by Amelia Price
She sighed and doubled her effort to focus, but after the fifth time he gained contact with her skin before she could sense him, she opened her eyes.
“Did I say we were done?” Tom gave her a serious look.
“I can't do it,” she replied and glanced at the clock. Immediately she groaned. “That wasn't even ten minutes. It felt like ages.”
Tom laughed.
“Close your eyes again. We'll try just a few more times.”
She huffed out her breath but obeyed him.
“The trick with this isn't just to rely on only your sense of touch to feel me getting closer. It won't warn you in time. You need to use your sense of hearing and smell. To some degree you'll even use your sense of sight. There's enough light in here that some movements will cast a shadow. You need to detect my movement with every sense you have.”
“Okay.” Amelia calmed her breathing again, and this time she focused on her hearing. It didn't seem to help. Three more times he tapped her or brushed past some exposed skin. She switched her focus to trying to smell a difference.
The next contact came as unexpectedly as the rest had, his hand brushing past her knee cap. She didn't let this deter her and focused on the background smell of the gym. Then the smell of sweat and cologne appeared.
“Now,” she said, a second before his finger tapped the end of her nose.
“Good. I hope you smelt that one?”
She nodded.
“Try a different sense for the next one.”
A few seconds later she thought she saw a shadow moving over her eyes.
“Again,” she said, snapping the word.
“Good. How did you detect that one?”
“With sight. You cast a shadow.”
“All right. It's the sense I want you using least at the moment, but that's the sort of thing that helps you when it's almost dark. Let's try one more. See if you can hear it this time.”
Amelia didn't pre-empt any more of Tom's touches; instead, she grew more and more frustrated as time and time again he surprised her.
“All right. I think that's enough. Take a break for a moment, then we can spar.”
“What does all this have to do with martial arts, Tom?” she asked when he handed her a bottle of water.
“Directly, it's not part of the course, but I'm not just teaching you to fight. I'm training you to cope in dangerous situations. A lot of those situations will need other skills for you to survive, not just how to beat up the bad guys. You'll need to know what to do in any situation if you want to do anything of any importance for Myron. He's not an easy man to work with.”
“You sound like you've worked with him quite a lot,” Amelia replied, fishing for more information. But Tom only grinned.
“None of which I can talk about, as you should never talk to me about anything he gets you to do. The only thing I know about you is that you're a damn fast learner and Myron seems to trust you. I may be damn curious about what he's training you for, but I can never know. It's safer for both of us that way.”
“You think I'm in danger, then?”
“Myron pretty much is the UK government. Just knowing him puts you in danger. Dozens of foreigners and spies could see you with him and think you know more than you do, or find out you do know something they want to discover for themselves. And Myron has to tread carefully with other countries. He won't start a war to protect just one life.”
A shiver ran down Amelia's spine. Although she'd considered that being around Myron was dangerous – it was even a little dangerous being near Sebastian – she'd never thought that she'd be in danger just because she might be seen with him. It put her trip to Scotland with him in a whole new light.
“What do you advise?” she asked a moment later.
“Whatever you do, don't betray Myron's trust... Now come on, time to spar. You'll come to no harm on my watch.”
She nodded and tried to push the thought from her mind. If trouble was in her future somewhere, the best thing she could do now was train, and hope she'd learnt enough by the time it did come. In short, she had to trust Myron.
After twenty minutes of sparring with Tom, Amelia felt her concentration slide. Seconds later, his fist smacked into her torso, getting through her defences much more easily than it usually did.
“Ouch,” she said as he backed off. A wince crossed her face as she felt the damaged ribs. It was going to give her a very nasty bruise.
“You lost focus.” Tom didn't look pleased.
“I'm shattered. I didn't get much sleep last night and I was... busy for a very long time yesterday.” Amelia stumbled over her words, remembering what Tom had said about not telling him anything only half way through the sentence. No one else should find out from her that she was in Scotland with Myron the previous day.
“We'll stop now, then, but you'd have lost a real fight if you'd let your concentration drop like that.”
“In a real fight I'd have had adrenaline to help.” She grinned her reply but Tom's disappointed shake of his head wiped it off in less than a second.
“To begin with, the adrenaline might help you, but whoever you're fighting would be pumped with it too. Mostly, all adrenaline does is tire you out even quicker. You shouldn't ever need it to win anything, Amelia.”
“Noted.” She sighed and straightened her body. There was always something new to learn.
“Here.” Tom reached out to her, a small envelope in his hands. “I was told to give you this today.”
“From him?” she asked. He nodded as she took it. She turned it over to open it.
“Not here. I don't want the chance to accidentally see what it says.”
“Until next week, then.”
He nodded his goodbye and gave her a small bow which she copied. As soon as he was gone, she sat on one of the wooden benches and tore open the envelope.
