Chapter Text
Normally Abigail liked seeing her cousin Peter. He actually listened when she talked, some of the time, and occasionally he even knew things worth learning. But right now was so not the time she wanted to talk to him, even if he wasn’t a police officer anymore. He’d still flip if he knew why she was here, and she was expecting her client to walk in the door any second now. There was a good possibility they were going to freak when they realised the hacker they’d hired was a nineteen-year-old girl. There was only so much flipping and/or freaking she could handle in an afternoon.
Which would have been a fantastic pun if she hadn’t been thinking it to herself; she tucked it away for later, slouching over her laptop and tried to look as teenage and uninteresting as possible. With anybody else she’d have flipped her hoodie up but, see former police officer, that would have just got Peter’s attention.
When he sat down across from her, she thought that maybe she should have anyway; it might have worked. She’d heard, mostly from his mum, that he’d been really upset about losing his job, but he looked like he was doing okay. Or at least he was keeping up with haircuts and shaving, which were the first things to go when any of her other male relatives were having a bad time.
“Abigail,” he said. “Doing some homework in peace and quiet?”
“Yeah,” she said, since apparently he didn’t know she wasn’t studying this year, and didn’t close the laptop, because: suspicious. But she did hotkey a couple of programs closed. “What about you – job interview?”
Which she realised as soon as she said it was stupid; he was in a Keep Calm And Don’t Blink t-shirt and jeans instead of the suits he’d worn as a detective. Not job interview clothes at all, except maybe if he was interviewing to be a barista or something. She knew he’d worked a coffee kiosk once, but surely he could do better than that now, even after what had happened.
“Just meeting someone,” Peter said. “They were supposed to –” Then he stopped and stared at Abigail like he was seeing her for the first time.
“What?” Abigail said, and then she took in his t-shirt properly, and – no. Couldn’t be.
“That, uh,” said Peter, slowly, almost disbelievingly. “That drink you’re having looks good. What is it?”
“Double-shot moccachino with hazelnut syrup and whipped cream,” Abigail said, trying not to gape. Oh, shit. Oh, she was so busted. Maybe the quitting thing was a ruse – maybe this was a sting – but of all forty thousand police in the Met, the odds that it would be Peter –
“That sounds great,” said Peter. “Might get one myself.”
Abigail choked at that. “You hate syrup in your coffee!”
He glared at her. “Okay, let me try again: I might get a coffee I actually want to drink myself, and then we’re taking this conversation somewhere else.”
Abigail thought about running, but he knew where she lived, literally, and her parents, and really, what would be the point.
“Why?” she asked. “It’s quiet enough in here. We’re out of the CCTV line of sight. And it’s totally legit that we’d spot each other and have a conversation.”
“It’s a nice day,” Peter said. “I was planning on going for a walk anyway.” With whoever had shown up, was what he meant. “I’m going to go get that coffee. Don’t go anywhere.”
Abigail wasn’t planning on it.
*
She hadn’t meant to get into a life of crime, exactly – when she thought about what her dad would think of it, or even her mum, it still made her cringe a little, on the inside. Even if they didn’t really ask where she got money for things; her dad always said “Oh, Abigail, she’s so smart, you know – people get her to fix their computers and things for them, protect them against hackers. There’s a lot of money in that these days.”
And it had started out as that, mostly, but she’d been bored and there were things she wanted to do that needed equipment she just couldn’t scavenge or borrow or build. Contrary to the movies, DDR-RAM chips and solid-state hard drives were not commonly found in your average council estate rubbish skip, and stuff like a decent black VPN server cost money to use, you couldn’t just magic one up yourself.
On the Internet, though, nobody knew she was a teenage girl, they just knew what she could do. So she’d picked up the odd black hat job here and there, mostly stuff like hacking databases for ID data and credit card numbers. She’d stayed away from anything like ransomware because that was both boring and pointless. The really fun stuff was government – most companies were too cheap to spend money on real security and any kind of targeted attacks tore through them like wet paper, also boring – but that was also the kind of thing that got you either locked up or recruited to work for public service pay in a cubicle somewhere.
Abigail wasn’t interested in either of those things; she was nineteen and even with her A-levels they hadn’t quite been able to make uni work this year, with the fees now and two older siblings and the thing with her mum’s car and her dad’s hours getting cut, but next year. Next year she could definitely afford it. A university degree would open doors for her that would shut when people saw her face, otherwise. Only white boys got hired by Google off the strength of their Github repositories. Everybody else had to have papers.
Then this job had come in, specifically for someone local to London, and she’d gone back and forth on it fifty times before agreeing to meet and talk through it – face-to-face was dangerous, but she figured she could just not speak up if she didn’t like the look of it. She’d picked somewhere she came reasonably often, somewhere it wasn’t unusual for her to be. It had sounded, really, like too much fun to pass up – something different from the usual moving numbers around. But when her contact had walked in the door of the café, of everybody in all of London – all of the U.K., even – it had turned out to be Peter: her favourite cousin, if she had to pick one. Much more importantly, until last year, her only cousin who was also a detective in the Metropolitan Police Service.
What the actual fuck.
*
To give Peter credit, after a couple of probing questions to check it really was her he’d set up the meeting with, he didn’t hesitate; he launched straight into the details of the plan, or at least as much of the plan as he was willing to tell her. They left the coffee shop and walked as they talked.
“Let me get this straight,” Abigail said. “Some consultancy think tank bunch of Oxbridge wankers has a bunch of physical assets they keep in a warehouse, including some very valuable old books, and we’re going to steal them and hock them off. You’ve got someone to go in there, and someone for physical stuff, and me to deal with the alarm systems, but what exactly are you contributing to this?”
“The plan,” he said. “And keeping everybody pointed in the same direction.”
“No offence,” she said, “but how do you even know people who pull these sorts of jobs? You’re a cop. You were a cop.”
“Exactly,” he said. “You do my old job for long enough, you get to know people. Actually the Met worries about that a lot; it’s why they rotate people in and out of Organised Crime, and around different parts of it.”
“They didn’t rotate you fast enough, then,” said Abigail.
“Something like that.”
Abigail stopped walking. They were high on Hampstead Heath; the city was spread out below them. “I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t want to do the job,” Peter said, “I’ll get somebody else. There’s time.”
“I’m doing the job,” Abigail said. “But, apart from my share of the profits, the deal is that you tell me why we’re really doing this. Because I don’t buy for a second that you just decided you liked the other side of the fence better. And if this is, like, some personal revenge bullshit, that could go really wrong really fast, so I want to know about it.”
“It’s not personal,” Peter said. “And it’s not about how I lost my job. Well, not directly. But it is something that’s worth doing for more than just the money. I’ll explain why when it gets to it.”
“Your other people. Do they think that?”
“Ummmmm,” said Peter. “Not exactly. But they’re in, so you don’t need to worry about that.”
“You going to tell me who they are?”
“Not if it’s not necessary.”
“Any of them on the inside?” Abigail asked, trying not to roll her eyes; that was probably legitimate need-to-know stuff, not just Peter trying to keep her out of the worst of it. “If it’s going to work the way you say, we need someone on the inside, or someone who can get in.”
“Yeah, there’s someone,” Peter said. “But I’m definitely not telling you who that is, yet.”
