Chapter One

 

It was good to be rich. And Rory was feeling quite rich these days. Not that she had the kind of money to buy up yachts and float around the Med, but she was doing pretty much of all right.

She'd been born on an island in the Hebrides of north Scotland. It was an inhospitable place at the best of times, and the MacNeils were one of the more notoriously violent of Scotland's highland clans. Rory was a popular boys name, and given to her by an obstinate and bad-tempered father who had little time for girls and was disappointed to have been presented with one.

He was sufficiently indifferent to her upbringing and fate, compared to her eight brothers, as to hardly notice when she went off to university at sixteen (a waste of time, as far as he was concerned, girl or not).

Rory gained from her brothers the knowledge of how to fight, and from her father, flaming red hair and a moral ambivalence which encompassed doing whatever she thought would benefit her and which she felt she could get away with.

And since she knew very well he'd give her no funds to tide her over while at university, she didn't bother to ask, siphoning them out of his business accounts instead. Fuck him if he couldn't take a joke.

Rory had spent (misspent) her time at university learning all about cybersecurity and the internet. She'd never really intended to use that knowledge to work in some dull office with a bunch of nerdy men. Instead she'd honed her ability to siphon funds away from people she felt less deserving of them than she.

Which was a lot of people.

She signaled to the dealer and another card was tossed her way. She picked it up carefully and examined it along with what she already had.

Rory liked to gamble, and London had a number of casinos to cater to her moods. As long as the other customers left her the fuck alone.

Unfortunately for her, she was gifted with a tall, slender and shapely body, as well as a more than attractive face. That tended to attracted men like flies to... honey. Rory used that to her advantage at times. She found the weakness men had, and their willingness to do whatever she wanted to please her to be entirely unimpressive.

She was not very impressed with the human species to begin with, and certainly had little time for simpering, obsequious men desperately trying to impress her in hopes she'd let them touch her body. Unless, of course, she wanted them to do something for her.

Here at the casino, all she wanted them to do was leave her the fuck alone.

Partly in aid of this she was wearing a mud-brown wig with heavy bangs, thick glasses, a turtleneck sweater, and a hip-length brown jacket with epaulets which testified to its former military use she'd bought at a second-hand store.

She examined the cards carefully, though in fact, she was barely seeing them. Her mind was running through combinations of cards based on what she'd seen so far from the deck. She had an eidetic memory, so she could recall perfectly every card which had been dealt so far. At least, the visible ones.

Counting cards was not really cheating. At least, so said the law. The casinos didn't like it, though, and if they caught you at it they'd introduce you to the exit doors they tried to keep hidden from their customers as long as possible.

Whether it was cheating or not didn't bother Rory. She had no moral qualms about cheating, lying or stealing. Whatever benefited Rory MacNeil was a good thing to her way of thinking. Rules and laws only had to be followed if you thought you'd be caught. And given the poor record the Metropolitan Police had for solving crime (currently less than one out of ten) she wasn't very worried.

Across from her sat a bearded Saudi. He was a member of the elites, worth hundreds of millions. Money was nothing to him. But he studied his cards fiercely, and glowered at the dealer as if the man had personally offended him.

People like Khallid Al-Kabir were used to getting their way. In everything. But he was losing, and he clearly didn't like it nor know how to handle that. The cards were not flowing as he would wish, and yet he had no way of beheading anyone to get them to change.

The tall, gorgeous blonde girl half his age standing beside him tried to rub his shoulder in sympathy and he shoved her hand away. He was a sullen man at the best of times, bad-tempered and more than a little narcissistic. But the blonde was paid a lot to put up with him, including pain, now and then.

But Al-Kabir couldn't even work his temper off on her, not here, not in public, not in London. Oh, he had diplomatic immunity, though he wasn't a diplomat, but there would be questions asked, and criticism issued which he couldn't answer with violence.

And besides, the casino would throw him out, high roller or not. No matter how much money he had he was a still just a jumped-up wog to the British.

Of course, they didn't feel much better towards the French.

He got a notification of some sort, and glanced at his phone, then picked it up and read the message.