E: 48/2(9+3)=
“Well that's not very difficult,” Amelia said out loud to the empty room. Shrugging in disbelief at the ease of the sum, she grabbed her water bottle and headed back to the women's changing rooms.
It was only once she was part-way dressed that she realised this was clue E. She had no idea what D had been.
With all the current clues in hand and an empty changing room to hide in, Amelia decided to try and solve her puzzle now. She pulled the wooden box out of her handbag and right away she noticed the arrow on it had moved to the other side.
As she looked over the letter that had come with it again, she realised she was holding a reverse geocache. The clues so far were the coordinates she needed to take the box to so it would unlock and let her inside. She chucked everything back into her handbag and finished getting dressed. She knew just the café to have a cup of tea in, so she could finish figuring out where to go to get her box to unlock.
Chapter 9
A fire burned merrily in the grate in Mycroft's study while he sat as his desk with his laptop open in front of him. He wasn't really working yet. He'd only got back that morning from Scotland, and after destroying the physical copies of the leaked financials, he'd spent another hour probing through all the phones and computers owned by McGregory and Kendel to ensure no more copies existed anywhere.
McGregory had been naïve enough to destroy everything himself, evidently as unambitious as he'd seemed, but Kendel had tried to keep a copy on an external hard drive. He'd just been stupid enough to leave the hard drive plugged into a computer. Mycroft had deleted it for him and then gone to bed.
Today he was dealing with a few minor internal affairs between three MPs who'd fallen out over some bill they tried to draft. All of them were wrong, which made it an easier problem to fix. If one was right, it was always harder to convince the other two they were wrong. After writing a brief fourth point of view, he emailed it to his secretary. She would ensure it appeared to come from a fictitious other expert.
Mycroft raised his eyebrows as he saw the next email in his list. It was from one of the men he'd taske
d with Amelia's latest challenge.
Message delivered to person described via a rose. Stunning woman. Is she one of ours or is she off limits?
He clenched his fists at the cheek of the man before he realised what he was doing. Immediately, he recomposed himself. The question wasn't worthy of a reply. It may not have been an official task but the agent should have approached it as such.
Technically, she was neither. He'd laid no claim to her and she wasn't an official agent of theirs or off limits because she was another country's agent, but Mycroft felt tempted to reply that she was unavailable. If it wouldn't have implied she was an agent, he'd have already done it.
Instead, he sat back and summoned the housekeeper to make him some tea. It was a little early for his midday tea but he'd upset his routine the day before and would take a few days to fully adjust back into it.
While he sipped the hot Indian tea, Mycroft thought over his plans for the day. Currently he had none, but if Amelia solved her latest problem soon enough he planned to bring forward her final task to this evening. He had nothing else pressing at the moment, even if there was plenty he could do with his time.
Given the message he'd just received, he was a little concerned Amelia might read more into it than was wise, but she'd been reading more into the relationship between them since they met. The rose would only have made this worse, but he knew he could put her in her place if need be. The next time she flirted with him, an obvious rejection would set her back a step or two. It would be simple.
Mycroft was just placing his empty teacup back on its saucer when another email came through. He smiled when he saw the sender. It seemed Kendel had noticed the missing documents.
You really are thorough. I guess I have no choice but to trust that it really is for the best, despite my desire not to. I do have to thank you, however, for an inadvertent gain from that article. Our chief was so impressed with it he gave me a pay rise.
A small amount of satisfaction rippled through Mycroft. It seemed Amelia had plenty of written talent, and he had her completely at his disposal. It was always good to have people who could be trusted with tasks of a certain type. It meant he could do less of the mundane and focus more on the strategy behind everything. Anonymous managing from his own desk was always something he'd preferred.
He'd make sure Amelia was rewarded as well. The perfect opportunity would present itself after the next task. All he had to do now was sit and wait for her to unlock the box he'd had stashed in her house.
***
The waitress in the café smiled with recognition as Amelia sat down at her favourite table inside. She could see the entire set of tables, and despite her being there to solve Myron's latest puzzle, it made her feel at home.
As soon as the waitress placed her tea on the table and started walking away, Amelia pulled all the letters she had out of her bag and spread them out. She knew for sure what two out of the five clues were. So she wrote them into the message which had been beneath the box.
NAA DD:DD WEEE 17:79
At first glance, she had thought Clue E was 2, but it didn't fit with the three spots in the location information, so she pulled that piece of paper back out again and stared at it. She'd assumed that the brackets were multiplied out first as she'd been taught in school, but she remembered that it was a more recent way of doing the maths. Instead, she decided to try and do the operations in the order they appeared, dividing forty-eight by two and then multiplying it with twelve. This gave her a three-digit number so she wrote that in as well.
For clue A, she'd worked out three possible numbers but only one of them was a double-digit answer, so she ignored the other two answers for now. That left clue D, which she'd not seen and couldn't think what it might be.
