped them in the well along with the burner. From the bottom of my bag, I dug out a new smartphone, already loaded with the Menopaws app. I always traveled with a spare, and it would be our only source of communication until we rendezvoused with the others.
We climbed into the car and took off. It was a thirty-two-minute drive to the Port of Poole, but I made it in seventeen. We ditched the car, leaving it unlocked in an area frequented by angry young men without much to do. The car would disappear within the hour, I had no doubt.
We used our fake passports to buy tickets on the next ferry to Cherbourg. The ferry runs four times a week, departing at 8:30 in the morning, and we got lucky, rolling up the gangway at 8:28. We headed straight for our cabin, a four-berth box where we spent the next few hours combing through our possessions for anything suspicious—trackers, AirTags, bugs, anything that could give away our locations. When we’d established that the bags were clean, we picked through our clothes, whittling everything down to essentials only. Each of us always carried a spare set of papers and a stack of assorted currencies. We transferred these to our smallest bags. We also packed a few items easily pawned in case we ran into trouble in a place where we couldn’t use cash. I used to carry a belt made of pahlavis I’d picked up in Iran—solid gold and wortha fortune—but it was heavy as a small child, and I finally decided the backache wasn’t worth it. I’d switched to gems instead. I already wore a pair of flawless blue diamond studs, but I’d added a sizable emerald on a long chain that I tucked into my bra.
The one thing we omitted were weapons that might attract attention. No guns or switchblades. Instead, we opted for things that wouldn’t draw anybody’s notice. Helen carried a Swiss Army knife that had been modified to include a few nifty extras, and I always had my favorite slapjack. A saddlemaker in Dallas had run it up for me. It looked just like a leather Bible bookmark except for the William S. Burroughs quote tooled around the side—“No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.” I’d had the saddlemaker fit it with lead shot on one end. It gripped beautifully, and if swung at just the right spot on a temple, it could shatter the skull, driving a piece of bone straight into the middle meningeal artery. Messy, but it made a satisfying crunch. Mary Alice and Helen always carried a few handy odds and ends, and god only knew what was in Natalie’s fanny pack of death. She pulled out a handful of ping-pong balls and a pencil.
“Are you finished with that?” She gestured towards the pork pie Mary Alice had bought at the station.
“Natalie, I told you to get your own,” Mary Alice protested through a mouthful of crumbs.
“Not the pie. The foil,” Natalie said, grabbing it away from her. She borrowed Helen’s Swiss Army knife and set towork, cutting a hole in one ping-pong ball and reducing the others to tiny squares.
“What are you doing?” Helen asked.
“You’ll see.” Natalie was focused, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth.
She stuck the pencil into the hole she’d made in the first ping-pong ball and shaped the foil carefully around it.
“It’s a bong,” Mary Alice said with a frown. “And not a particularly good one,” she warned Natalie. “You are going to poison yourself smoking anything out of that.”
“It isnota bong,” Natalie corrected.
“Then what is it?” Mary Alice demanded.
“Mind your business. And wipe your mouth. You’ve got pork pie on your lip.”
It did look a little like a bong, I decided, but Natalie was in too foul a mood to ask her again. I shrugged at Helen and we let her get on with it.
There was no need to talk about where we were headed. The first few months after our last mission had been quiet—alarmingly so. I wasn’t used to settling down and not looking over my shoulder. Paranoia is a hard habit to break. So I’d made a few arrangements including finding a dilapidated farmhouse in Sardinia. I’d sent the details on to the others in case they ever needed to lie low for a while, but nobody had used it. I hadn’t seen it myself in more than a year. Sardinia is not far off the beaten track; it sits squarely in the middle of the Mediterranean, after all. It has good transportation links to France, Spain, Italy, and even North Africa if you don’t mindbribing a guy with a fishing boat. And the thing about Sardinia? There is always a bribable guy with a fishing boat.
The trip was uneventful by which I mean nobody bombed, shot at, or otherwise assaulted us. We changed up our appearances with cheap wigs and hats and reversible jackets. We varied how we walked—sometimes in pairs, sometimes singly, so we didn’t stand out as a foursome traveling together. From Cherbourg we took the train to Toulon via Paris. It was a risk sticking with the same mode of transportation for eleven hours, but we were banking on the fact that most travelers leaving England for the Continent would pass through London at some point. We hadn’t, and we’d avoided airports although it meant staring out at the endless grey landscape as it rained all the way south.
In Toulon we changed our appearances again and hopped a ferry to Porto Torres. Ten hours later, we staggered off into dazzling Sardinian sunshine. I led the way to a beater I’d left parked in an illegal garage in the maze of alleys behind the ferry terminal. In seven minutes the narrow stone streets of the port were behind us and we were headed southwest, into the interior and as far from tourists as we could get. The drive was two hours if you didn’t care about being followed. I wound around for twice that amount of time, backtracking and checking for a tail. I stopped once to buy some snacks to throw into the back seat before Natalie started gnawing the upholstery, but apart from that, I kept my foot to the floor. The landscape got progressively more desolate as we made our way south. There are two schools of thought when hiding out: stay in a crowded area and blend in or get to the highcountry and hold your ground. Both have their uses, but I wanted to see the enemy coming if they managed to find us.
By the time I turned onto the dirt track leading up to the farmhouse, the countryside was deserted as the moon. In the rocky fields, sheep stared balefully at us as we passed. They weren’t fat, fluffy sheep like you see in England. These were skinny, wiry animals, tough little survivors who knew what it took to endure. Like us. Counting transfers, we’d been on the move for more than thirty hours since we’d left Benscombe, and we were stiff as new boots as we unfolded ourselves from the dusty car. I’d parked behind the farmhouse to shield the car from the road, and just as we scrambled out, the back door of the farmhouse swung open.
We might have been exhausted, but good training never dies. Helen and Mary Alice were already on the far side of the car, and Nat and I vaulted over it for cover. Helen’s Swiss Army knife was in her hand, the corkscrew locked into position. I was gripping my slapjack as Natalie applied a lighter to the bottom of her homemade foil bong until it started smoking.
“Do you really think getting stoned is the best course of action right now?” Mary Alice demanded.
“Bite my ass, Mary Alice,” Natalie said cheerfully. She popped her head above the car long enough to hurl the smoking projectile into the open doorway where it sent out a dense black cloud of chemical stench.
A moment later, we heard coughing and a figure emerged from the smoke, waving a white handkerchief. “Jesus Christ, it’sme.”
“Taverner,” I said, pocketing the blackjack. I signaled the others to stand down.
“What was in that thing?” he demanded. “Am I going to die?”