The Bond wasn’t quite boring enough to be a Gray Man—a totally average guy, the perfect street-level tail—he was too tall and muscular. But with his suit and briefcase nobody would spare him a second glance. Nobody dreamed it contained a drone with an optional grenade launcher and thermobaric rounds, nobody imagined the suppressed Glock 17 Gen4 and its spare magazines, the duct tape and the gag and the row of foam-wrapped syringes loaded with flunitrazepam and suxamethonium. All the paraphernalia of what those in the trade euphemistically termed “wet work.”
There was no equivalent anonymity for women or anyone else who didn’t code as white and male. Both the thief-taker and the thief were distinctive and easy to track: the butch ex-cop in her combat pants and paratroop boots, the dark-skinned bike courier with her dreads and skintight leggings. Put them in a boardroom or a ballroom and they’d stand out. Put them in cocktail dresses or skirt suits and drop them in a drafty warehouse or a bus terminus and they’d still stand out.
After giving them time to get settled, the Bond entered the kiosk and settled into a corner seat, where he pretended to look at his phone as he sipped his coffee. Smartphones had been another major innovation in tradecraft: everybody carried one, you could use them to track owners who were clueless about SIGINT, and you could hide your gaze behind a screen more easily than a newspaper. So he waited, and while he waited he eavesdropped.
“It’s my day off and I was stood down from the job,” the thief-taker was explaining, “so not only do I not have to arrest you, legally I can’t. Unlike a police officer I don’t have any particular powers of arrest, except when I’m on the clock and executing a warrant. Even then, I’m supposed to wait for the force to show up and do their job. I mean, the common law power of citizen’s arrest—section 24A of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984)—only works if I catch y—er, someone—in the act of committing a crime, and it has to be something serious, like assault or theft. At any other time I’d be committing a crime myself—unlawful detention.”
The car thief narrowed her eyes suspiciously: “But you cuffed me!”
“Yep.” The thief-taker briefly looked abashed. “You were having a panic attack. I thought you might hurt yourself. Also—” she side-eyed the car thief—“don’t you think it was a little bit hot?”
“Fucking give me a safeword next time!” Del glared at her. “And ask, don’t grab!”
“Consent is kind of difficult to get when you’re freaking out.” Wendy paused. “But next time, just so you know—if there is a next time—if you want me to chain you up, all you have to do is—”
Mount Deliverator blasted out a pyroclastic flow: “No!” She subsided, glowering. “We are not having this conversation in public!”
“You’re so easy!” Wendy taunted: “You’re so far in the closet you can see snowflakes falling in the street light!”
“You’re going to get us chucked out! And I haven’t had my ice cream yet!”
And so on and on and back and forth, verbal fencing moderating into heavy flirting for almost half an hour as the coffee cooled and the ice cream melted and the thief-taker worked—very effectively, the Bond thought—at building a rapport with her mark. Her snitch. Her informant.
Grooming, they called this, when conducted for unlawful ends. Not that the Bond cared one way or the other about legality—the only lawful authority that rocked his world was the privilege of money—but it was interesting to watch Wendy work her target over with words rather than weapons. It was apparent that they had a rapport, and not just the polarity of predator and prey, the cop and the robber, or even the black lead and the red lead clamped to the terminals of the car battery in the basement. The Bond had heard about the easy intimacy that the very best interrogators used to make their subjects spill their guts out of a misplaced desire to be helpful, but he’d scarcely credited its existence before now. His interrogations were messy affairs involving pliers and screaming. They usually ended up in a shallow grave in the forest: not in an ice cream parlor, feeding the other participant spoonfuls of frozen yoghurt while gazing wistfully into their eyes.
After a while Rebecca was sprawled at ease in her chair, not even trying to flee when Wendy went to order more refreshments. Instead, her gaze lingered on the other woman’s ass. Then when Wendy returned, Rebecca’s hand shyly crept across the table to touch her arm. (Disgusting, thought the Bond, salivating slightly as he leaned forward.)
“Admit it, you wanted me,” Del said. “I mean, something from—”
“I know what you mean.” Wendy smiled. “And yes. But what I want, and what my boss wants, and what his customer wants, are all different things, and my boss and the customer get zip while I’m off the clock. So this is me time, or maybe us time.”
“Is there an us? You’re moving kind of fast.”
“Would you rather I moved slow?”
“… Not really. So what do you want?”
“I thought maybe we could hang out together? Go for a drive in the country or something.”
Del snorted. “Fat chance.” Of a sudden, her expression clamped down, guarded and remote.
Wendy slowly reached inside her hoodie’s pouch. “I can get your ride un-clamped. What do you think?”
“You know that’s not—” Del licked her lips.
“Not your car, right? Doesn’t matter, I’ll do it anyway. Then we’ll go for a drive together.” She produced her phone with a flourish, then raised one eyebrow. “If you like?”
“You can’t just…”
“Watch me.” Wendy dialed a number. (The Bond waited patiently as the illegal picocell in his briefcase snatched her call from the aether,
