Hare and Hounds Read online



  Hare and Hounds

  by Alex Brightsmith

  Copyright 2013 Alex Brightsmith

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to your favourite ebook retailer to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

  *** * ***

  Table of Contents

  Hare and Hounds

  A word from the author

  Some introductions

  Blake, on choosing dragons

  Christine, memories

  Hal, a glimpse of the younger man

  Thierry, Find the Lady – Bella

  *** * ***

  Hare and Hounds

  Kate ran, choosing no direction, trusting to her luck and to the darkness.

  By the time she reached the wire she had more faith left in her famous luck than in the darkness that had seemed so complete from the doorway, for the promised cloud had broken, the night grew brighter around her with every stride, and she knew that her pursuers would find their vision adjusting just as fast as hers. Though she had known that she would have very little cover as she crossed the moor, she had not meant to make herself so clear a target; she would never have chanced it, not daring to imagine so incompetent a pursuit.

  As her hands found the tools she would need she stole a glance at the buildings clustered below her. There was a blaze of activity at the doorway, dark figures swarming around it like ants, their torch beams dancing chaotically against the sky. She wondered if, like ants, they would have the hive intelligence to find her trail before their own hapless milling destroyed it, but she had no time to spare to watch, or to let the thought distract her.

  She turned back to the wire and worked fast, for there was no hope of discretion in this job. They could not help but find any gap she made for herself, though it was impossible to guess how long it might take them to do so. She glanced back, and saw the torches trained more sensibly along the ground as the party fanned out in their search, and once more she ran.

  It had not mattered where she hit the wire, but now she made for the woodland above her by the straightest line, unable pick her terrain. It slowed her, but a little extra cover as she approached the welcome line of trees compensated somewhat for the brightness of the clearing sky, and by the time she reached full shadow the sounds of pursuit had grown fainter.

  Another glance, the briefest glimpse, a small group converging on her breach in their defences. She pushed on. A few moments of unavoidable blundering through the underbrush, leaving a trail that could hardly be missed, and then she stepped – fell, rather – onto the path. It was no more than a deer track, her footing invisible in the deep shadows, but she had checked it in daylight and she flew along it now. How far to push it? How long, on that obvious path, before they stopped checking for her footprints? But she must not push it too far in her caution. She must be off the path before they found it, and she was aware of the invisible boundary looming ahead of her that she must not cross. She balanced the risk as she ran, passing one tree perfect for climbing, a second, a third, promising herself that she would take the next good chance, and going five aching minutes without one. She almost turned back, but then an old beech offered firm handholds, and she flew up it, and lay still.

  She could see the line of the wire, but not the place where she had crossed it. She could hear their voices, but even if she had known the language she was not close enough to follow their discussion. Nothing for it but to wait, and hold her nerve, and draw some confidence from the memory of Tomeckova's welcoming smile when she walked into his office, his satisfaction only faintly edged with relief.

  She had half hoped to surprise him, knowing that no name had been sent ahead, but she had known the moment she saw that familiar, wolfish smile that he had caught exactly the fish he had angled for. It had not, she realised, been a difficult calculation. The favour called in, the skills requested, the clear fact that they would send an agent he already had a file on, if they could; she had been the only likely candidate.

  She had protested inadequate briefing and made him run through his scheme, and he had stuck to the script as she had already heard it. A training camp closer to his border than he liked to see it, but no valid grounds for action, and a party of international observers restricting his options. He needed a thief, and a thief with no possible connection to his service. He saw her doubt, and his predatory grin flashed back.

  "Perhaps I do have one or two people," he had admitted, "who can't be traced back to me or mine, but no one I could trust to pull this off – except you. I’ve seen you run before."

  He had, she knew, but as she rested silently on her high perch she couldn’t help wondering if his confidence had been well founded. Lights and voices still clustered around the wire, but she could not risk moving far enough to see what progress they had made. Eventually the excited voices gave way once more to order. Through the trees she made out glimpses of a small party following her faint trail across the hillside, and she heard their self-congratulation when they found the place where she had broken through to the track. As she had hoped, they followed it with renewed confidence and reduced care, and they passed beneath her without an upward glance between them. Did they know where the path led? Would they cross the border in ignorance? Or would they cross it in the comfortable belief that their incursion would never be noticed?

  It hardly mattered. She allowed herself to relax, and to imagine the encounter that she was so tempted to follow and observe, as Tomeckova's picked men rose up like ghosts around the unwary group. They would talk of a provocateur, but their talk need not concern her. It would fall on the unsympathetic ears of observers who were confident that no one else had crossed the border that night.

  *** * ***

  A word from the author

  Hello, reader.

  Thank you for joining me. I hope you've enjoyed my company.

