But wherever the blame might lie, going off the map—even briefly—had cost the Bond his lead, and picking up a local guide had cost him even more time.
“It’s in ’ere,” said Ned, pointing at a dark backstreet opening off the yard they stood in. The yard was fitfully illuminated by a gas lamp bolted to the back wall of an unusually well-kept house. (Its ground-floor windows were all bricked up: presumably it was the home of someone who chose to live in Whitechapel and could afford the lighting as a deterrent against burglars.) Ned spat: the mist hereabouts was so thick that it swallowed his expectoration before it hit the cobblestones. “Not gunn’ any further. Pay me.”
The Bond produced a coin and held it just out of reach. “Why not?” he asked.
“Them Piss-Gavey boys will fuck you up.” Ned’s idiolect warped towards modernity when he swore: or perhaps scatology was less prone to updating than other linguistic elements.
“How.” The Bond paused. “What do they do?”
“Issa molly house, but it ain’t like the others. Lads who go in ter try their luck fer a shilling, e’en if they come out again they’re nivver right in the head.” Ned spat behind him. “’S not right. ’S’not fucking right. What they do in there—”
The Bond flipped Ned the coin, a silver sixpence, and he dived to grab it. The Bond was pretty sure that a molly house was a gay brothel. Well, they could keep their fucking hands off him. Assuming it was a knocking shop, of course—it was called a reading room, and he was here for a book, so fuck, a library in a molly house would do. “You can piss off now,” he told Ned, giving him a hard stare. Ned tugged his cap down, shoved the coin in his cheek, then staggered away up a narrow yard beside the building with the lamp. The Bond allowed him to go: his silence wasn’t worth the price of a bullet. But a few seconds later there was a muffled thud and a sound that the Bond recognized as a body falling on pavement. Then a metallic chink and a clatter of something bouncing off the bricks.
The Bond bolted sideways and flung himself around a corner, drawing one of his pistols. He crouched and crab-walked away from the yard, keeping his head down. A couple seconds passed, then the gut-shaking crack of a fragmentation grenade reverberated from the walls. Ears ringing, the Bond barely heard the ping of shrapnel hitting the opposite wall. He loped back to the entrance, raised his gun and braced his wrist, careful to keep one eye closed. As he covered the alley Ned had chosen, a shadow emerged from the mist, and he squeezed the trigger.
A Glock 18 outwardly resembles a regular Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol—except that it was developed specially for the elite Austrian EKO Cobra counter-terrorist unit. It’s capable of burst and fully automatic fire at 1200 rounds per minute, making it one of the smallest submachine guns on the market.
The Bond wasn’t one to spray and pray: he aimed and squeezed the trigger repeatedly, three-round bursts that set the mist swirling beneath the shattered streetlamp. A scream, cut off sharply, told him he’d hit someone. Whether it was Ned or his assailant was impossible to tell. He ducked back into the alley and darted back down it as hastily as he dared, relying for night vision on the eye he’d screwed shut against his muzzle flash. He counted as he ran. He’d fired three bursts, giving him twenty-four rounds left. He reached for a spare magazine with his free hand. Both his guns had the extended, 33-round magazine, but his accuracy shooting left-handed would be compromised and he could swap magazines faster than he could swap guns.
As he neared the corner of the building the harsh crack of a modern Kalashnikov sent him diving for the ground. He was up against professionals; he’d tried to outflank them from behind the building and they’d done exactly the same thing. But it was suppressive fire—they hadn’t seen him, of that he was sure. Which meant they were ahead of him and trying to cover their entry—
As he lay on his back aiming his gun towards the corner of the building, someone opened up on full auto. But they were firing away from him. Interesting. The Bond’s lips drew back in a feral rictus. He rolled over and scrambled to his knees just as a different gun started firing, single shots, much louder, like a shotgun. So two factions were shooting at each other now? This is going to be fun, he thought, reloading his pistol, then reaching under his coat for a concussion grenade as he stealthily approached the end of the alley.
Half deafened by the gunfire-induced tinnitus ringing in his ears, the Bond missed a tinkling as of malevolent glass windchimes, following him up the alleyway.
Alexei was having a really bad night.
First they’d missed the asshole assassin even though they’d run through the building like Satan’s laxative. He was almost certainly ahead of them—he might be the kind of bastard to hide in a closet long enough to shoot them in the back, but he wasn’t a coward and Alexei’s back was still intact, so their target had to be in the lead. The banging open door on the darkness and mist proved it conclusively. So Alexei was on edge as he and his team followed the directions to the ley line route from the graveyard. Although they did cheat slightly; the instructions took no account of the utility of night-vision goggles on a moonless night as they flitted along the fog-bound sunken road into London’s past.
“Fuck this dogshit haze,” Yuri complained when they slowed for a regular breather, an hour down the lane. “No telling when you’re going to trip on a tree
