Lanie pushed the flimsy lavatory door closed and twisted the lock. She pressed her forehead against the faux wood-grain panel and tried to calm her breathing. The rocking of the train and the flicker of the cheap fluorescent lights played hell with her sense of balance, and didn’t play well with stress and exhaustion. This was not fun at all. Train travel was something she normally enjoyed—but not today. Not when she was trapped in a glorified tin can speeding through the Turkish countryside with armed men on board hunting her like prey.
She snorted and turned from the door, her sarcasm bubbling up. “Yeah, you're ready for the big time, alright. Real heist, real payday. See Europe, get cultured, steal something priceless. What could possibly go wrong?” She dropped her bag onto the toilet lid with a thud. She let out a long sigh. "Well, you wanted excitement, you got it, chica."
Oh, it was exciting, all right. Right up until it turned deadly. Excitement was usually a plus for her, but too much of a good thing could loop right back around to bad. The men chasing her were killers. They were more professional, intense, and coordinated than the gang-bangers and petty crooks she usually dealt with. One look in their eyes had told her everything she needed to know. They had dead eyes, like sharks in human skins. They hunted like wolves—coordinated, quiet, cold.
There were three that she’d seen so far, but she couldn’t rule out more: one in a dark suit, one in motorcycle leathers, and one in jeans and a gray t-shirt. They’d picked up her trail almost as soon as she’d slipped out of the museum with her prize. They weren’t museum security. This may have been her first museum heist, but it was a dinky local museum in a small city. Its only interesting feature had been a single tiny artifact in a traveling archeology exhibit sponsored by some no-name university. Not exactly the Louvre. There hadn’t been a hint of high-end security when she’d cased the place. These men were something else—private contractors, most likely. After the same item she’d been hired to steal.
Her client hadn’t mentioned competition. She was going to have to raise the price.
Assuming it wasn’t a double cross.
That thought twisted in her gut. It was possible that the client had hired these guys to take the artifact so that he wouldn’t have to pay her. But that logic didn’t track. Three hired killers had to be more expensive than one up-and-coming thief. Unless it was about getting rid of loose ends. That math checked out. She would need to have words with her client, but it would have to be done carefully.
Then there was the question of how they kept finding her. She’d run every evasion play she knew, but she just couldn’t shake them. It was possible they’d somehow gotten a tracker onto her, but how? A couple of bad foster homes had taught her early and thoroughly to be aware of who was in arm’s reach. Unless she’d slipped up very badly, there hadn’t been any opportunities for them to plant anything on her, and she wasn’t dumb enough to bring a cell phone to a break in.
City streets were Lanie’s natural habitat. Even in a strange city where they had the numbers advantage she’d been able to keep ahead of them. Barely. Every city had a rhythm to it. This city was half a world away from her home, full of exotic sights and smells and languages she didn’t speak, but for all its differences, it was still a city. For weeks she’d been living here, watching the flow of people, the traffic, shift changes at the museum, police response times, bus schedules, and bar crowds. She was a good thief because she prepared. There was more to a successful heist than just knowing how to pick locks or foil a motion sensor. Get in, get out, and get away. Escape routes and backup plans were just as important as how to get inside in the first place.
Her pursuers were determined. They were coordinated and skilled. Every time she thought she’d lost them, they picked up her trail again. She used busses and crowds to break their sight-lines, parkoured over debris in a blocked ally, cut through shops and stalls and blended into the crowd in a bustling night souk. They kept finding her. She was ahead of them by just enough to make it onto the train. She wasn’t far enough ahead to get away clean. They must have spotted her slipping onto the train, and now they were hunting her, car by car.
The theft couldn’t have been officially discovered yet, but it certainly would be in another hour or so. That deadline was the reason she still had the marble-sized relic in her pocket. The killers had cut her off from her planned drop location, and she hadn’t had time to circle back to it and still get out of the country before the theft was reported and the authorities shut down the borders. She had no choice but to keep the little sphere and find another way to deliver it to her client. Assuming she lived through this.
