As he closed the front door behind him, an unmarked white Transit van slowly cruised along the street. The only visible occupant up front was the driver, but crouched inside the windowless rear were six passengers, all wiry men with close-cropped hair. They wore dark suits of archaic cut, worn with long overcoats and bowler hats.
One of them spoke on the phone, in Russian with a heavy Ukrainian accent. “—Yes, Andrei, is all in hand. What you say? Yes, I see—” He broke off to address the driver through a slot in the plywood front wall of the cargo compartment—“Do you see it? Do you see it?”
“Da.” The van slowed, then began to pull in. “Hey, I see Aston Martin. Is area clear?”
“I see it. Andrei, we are on target—we talk more later.” The speaker hung up, then looked at his men. “All right, what you wait for? Out! Out! We got a job to do!”
The rear door opened, and the bowler-hatted ex-Spetsnaz crew piled out, suppressed AK-12s at the ready—a modernized, more accurate, more reliable descendant of the venerable AK-47. Despite resembling a heavily armed funeral cortege, they moved speedily into position around the building. Two of them—the leader with the satellite phone, and a demolition specialist—slipped through the gate, leaving the severed ends of the chain behind. The van inched into the driveway leading to the house, then turned and reversed up to the front door. Everyone donned respirator masks and latex gloves, then two of the soldiers disappeared around the back; the others readied compact gas cylinders and ran through the checklist for a forced entry with knockout gas.
They had a kill order for the Bond: shoot on sight. Ms. Starkey’s bodyguard would be dealt with similarly. Random squatters could also be disposed of at will. But their employer hadn’t quite grasped that Evelyn Starkey was not simply Rupert’s sexy blonde piece of fluff but a player in her own right—and this was a fatal mistake.
Shadows gathered.
Alexei Popov from Novosibirsk, the team leader, was a former Spetsnaz sergeant. He’d worked on English soil before, back when he’d been part of a team seconded to the KGB’s occult operations directorate. Vassily Panin, the operative in charge, had his head handed to him by the British security services. It spread a pall over everyone’s career—those who survived. Now he’d been out of the army for most of a decade. Working on special projects for Andrei was okay. It paid really well, you didn’t have to wear a uniform (unless you counted disguises like the ones for tonight’s operation), you didn’t need to salute every asshole in epaulettes you ran across (unless they were Andrei’s shadowy employer: people who didn’t kiss his ass tended to disappear), and every so often you got to kill scumbags who had it coming to them.
But this job, this was something else.
“Sound off,” he spoke into his throat mike. “Positions, people.”
One by one his men confirmed that they were in position, gloves and masks sealed. All good.
“Five seconds. Knockout gas, ready. Okay, two … one … go!”
Glass shattered in four windows, followed moments later by the screeching hiss of the aerosol bombs his men had thrown inside. They crouched, all holding their breath despite the gas masks. Aerosolized carfentanil was serious shit, an opiate more than a thousand times as potent as heroin. It made a better nerve gas than a painkiller: they’d used it in Grozny, in the Dubrovka theater siege, anywhere there was a hostage situation where they wanted KO gas with an antidote that didn’t leave the survivors crippled for life. Alexei clutched a spring-loaded Naltrexone injector tightly in his left hand, counting off his breaths, alert for the first sign of disorientation.
Ten seconds passed, as the hiss from the gas bombs died away. “Sound off,” he ordered. When everybody had reported in, he unwound a fraction. “Okay, let’s get in there. Go! Go! Go!”
The operatives on door duty hit the lock with a battering ram, shattering the frame and throwing the front door wide open. Two more soldiers rushed past them to cover the interior, flashlight beams skidding across staircase and hallway. Interior doors led to the rooms they’d fumigated: the gas wouldn’t linger for long with broken windows and unsealed chimneys.
“Nobody in the back,” reported Vassily as Alexei did a quick sweep of the front room. “You’re going to want to see this, boss.”
The back room was a weird mess. Strange theatrical backdrops blocked off the windows. A huge sofa—almost a double bed—dominated the room, flanked by a rack of clothing and a crazy gaming rig set up with multiple monitors and PCs. Alexei took it in: Staging area, he realized. Vassily was pointing at a laser printer. “Get papers.”
Alexei peered at the document. It was some kind of flowchart or map diagram, and after puzzling over it for a short time he realized a chunk of it referred to this building. Andrei’s intelligence was right: the gate was on the top floor. He keyed his mike again. “Team one, second floor. Team two, third floor. Go!”
The fuse of Imp’s family curse was lit the moment Jeremy placed his hand on the cover of the black leatherbound volume. He removed it from the trunk, and opened it to read the flyleaf.
As with a black powder bomb, when the fuse is lit, the powder fizzles furiously, burning down through the pinhole. The bomb is about to detonate, but for a split second nothing appears to happen. A split second: or, in Imp’s case, a number of years.
At first he’d mistaken it for an old family bible. Certainly the list of Starkeys and dates, inscribed in copperplate script, suggested a record of births, marriages, and deaths. It was a family dogged by a curse: in every other generation, at least one child’s name was struck out. When he turned the page, there was more handwriting, much of it in Latin, some of it in a weird squiggle that hurt his eyes.
