“See what’s parked out front.” She grinned smugly.
“If you get pulled over driving a stolen van, you’ve got bigger things to worry about than a breathalyzer—”
“’S not a van, what do you take me for?” She crossed her arms and feigned disdain.
“Go ahead,” Imp said wearily, “check it out, give her a round of applause.”
“I’ll go.” Game Boy stood and trudged towards the front door. Paused, then returned: “Why the ever-loving fuck did you boost a Chelsea tractor, Del?”
Rebecca smirked. “That, my friend, is not just any Chelsea tractor: it’s a 2010-model Porsche Cayenne Turbo S. With disabled anti-theft and tracking, and a—” she held up a remote keyfob—“working ignition. More than five hundred horsepower and enough torque to tow a jumbo jet. Just right for this neighborhood.”
Game Boy reddened. “Are you trying to bring the—”
“Relax, GeeBee,” Imp commanded: “I said relax, Boy.” He touched Game Boy’s shoulder. “I’m sure Del has a plan for avoiding the gentlemen of the law, right? Rebecca?” He put a slight hard edge on her name, casting her a warning look.
“The bloke who sold it to me put cloned plates on it first. They match a real one registered in Clapham, so it’s all legit, see? I thought I’d park it round in the long grass at the back.”
“Just so we’re all keeping busy, children,” Imp grinned, “practicing our skills, yes? So: while you were driving without insurance or whatever, Game Boy and Doc went exploring upstairs, and I’ve been catching up with fam and getting us a job.”
“Yeah, about this job—” Game Boy began.
“I will explain everything in due course!” Imp struck a pose.
“What’s it worth?” the Deliverator asked with barely concealed avarice.
“Lots.” Imp side-eyed the corners of the room. “Eighty large in cash, plus extras. Cameras, lenses, lights, a sound stage. And some payments in kind as well.”
“The fuck! What do we have to do, hand over our kidneys?”
“It’s quite simple. A rare book came up for auction this week. Trouble is, the book dealer who had the details has been murdered—yes, it’s that valuable. He kept the contact details for the seller in a safe deposit box. My customer hired him to bid in the auction, but one of the rival bidders has gotten a bit overenthusiastic, so she’s asked me to try and get hold of the book first.” He narrowed his eyes and frowned at Del’s keyfob. “It’s really no riskier than being in possession of that.”
Doc beat the others to the punch: “Who’s the customer? Why the fuck would they pay that much for a book? This stinks, are we being set up?”
Imp smiled thinly. “The customer is my sister. Or rather, her boss is paying and she’s organizing everything. I very much doubt she’s going to double-cross me.”
“Your sis—” Game Boy’s eyes widened—“you’ve got a sister?” From the way he shrank back into the sofa, he found the idea of a family of Imps terrifying.
“Obviously he got parents, Boy, where’s your head at?”
“I’ve got a sister,” Imp acknowledged with the haughty dignity of one who’d been caught out and now felt compelled to bluff his way to the bitter end. “She’s not an overachiever like me, but she occasionally has her uses.”
“A book.” Doc leaned forward. “Tell us about this hundred thousand pound book.”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Imp relaxed. He reached for a plastic document wallet, and began leafing through the pages he’d printed out. “What we’re after in the first place is not the actual book itself, nobody’s got that. We don’t even know who’s selling it yet, or rather, selling the treasure map—directions to where the book is hidden. Once we’ve got that, we’ve got to get hold of the book before anyone else, and then it’s finders keepers. The book itself is a unique manuscript, and the last legal keeper was the Vatican Library, where it was stashed in the Vatican secret archive. It was stolen during the Napoleonic Wars and went missing in London in the 1880s…”
“The book dealer,” Game Boy raised a finger, “he was killed by someone else who wants the book, do I have it right?”
“Yes.” Imp looked slightly abashed. “A rival buyer who’s not terribly concerned with legal niceties seems to be after it, and it looks like they’re a jump ahead of us. So we’ve got to get hold of the deposit box with the auction details in it toot sweet. But that’s going to be a bit of a problem, you see.”
“Why?” Imp wondered if Doc and Game Boy were tag-teaming him.
“Well, you know the branch of Pennine Bank that we, uh, filmed in last month?”
“Oh fuck off,” said Del, her eyes widening, “it’s in a deposit box there?”
“Yes.” Imp nodded.
“You want us to rob the same bank twice in a month?” Del’s voice rose.
“It’ll be a piece of cake! You see, I’ve got a plan…”
The Bond was having a bad day.
“What do you mean, you can’t get any data off it?” he hissed over the counter.
“It’s ancient, sir.” The technician gave him a company-approved cheerful smile. “I mean, it’s a 40-megabyte SCSI disk—that’s short for Small Computer Serial Intelligence—they don’t make them any more? You said the PC was a 1988 model? You might be able to read it on a Mac like the one my gran still uses, as long as it was made before 1995, but PCs won’t work with them without a special card. Are you sure it came out of a PC?”
“For the third time, yes, it came out of a PC. Big beige box, amber screen, one of those printers that shrieks like it’s having its toenails torn out with pliers. Can you get the data off it for me?”
“Um … to be perfectly honest, I don’t think so, sir. But it’s not as if there can be anything important on it, they haven’t made these things for more than twenty years and it’s less than a tenth the capacity of a single CD-ROM, there