“You might have to,” Abigail said. “For the first part, I’m going to need access to the building.”
“No,” he said, instantly.
“Yes,” she said. “Peter, I’m really good at this, but I can’t do actual miracles. If the system isn’t hooked up to the Internet, and if they’re even the slightest bit intelligent it’s not, I need physical access, which means I need into the building. I’m an adult – relax.”
“You can be tried as an adult, that’s why I’m not relaxed,” said Peter. “Mum would dissect me if you – Jesus.”
“You want my expertise on this or you don’t,” Abigail said, looking him directly in the eye. There weren’t a lot of people who could stand up to her looking them in the eye and thinking firmly, she’d found.
“Fine,” said Peter. “Fine. But we’re still not burning my insider for that. We’ll have to do it another way.”
*
The thing Abigail found least impressive about the other way was that it involved her having to sit through some excruciatingly dumb “on-boarding” presentations at Finlayson Amberley, the consultancy where she was masquerading as –– well, being, really – a secretarial temp. Not under her real name, obviously.
“Grace, that’s very pretty...Otieno?” said her direct manager, a white woman even shorter than Abigail who covered it up with truly impressive heels –– impressive because she was walking in them without wobbling, which Abigail was barely managing in her own, much lower set. “Where’s that from?”
“Kenya,” said Abigail.
“Huh,” said the woman, defrosting slightly – she’d been giving Abigail dubious glances over the tops of her catseye glasses for, like, an hour now. “I never would have guessed, your English is so good. They have safaris there, don’t they. Did you get to see lions and things when you were growing up?”
“Only once,” said Abigail, which wasn’t even a lie because she’d been to London Zoo on a school trip when she was twelve. “But we moved here when I was still really little.”
“That’ll be suspicious,” Abigail had told Peter, when he’d explained his solution for this part of it to her. “If I go in and then I vanish –”
“It’s a two-week contract,” he said. “It’s a massive security risk for a financial firm but they’re cheap and up themselves enough to think they can handle it – they get rotating temps for the boring admin instead of hiring permanent people. We substitute you for whoever the temp company was actually going to send, they’ll never noticed the difference.”
“And who’s going to do all the hard work so the temp company don’t notice the difference?” Abigail pointed out. “Yeah, alright.”
“You won’t be on your own, either,” Peter added. “I told you –
“Someone on the inside.” Abigail nodded, hitching one leg up to sit more comfortably. “Why can’t they do this, then?”
“Hold on – you’re the one who said you needed in!” Peter’s tone was indignant, but his eyes were sharp.
“Whoever they are, they wouldn’t be as good as me anyway.” Abigail had been hoping for something of a hint on who Peter’s person was, but if he was going to be that way – fine. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t trust him; she just wished he trusted her a bit more.
*
The real problem with the plan, it turned out, was that even if she was a temp this was the sort of posh-pretending-to-be-modern place where women were called girls and girls were expected to wear skirts and heels and do their faces or whatever, and Abigail didn’t object to that in particular, but it was something she’d skipped on learning past how to put on lip gloss and look after her own hair. Her mum had tried to teach her when Abigail was younger, girly bonding stuff, and Abigail hadn’t minded, but Mum had just got more and more frustrated that the makeup she bought didn’t look right on Abigail, even when it was the middle of winter, and they’d both given up. Abigail supposed she could have asked some of her other cousins or aunts, on her dad’s side of the family, but she hadn’t wanted to know enough to make the effort. She’d had better things to do with her time.
Which was how she came to be sitting in front of a mirror in an old warehouse with Peter’s friend Beverley Thames, who clearly knew how to do her own makeup and, presumably, could help Abigail with hers.
“What are you on this job, the image consultant?” Abigail had asked, a bit put out that Peter had suggested this before Abigail had even – but, the thing was, she hadn’t ever had to go into somewhere like this, had managed most of the really big stuff she’d pulled off sitting cross-legged on her bed in a t-shirt and track bottoms, or at worst, sneaking around in a hoodie so all people saw was some teenager. This was a whole different thing and it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to have help with it.
That didn’t meant she had to admit that.
“For right now, maybe,” Beverley had said. She had a cascade of exquisite braids. Abigail had never liked letting people touch her head, after the endless rounds of relaxing and straightening when she was a little kid, enough to get a hairstyle like that. “But mostly I’m going to be stealing things.”
“Physical security stuff?” Abigail asked, and Beverley nodded. “Cool. I’m strictly digital.”
“I know – Peter said. We should go over a couple of tricks before tomorrow, in case you get stuck somewhere.”
“I guess,” said Abigail, who really wanted to ask about lock picks. She’d watched YouTube videos but it wasn’t the same as having somebody show you, even if duplicating keys from pictures was easy enough nowadays that it was a hobby more than anything. Then again, she didn’t want to seem too interested. “How did you get involved, then?”
“I used to run into Peter on the job, now and then,” Beverley said. “And we got chatting to him at a party, once. Went from there.”
“On the job before or after…” Abigail figured she didn’t have to be specific.
“Both,” Beverley said, and changed the subject. “Okay, so the great thing about this stuff is that it’s totally waterproof; the main problem is getting it off the next day.”
“I’m going to be doing office drudge work, not going swimming,” Abigail said, wondering who we was. “Or bursting into tears in the loo or anything.”
“Well, you never know,” said Beverley. “Just saying.”
“Hang on,” Abigail said, something from earlier clicking into place. “You said Thames – you’re not related to Lady Ty, are you?” Abigail had heard things about her, like you did. They were mildly terrifying.
Beverley eyed her in the mirror for a long second. “Yeah, as it happens. But she’s not in on any of this.”
“Good,” said Abigail. This was feeling complicated enough already.
*
In the end, the actual infiltration – well, you couldn’t even call it that – was so boring Abigail couldn’t believe it; she went in, kept her head down, did tedious data entry, and sprinkled a few USB drives around the place. The first copy of her program called back to her laptop the second day she was there. People were so monumentally stupid about this stuff.
Of course, the first system she got access to wasn’t anything really useful, although she copied all the folders that looked like they had personal information to a spare hard drive just in case, and the second and third set as well. It was on the Friday, when the data analysts had all gone off to do their whiskey-tasting or whatever it was – one of them had invited her along and called her a bitch when she’d said no, so Abigail had made a note to hack his car on her way out – that she finally got into the secured systems. Someone on the actual security team, all two of them, had clearly picked up one of the USBs. It made you want to cry.
Abigail was just packing up her things, impatient to get home and start the real work, when someone approached her. She was white, like almost everybody else here, blonde, and walked like she owned the place. Abigail knew she’d seen her before but couldn’t remember where.
“Grace, right?” the woman asked.
“Yeah,” said Abigail. “Uh, can I help you with something?”
“Come with me for a second,” she said.
“Sorry, who did you say you were?” Abigail asked, as she followed behind. She took her bag with her; this didn’t seem right, and she was mentally mapping out the nearest exit when the woman said “I’m Lesley. Peter didn’t tell you I was here?”
That was when it clicked. Peter had had a friend Lesley when he’d been a copper, Aunt Mamusu had thought she was his girlfriend for a while and she hadn’t been too pleased about it either – Abigail wasn’t sure why – but then she’d left, before the whole thing with Peter had happened. Peter had said it was a shame, that she was really good at her job. Abigail had seen her once or twice but not met her properly, and anyway she’d been a little kid then. But she had to be Peter’s inside woman – too much of a coincidence, otherwise.