While she drank her tea, she scanned her memory between getting the two envelopes for clues C and E, to try and remember if something might have passed for the missing clue D. The only strange event was the box itself and how she'd received it. Nothing else sprang to mind.
Having no other lead to go on, Amelia took the box out of her bag to inspect it. Once again, the arrow had moved, pointing East from her current location, as it had every time, but the padlock icon was still locked. With a frustrated sigh, Amelia ran her hands over the smooth pine. If nothing else, she could at least enjoy the feel of the buffed wood.
As she ran her hand underneath, she noticed it wasn't perfectly smooth. She flipped it over and saw a big D carved into the bottom of it. The box was her clue D, although that didn't get her much closer to an answer. There had been no puzzle attached to it, just the letter.
She frowned and drank more tea. It didn't help.
Only when she glanced at the location clue did she realise it must be a time. The D's in her message had a colon in the middle. If the box was clue D, then the time it had been left in her wardrobe might be the answer. If so, that meant they'd wanted to wake her up and they'd wanted her to notice the time. This left her with a possible location.
N51 23:03 W288 17.79
When she put the coordinates into the compass on her phone, it threw back an error and she almost smacked her head with annoyance before she realised where she'd gone wrong. The number after W couldn't be more than 180, so it must be the other possibility she'd thought of: 002. When she put this into her phone, it immediately pointed to a location east of her, a little over five kilometres away.
Tucking everything but the box and her phone away, Amelia hurried out of the café and into the street. She walked eastwards towards the centre of Bath and watched the arrow on the box move to match the compass arrow and the distance decrease with each metre she walked.
It didn't take her long to realise she was going to need a taxi, so she wandered along to the train station where she knew there were always a few waiting.
Within ten minutes, she was getting into a cab.
“Where to, love?” the balding driver asked. She frowned for a moment, not entirely sure.
“Can you head out to London road and the A4? I'm trying to find some coordinates a few miles that way,” she said, holding up her phone screen with the compass app on display. His eyes widened at the strange request but he turned on the engine and pulled off without asking any more questions.
As she got closer to the destination, she gave him a couple more instructions of which roads to take, but she'd picked well in the first place and was soon whizzing down a road through Sally-in-the-woods watching the number tick down below a thousand and then even lower. As she reached three-hundred metres to go, she realised it was slowing down, and the arrow was starting to move to her left, pointing into the woodland itself.
“Can you pull over at the next good place?” she asked.
“Of course. There's a place just up here.” He kept the car going but slowed and she watched her phone count down to a little over one-hundred metres before it started to climb again. As the taxi-driver pulled over, it fixed onto 132.
“Great,” Amelia said and handed him some money to cover what she owed so far. She then put on her most charming smile. “I'm really hoping this won't take more than a few minutes. Will you wait?”
“Sure thing, love. Wouldn't want to leave anyone out in these woods for long.”
She widened the smile and hurried out of the car. Walking as fast as her legs would carry her, Amelia hurried back down the road until she was at the lowest point while still being on the road. As she turned east, the arrow on the box moved back in front of her but it still showed the locked icon.
Taking a deep breath, she plunged into the woods. As she went, she kept an eye on the road behind her, trying to keep it in sight, but she soon found there was far too much in the way of bushes and undergrowth to see back to it, despite the trees being stripped of their leaves and there being little sign of spring growth yet. Thankfully, she could still hear the road, even when she only had twenty metres to go.
As she went farther along, her phone's app reached its accuracy limit and jumpe
d from in front of her to behind, and then to the right. She turned it off and tucked it back into her pocket. The arrow on the box had remained steady in the right direction so she used it to narrow down the last few metres. Its GPS was obviously more powerful, something she expected from Myron.
After only a few more steps, it beeped at her. Then a little while after that, it beeped at her twice. Finally it beeped at her three times in quick succession and she heard the satisfying click of the lock opening. To match, the padlock icon switched to an open one and the arrow disappeared.
For a couple of seconds she just stared at the box, not quite wanting to open it, but she knew she had to at some point. After glancing around her to see if anyone was nearby, and predictably finding she was alone, she pulled open the lid. Inside was another envelope. Feeling a little saddened that so little was in there, she frowned and pulled it out.
She then shut the box again and listened for the road. As she walked away, she heard the box lock itself again. Hoping the taxi-driver hadn't already grown bored of waiting, she hurried back through the woods and out to the road.
Before she reached a point she could be seen, she stowed everything back in her handbag. She didn't want anyone to notice her with anything out of the ordinary, so reading Myron's letter would have to wait until she was home.
As she reached the road side, she turned and looked down the road. The taxi was still where she'd left it and the driver was standing outside, smoking a cigarette.
“Where to now, love?” he asked once she was back.
“Home. I'm done.”
“Do I want to know what you were doing out here?” he asked as they both got back into the vehicle.
“Nothing dodgy, but I can't say. I promised someone I'd never tell anyone about it.”
