Assassin by Richard Weale

Author:Richard Weale [Weale, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

The Crystal City

Miss Ann Thrope woke up feeling the discord in the air. She reached under her pillow, withdrawing a gun of some sorts, gently rolled over as if in her sleep, and shot the intruder through the quilt.

She had been sleeping in her suite at Jammie’s, and no one entered her inner sanctum until her security system was disabled. She made a call to Beetle Jammie, the current owner and General Manager of Jammie’s, informing him of her breakfast requirements, and arranging for some of his people to take out the trash.

By the time breakfast arrived in her charming dining room overlooking the magical Crystal City and its nebula backdrop, the smoking corpse had been removed, the beautiful carpet looked as if it had just been shipped from Persia, and fresh cotton bedding was in place on the bed. Closing the door of the bedroom she glided over to her wonderful antique table, set for one, and poured coffee into a bone china cup.

Her meeting was scheduled for later. Time and place for her was a somewhat fluid concept, being in the enviable position to travel backwards and forwards in time, and even within and without, parallel universes. Whilst maintaining particular advantages in her specialised line of work, still there were many hidden pitfalls. For the sake of her own temporal stability, and also her sanity, she had to keep a firm grasp on her own sense of time, hence the incredible importance of breakfast. With the many worlds and star systems that she visited with their many differing time structures, her internal clock kept to the standard earth twenty-four-hour time, and to be really precise, Greenwich Mean time. She smiled to herself. As she had archly recounted once at one of Stiletto’s dinners, actually, she didn’t think it was mean at all.

Her appointment was on a small moon in the Dikdak system in the iridium mine where the finest ore, used for the most sought-after iridium blades, was found.

She arrived early using Stiletto’s spatial virus to avoid detection whilst she made a physical check of the location. It was her amazing attention to detail, and thorough state of preparation, even in the smallest eventuality, that enabled her to pull off the most difficult of engagements. But even with all her preparation, something inevitably, and spontaneously, went wrong.

That was the thought repeating through her head. The nerves in her arms screamed in pain where the cable ties had bitten into the delicate flesh of her wrists, where they held her to the chair. That in itself was worrying. Where in hell, or who in hell, was using simple nylon cable ties?

Cold water soaked her hair and dripped in frozen rivulets down her strained face. Whoever had her, had disabled her neural net with a wet towel, which had been secured to her head with duct tape, wrapped round and round. Her heart beat rapidly as she surveyed her situation. She half expected to see an old car battery, jump leads, pliers, and a Stanley knife, but she didn’t want to lose her grip on reality.

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