She’d lost her pursuers for the moment, but hiding in a cramped train lavatory wasn’t a long-term solution. She didn’t have much time to make her change, and the heavy lump of the little stone antiquity in her pocket was going to be a complication. Carrying stolen goods across a border hadn’t been part of the plan. A quick pass behind a restaurant had given her a chance to dump the most incriminating parts of her gear into a dumpster. All she had left was her stolen prize, an easily concealable set of lock picks, a forged passport, and her quick-change kit.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She studied her blurry reflection in the vibrating polished steel mirror. “You can do this,” she told herself, “Don’t think about the fear, just the next step.” Another long breath to calm her nerves, a whispered wish for a little luck, and she got back to work.
Shucking out of her dark gray leather pants and cream turtle-neck top, she tossed them on the closed toilet seat and unrolled their tightly packed replacements from her satchel. Dark blue leggings and a blue-gray sweater that looked much too bulky to have been compressed down so small gave her the look of a casual traveler. Tucking her short raven-black hair carefully under a medium length auburn wig made her look more like the photo on her forged passport. A little makeup, and some careful shading, made her look ten years older, closer to her mid 30’s than her mid 20’s.
The pants and turtleneck went out the tiny window, grabbed by the wind and ripped away to have their own adventures. She was sorry to see the leather pants go, but the pay-off from this caper would give her plenty of cash for new clothes. The satchel, once emptied, was simple to transform; a hidden slit in the lining let her pull the whole thing inside out, revealing two shorter shoulder straps. It went from a plain brown canvas messenger bag to a casual backpack of rough green cloth adorned with a couple of novelty souvenir pins, one of which was a Canadian flag, and another was a university crest to help sell her passport and cover story.
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The passport was good. She had no worries about it passing inspection. A well used billfold with a Canadian driver’s license, a couple of worn customer loyalty cards, a crinkled receipt or two, and an employee ID for a company based in Toronto, all in the same fake name, rounded out the identity. The ID wasn’t fully backstopped, she didn’t have those kinds of resources, but it was good enough. It had better be for what she’d paid for it.
What worried her was the intricately filigreed antiquity she was carrying. It was small, and easily overlooked, but distinctive. One look at it and anyone would know it didn’t belong in a tourist’s pocket. With killers on her trail it was going to be hard to look casual, and they would give her extra scrutiny. She was usually good at playing it calm and sailing through under the radar. This time she was going to have to stay alert, and well trained border agents would pick up on her tension. She would almost certainly get a closer inspection than usual. On the positive side, though, the border would slow down her pursuers, and hopefully give her a chance to break away from them for good.
Assuming she could get to the border in the first place. That wasn’t a given. She’d already lingered in this lavatory for too long. It was cramped, and with only one way out she’d be trapped if they discovered her. She checked the time. They’d be at the station in fifteen minutes. She just had to lose herself amongst the other travelers until then.
There was no direct train from Turkey into Bulgaria that had worked with her time-table. It would have been nice if she could have taken the Istanbul-Sofia Express straight to Sofia, but by the time she made it to Istanbul and changed trains, the theft would have been discovered. She would have to disembark at Kulikan, go through customs by bus, and transfer to another train on the other side. From there it would be another six or seven hours to Sofia, where she had a bag of goodies stashed away in a rental locker. She could do a better job of changing her identity, and with a clean burner phone she could leave a message for her client to arrange a new drop.
She rolled the valuable stone between her thumb and forefinger, turning it in the light to admire the delicate, intricate carvings. The lines and curves looked like a spiral of Sanskrit text, carved deep enough to reveal that the marble-sized stone was hollow, and there was something inside. The openings were too tiny, and she couldn’t see what it was, but the way the light gleamed, she was certain that it was metallic. It didn’t look too fragile, and that was good, because she could only think of one sure way to get this little beauty through customs. It wouldn’t be the first time a client had to wait for nature to take its course.
