by Rufus Offor
He was tall, brooding, silent, terrifying and stealth-like. He had once been hired to assassinate a made who frequented a museum in Rome. He stood in the museum impersonating a statue perfectly. Every time someone became curious about the strange, sweating marble-like creation, he would catch their eye for a few seconds and they would become immediately disinterested.
After three hours the man he’d been waiting for turned up. Yan locked eyes with him for one full minute, stepped off the pedestal he’d been on and walked out of the building without anybody ever remembering him being there. The man that held his gaze waited for five minutes, started crying, walked out of the museum, found the nearest high bridge and promptly threw himself off.
Yan was a very handy person to have around.
All of the independents were very handy people to have around
All of the independents were secretly terrified of Shoop. His abilities eclipsed all of theirs by quite a stretch.
“Evening boys!” said Shoop once the driver, Carl, had wound down his window. All of them nodded at him in acknowledgement. “Anything been happening?” He gestured to the lights flashing between the trees not fifty feet away.
“There’s a removal van down the side of the cottage but there’s been no activity. Looks like whoever’s in there is packing things up to be moved,” Said Carl through a thick sweet plume of cannabis smoke.
“So when do we get the full story on what’s going on here?” asked Jim.
“And how much are we getting paid?” ventured Dr Komodo.
“I’m not a hundred percent sure of what we’re dealing with here, but it’s big, and the rewards will match the size of it.”
“I think we might need a little more to go on than that!” said Dr Komodo through his permanently scowling face.
“All you need to know right now is that the people in that building know that I’m on my way to get them. They think they’ve got time though. I’ve worked quicker than they’ve anticipated. The owner of the house was still sitting at work when I found him and he wasn’t in any hurry to get back here. He was supposed to be organising the men inside with there clearing of out of the place and they’ll probably wait for him before putting anything in the van. Needless to say he won’t be making it.”
“There’s a vault under the house that has some very valuable things in it. The men are trying to empty it before I get down there but, like I said, I move quicker than they’d expected. We don’t have all the time in the world though, they’ll probably get reinforcements before long and I want to be finished before that happens.”
“So the plan is,’ ventured Dr Komodo, ‘to get in there, disable the men without destroying any of the valuables and make off with the loot as quickly as possible.”
“Hit the nail on the head as usual!”
“What do we know about the structure and lay out of the building?” asked Jim, tying up his dread-locks ready for action.
“There’s a back and front entrance to the building but only one way in or out of the vault. My guess would be alarms on the front and back doors with a guard at the entrance to the vault as they’ll want to have as much man-power as possible packing things up in the cellars, not keeping watch.”
“Right!” said Dr Komodo assertively, “looks like you’ll need to be going in the front Yan, and you around the back Jim, Once the main guard is out of the way through your interesting eye work,” he gestured toward Yan sitting like a sweaty slab of concrete, “we can group up and get the drop on the men down stairs.”
“We’ll need to wait for George before we move. We need to know which things to take and which things to leave and George’s got a well trained eye for that sort of thing.” said Shoop.
“Can you tell us anything at all about what it is we’re looking for?” asked Jim.
“It’ll all become apparent as we go along. All I know is that my sixth sense is tingling more than it has done in at least five years, and the more I follow this case, the more it tingles.”
The fact that Shoop’s sixth sense had been acting with renewed vigour silenced any more questions. Each of the independents had had experience of the sixth sense, and they’d all come out of those situations a good deal better off than they’d been before. Secretly, each of them had believed that Shoop had lost his abilities for good and were strongly considering ignoring his requests for aid. The news that his old talents were picking up again had a very positive effect on them. They could smell the money when Shoop picked up his game.
Shoop was suddenly distracted by a far off screeching noise. It sounded like someone had recorded the sound of a cat having its tail stamped on and was playing it on a constant loop. He recognised it as the sound of a moped. He looked up the winding road that ran through the glen and saw a single light careering along the track. He took out his phone and dialled.
“George! Turn that damn moped off now! You’re giving us away you twat!” Shoop hung up.
A couple of second later the noise stopped and the light went out.
“Pillock!” grunted Shoop under his breath.
The front and back entrances had been fitted with trip wires, just as Shoop had predicted, but on top of that, a good portion of the surrounding area of the house had been booby trapped with flares and tiny explosives that weren’t big enough to kill but would cause a nasty headache. The men inside were clearly anxious to know if they were receiving any visitors but weren’t overly keen on hurting anyone.
One by one Yan and Jim’s nimble fingers disabled the trip wires, the years of experience in such things serving them both well. They made their way to the main building, Yan to the front and Jim to the back. Shoop and the rest of them waited, nestled in a group of trees across the road from the house. Yan and Jim’s progress was slow but steady as they worked their way toward the cottage lit only by the high full moon, disabling traps as they went.
It had taken Shoop many years to find these men and was subsequently more than confident in their ability to do their job without incident. He leant against a tree, perfectly relaxed with his hip flask in hand, watching them as they meandered through the cottage grounds; his exceptional eye-sight allowing him to watch their every step.