“You used to work with my cousin,” Abigail said cautiously, because just because it seemed like too much of a coincidence didn’t mean it definitely wasn’t one. “He didn’t tell me you were working somewhere like this now.”
“Of course he didn’t,” said Lesley, rolling her eyes. “He’s worried I’d have him on over getting his baby cousin involved, which I’m going to, the next time I see him.” She frowned critically at Abigail and it was a bit too much like some of her teachers at school, only sharper somehow. Ugh. Abigail couldn’t wait to not be a teenager. Not that it really made a difference but people cared about it anyway. Three more months, and it felt like about three more years.
“Should we really be talking here?” Abigail asked, not being careless enough to say doesn’t this look suspicious when she was on the premises. There were definitely cameras, although she’d taken care of the key ones already. She hadn’t found audio yet – it was illegal anyway –– but she wouldn’t put it past these creeps and audio bugs were practically invisible these days.
“You’re going to help me with a project, that’s the excuse,” Lesley said. “We’ll have lots of time to catch up under the radar.”
“Cool.” Abigail relaxed a little. She did wonder what was in it for Lesley, but she’d grown up on an estate too, she remembered Peter saying that, and had to leave the Met the same as Peter, and look at all these rich wankers around them – no wonder she was willing to help out.
Besides the money. Abigail had learned to never underestimate the motivational power of large amounts of money. After all, it might not buy happiness, but only past a certain point, which Abigail had not yet reached. There were studies and everything.
*
Three days later, once Abigail was sure she had all the system access she needed – but a week before her temp job was up – they met for the first time to go over the plan for the day, all four of them. Well, technically except Lesley, but Abigail wasn’t sure the other two knew about her. “Good, everybody’s here,” said Peter when Abigail finally found the right room. Abandoned warehouses weren’t supposed to have this many internal doors.
“Except your mate Lesley,” said Beverley, and the other guy didn’t make a face, which he would if he didn’t know – extra people was practically the biggest no-no on this sort of job – so they both did know, after all.
“The less she knows about this end of it the better,” said Peter. Beverley shrugged in agreement. “Abigail, I don’t think you’ve met Thomas.”
“I have now.” The Nightingale - it had been hard not to choke when Peter had mentioned his name - wasn’t nearly as impressive in person as Abigail would have expected; just a slightly-taller-than-average white guy, though he apparently had a talent for making even a polo shirt look dressed up. She hoped they never had to do undercover together. He’d stick out even more than Abigail felt like she did.
He hadn’t done a double-take when she’d shown up, which boded well, and he shook hands with her like they were at a normal business meeting or something. Abigail could feel strength in his grip he wasn’t using, and some weird callusing.
“A pleasure to finally meet you,” he said.
“Uh, the same.” Abigail hopped up on a filing cabinet; Beverley was sitting on a table and Peter leaning back against the wall.
“Alright.” Peter pointed with something in his hand, and a projector Abigail had thought must be broken whined to life, a map fading in on the dented grey wall. “Aerial view of where we’re breaking into – Google updated their London scans last month, so it’s decently up-to-date.”
“I could get you better footage than that,” Abigail had to offer, because she wouldn’t hack military satellite data herself but other people were that stupid. And once the data was out, it was out.
“I know you could,” said Peter.
“I could also do you a much better powerpoint than that,” she said when he clicked to the next slide.
Beverley laughed outright, and even the Nightingale smiled. “I’m starting to see why this is our first group meeting.”
“Yeah, I’ve never heard either of you mock me to my face before, this is a real change of pace,” said Peter. “First thing we have to deal with: surveillance. The thing about London is that there might be mass surveillance, but it’s not smart mass surveillance…”
It took about an hour to go through everything, faster than Abigail had hoped. She had to give Peter credit – he was good at keeping other people on track, even if Beverley and the Nightingale had to haul him in from his own verbal wandering once or twice.
“It doesn’t really matter where the books come from and how old they are,” Beverley was saying. “It matters that they’re valuable.”
“They’re valuable because of where – fine,” Peter said. “Someday I’m going to get you to say that to Dr Winstanley’s face. It makes a difference to how we have to handle them, though. You can’t go tossing these around. And they really can’t get wet.” Nightingale frowned minutely at that; maybe he was interested in the actual targets, not just the idea of selling them? Abigail filed that away to think about.
“I figured that much,” said Beverley dryly.
“The one thing I want to know is how we’re shifting them on,” Abigail said. “You can’t just dump these on a second-hand shop, even in London; they need buyers.” She hadn’t thought of that when Peter had first gone over the plan to her, but she’d realised in the interim. Old books weren’t easy money.
Nightingale waved a hand. “We’ve got two people for that – an old friend of mine in Oxford and an old acquaintance of Peter’s. One of them approached us over their retrieval, actually.”
“An old acquaintance of my mum’s, really,” said Peter.
“Oh my god,” said Abigail, shifting so the filing cabinet wasn’t digging into the same spot in her thighs. “You’re getting Elsie Winstanley to fence them? I’m not sure if that’s genius or the stupidest thing you could do.”
“It’s only stupid if Mum gets wind of it, which she never will,” Peter said ominously. “How do you even know her?”
“Aunt Mamusu took me to interview her for a school project, like, years ago,” Abigail said. “How do you even know her?”
“Professional stuff,” said Peter, vaguely.
Beverley raised an eyebrow. “Professional here or…”
“Both,” said Peter.
“She and Harold have known each other for decades, anyway,” said Nightingale. Postmartin must be his Oxford guy.
Suddenly there was an ominous creak that had everybody on their feet, but it didn’t come again, and Abigail could hear the whistle of the wind out one of the broken windows, high up. The small room they were in didn’t have a ceiling; it was just a cubicle with pretensions, really.
“Meeting in an abandoned warehouse is so cliché,” Abigail said, once Nightingale had nodded, which seemed to be the signal for Peter and Beverley to relax. “Whose idea even was that? And how come it’s abandoned? This is a pretty posh area.”
“Mine,” said Nightingale. “Elements of the Russian mafia were using it until a few months ago, but then that particular branch collapsed in a petty bout of infighting -”
“Someone was sleeping with someone else’s wife, the usual,” said Beverley. “And then the people in charge all ended up dead or arrested, clever them.”
“That was some quite good police work, actually,” said Peter. “Give my former colleagues some credit.”
“Anyway,” said Thomas. “They’re not using it, nobody else wants to go near it just in case, so here we are. And we’re going to need storage space.”
Abigail frowned. “How do you know it’s not still being watched?”
“I checked that,” Peter said. “That’s what I got you to set me up HOLMES access for, with the MAC address mirroring and all that. One of the things, anyway.”
“It was way more complicated than that,” Abigail informed him, because she didn’t want to undersell her abilities, here. “But OK. Wait – I thought you still needed a password for that. You got one?”
“Assistant Commissioner Folsom uses his daughter’s birthday,” said Peter, with a grin. “Which is totally against organizational policy, not that he’s ever read it, I bet.”
“You’re using Folsom’s account?” Beverley raised her eyebrows. “Ty’ll be pissed if you get him in trouble.”