So did Rory, as it flashed briefly across the inside of the glasses she was wearing. It was in Arabic, but she read Arabic. Perfect memory allowed her to learn languages fairly easily. She picked up her drink and took a sip, then tossed her cards in, stood up and walked away.

She knew where he was going, where he would be going very soon. No need to follow someone when you could get out ahead of them. She reached into her coat as she walked and took out one of the phones there, the one which had paired with Al-Kabir's and watched the signal strength of the contact fade as she moved away. It was a short-range thing, and didn't work beyond twenty yards.

She made a face and put it back. She was going to have to break into his ISP and start getting the messages that way. It was more complicated and took more time but she wouldn't have to get as close to him.

She stepped out onto the road and crossed between stalled traffic, heading for Coventry Street with a quick stride that took her to Regent Street.

Regent Street was bordered on both sides by four to five-story centuries-old white stone buildings with expensive shops on the ground floor. Above the shops were a mixture of pricey offices. Al-Kabir was headed for one of those.

She stepped into a stationery store which seemed to have enough customers to deter the clerk from approaching her, and examined things in the window while she waited for Al-Kabir. Behind her were a pair of women exchanging opinions of invitation cards in the kind of upper-class English accents which grated on her Scottish sensibilities.

Not that she'd gotten along very well with her Scottish peers at the University of Edinburgh either, of course. Rory rarely got along with anyone. One of her deans had somewhat diffidently suggested she had a personality which was "off-putting".

She'd told him to go fuck himself.

Gifted with an eidetic memory and a keen intellect, Rory had no difficulty quickly reading through her textbooks, nor, while attending lectures, absorbing and understanding them. Her major issue was in keeping to herself her low opinion of most of her teachers, to say nothing of her fellow students.

Rory was not a modest girl, and had a formidable ability to crush the arguments of both groups with information and logic even as she coolly dismissed their intelligence.

She was, to put it mildly, not well-liked.

Her professors were all fierce progressives to a greater or lesser degree generally. Their constant attempts at infusing their teaching with their ideological beliefs ran into Rory's cool dismissal of their logic as well as a withering sarcasm.

But while they loathed her they could never quite come up with an excuse to give her anything less than top marks. At least, none which would stand up to her inevitable appeal to their superiors as well as suggestions of legal action if that appeal failed.

She was eventually expelled, in her third year, for violations of the general regulations of discipline in that she had harassed, threatened and endangered the safety of various other students and interfered with their right of lawful assembly.

All of that came about when a group of students had blockaded the entrance to the building where she had classes to protest against white privilege. Rory had argued with them for about thirty seconds before forcing her way through with the aid of a few wrist twists and a kick to the knee of the guy who had tried to grab her from behind.

Following her expulsion she'd hacked the accounts of the protesters involved as well as the administrators who had expelled her. The female students had been kind enough to have naked pictures of themselves available for distribution, so she had distributed them widely, much to their humiliation.

One of the male students was gay, but in the closet. Not anymore. He was also buying papers for several of his courses. He'd been expelled for that.

The professor in charge of her disciplinary hearing was involved in an affair. He was divorced now and living in a shared flat an hour from the university because that was the best he could afford. Another had falsified his resume before being hired. He was now unemployed.

Everyone had secrets, she had learned. And if you could expose them you could destroy almost anyone. It pleased her to destroy people who got in her way or caused her trouble.

Fuckers.

Because she was standing right in front, the man who came through the open door was basically right in her face. He had a ragged beard, his eyes were wide and wild, and he held an AK-47 assault rifle in his sweating hands.

"Allahuh Akbar!" he shrieked into the shop.

Then he noticed her and started to swing his gun towards her.

As he was right-handed and she was on his right, the barrel of the gun was pointed up to the side right next to her. Her left hand shot out and grabbed it to hold it there, while her right punched him in the throat. Hard. Very hard. Repeatedly.