  I wouldn’t normally put out an ebook so short - not even as a giveaway - but I have promised here and there - and rashly - that Kathryn Blake will return in December 2013, and fate has laughed at my plans. Her next novel-length outing, Find the Lady, should be creeping in to the pre-order listings even as you read this, and will be available for download from January 24th. For now, I hope that this makes up, in some measure, for the delay.

  If I have piqued your interest, you can find me on Twitter as @findingthelady, on Facebook as Brightsmith Gamp, or you can join me on Goodreads where I am, as ever, Alex Brightsmith.

  In the following pages I will be introducing some characters you will be meeting again in Find the Lady, but for now, adieu, and thanks again for coming along for the ride

  Alex

  ps That game on the cover? I was sure that I remembered calling it Hare and Hounds when I was a child, but it turned out to be a variant of Fox and Geese. Hare and Hounds, as this story may have reminded you, is an entirely different game.

  *** * ***

  Blake, on choosing dragons

  Of all the people you might think to ask about Kathryn Blake, her father is perhaps the most obvious, but if you do not have David McAllister's old familiarity, you may find him the most difficult to approach. McAllister? You’ll have a wait a while to find out about him. For now, Dr Blake talks about dragons . . .

  Pass the bottle, Davie, and let's not talk about the girl. It's been too long since we had a night for this, a night to not quite talk shop, a night for dragons.

  Isn't that what you signed up for, Davie? Isn't it what we all signed up for, slaying dragons? Only I think perhaps you chose yours better than I c
hose mine. I know you chose a Hydra. I know you'll never be done with hacking off heads - it's human nature you're fighting. But at least I'm sure you chose a monster.

  Me? I know everyone thinks I got out because of Elisabeth. She was a handy excuse, and you can imagine how many sleepless nights I've given myself over letting myself think of her that way, but Hal knew, I think, all along. He had to pull a lot of favours to get me out, but the Service would have got a pretty raw deal if I'd stayed. You can't fight a thing you don't know, that's the nub of it, and once you do know it, well what if it's no dragon after all?

  You remember Reilly, of course? Used to get fighting drunk about twice a term; one or other of us must have been the one to sit on him a dozen times. You don't kick a man like Reilly when the fit has him, you put him down as gently as you can, and wait for it to pass. That's how I'd started to see it, a rather grubby fight that left the wrong people hurt. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it was never the right Service for me.

  But I shan't be sorry if you give my girl your Hydra to fight, in place of Hal's dragons.

  *** * ***

  Christine, memories

  I have revisited many old friends in Find the Lady, but Christine Ness is entirely new. She is forthright and determined, but also damaged. Here’s a piece I wrote for her as a response to the weekly Visual Dare prompt at https://anonymouslegacy.blogspot.co.uk/ (a site that I urge you to visit for consistently fresh and interesting flash fiction from masters of the form).

  It makes me shudder, that picture. I suppose that sounds odd, when I keep it in my office. Perhaps I keep it here because it was taken on a perfect day, a day I’d been allowed to tie my hair back any old how, and spend time with my father.

  Yes, he loved his butterflies. Loved them so much that he pursued them and poisoned them and pierced them with pins. It’s strange that I was allowed to play with that one. It must have been a reject, marred somehow. That seems apt. There was something damaged in me long before I ever met my husband.

  Perhaps that’s why I really keep the picture, as if one day it might help me to remember how to be that little girl again, seeing only the beauty, instead of the butterfly, pierced by my husband’s love.

  *** * ***

  Hal, a glimpse of the younger man

  Or what about Hal? He’s a man who might unguardedly admit that he has never been a sportsman, a man who at his best – at his worst – is a bluff, avuncular figure, playing on the assumptions that people are apt to make about a man who flies a desk, and has let his physique, once taut, run to fat. But there was a time when he was someone very like Kathryn. I recently caught a glimpse of that younger man in response to another Visual Dare prompt.

  Hal Marchant looked at the moon, hanging bone white in a washed-out dawn sky the colour of his mentor’s eyes, and knew two things. He must be dangerously overtired to be distracting himself with unhelpful comparisons. And he was late.

  He curled deeper into the inadequate cover of the bare winter bushes, surveying the fields he had hoped to cross by night. He would be fatally exposed if he crossed them now, and though Hal, at 21, had been fairly accused of over-confidence, braggadocio, and a flippant disregard for procedure, the year now was 1987, and a sadder, wiser man watched the waking hamlet.

  He might have risked it, for himself – the run was tantalizingly short, the nearest guard post temptingly distant – but he was carrying more than his own life in his hands. His mind flicked back to his contact, the old woman. Old? Ancient. So ancient that it seemed possible that memories of White Russia stoked the furnace of her rage, the inner fire that sustained that wisp of a body and compelled her to risk a charge of treason in the name of patriotism. He couldn’t allow it to come to that.

