“What’s happening?”
“I do not believe this.” Wendy shook her head. “Shit was a lot simpler when I was a cop.” She noticed Rebecca’s sudden tension: “Oh, it’s not about you, you can relax. Boss man says the boot’s coming off your car within the hour.” She shrugged. “The bad news for me is, I’ve been pulled off your case completely. So my employer doesn’t get paid. Boo hoo, some other job will come up. The good news for you is someone coughed up more money than Hamleys insurance underwriters to buy out the investigation, and because we’re HiveCo Security—not law enforcement—money talks. You have friends in high places, it seems. Do you have friends in high places?”
Rebecca boggled. “I don’t get it.”
“Well that’s okay because that makes two of us. But it does make life a little easier, doesn’t it? Now I’m not being paid to haul you in, but my boss is going to want to talk to you: he’s actively trying to hire transhumans for this program I’m part of, and as there’s always been a revolving door between thief-taking and smarter crim—” Her phone vibrated—“job done, boot’s off. Listen, that’s a sweet ride. How about we head for the M40, then once we hit the M25 you show me how fast you can lap London?”1
CANNONBALL RUN ON THE M25
In the end, the hammer blow that finally cracked the crystal shell around Eve’s conscience was a phone call that interrupted her while preparing a request for tender.
The Komatsu buried in the sub-subbasement had been annoying Eve for some months now, if only by implication. They’d run out of room for further downwards excavation, which meant some creative outside-the-box thinking was required to deal with the mansion’s persistent sanitation problem. The ground beneath central London was principally composed of sedimentary rocks: clay, chalk, and mudstone. If you dug too deep, then you were going to undermine your own foundations unless you were willing to be obvious about it (and sinking reinforced concrete pillars twenty meters underground was nothing if not obvious). Extend too far to either side and the neighboring billionaires would take offense and tie you up in court for years.
The Komatsu mini-digger was where it was because it was impossible to go any deeper, and the tunnel of shallow trenches behind it was slowly filling up, patches of shiny, fresh-poured cement betraying the final resting places of Rupe’s victims.
An in-house crematorium being impractical, Eve had been searching for a better solution to the problem of corpse disposal. But just as she thought she’d found a solution—just as she was drafting a serious requirements document and bill of materials for her very own Eiserne Jungfrau—the fucking phone rang.
“Yes?” she barked, quite forgetting herself for a moment—but only a moment, because then her eyes tracked to the caller ID and she gulped before continuing in a very different tone of voice: “Sorry sir, I wasn’t expecting you, how may I be of service?”
“Am I interrupting something good?” Rupert sounded amused rather than outraged. Phew. Eve dabbed at her forehead.
“I’m really sorry, sir, I was working on a final solution to the packing density problem in the sub-subbasement—” she glanced sideways at the dog-eared paperback lying facedown on her desk, copiously annotated: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach—“and I may have become slightly distracted.”
“Well jolly good, carry on then, nice to hear you’re keeping busy!” Rupert whiffled on in this mode for a minute, during which Eve gradually felt more and more uneasy. Rupe didn’t believe in soft-soaping his minions, especially her. Something was very wrong here. Is it (a) something I’ve done, or (b) something I haven’t done, or (c) something he wants me to do? she wondered. “How soon can you have it up and running?” he demanded.
What—she stared at her notepad. She had sketched her idea with pencil and paper. Her computer was, of course, keylogged six ways from Sunday, but—Oh, he must have upgraded the cameras again. “I’m not sure, sir.” It was going to require some complicated custom fabrications, unusual metalwork that wouldn’t be embrittled by exposure to liquid nitrogen coolant. Actual rocket science. “There’s apparently a cemetery in Canada that has a pilot plant that operates like this, but it’s a bit new and experimental.”
The fourteenth-century Iron Maiden of Nuremberg was a myth concocted in the Victorian era to titillate the proto-moderns and reinforce their sense of superiority over their benighted ancestors. According to the story, victims were forced inside the sarcophagus-shaped device and it was clamped shut around them, then spikes were screwed into their flesh. When the screams stopped and the blood slowed to a trickle, the spikes were withdrawn and what was left was dropped into a deep ravine through a hole in the bottom. It was bullshit, but it was prime grand guignol bullshit, the sort of thing guaranteed to keep the boss off her back for a while—especially once her twenty-first-century improvements were up and running.
“Set up a shell company and run the accounts through it,” Rupert instructed her. “Index it under hobby projects. Before they start bending metal I’d like to see the schematics.” This was typical Rupe behavior. Rupe loved snuff. One of his hobby subsidiaries existed solely to provide employment for a sick fuck of a former slaughterhouse technician in Somerset who turned standard-size shipping containers into mobile gallows. He was selling them by mail-order to the more sanity-challenged corners of the globe. (The less said about the concealed webcams Rupe had insisted on adding, the