“You worried about that?” Peter asked her, cocking his head; she patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. “No, he’s a complete wanker. I’m fine with it.”
“Good,” said Peter. “Do we have anything else left to get into place?”
“We still need the schedule for the security guards,” said Thomas, pointing at the last slide. If Abigail was standing where he was she’d be slouching against the wall; he was standing ramrod-straight, still. Military, definitely, she thought.
“It’s outsourced, I’m working on it,” said Abigail.
“I’ve got that covered,” said Beverley. “One of Maksim’s friends is working for that company now, since his previous employment fell through.” Thomas gave her a nod at that.
“One day you’re going to have to explain to me how the Russian mob tried to kidnap you and now you have one of them doing everything you say,” said Peter idly.
“One day I will,” said Beverley. “But not today.”
Did that mean Peter didn’t – Abigail almost said something, but bit her tongue at the last second. It wasn’t like she knew that much, anyway, and if Beverley was keeping it to herself….
Still. Huh.
*
Evening at Finlayson Amberley, and all the lights still on. Abigail lifted her head from her data entry in time to see another person slipping out the door at the egregiously early hour of seven-thirty pm – Greg, who sat in the far right corner under the air conditioning unit – and narrowed her eyes. Time to start making her way to the server room? To get full access to the system she needed, she was going to have to manually re-wire two of the racks, which was a pain. Still, it gave her some weird Stockholm Syndrome-ish pride in the company’s computer security policies, which weren’t totally useless after all. Until now she’d practically felt insulted by them.
Yeah, time, she decided. She’d been keeping count and the only other person left in this section was another white guy whose name she hadn’t got yet, but he was one of the algorithm crowd, something to do with one of the big-data contracts this place had with the government, and it was impossible for people to get his attention even when they wanted it. He fended it off with noise-cancelling headphones and a total disdain for anybody he thought was more stupid than he was, which was everybody, but especially anybody he thought was female. Definitely time to –
Then one of the cleaners came in the far door, the one that led to the hall the server room was off, and Abigail groaned internally. That was so annoying. She left her cart parked just to the right of the doorway and came over to Abigail. That wasn’t annoying, it was concerning.
“Hi,” Abigail said. “Sorry, am I in the way?”
“There’s been some problems with the power in here when I run the big hoover,” the woman said. She had a Somali accent with the edges smoothed over, almost in a posh way. She was tall, really tall, with a neatly-pinned navy blue hijab that shimmered in a way that looked expensive. “It’s been tripping fuses. You might lose things -”
“I’m almost done,” Abigail said, and shut her computer down.
Here was the thing, though: Abigail had been learning from this job that white men would practically live in the office if you paid them enough and gave them free energy drinks and table soccer (even though they never used it), and that the cleaners didn’t come until after nine, usually, because by then even the most hardened had staggered off to the pub. She’d stayed late a few times herself to learn that. She hadn’t got paid overtime, of course, but nobody had even told her not to; they probably thought she was trying to show willing and maybe get a permanent job. Ugh.
It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet, and the cleaners who normally did this office were Polish, which had been a real relief because the way this was going she’d half expected Aunt Mamusu to show up. This woman was new, and early, and the thing about the vacuum was pure bollocks.
“Hey,” Abigail said, as she was packing up her things. “You don’t know my cousin Obe, do you? He usually does the posh flats but he’s had a couple of office cleaning jobs -”
The woman started, like she hadn’t expected Abigail to pay attention to her. “No, no I don’t, sorry.”
“You probably know some of the same people, though. What’s your name?”
“Awa Shambir,” said the woman. “I only moved back to London very recently, I’ve been in Manchester. I’m sure I won’t know him.”
“Oh, never mind then,” said Abigail. “Sorry, I’ll let you get on with it. Word of warning – that bloke in the corner totally hates being disturbed, he might make you come back.”
The woman flashed a quicksilver smile. “I can handle it, but thank you.”
Abigail left the open-plan part of the office to the dulcet sounds of the cleaner asking the brogrammer across the room politely if he was done and the brogrammer swearing at her. Any real cleaner would have known her job would be gone after that. She walked down the hall, ducked around through the tearoom area and back at the other end before the lights – on an automatic movement sensor –– timed out, and hid herself under a desk. Down the other end of the room, brogrammer guy stomped out.
Abigail stayed very, very still. When the cleaner moved into view, she breathed as shallowly and quietly as she could, and got a couple of photos with her phone. Not a perfect view of her face, but you couldn’t have everything.
The woman didn’t even bother pretending to start vacuuming before she opened Abigail’s desk drawer.
“I promise it’s clean in there, I’ve only been here a week,” said Abigail, standing up. She didn’t raise her voice; she didn’t want to attract other attention. “What are you doing?”
The woman didn’t freeze, like Abigail was expecting; she shut the door and turned around, smoothly. “Better question – what are you doing?”
“My job?” Abigail said, folding her arms and giving her a look that had cowed teachers and bullies alike at school. “Guys like the one you just got to leave might not know who the cleaners are, but I do. You’re new. And cleaners don’t wear silk on the job, either.”
That just got her a petulant frown. “What are you, the…the filth?” There was the barest hesitation, like it wasn’t the word she wanted.
Abigail had a frozen second of shit, what if she’s a cop, then logic reasserted itself; a policewoman wouldn’t be pretending to be a cleaner, she’d have a warrant and show up during the day, and not by herself either. If you go after somewhere like that, you do it – they do it mob-handed or not at all, Peter had commented when they’d been talking over this.
She laughed, and it sounded incredulous to her own ears at least. “Look, I just want to get a proper job, maybe enough to get out of my parents’ place, and if you’re nicking things they’ll blame me first.”
The woman looked at her for what felt like forever, and of course she hadn’t said anything about calling the cops, like she should have; shit. Shit. If she ever got booked, even once, they’d have her face and her fingerprints and then things got difficult -
“How about…I won’t get in your way if you don’t get in mine. And I promise I’m not here to do anything they’d blame on a temp.” Her voice shifted as she spoke; no Somali accent now, just pure RP vowels. What the hell, Abigail wondered.
It was too late, anyway, and she wasn’t going near the server room tonight. Her heart was hammering in her chest so hard she thought it must be audible halfway across the room.
“Fine.” Discretion was, Abigail decided, the greater part of valour here. She didn’t do face-to-face fights.
*
“I don’t know her,” Peter said, squinting like it was going to improve the resolution; Abigail had been carrying the kind of phone Grace Otieno would have, eighteen months old, and the angle hadn’t been that good either. “Have you -”
“I ran the name already, she doesn’t come up anywhere; I mean, nowhere, which makes it a shitty alias,” Abigail said.
“Wait.” Peter squinted some more. “Actually, take away the headscarf, I think I have seen her – but I’m buggered if I can remember where.”
“So have I, and I do remember where,” said Beverley. “She’s got a title, I think, but I don’t know her name. What worries me is…” She trailed off, and Nightingale took up. “She’s got a very particular skillset, and it’s…extremely curious that she’d be anywhere near Finlayson Amberley.”
“What sort of skillset?” Peter asked.