Before long, Yan and Jim had made it into the cottage and a man staggered out of the house, fumbled his way past all the booby traps and headed for Edinburgh, all the time sobbing like an exhausted infant with a scuffed knee. Shoop presumed that it was a guard who’d been watching the entrance to the underground vaults. Yan’s eyes had obviously lost none of their potency since the last time Shoop had seen him.
“Right, that’s our queue. Let’s get moving.” Ordered Shoop.
George, Dr Komodo, Carl and Shoop clambered out of their wooded ditch and matched Yan’s path to the front door, avoiding any left over booby traps as they went. The cottage itself was at least three hundred years old by Shoop’s estimation, it’d been constructed with randomly shaped masonry and looked a little thrown together, still, it had been built to last. It looked like it would live on ‘til the end of time.
They tentatively advanced through the small entranceway and were greeted by a living room with a low ceiling and packed to bursting with all manner of antiques and leather bound books. Ancient framed pictures blanketed any available space on the wall that wasn’t taken up by candle-holders, shelves, mirrors and a myriad of other stuff of ages. Regardless of it’s clutter, the room seemed very well ordered and immaculately clean. There was a fireplace to their left as they entered the room; the tiny hole was a relief to the eyes from the cluttered walls.
They filed through the room to a hallway with George at the rear. Only George gave the room anything other than a glancing interest. His eyes scanned every item in the room longingly as his mouth stood open. The place reminded him of his underground library. George hadn’t been out of his sanctuary for more than an hour at a time over the past five years. Since Shoop’s senses had faltered there had been little call for him to do anything othe
r than indulge himself in research. He’d turned into a squinty-eyed little ginger mole and he liked it in his elaborate hole. He missed it. He wasn’t used to sneaking around into places that might involve violence. He felt very uncomfortable.
They passed the kitchen and the back door that Jim had entered. Jim and Yan were standing at the mouth of an opening that revealed an old, ornately carved wooden staircase descending into an ill lit area below. Shoop nudged past his hired henchman and climbed down into the gloom gesturing for the others to follow but for Jim to keep watch outside.
They crept silently down the stairs and into an arched stone passage lit by flaming torches on the wall.
“This is all a bit Indiana Jones isn’t it?” asked George, sweating a bit from all the excitement.
“Shut up!” hissed Shoop in a low stabbing voice through clenched teeth.
The light in the passage was stark and poor. Shoop could see the end of the passage twenty feet ahead where it abruptly widened and heightened as it turned into the main chamber of the vaults. It looked to be very long and Shoop could see that the walls inside the main chamber were lined with dozens of anti-chambers.
The passage they were in was about five feet tall and three feet wide. It felt like it had been made for dwarves. The main chamber, however, had been built for giants. It was massive and housed two stories of anti-chambers.
George realised just how difficult the task of sifting through all of the information hidden in the vaults was going to be. There was no way that they were going to find out all that that needed to know in one night. They were going to have to take weeks with this stuff, possibly even months, which meant getting everything out and away from the small cottage to a place where no-one could find them.
It was going to be a long night.
They all crouched down and waited in the shadows of the passage. There were signs of recent activity in the main chamber. Boxes and crates sat in the middle of it in various different stages of packed completion. Most of them were empty though, which suggested that the men packing up the vault hadn’t managed to get too far with the daunting mass of objects that they had to pack away. From an alcove close to the passageway they were hiding in, stepped a man carrying a tray with five mugs on it.
“TEA UP!” Shouted the man.
“Jesus!” thought Shoop to himself, “They won’t keep watch outside, or pack very quickly, but they will find time to have a cup of tea. Bloody amateurs! This is going to be a piece of piss.”
From various different alcoves along the length of the main cavern emerged four other men. Oddly, none of them looked like they were in much of a rush. Shoop decided that, whoever these men were, the people who were in charge of them couldn’t have the slightest idea that Shoop had managed to work as quickly as he had. It was the only explanation for the men’s lack of haste and blatantly casual demeanour. It occurred to him, though, that if they were members of the Priory Of Sion, an organisation that had apparently kept itself secret for thousands of years, then they would’ve been a lot more professional and effective. He began to smell a trap. Everything was just getting that little bit too easy.
“Yan, I don’t like this, it’s all going a little bit too smoothly,” He whispered, “get back outside and keep watch.
“You smelling a trap?” Asked Dr Komodo.
“Could be! I don’t want to take any chances.”
Yan said nothing, but looked at Shoop and the word “Okay” appeared in his head as if he’d thought it himself but with a deep Russian sounding voice. Yan had a freakish knack of putting his words into other people’s heads. He was about to leave when George whispered.
“What is your sixth sense telling you?”