He let go of the gun with a wide-eyed gurgle, stumbling back outside and Rory yanked it away, then stepped forward and drove the butt into his face a second before her foot came up between his legs. He doubled over and she slammed the butt down against the back of his neck sending him sprawling onto the sidewalk.

All of which had taken about three seconds.

It was vaguely possible he would survive. But he wasn't doing any breathing right now, not through the throat she'd caved in. So unless paramedics reached him quickly he was likely dead. That thought bothered her not at all.

"Fucking wog," she growled.

She heard the sound of gunfire up the sidewalk and cursed. Another one was coming out of the next shop. He gaped at her and she brought the AK-47 up with hardly a second thought, aimed dead center, and pulled the trigger.

He went flying back in a spray of blood to land spreadeagled on the sidewalk.

Rory stared at him for a long moment. All of that had taken about ten seconds. The world was moving even faster than her own wickedly fast thinking processes could follow.

"What was that?" asked a voice in her ear.

"Shut the fuck up," she growled.

Everyone not running away was staring at her. That wasn't good at all.

She threw the gun down, glad of the thin leather gloves she was wearing, and strode up the street with very quick strides. Then she broke into a run. There were enough people doing that she oughtn't to stand out.

She turned the corner and kept going, turned the corner again as the voice in her ear became more and more agitated.

"Where the fuck are you going? Al-Kabir will be there any second!?"

Cursing, she ran through the map in her head.

"I need somewhere without cameras. Now!" she demanded.

"Why?"

"Shut the fuck up and find me somewhere nearby without cameras or I'll rip your balls off!"

There was a long pause as Gerald brought up the appropriate overlay of the massive network of CCTV cameras which littered most of London's main streets.

"Turn left," he said. "There's a garage middle of the block on the left. It has entrances on this street and Pimco. Go out Pimco. There are no cameras there. What the bloody hell is going on?"

"Had to kill a couple of people."

"What!?"

"It's not like they're a loss to society."

"Who the bloody hell did you kill?!"

"I didn't get their fucking names, did I!"

Sirens were screaming in the distance, but she knew she had some time. They'd wait for the armed police before moving in and then asking questions.

She kept her head down as she walked into the garage. Away from the entrance, and the inevitable cameras, she looked around, found a gray Volvo and took a small, electronic box from her coat pocket. It ran through the combination of signals the Volvo's electronic lock was looking for, found the right one, and she opened the door and got in.

She turned it on and backed out, then headed for the exit. There she paid the machine with cash and took off.

"Now find me a street I can transfer from a stolen car without the cops finding video of me. Then send someone there to pick me up. And do it quickly."

Ten minutes later she was in the back of a white van headed for south London. Albert Goring was driving it. He was very large, very bald, and middle-aged, and looked like the ex-bouncer he was, with tattoos going up and down his arms.

"So I heard you killed someone," he said.

She shrugged.

"That time of the month?"

"Piss off."

He snickered in amusement.

It wasn't the first time she'd killed someone, and was unlikely to be the last. It didn't bother her. Rory only valued one life and that was hers. Not counting her family. Well, some of them. She hadn't seen any for a while, though she'd had occasional phone calls with a few of her brothers.

She'd continued to learn all about computer security, and her hacking had graduated to impressive levels, garnering her quite a tidy sum of cash.

In retrospect, she acknowledged that the ease with which she broke into computer after computer made her a little too arrogant. So she'd broken into GCHQ, Britain's super-secret electronic spy agency. For sport.

Or at least, she thought she had. It had turned out to be a mere shell, an invitation to people like her to stay and explore while they traced her signal. She hadn't expected them to be able to do that, but it turned out they had some tricks, some software and hardware that the private sector had never heard of before.

When they'd come calling for her she'd jumped out a window and led them a long chase up and down streets and alleys which had ultimately gotten her nowhere since they had followed her on the city's camera network.

Then they'd threatened to put her in prison for a very long time. Unless she came to work for them.

The van drove into a garage, and the door closed behind them. She got out and pulled the wig off, scratching her head and combing out her red hair. She followed Goring into the building and down the stairs to the basement, then through a steel door into a section of the building which didn't show on blueprints.