“Nothing to do with what we’re doing here,” said Nightingale, and that was a brush-off; Peter’s eyes narrowed for just a second. Abigail was pretty sure she knew what he wasn’t saying, and really –
“Okay, then,” said Peter, which was worrying on at least three levels. “Abigail, how much longer do you need to be there, or are you going to come down with the ‘flu or something -”
“I’ve got to get into the server room,” Abigail said. “They keep the master key for the alarm system on – look, I’ve got to, I told you.”
“Odds are she thinks Abigail’s with your old lot, even though she said she wasn’t,” Beverley said. “Alias with no paperwork to back it up, gives up on her cover story nearly as soon as she’s pushed – she’s not professional.”
“Then odds are she never shows up there again,” Abigail said, “but I’m the one who has to walk in there tomorrow.”
“I’ll check in with our fifth column,” said Peter. “We’ll clear it before you go.”
“This is getting unnecessarily complicated,” said Nightingale.
“You have a better suggestion?”
“No.” He grimaced. “That's the bit I don’t like about it.”
*
“No need to worry about our friend Ms Shambir,” was the first thing Lesley said to her the next day; her actual job, Abigail had discovered, was as a PA for one of the senior management people – that was how she knew about the books in the first place – and Abigail was supposed to being doing data entry for her so she could do, well, whatever more important things a PA to senior management did. Abigail didn’t care that much; they all seemed pretty interchangeable, middle-aged white men in good suits. She’d bet none of them would have the first idea how to so much as write a line of code, or how the data analysis that underpinned their think tank actually worked. They were there for the bit of consultancy that involved lots of long lunches with the right people. They’d suspect her of nicking the petty cash jar, but never of breaking into their servers. Especially not in heels.
“Are you sure, though?” she asked Lesley.
“If she so much as gets within sight of the building security will be having a word,” Lesley said. “God, she can’t be very bright – she could have tried harder to make like she was a real cleaner. How’d you clock her, anyway?”
“She wasn’t one of the cleaners,” Abigail said, and Lesley just looked blank. “Haven’t you ever – anyway, what did you tell your boss, or security, or whoever?”
“Said I saw her lurking this morning. Nobody ever checks the cameras – it’s fine.”
“Alright.” Abigail made a mental note to install her wipe program today, not the end of the week. “I’ve still got to get to the server room tonight.”
“Won’t be a problem.” Lesley smiled at her, upbeat. “Everything’s going according to plan. Don’t you love it when that happens?”
“I don’t trust it when that happens,” said Abigail, but Lesley had a point.
“Then trust me.” Lesley straighten. “Got to get on with it – let me know if something else comes up.”
Abigail nodded, already thinking about the server room tonight, letting her fingers do the data-entry work without her brain getting in the way.
*
That evening, after she’d been in and out of the server room without so much as a glimpse of anybody, she made her way around the back of the building to the rubbish skips that lined the alley. It was dark and dodgy-looking and something gave a suspicious rattle, but that was what she was looking for.
“Hey,” she said. “Finding anything good?”
A fox popped up; it was a little larger than a regular London fox, maybe, but just a fox, otherwise.
“Come on,” Abigail said.
The fox sighed. “No. It’s all paper today. Fine if you want something to line a den with. Nothing tasty.”
“They’re having a big client do on Thursday,” Abigail said. “MPs and that sort of thing. There’ll be good leftovers then. Lots of cheese and crackers. Maybe some proscuttio.”
“That sounds more like it,” said the fox. “What are you doing here?”
“Work,” Abigail said. “Long story. Listen – have you seen a woman sneaking into this building? Really tall, East African, wearing a silk headscarf.”
“Do I look like I’ve been staking the place out? No.”
Abigail shrugged. “Worth asking. Something funny about her.”
“Speaking of that,” said the fox, “word is you’ve been seen in the same place as the Nightingale and that River he hangs around with. And their clever policeman friend.”
“He’s not a policeman,” said Abigail. “Not anymore. Whose word?”
“Just ours,” said the fox, and now Abigail thought about it, abandoned warehouses were probably prime fox territory. “I was curious, is all. You haven’t gone near the Rivers before.”
“And I’m still not,” said Abigail. “I’m not stupid. Bev’s just - this isn’t about River stuff.”
“Then what is it about?”
“Tell you when it’s all over, maybe.”
The fox laughed, a weird raspy sound. “Laters.”
“Laters.” Abigail waved as it whipped around the corner and out of sight, and wondered: did Peter really not know about any of this? But it wasn’t something she could ask him, because if he didn’t, he’d think she’d lost it, and they were too close to the business end of this job to let him think she’d lost it.
She’d wondered that about herself, the first time a fox had talked to her, when she’d been thirteen and stupid and wandering about on train lines looking for the ghost someone at school had said haunted them. But she’d proven it to her own satisfaction and after that – it was just another corner of her city, the one where foxes talked and ghosts showed up now and then and apparently there were wizards, although Abigail had never had anything to do with wizards, unless you counted the Nightingale.
It was a shame. She’d like to learn magic, if magic was something you could learn. She’d never really got a clear answer on that, either.
*
Abigail still lived with her parents even though technically she could have moved out, because moving out would have meant flatmates – crime didn’t pay that well considering London rents, or at least it hadn’t up until this point – and flatmates would have asked inconvenient questions. If, no, when they pulled off this job, she was totally getting her own place, though.
She’d grown up on the same estate as Peter, although she’d still been in primary school when he’d legged it, not having the same worries about flatmates, apparently, so she hadn’t known him that well then. He didn’t visit his parents very much; not never, and more recently because his dad was getting sick, so Abigail’s dad had said – Peter’s dad was old old, as old as Abigail’s grandparents – but still not much. Definitely not enough for Aunt Mamusu’s liking, Abigail had also heard, from Aunt Mamusu herself. She somehow kept tabs on everybody in her vast extended family. If anybody was going to figure out what Abigail actually did, Abigail had always figured, it would be her. She’d either take it in stride or come down on her like the wrath of God; Abigail still wasn’t quite sure which and planned to never find out.
So Abigail took notice when she was heading home from the Tube station and heard Peter’s voice. At first she thought he must be trying to get her attention, and then she had a spike of panic – why wouldn’t he just ring or text – and then she realized he was talking to someone else, but around a corner, where she couldn’t see him. She was going to brush by when she heard “– following me for a reason, Sahra?”
Sahra Guleed, Abigail knew, had worked with him in the Met; unlike Lesley May, she was still police. Abigail tucked herself into the wall, and waited. She pulled out her phone so it just looked like she was waiting for someone.
“We’re a bit paranoid today,” said a voice Abigail didn’t know; female, a Londoner, not really old or young. “Then again, I would be too, after what happened to you.”
“What?” Peter sounded genuinely confused. “Oh, you mean – nah.”
“They practically stalked you, Peter,” said the woman – Sahra. “At least they lost interest when you left, didn’t they? Small blessings.”
“I think I deserve one or two,” Peter said, dryly, and Sahra chuckled like she agreed, but not like it was funny. “Visiting your parents?”
“Just on my way back from it. What brings you to my manor?”
“Same sort of thing,” Sahra said. “Look, I’ve been meaning to ask –”
“Can we not?” Peter sounded tired. “No offence, Sahra, it’s nice you care enough to check up, but I don’t feel like being checked up on today.”