  Somewhere a diesel engine coughed its way into life, not quite masking a girl’s voice, singing. She sang joyfully, and a smile touched his lips as he listened, absorbing the patterns of the hamlet and beginning to understand that he had been wrong. He had not come too late, but too early. He glanced at his nondescript clothes, checking. Yes. By darkness he could only have seemed exactly what he was, a thief in the night. In a few hours, with care, he might pass for just another busy local.

  It would take only nerve, and Hal Marchant had never been short of that.

  *** * ***

  Thierry, Find the Lady – Bella

  Thierry Dupois has the distinction of being Find the Lady’s opening narrator, and here is his first impression of the lady in question.

  Perhaps it was just that the weather matched my mood that night, as I waited in the cooling cab of my truck for my load and for my passengers. I wasn’t ready for passengers. I wasn’t ready for this at all. I should have had months to feel my way in; I’d been prepared to be patient, expected to be frustrated long before I’d made progress. I’d had it thoroughly drummed into me that undercover is for the long game, but here I was in Dieppe, waiting.

  I’d had my licence for less than a year when I first met Xavier. I’d got myself the beginnings of a reputation, but I’d barely got started on that carefully calculated fall from grace. I hadn’t even managed to get myself fired yet. I must have said the right things. He slipped me a few packages. I opened them carefully, let two get through, arranged for the other to be found in a strictly random search. I hadn’t liked that, either. We couldn’t pull the trick too often, but it had been altogether too much to let pass, and it didn’t seem to have dented Xavier’s good opinion of me.

  One November evening he told me he had a truck and needed a driver – told me to get sick, skip work and be available. I’d thought it was just a beginning. I’d been pleased. And then he’d said casually that I was especially honoured.

  “Bella’s coming along for the ride,” he’d said.

  I wasn’t meant to get so far so fast. I’d heard of Bella, and I knew I wasn’t ready. It kept running through my head as I waited, the thought just as insistent as the steady rain.

  We’d first heard of Bella about six months before. It was never much, just fragmentary mentions on wiretaps and surveillance tapes. She was half a phantom, before that night. A whisper, a threat. Don’t write me off as some romantic frog. Bella was more frightening than ten years to life, and these are hard men I’m talking about. They believed in her arrangements, and generally they were right to. We’d had some good lines on Kimine’s affairs, but they’d fallen apart. A dozen raids, two of them fair sized busts, and three probable convictions to show for it. All three of them were men who would have been home free if they hadn’t tried to make a little extra on their own account, and they knew it. They were going down quietly, implicating no one, despite our best efforts. They all had more faith in Bella than in the witness protection scheme of which we were so proud. Even reliable narks got superstitious about Bella; if they gave us her name we counted ourselves lucky, it was about as much as we ever got.

  Take Claude Chanel. Chanel had been dead right about one thing, and as far as I know one thing only, in all his miserable life. He’d stood at the threshold of a rundown apartment in Rouen and said “I don’t like it, something’s wrong.” I know he said that, because there were six of my colleagues on the other side of the door. His companion had asked scathingly if he wanted to go home and tell Kimine that they’d given up the job because he’d had a funny feeling.

  “I’ll tell Kimine whatever the hell you like,” he’d said, “as long as you tell Bella.”

  We never did get much more than that. She worked for Kimine – for him or with him, we weren’t even sure about that – and she didn’t take kindly to idiots who diverted from her very clear plans without good cause. She was French, or Arabic, or maybe Swiss. She was an ice goddess. She could see in the dark.

  I believed about a tenth of it, and it wasn’t entirely Bella who was tying my stomach in knots. There was Jacques Martin, too. I’d arrested him once, in Marseille, and he wasn’t supposed to be involved in Kimine’s business. When I say I arrested him, that’s not entirely true. I was on
the team, there were a score of us, it was dark, and I didn’t interview him. In short, he had no reason to remember me particularly. Even so, it hadn’t done my nerves any good the first time I saw him with Xavier.

  So here I sat at Dieppe port, in the dusk, in the rain, in the cold cab of a hot truck, waiting.

  They came out of one of the warehouses, a little knot of men I would have overlooked, except that I recognized Xavier as they passed under a lighted window. Xavier, two men I took to be customs officers, and another I had seen in Xavier’s company before. Nothing surprising in that. It was the sight of Jacques in that little group that made my stomach lurch and distracted me from the sixth figure. They walked quickly through the rain, and I almost missed my first sight of Bella, buried in the heart of the group.

  There was little enough to go on. A slight figure, even in her bulky spray jacket, her hood thrown back for the short walk but her hair covered by a cap. I couldn’t even be sure, from what little I saw, that I was watching a woman. There was no trace of femininity in her confident stride, but this had to be Bella, unless the plan had changed. She was doing all the talking, and even Xavier deferred to her.