The Society by Karen Guyler (best ebook reader android txt) 📕

“Let’s play a better game.” He was enjoying this.

A crash of breaking glass from where she wanted to get to made her freeze. Eva crab-scrabbled up her row, stealth abandoned now as another crash got closer to her.

“Having fun yet?” He shouted, his voice muffled now. She shot a look at him advancing on her, the other side of the first row of lab benches. The respirator he wore signalled his intentions. “Let’s see how good a chemist I am.” He lobbed a glass flask towards her that fell short but hissed and fizzed on the white floor. He pitched another, the liquid inside puddled amongst the broken glass. “That’s boring.”

He emptied the cabinet closest to him of flasks, pitching them onto the floor, at the walls in Eva’s general direction.

The driver was banging on the fire exit door but his partner was all caught up in his boasting how long it would take him to hit upon chlorine gas, see how he’d have some real fun when he knocked her out. Beneath the bench beside Eva stood a padlocked cabinet. She changed the combination to the same code as the door and pulled.

Not right.

Eva tugged the padlock. Another crash. The air was tainted with the sharp unpleasant tang of chemicals making her cough.

He’d better be thinking like a normal man there, Charles, or she was in trouble. No mathematical sequences for the combination, please. His birthdate? No. Lily’s? The padlock snapped open. Eva scrabbled out a flask in each hand.

“I can play this too.” She stood up as the man spun round towards the sound of her voice and threw them both at him.

Speed of light fast, the chemicals ignited when the glass broke, one on the floor, the other on his chest. Faster than she could comprehend, the man was a fireball.

His blood-curdling screams, unmuffled now, chilled her even over the sudden blare of the alarm. It was a terrible way to die. The automatic response from the fire brigade would take too long. She dithered in front of the fire extinguisher array. What was it Charles always said about the hazardous stuff? Flammable on contact with air and/or water, she grabbed up the CO2 extinguisher and fired it at the man writhing on the floor.

Eva squeezed the trigger until the extinguisher was empty, long past when his screams stopped. Gasping for air, she realised her mistake. She almost collapsed against the fire exit where the driver leant against the outside of the door, shaking his head at her.

She dragged herself away. The other door then, but it was so far. Her lungs screamed as she scraped in a breath that had nothing in it, the oxygen gobbled by the CO2 she’d sprayed everywhere. A lurching stagger past the burned man and she could pull in a scrap of a breath. Dizziness made her crash into the bench, drop to the floor. Come on, get up.

She pulled herself onto her feet, gripping the bench like a crutch. The lab wavered, mirage-like. Eva pulled herself along it, half a breath. Another step, thank Charles again for the size of the lab. But it was his space, and all that that meant was disastrous.

A warning siren split the fire-alarm into a whisper. A sun-bright light strobed Eva’s vision.

Another step.

“Warning.” The computer generated voice sounded like every sci-fi disaster movie she’d ever watched. “Air purge in ten seconds.”

23

Luke selected the feed option from the last of the five cameras he’d placed that day. Not as choppy as lapel cameras tended to be. Had to love the twenty-first century, the tech got better every time he used it.

The wearer of the jacket to which the tiny device was attached lowered himself into a seat, sighing out his inconvenience, but there were worse places to wait. The light was too muted, but what Luke hoped to see wouldn’t play out there in the dark wood-panelled corridor but, with everything going to plan, in the office beyond the self-important door opposite.

He scrolled through his other feeds while he waited. Still no one at Eva’s house. He’d apparently dropped the ball on that one.

The office door opened and the camera feed picked up a back-lit woman Luke knew was Anna Bailey, wrapped up in a dark coat. Maybe it was the plush carpet’s thickness, the reason she wobbled on her high heels, rather than the surprise of seeing an ambush.

“Gordon, you’re waiting to see me?” She looked around as though someone else might have materialised who could be used as an excuse to put him off.

Gordon Stamford heaved himself to his feet and fetched up a dilapidated briefcase. “I am, Anna, a word?”

“I didn’t miss an appointment.”

“I didn’t have one.”

“My assistant didn’t tell me you were waiting otherwise I’d have seen you earlier.”

Otherwise she wouldn’t have seen him at all, but her bluff was believable.

 “It won’t take long, one whisky.”

“A whisky discussion?” her voice rose. “You’d better come in.”

The light was more Luke’s ally in there, he could see her and her surroundings clearly. Richer and grander than the workaday spaces, leaded-light windows behind her desk reached up towards the high ceiling in stone arches that had seen the comings and goings of men plotting and scheming through the centuries. The secrets those walls could share. What must they have thought when a woman took the office?

Bailey slipped her coat off and poured a generous measure into two crystal tumblers, sauntering to where Gordon had settled himself into one of two easy chairs facing each other. More in control of her heels in there. A flatter carpet or she believed she was driving this.

Luke waited for her to discover his tech, but she held out Gordon’s drink and sat opposite. No handheld scanner, Director General? You trust too much in the gatekeepers at the entrance of Thames House, outdated already as it had let the lapel camera through. He wanted to know if would have picked it up had she used a