“It’s not just me. The boss and the other boss are both wondering – nobody’s alright with how it went down.”
“But it went down, all the same.” Now Peter sounded the tiniest bit bitter. “Or I did, and it’s nice you’re all wondering, but I’m trying to get on with my life.”
“Right.” There was an awkward pause.
“I need to…” Peter said. Abigail debated what to do, and settled for pulling the hood of her puffy jacket up and rounding the corner, head still down and over her phone. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Peter, or Peter’s shoes and jeans; she couldn’t spot Sahra without looking obvious.
“Just,” Sahra said as Abigail was passing. “If you do – if they didn’t lose interest, you’d let us know, right? We could help.”
Whatever Peter said was lost as Abigail moved on, but she raised her eyebrows at her phone. No bets taken on who they were. Wasn’t that interesting.
*
“Did you stalk Peter?” she asked Thomas the next day, when they were going over the final plan. Abigail was already in her work clothes and looking heartily forward to the end of the week and her mysterious failure to have her temp contract extended. Looking ‘appropriate’ for Finlayson Amberley was almost as much of the job than the actual work she had to do. And her nylons itched.
“That’s a very strong word,” said Thomas, which was as ineffectual a denial as he could have possibly put up. “Did Peter say that?”
“One of his mates did,” said Abigail. “One of his cop mates.”
“Sahra Guleed?” asked Beverley. Abigail hadn’t even heard her come into the room. She really needed to get Bev to show her how to do that. Except probably she was never going to see her again after tomorrow. “She’s a little bit paranoid, sometimes. When were you talking to her?” Her voice sharpened.
“I wasn’t,” Abigail said. “I eavesdropped on her and Peter when they ran into each other near the estate. She grew up in Gospel Oak, I think it was legit. But there was this whole mysterious conversation about ‘them’, unquote, having ‘lost interest’, unquote, when Peter got dismissed. Or whatever the Met call it.”
“Oh, hmm,” said Beverley. “Yeah, that was probably us.”
“Peter hasn’t mentioned that,” said Thomas thoughtfully. He was saying it to Beverley, not Abigail.
"Of course he hasn't," said Beverley. Her mouth opened again, but then closed abruptly. Her eyes hadn't even flickered, but Abigail knew Beverley had something to say that she didn't want to say in front of her.
"Stalking," she said slowly and clearly, "is creepy. I don't mind illegal but I do mind creepy."
"We're not creepy!" Beverley objected.
"I think anything we say is going to be protesting too much," said the Nightingale. "Ask Peter, if you like."
"Like he's really going to tell me," said Abigail. "But you don't think this Guleed's going to get in the way tomorrow?"
"If there was a chance of that –" Beverley said, and then Peter walked in, so she stopped. It was as suspicious as it could be, but Peter didn't notice, because he was too busy saying "We might have a minor problem. I ran into Sahra Guleed yesterday and –" He paused, taking in the room. "Can someone tell me why this was a topic of conversation before I even got here?"
"I overheard you guys," said Abigail. "Outside the Tube station. Nobody was stalking you."
"You really have been taking tips from these two," said Peter. Abigail scowled at him, because she wasn't creepy, and Beverley scowled at him, presumably because she thought the same, and the Nightingale looked away. Peter made a face. "Look, it's not - it's a frame of reference thing. Can we focus? I ran into Sahra, and it was almost certainly a coincidence, but...maybe not."
"Too late to worry about," said the Nightingale. "There hasn't been any other sign of an ongoing investigation or extra security, and if it's the absence of such that concerns you - the police tend to be more interested in stopping illegal activity than conducting elaborate stings."
"I know that," Peter said, with some emphasis. "It's less an operation I'm worried about and more –"
"You're the only one of us with any good reputation left to lose, at least in those quarters," Beverley filled in, more sympathetic than dry.
"Too late to worry about," said Peter, shrugging, that cheerful mask he wore sometimes coming back down. "That's not what we're here for. Pass those blueprints –"
*
The storage building their targets were in was near the Thames, not that common anymore, both because residential made more money and because people had really started to think hard about flood risks. But it meant that after the meeting, Abigail could walk down to the riverbank and look out across it at the building that she was never going to get closer to than this, if everything went right. Probably everything wouldn't go right. But she had a good feeling about enough things going right, for this job.
The waters of the Thames were very still tonight, and she wondered what was lurking just below the surface. Not in a menacing way. Just…going about their business.
"Psst," said a voice from the bushes, but it was just Dan. "What're you doing here?"
"Just taking a walk. You?"
"The usual." He said that a lot, although what the usual was for a talking fox, Abigail had never quite worked out. "Listen, about that woman –"
"Who are you talking to?" Peter asked from way too close behind Abigail. She was quite proud that she only twitched a bit and didn't audibly shriek. Clearly he'd been taking lessons from Beverley and the Nightingale on moving quietly.
"Just myself," she said on autopilot; the bushes rustled as Dan slipped away. "There was a fox."
"Not hard to find these days," said Peter. He looked around, but of course there wasn't anybody human in sight for him to see. "Wanted to get eyes on it?"
"Just, you know, before I'm doing things blind," Abigail said. "Walk-through would be better."
"I can't do miracles," said Peter. "Unlike some."
Abigail shot him a sharp look at that, but he just said "What? You practically can, if you've got a keyboard in front of you."
"It's not miracles," Abigail said, and didn't say, you want to talk to the other half of the team about that. "It's just hard work. And that I'm really good."
Peter grinned. "I know you are."
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Abigail asked, before he could push on the talking-to-herself explanation; a flicker in his eyes suggested he knew what she was doing, but he let it slide.
“Staring thoughtfully at our target,” he said. “Comes with the job. Lots of thoughtful staring.”
“Not your job, not really.” His mouth tightened, and Abigail wished the words back, not something she often did. “Peter – why did you…why are we doing this, with, you know. Beverley. And the Nightingale. They’re…”
“I trust them,” Peter said. “For this, anyway.”
“They’re -“ Abigail said again, and Peter gave a tight smile. “Criminals? So what does that make you? Is that what you’re asking?”
“What does that make you?”
She wasn’t even sure how she meant it; who knew which way Peter took it. His face wasn’t giving anything away.
“I’m setting some things right,” he said. “You knew that when you took the job.”
“Stealing old books is setting things right,” Abigail said, not able to keep her scepticism out of her voice. “You told me it was about more than a profit, but you haven't told me how.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you.”
“So?”
“I’ll tell you the whole thing,” he said. “After tomorrow. You’ll need to know for the second half, anyhow.”
“Second half?” Abigail put her hands on her hips and glared.
“After tomorrow,” Peter said. “Cross my heart.” He looked out across the river again. There was a splash, somewhere just out of sight, near where the water slapped against pilings and stone. It was the wind, Abigail hoped.
“Fine,” said Abigail. “I’m going to go get some sleep. Some of us have work nine to five right now.”
“Hey, that was your idea.”
“Don’t remind me.”
She looked everywhere she could think of, on the way home, but she couldn't find Dan again. She wondered what it was he’d wanted to say.
*
In the movies, when people stole stuff, they did it in the middle of the night. They even hacked things in the middle of the night, which was more true than the other bit because something about hacking tended to attract the kind of person who woke up at noon even without the excuse of a shift job. Also, there were way fewer sysadmins logged in at two in the morning, unless everything had been outsourced to India, in which case there were lots of sysadmins and you might as well do your thing during the workday.
