The Woman Who Died a Lot

I checked my watch again and nodded to Phoebe, who was parked in the entranceway to the abandoned Chiseldon camp three hundred yards off. The clock ticked by until it was eleven, then eleven-fifteen. The traffic died down, as presumably everyone was in place to watch the spectacle, and even the staff in the gas station closed up the shop to go watch. Within a few minutes, I was completely alone.

As I stood there, I noticed a large Pontiac driving along the road in a slower-than-normal fashion. It pulled in to the gas station’s forecourt and stopped, just the other side of the pumps. I walked cautiously toward it and soon noticed that the engine was still running and that the windows were tinted.

I knocked on the window. After a pause the window wound down. There was a tanned man with a military-style haircut sitting in the driving seat, and through the window there came the faint waft of gun oil, coffee and body odor. There were four of them. They were armed, and they were bored.

“Yes?” said the driver.

“You know who I am and why I’m here,” I said softly, “and I want you to turn the car around and leave.”

He looked at me curiously and gave a slight smile. “And why would I do something like that?”

“Because I don’t want to kill you, and you don’t want to be dead.”

The smile dropped from his face.

“I don’t respond well to threats,” he said. “There are four of us, Miss Next. How many of us do you think you can take down before you’re dead?”

I stared at him, then at his front-seat passenger, who had his hand beneath a newspaper on his lap, presumably hiding a weapon of some sort.

“I can take two of you down for certain, three possibly. But it needn’t come to that. You’re not Goliath. You’re mercenaries. So aside from the cash, you’ve got no real reason to show any loyalty.”

“We think a lot of you, Miss Next,” replied the driver, “and we don’t actually want to hurt anyone. It’s messy, the paperwork is a headache and the lawsuits frequent, and the clients don’t like it. Our instructions are clear: Hold the righteous man in custody until after midday. But if anyone stands in our way, we are required to take whatever action is deemed appropriate. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly. Now just go home and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

He shook his head, and I heard two faint clicks from the backseat as safeties were released.

“We can’t do that. We have reputations to consider. Do you know how oversubscribed the menacing business is these days? Gigs are hard to come by, and one failure can lose you clients as easy as blinking and, what’s worse, slash the daily rate in half.”

And that was when I heard a mild squeak on the adjacent railway line. It was a faint noise but one that unmistakably heralded an approaching train from the south at a distance of five hundred yards. I could sense the speed it was going, too, and given that it was slowing at a progressive rate, my Day Player mind calculated I had a little over thirty-one seconds to get rid of these idiots before the 11:36 from Marlborough pulled into Chiseldon station. The righteous man was arriving by train. “Reputation, huh?” I said. “Ever heard of the Special Library Services?”

They had. Everyone had. Ex-SLS could get a job in security anywhere in the world. Half of President-for-Life Vera Lynn’s bodyguard had been SLS at one time. The driver looked momentarily worried, and there were some mumblings between the two in the backseat.

“The SLS has no interest in righteous men,” said the driver, “or people like you.”

“Wrong,” I said. “I’m the chief librarian of Wessex. The SLS cares very much what happens to me, and right now you’re surrounded by a half dozen SLS. Make a wrong move and you’ll have more holes in you than a lump of Emmentaler.” The driver and the front-seat passenger looked around. They couldn’t see the SLS, of course, for the simple reason that they weren’t there. I wasn’t here on library business and had no right to ask the SLS to risk their lives. It rattled the mercenaries in the car, though.

“Bullshit,” said the driver at last.

“Okay,” I said. “Watch.”

I pointed at one of the many lamp standards that were dotted around the periphery of the forecourt. I had to just hope that Phoebe had seen the car pull in and had positioned herself well.

She had. The lamp fitting on the standard exploded into fragments from a carefully placed shot. I’d told her to bring a sniper rifle.

“So,” I said as the train heaved into sight along the tracks, “you’re going to leave now, aren’t you?”

The driver didn’t answer and instead drove out of the forecourt a lot faster than he’d come in and was soon lost to view. I gave a cheery wave to wherever Phoebe might have been hidden, then walked across to the station and pushed open the gate to the platform.