The question halted Shoop dead. He paused for a moment, puzzling around inside his own mind wearing a strange confused and surprised kind of frown. It hadn’t occurred to him to listen to his sixth sense. He’d been so long without it that he was working purely on his base skills without thinking that there might be an alternative. He tuned back into his senses again to see what they had to say about everything. He was instantly aware of a shift in his perception and revelled in the sensation of being privy to knowledge that no one else had. His senses were nice and calm; no alarms went off in his head. It appeared that there wasn’t a trap waiting for them and that everything was going perfectly. It was a situation that Shoop was unfamiliar with and it didn’t sit well with him but after a few minutes of silence and everybody waiting for him to reply, he could say nothing other than.
“Everything’s fine.” He said it with a confusion that sat uncomfortably with the others.
“Are you sure?” asked Yan, sending the question into Shoop’s mind with a heavily accented Russian drawl.
“Yeah, it’s odd, I can’t explain it but, yeah, everything’s fine. There’s no trap, in fact I fully believe that we’re all going to get out of here without a scratch. No, I don’t believe we will. I know that we will.”
“Are you alright?” George was starting to get a little worried about him. As he looked at Shoop he saw him visibly relax. His shoulders un-tensed and his permanent grimace seemed a little less severe, although still quite unnerving. Shoop shook himself and looked like he was waking up from a daydream. He turned to Yan.
“I still want you upstairs. All may be well but there’s no point in being under cautious. Dr Komodo, Carl and me can handle those five in there, George, you keep your head down.”
Everyone nodded in agreement, apart from Yan, who just made everyone think that he’d nodded. He slid up the stairs and vanished while not looking like he’d moved a muscle.
“Carl, up here with me!” demanded Shoop.
“What’s the plan?”
“You’re going in first, get your guns ready, if any of them make a move, perforate them, but don’t hit anything that might be of value in the room and if you have to shoot, try to keep at least one of them alive. Understood?”
“No problem,” Carl let a sadistic grin crawl over his features, ignited an unreasonably large marijuana joint and whipped his cannons out from under his crumpled denim jacket.
The men were all sitting on boxes and sipping their brew while engaged in polite conversation about the mixing of various herbal teas.
“This is new isn’t it? I can’t remember having this combination before.” said one of the men. “It’s ginseng, vanilla, ginger and blackcurrant isn’t it?”
“Cranberry, not blackcurrant.”
“Oh that’s it, that’s where that slightly sharp fruity tang is coming from. I couldn’t figure it out, it’s very tasty, well done.”
“Thank you, would anyone like a rice cake with organic humus? I’ve got carrot sticks too.”
This wasn’t the usual fare of workmen. ‘Where are the bacon rolls, crisps and cans of acidic fizzy drinks?’ Shoop thought to himself as they all enthusiastically, but politely, tucked into the low fat organic snacks.
“Mmmm, delicious.” Said one of the men.
One of them got to his feet, tea in hand, munching on a rice cake and gazed down the length of the main chamber at the huge amount of anti-chambers that were full to the brim with ancient artefacts, books, maps, charts and rolled up parchment.
“How the hell does Jeeves keep track of all this stuff?”
“He has a system,” piped up one of the others through a mouthful of humus laden carrot, “he has an inventory of it all and keeps it in a filing cabinet in that first alcove over there. It’ll come in handy, it’ll mean that we can get the most important stuff out first and then come back for the rest. By then the other guys should be here, and Jeeves too.” He stopped for a moment and sniffed the air with a questioning expression on his face, “can anyone smell anything funny?”
They all sniffed the air, sensing a strange sweet and pungent reek, finding the source of it they slowly turned round to look at the entrance to the cave as a voice came out of it, “Thanks for the information!” said Carl stepping into the light of the
main cavern, brandishing two very large hand guns with a joint dangling from his mouth that was the source of the odour.
The men froze, momentarily surprised that both their trip wires and the guard posted at the entrance to the stairway had failed to warn them of an alien presence.
“Now,” said Carl coolly but with a sharp edge of malice, “if anyone moves, they die!” He was surrounded by a thick plume of sweet smelling pot smoke and glowered at them through squinted eyes.
“Um?” said one of the men, “could I just put my mug down, please. It’s very hot and it’s burning through my hand cream. I wouldn’t want to get dry hands now would I?”
At first Carl thought he was being a smart-arse but when the others nodded sympathetically at the threat of dry hands it became clear that he was being perfectly serious. “Who the hell are these people?” he thought.
In answer to the man’s question Carl let a shot off and the mug exploded in a cloud of steaming hot tea.
“Any one else got a stupid question?”
“I didn’t think it was that stupid,” said the man holding nothing but the handle of his mug. Carl walked over to him and thunked him in the temple with the heavy metal handle of his gun. He dropped like a cheap hooker with a hand full of fifties.
“Anyone else?” they all shook their heads as Shoop, George and Dr Komodo emerged from the tunnel. They were an imposing looking lot. Well, excluding George of course.
“So, the inventory’s in there is it?” Shoop gestured to the alcove, “and we can be expecting company yes?”
The men looked sheepish and felt a little stupid at having given away too much information.
“There’re only two more things I need to know. How long until your back-up arrives? And where’s the drinks cabinet?”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a nice cup of herbal tea, I blended it myself, it’s very tasty.”