Also, if it’d been outsourced, odds were they weren’t good enough to spot whatever it was you were doing. Not because there weren’t perfectly good network admins in India, but because the kind of idiots who outsourced the most crucial parts of their IT department to another continent to save a fraction of what they’d lose if they had a breach didn’t know enough to hire the good people.
Anyway, according to Peter - who was running this job and therefore got to make these decisions - stealing things in the middle of the day was often just as good a plan, because alarms weren't set, people were expected to be coming and going, and you could practically just walk out of buildings with things. In this case, someone was actually going to just walk out of the building. Hooked into the network here, Abigail had created a fake shipment order for the books and overwritten the master key to re-set the alarms. Beverley would arrive and pick them up, with Abigail overriding any confirmation requests, Nightingale would drive the van, and tomorrow night – this bit did work better in darkness –– there would be a crude attempt at a smash and grab, at which point the books would be discovered to be missing. Their actual removal the day before should pass unnoticed.
Properly they should also have walkie-talkies, but obviously that wasn’t going to work when Abigail was in an office, so she’d set everybody up with Bluetooth earpieces and a group VOIP call on Signal. They still couldn’t say anything totally obvious like “let’s commit this theft now”, because odds were the GCHQ and by proxy the rest of the Five Eyes SIGINT crowd were capturing the packets anyway to decrypt at leisure, but this wasn’t something that SIGINT agencies were interested in, and who even talked like that, anyway.
She’d asked Peter if she should set Lesley up with one too, and he’d said “yeah, why not, she can call in if there’s a problem”, so she’d done that first thing this morning.
“This is going to be obvious,” Lesley had said when she’d been handed an earpiece. “My hair doesn’t do…that.” She’d waved at Abigail’s neat bun, which was only just starting to friz; Abigail hadn’t relaxed her hair voluntarily ever and was counting the days until it wore off.
“You wish your hair did this,” Abigail said. “Just wear your hair loose, nobody’ll notice it.”
“Well, alright, but I can’t promise I’ll have it in all the time.” Lesley frowned.
“Just for emergencies,” Abigail had said. She’d never been a Brownie or anything but it didn’t hurt to be prepared.
*
Abigail had never tried to pull something like this while sitting in an office before, but she’d grown up with an older brother and an inquisitive mother; looking over your shoulder before you opened up something on your screen that you didn’t want people to see was for beginners. She flipped open the shiny metal case that had once contained a protractor-and-compass set and now had a collection of pencil stubs and Abigail’s favourite biros – the pens here were terrible - and propped the lid up against the small-footprint computer case padlocked to her desk. Nobody was passing behind her without her seeing it.
Preparations complete, she opened up the VM she'd set up and got to work.
“Alright, everybody,” said Peter in her ear. “Are we good?”
“Check,” said Beverley.
“Roger,” said Nightingale.
“Mmm-hmm,” said Abigail, chewing on a thumbnail.
Most of her part of the job had been prep work. The collection of antique, rare, expensive books they were after was currently in the physical if not strictly legal possession of one of the managers here, the one Lesley answered to. They were inexplicably listed as a company asset, probably to keep them from being linked to him personally; Abigail would lay money on him having acquired them extra-legally to start with, which made it only fair that they were going to lift them.
Being a company asset, and the company being short on cash right now, Abigail had faked up a sale. In most circumstances she would have done a corresponding email trail as well, but there wasn’t any point here; all they needed was enough documentation that when Beverley arrived at the other site today with a man in a van and some official-looking paperwork, it passed inspection. Technically you also needed a physical pass to get into the building, but nicking that was Bev’s job.
She could hear Beverley making small-talk with somebody through the earpiece, sounding genuinely interested in the woman’s garden and some birds that had apparently taken up residence there.
“Come on, Bev,” Peter muttered, but it was only barely audible; Abigail let herself smirk, because it wasn’t like anybody was there to see it.
She flicked Windows and desultorily did some data entry, keeping up appearances, for about five minutes before Beverley said “Got it,” in tones of satisfaction.
“Time to bring the van around?” Nightingale asked.
“Give it ten,” said Beverley, and then more loudly, “Hi, I’m here about –”
Abigail had given herself a hangnail by the time the boxes were being loaded into the van, mostly at the points they were going over the sale docket; she’d brought up the security cameras from the other site and it was an effort not to micro-analyse every twitch on the face of the man paging through it. She was good, and she’d had plenty of material to work off, but you never knew. Weirdly, however, the manager at the other site seemed more than willing to believe everything Beverley said – okay, maybe not that weirdly. Abigail had heard stories. Beverley herself didn’t look even slightly worried at any point.
“And we’re loaded up,” Nightingale said, half an hour later that felt like about a thousand years.
“I’m staying for a coffee,” said Beverley. “Go on without me, I’ll meet you there.”
Abigail stayed in the security system just long enough to set up the faux-ransomware exploit that would wipe the CCTV footage for the last two weeks – all they kept – overnight. It was a nice little zero-day exploit that patches were being rolled out for next Tuesday on Windows machines, an early copy of the press release was making the rounds, so it was now or never to use it, really. And they’d be so relieved when all they lost was half their data instead of all of it.
“Are you sure about that?” Peter was saying to Beverley. “Thomas might need you to get into the storage spot –”
“That’s true,” said Nightingale. “When I deal with a lock it’s somewhat obvious it’s been dealt with.”
“What do you do, punch it out?” Abigail asked.
“Something like that,” he said.
Peter made a skeptical noise. “Bev, c’mon.”
“Fine,” Bev muttered, and made normal-volume excuses about a moved meeting. “I was really going to sell how harmless and boring I was.”
“Nobody’s ever going to buy that,” said Peter.
“Excuse you,” she said sharply.
“That you’re boring,” he said, quickly; Nightingale chuckled.
“You’re lucky you’re pretty,” Beverley said.
“Can you not,” Abigail said; the tension was leaking out, she was going to have to do data entry all the rest of the day before the other fun stuff kicked in, and she wasn’t interested in listening to two of the others flirting.
“Quite, sorry, Abigail,” said Nightingale, which really didn’t make it better.
“How’s it going?” said a fourth voice, and Abigail nearly jumped out of her skin, or at least twitched violently, before she realised it was Lesley.
“On track,” Peter said. “Keeping an eye on Abigail?”
Abigail put her head round the side of the pitiful divider that was all the protection she got between her desk and the rest of the office; she could see Lesley on the far side of the room.
“Or I’ve got an eye on her,” she said.
“Let me know if anything goes wrong,” Lesley said, and disconnected. Abigail wondered why she bothered.
Abigail tuned out to focus on setting up the wipe program for the CCTV here, as well; no point having her face on camera footage, although this one was going to just re-direct the cameras to save their data to a hard drive that got wiped regularly. It was elegant, if she did say so herself, and looked like a dumb mistake by the IT department. Beverley was out, Nightingale was heading for the drop-off point, and there was nothing else for her to do right then.
“I’m going to go and grab lunch,” she said. “Alright?”
“Give it ten minutes,” said Peter, but Beverley made it to the drop-off in eight. “Alright, go, but keep your earpiece on.”