She pulled a latex glove from her little travel toiletry kit and used the nail clippers from the kit to snip off a finger. Throwing the rest of the glove away, she pushed the sphere into the rubber tube and tied a knot in the open end, snugging it down tight. She clipped off the excess rubber to make the package as small as possible. She stared it it for a long moment.
“Here’s to poor life choices,” she muttered. With a grimace, and a deep breath to steel herself, she put the priceless antiquity in her mouth and forced herself to swallow, washing it down with water from the tap in a cupped hand. It was almost too large to go down. She coughed and panicked as it caught in her throat. She kept swallowing, willing it to go down. It scraped all the way, leaving her throat feeling raw. As she turned off the tap, she sagged over the sink. “Damn, I should have double-wrapped it,” she rasped. “Too late now.”
Her plans very nearly went to shit as soon as she opened the flimsy lavatory door. Cycle Leathers and Gray T-shirt were standing at the far end of the passageway that ran the length of the car. This was a sleeper car. Doors to cheap sleeper berths ran along right side of the aisle, with a pair of lavatories at each end, and windows along the left side showing the predawn countryside passing by.
She was too far away to hear what they were saying, but from their body language, she guessed they were debating checking each compartment for her. She very nearly froze in panic when she saw them, which would have drawn their attention. Two things saved her - lots of experience, and a little luck.
Her instincts said freeze, but she knew better. She forced herself to turn casually away from them, unshouldering her bag and pretending to dig through it. Luck helped, as one of the compartment doors between her and the men opened and a young couple stepped out, bleary-eyed from the early hour. They partially blocked the hunters’ views. The wig and clothing change did the most to keep her safe, though, and she stepped from the sleeping car into the next car forward, using every ounce of her willpower to avoid looking back. She made her way through two more sleeper cars before she checked to see if she’d been followed. There was no sign of her pursuers.
The next car had rows of seats, each bench seat alternating directions to allow groups of passengers to face one another. Lanie chose the first seat she came to, putting her back to the wall and allowing her a clear view of the rest of the car. It was sparsely occupied, but slowly filling up as they neared the station and the sleeper berths began to empty out.
As the ten-minute warning came over the speakers in three different languages, all too distorted and tinny to understand, the flood of passengers into the compartment grew. Many moved through to cars farther forward, and most who chose to sit in this car clustered near the doors, but one of them plopped down beside Lanie faster than she could react. A second sat directly across from her, his mouth quirked upward in a smirk. The third, the one in the gray shirt, leaned against the end of a seat across the aisle, ready to react if Lanie tried to go high, across the seats. Something hard pressed into her ribs. A shiver of cold dread ran down her spine. She didn’t have to see it to know what it was. Dark Suit had her at gunpoint, while Cycle Leathers flashed his own gun at her briefly, his eyes holding hers to make sure she got the message.
She got the message, alright. She was screwed.
“When the train stops, we will exit together. We will find a place more private for our chat, yes?” Dark Suit pressed the gun harder into her left side as he spoke. His voice was pleasant, as casual as if he was discussing the weather. Lanie couldn’t place his accent, but thought it might be German or Austrian, maybe.
Her eyes flicked from man to man. They were all well-built, athletic sorts. She was small, but agile. She was an outstanding thief, but not much of a fighter. They were armed, and all she had was a pair of nail clippers. She could raise a ruckus and hope to get other people involved, but hope wasn’t certain. Dark Suit could shoot her as soon as she raised her voice. Her heart raced, and she had to fight to control the fear that coursed through her, making her tense up.
If she screamed, she’d die. If she ran, she’d die.
There was no choice but to go along for now and hope for a chance once they were off the train.
The opportunity never came. With Gray Shirt walking ahead of her, Dark Suit walking close behind with the gun, and Cycle Leathers bringing up the rear, they waited their turn and stepped off the train onto a crowded platform. Before Lanie had a chance to make a break for it, she felt a sharp stab into her neck, followed by the cool flush of liquid into her system. It took less than thirty seconds for the drug to take hold and the world to fade to black.
