When her skinny assistant eventually appeared at her door, looking as if he’d just developed an ulcer, she had even managed a thin-lipped smile designed to reassure him. It scared him even more.
“Not your fault,” she said. “But it’s someone’s fault, isn’t it?”
“Sure is, Chief,” he admitted, eager to deflect the blame, his fingers playing nervously with the badge on his lapel.
“Whose?”
He had survived relatively unscarred the last few months of Flagg’s rule, and had already learned the different ways of Margaret Tabor. She didn’t mind honest admissions of failure, but it was better not to try to wriggle your way out of trouble by deceit or by lying to her.
“Can’t have been Thomas. Someone opened his cell after they butchered the guards.”
He laid some instant pix of the scene on her desk, one by one, as though playing some macabre game of patience. She leaned forward and scanned them, face showing no emotion.
“Something is very wrong here,” she said.
“No evidence of anyone else being involved. Just this…” He consulted a small notepad. “Veronica Poole. Teacher aged about sixty. From Fort Worth. The guard, Joe, was supposed to be hooking her. Doesn’t figure.”
“Woman of sixty, alone and unarmed, did this—” She waved her hand at the livid photographs. “Got a big man up on her own. Gouged out his eyes. She somehow overcame him. Got his gun… what was he carrying?”
He rifled the pages. “Oh, yeah. Something else odd. The old woman had a Port Royale machine pistol. Sixteen round, like an Uzi. Joe had it. Seems he also took one of a pair of matching Heckler & Koch P-111s that she’d been carrying. Nine-millimeter automatics. Fifteen round. Other guard had a standard .38.”
“Wait, wait. This old woman had weapons of that quality on her and nobody told me about it?”
“I didn’t know, Chief.”
Margaret Tabor nodded slowly. She reached for a yellow pad and then stopped. “Who interrogated her?”
“Miller and McCabe. I checked.”
“And neither of them thought that it was odd to find… Let it pass. This is spilled milk. Bring me the folder on Mistress Poole and the black file on people we’re supposed to be looking out for. Right away.”
MCCABE SAT on the floor, holding a kerchief to his broken nose, trying not to bleed on the carpet of her office. He was white as parchment, hands trembling.
“This is something very serious. And you missed it.”
“I’m sorry, Chief,” he mumbled through the blood and splintered teeth.
“No,” Margaret Tabor said very quietly. “Mistake like that doesn’t get you sorry, McCabe. It gets you dead.”
AFTER THE MAN had been taken away to the narrow passage with the rusting iron hooks in its wall, Margaret Tabor sat and looked at the slim file on Nanci Simms.
The light blue eyes stared back at her from a slightly blurred snatched photograph. It was a street in small-town America, and the woman was glancing sideways, as though she’d somehow detected the click of a hidden camera. From the car that appeared in the picture, it looked as if it had been taken several years ago around the mid 2030s.
There was surprisingly little information on her. No birth date, no birthplace. Nothing on parents. No home. No friends. No social security number or bank details, though it did mention her most common pseudonym of Veronica Poole and the phony job record of English literature teacher in Fort Worth.
Height of five feet eleven was followed by a question mark, showing it was only a guess. Same with the weight and age. Approximately sixty years old, it said.
The rest was a jumbled mass of supposition and partial information. What came through was a dangerous woman who’d been around a lot. Traveled in Europe and extensively in the Far and Middle East. Was believed to have flourished as an undercover assassin for several years. Skilled in armed- and unarmed-combat techniques.
“You got that bit right,” said the chief, laying the folder back down.
Someone who might have worked for Zelig… who might well have known where the opposition headquarters of Aurora was hidden.
It was bitterly frustrating to have had this lethal woman safe and snug in a cell. A chicken ready for the plucking. And then to lose her…