Since everything was going well, she went outside to let some of the sweat dry off in the spring breeze and picked up a kebab from a tiny shop two streets over nobody else from the firm would be likely to go near. She couldn’t help running through the rest of the plan as she walked back, eating as she went. She and Peter were going to grab the books from their temporary stash this evening while Beverley and Nightingale staged an obvious, crude, and completely fake break-in at the storage facility. In the confusion, it wouldn’t be clear where the books had gone, and –
Her train of thought broke off as she pushed open the lobby door to a completely unexpected sight: Tama, the tall and very friendly Samoan security guard who buzzed people in and looked after lost property, with the woman who’d called herself Awa Shambir carefully hemmed in. And Lesley, and one of the firm execs, not somebody whose name Abigail had bothered to remember. Not Lesley’s boss, one of the others, a David or a Matthew or a Charles or something like that.
“– what this is about,” the woman was saying. No hijab today, or cleaning gear; she was in a good-quality navy business suit and heels. Abigail stood there with her mouth open and poised over the kebab for a full second before she remembered to close it. “I’m here for a business meeting.”
“You broke into this building last week,” said Lesley, her voice very hard, and Abigail remembered suddenly that she’d been a cop, like Peter. “The police have been called.” She turned, frowning. “Abigail!”
“I was getting lunch?” Abigail said. Probably-not-Awa-Shambir’s eyes on her were sharp; she felt a spike of worry. “What’s the matter?”
“Come here,” Lesley said, and the spike started to dig into Abigail’s guts.
“This is the accomplice?”said the manager.
“No, this is Grace,” said Tama. “Abigail was the temp before last. She’s not -”
He was looking at Lesley, not not-Awa-Shambir, so when the woman made a break for it he didn’t stand a chance at stopping her. Abigail hadn’t even had time to decide what she was going to do when the woman ran past and grabbed her by the arm, pulling her out of the building. She stumbled a step or two, heard shouts rising behind, and decided that this was the appropriate time to leg it.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, she thought, taking off after the other woman, not sure what she was going to do if she caught up, but sure she needed to do something. She could say she’d been chasing her – Lesley would cover for her, surely, this had to be part of a plan, she needed to get in touch with Peter –
“We’ve got a problem!” She panted into her earpiece as she rounded a corner into the dead-end lane she’d seen the woman turn down, just ahead. It wasn’t that she couldn’t move, it was that it was very difficult to keep up with someone whose legs were half again as long as yours, and in this part of the City there weren't even any convenient cobbles to slow her down in those heels.
“What are you doing?” hissed the woman. “Split up – they can’t chase both of us!”
“They’re not chasing me,” Abigail said.
“They thought we were working together,” said the woman. “I don’t know what you did, but –“ she looked at the fence at the end of the lane. It marked off private parking, accessible from a different street. Abigail had taken a few lunchtime walks around the area, just in case. “Oh, let’s call this my good deed for the day.”
Peter was talking in her ear, but Abigail didn’t have any attention for him. “What?”
The woman grabbed her by the waist and Abigail’s feet left the ground. At first she thought she was being picked up and struggled against it, but improbably, impossibly, they were three feet in the air and rising.
Abigail stopped struggling. “Shit!”
“Ow,” said the woman, probably because Abigail had got a decent kick in at her shins, but then they were up and over the fence and dropping – a little faster than Abigail would have liked – to the ground.
As soon as she was standing again Abigail staggered a step or two back, bumping into the hood of a car. She froze, but it didn’t set off an alarm.
“I think I burned it out,” the woman said, frowning over Abigail’s shoulder. “Eggs and omelettes. Alright, now we should split up. Just remember to walk, not run.” As she spoke she was stripping off her jacket and letting her hair down from its sleek bun; with the jacket over her arm she looked, not completely different, but like a lawyer popping out for lunch.
Abigail realised she was still holding her kebab, and wrapped the foil over the top of it. “Who are you, anyway?”
The woman laughed. “That’s your question?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Alright.” She tilted her head. “Call me Louise.”
“What were you coming back for?”
“You’re really not going to ask about the flying?” Louise, if that was her name, looked put out. “Do you know how hard that is to pull off?”
“I know you’re a wizard,” said Abigail. “What I want to know is what you wanted there and why they were after you.”
“Maybe another time,” said Louise, and turned and walked – not ran – towards the pedestrian gate out of the parking area.
That was when Abigail realised Peter’s urgent voice in her ear was gone, and when she pulled her phone out of her pocket, it was dead. She glanced back at the car she hadn’t set off the alarm for, a shiny BMW.
“Burned it out, huh,” she said out loud, then shook her head. She had to get away, and let Peter and the others know she’d got away. She’d been gone too long to pretend she’d been chasing Louise. Lesley would just have to cover for her, if she could.
Time to start walking – not running – for the nearest Tube station.
*
Halfway to the warehouse where they’d stashed the books temporarily Abigail considered, with the sour taste of fear in her mouth, that she might be being followed. Then she realised that was stupid; if the police had been put onto her they’d just arrest her.
Also, she had absolutely no idea how to tell if somebody was following her, except for what she’d learned from watching thrillers, where it was always very obvious that the white guy in sunglasses and a suit was menacingly stalking the main characters. She really needed to learn stuff like that. She should ask Peter. He’d done organised crime for ages, he’d tailed lots of people, surely, and tried not to get followed himself. He’d know.
Meditating on the things she didn’t know kept her calm through the Tube ride. When she ran out of those, she switched to running through what she needed to burn on the Finlayson Amberley servers. All she needed was an Internet connection and ten minutes – she’d logged out of everything on her own machine before she’d gone to lunch, thank God – but right now she only had one of those. She pulled out her phone again, shook it, and scowled. It was making something like a rattling noise. She’d heard some rumours, but – what sort of bullshit was magic, anyway.
She came up around the back entrance to the warehouse. Beverley and Nightingale were there and they looked relieved to see her.
“You dropped out,” said Nightingale. “What happened?”
“Long story, but my cover’s probably blown at the firm unless Lesley is really good at talking,” Abigail said. “That woman came back, the one who was pretending to be a cleaner, and – anyway, my phone’s toast, that’s what happened. Why are you here?”
“Lesley messaged,” said Beverley, waving her phone in Abigail’s direction. “Don't you have a spare phone?”
“Five, but none of them are on me,” said Abigail.
“Five?” Nightingale said, eyebrows rising.
“It’s my job – how many sets of lock picks has Beverley got?”
“One complete one,” said Beverley. “I swear my couch eats all my rakes.”
“Lesley told you what happened, then?”
“No,” said Nightingale. “Just to come here –”
He walked into the meeting room and froze. Beverley walked into his back and Abigail only just avoided banging into her; she took a step or two back.
“Get out,” Nightingale said, very level and very short. “Out. Go!”
Abigail took a breath to ask why, but Beverley had already spun around and was pushing her back down the corridor. “Go, go!”
She took to her heels for the second time that day, already wondering resentfully why she was getting manhandled so much. She nearly ran right into Peter as she came out the outside door. He was talking, she thought at first to himself but then she realised to his earpiece. “Slow down, why do I need to get away –”
“Go!” Nightingale yelled, and then the world went white and quiet.