For the next ten minutes Eve did her best to explain. Human bodies are notoriously hard to dispose of, but one promising approach is to compost them. First, the corpse needed to be chilled with liquid nitrogen. (For that purpose, her iron maiden would be lined with cold fingers fed from an LNG tank.) Once frozen, the body would be dropped into a modified industrial shredder—one with special blades, tempered to survive ultra-low temperatures—to reduce it to mulch. It would be piped into a fermentation vessel, where bacterial cultures would be injected, causing decomposition, breaking down the subject’s DNA and generating heat for the mansion. Finally, the residual slurry would be flushed away through the sewer system. The Canadian cemetery also composted bodies, but the intent was to provide a dignified, environmentally approved final exit. Eve’s approach was efficient, logical, but—
Her vision blurred and doubled as she stared at the sketch on her drawing pad. Why the hell am I doing this? she wondered, skewered on the cusp of acute cognitive dissonance.
She’d started this morning with a fantasy of slamming the iron maiden’s lid on Rupert’s grinning face (for once, set in a rictus of terror rather than gloating). She would listen to the scream of boiling liquid nitrogen escaping from around his rapidly cooling corpse, then push the button to drop him into the flashing blades of the shredder that would flush him into the septic tank for composting. Then she’d turn on her heel and ascend to take her place at the head of the boardroom table. The blame sat squarely on Rupert’s shoulders: if he hadn’t shackled her to him she could have simply left—
But now her fantasy was sharpening and coming into close-up focus, bright and clear beneath the voyeuristic cameras Rupe had scattered through her life, and it wasn’t Rupe’s face in the iron maiden: it was her brother’s.
She realized with a sick sense of despair that she might never be free of Rupert. Over the years he’d molded her into the perfect assistant, polished to a state of gleaming perfection to carry out his will. She could destroy his body, but he’d installed a little sliver of his soul inside her.
“I’m sorry?” she asked, acutely aware that she’d zoned out and missed a possibly critical question or two.
“—Said, if it looks good, I’ll want you to file for patent rights and look into setting it up for limited batch-scale manufacturing? I’m sure the Home Office will be interested in buying it. Maybe you could give it glass walls so they can auction tickets to the executions?”
“Of course,” she said automatically, and crabbed a tiny footnote on her pad. “I’ll see to it, sir.”
“Great!” Rupert sounded ever so jolly when she stroked his turgid ego. “Now, about that manuscript. How’s the acquisition coming along? I see you retained Andrei’s people to handle reclamation of the escrow funds and that’s good, but there’s a quarter of a million earmarked for non-recoverable expenses? And an ex-gratia payment to HiveCo Security?”
“Yes, yes, exactly so, My Lord.” She swallowed. Had she really promised her kid brother a quarter of a big one? She must have been mad: it was well above her normal discretionary spending, which meant it would be flagged for Rupert’s attention. She hoped like hell that she’d drawn up the title deeds properly and the mortgage was in order. If she’d screwed up, she and Imp were both dead. “The agents I retained ran into competition—the kind with very large guns, I’m afraid. It spooked them, so I upped their retainer rather than trying to recruit another team. Trying to keep the operation as small as possible, you see. We also had a problem with a HiveCo thief-taker but they were trivially easy to buy off, and meanwhile my team’s back on the job. More importantly, I’m confident the opposition don’t have any more leads. So there’s that.”
“Excellent! I look forward to reading it when I get home. Which, by the way, should be the day after tomorrow now—I had some unavoidable meetings in Panama, but I’m clearing them tomorrow and then I’m about eight hours away as the Gulfstream flies. Anyway, you don’t need to worry about the oppo bidders getting back in the game, I’ve put my man on their case and—” He carried on for a few seconds before she could get a word in edgewise.
“—Wait,” she said, scrabbling for traction, “you sent the Bond after them?”
“Yes! So I’m afraid you’re stuck driving the Bentley or the Lambo for the next week—the DB9’s fully booked. But you should have smooth sailing just as soon as he’s tracked down all the loose ends and tidied them away.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said, her voice just slightly strangled. The Bond—any of Rupert’s Mr. Bonds—was always a son-of-a-bitch. The job demanded it, and Rupert worked them hard. As with Fleming’s fictional 00-agents, their life expectancy was less than twenty-four months. However, the current incumbent was even worse than his predecessors: a stone-cold psychopath, death on two legs. “That’s good to know.” Just keep him the hell away from me. Eve had met the current Bond only twice and was not a fan. If she was ever trapped in a stuck lift with him only one of them was going to make it out alive, and she was determined it would be her. “Is the Bond going to get in my way?”
“Not unless something goes wrong!” Rupe said brightly. “But that’s not happening. So.” Expectant pause, then: “Tell me, what color is your thong?”
“I’m wearing the black lace Bordelle one you bought me—” Her gaze sharpened. “Hey, don’t you have a camera under my desk?”
“Good idea! Not yet, I’ll get one put in once I’m home. When did you last
