ould only forgive him oh so much. It was a dull pain that started somewhere in the small of his back and worked its way wherever it particularly fancied in the spur of the moment. A conservative estimate was that it halved his patience. He kicked out some dust and ground his shoes into position in response to his calf. Dust seemed to always permeate these kind of parking garage stairwells in a way that made jackets dirty even though you'd swear you hadn't brushed up against anything. Amy coughed, partly from dust and part from crippling fever. She merely stared vacantly, eyes glazed and a chrome barrel out of focus before her. The shock started to hit her as a vast onslaught. Wait it out. She shivered and some detached part of her mind still free to manoeuvre felt sick. The heat was worse now than ever. It radiated and coursed. She couldn't speak. Just breathe, Amy.

Scott was whispering something.

"What was that?" asked Raynes, shades a few fiendish centimetres from his face.

"The keys. In the bag near the Marilyn Monroe picture." Scott pointed to her pink kittens, now a soot-laden shade that mewed of neglect. Raynes held it up and dug out her house keys, then threw the rest the satchel somewhere into a corner. Her vision turned to bare chrome-less concrete as one agent handed the mess of satchel to the other and shifted the gun off her.

"Please enlighten us about these keys Mr. Rowenstein before their teeth end up replacing yours."

Scott just shook his head. "Not those."

It took Matt a few moments to get the signal, and another few to process that, captured or not, Scott was still a sadistic bastard. He turned to Scott. "Keys?" he asked. "Why 'keys'?"

"Just...just try."

The American felt a buzz in his pocket and read the text while he held Amy's keyring. It was from friends at the National Security Agency who had access to satellites and quite a bit of CCTV, and another from the back-up team that replied they'd secured the parking level and were ready to extract their suspects.

The handle to the garage twisted as if in slow motion. Raynes took a step towards Scott and hauled him to his feet ready to be passed through to the backup team parked beyond. The door was yanked and he saw for a split second or two the ready van beyond. He was lucky to have the door shield him from the shrapnel. 'Keys?' the universe seemed to say. 'We can find two meanings for that.'

At that moment the kittens satchel detonated. The pressure change shredded Amy's well-crafted notes and obliterated her laptop. It ripped a few six-pin key-shaped holes through the top and sides where computer parts hadn't contained the change in mass. Schofield bellowed and connected squarely with an argon lamp. And the bent metal keys bounced off the concrete and settled in the darkness. They eviscerated those closest to the explosion and cracked the argon lamps.

There was a moment of quiet. There was Raynes in the corner, bent double on his knees. The figure of Schofield was slumped. And Amy crawled to the satchel, and pulled it towards her. She staggered to the stairs. She climbed. Someone familiar screamed into the darkness. Keep your head down.

The first set of stairs she cleared as if underwater. Shots from a ceramic handgun hit the railing as she rounded the corner, followed by three more drowned out by screaming somewhere down below. She'd seen Schofield's footage. There was no time now, only a numbed guilt for the other figures of friends too beaten to stand. She watched herself climb upwards painlessly, counted the stairs gone and felt drops of blood shaking from her fingertips. She felt as if she was floating, that it was almost someone else who'd made it up the stairs and turned the door handle beside a large sign stating 'ground floor' in quirky, hopeful lettering. She reached for the handle and crumpled in pain when it didn't give way to a shoulder barge. Blindly any bloodied key within reach was grabbed from the laptop ruins and she scrambled to shove it into the lock. She prayed it worked this way. It had clicked for her. Because if a smartphone could be made to do weird things then maybe these keys could do weird things too. The key had a swinging red label with two words written in block capitals. It wasn't one you'd use often on a normal keyboard. It clunked in the doorway and opened onto a narrow corridor. She stumbled through. The doorway slammed shut behind her. Ceramic gunshots cut into silence.

The first thing she noticed was the carpet, and then that it was shaking in a way that was unnerving. With what she assumed was blood loss anything was possible. The footsteps and screaming were gone, but the aftermath kept on ringing in her ears. She looked and tried to focus through blurred vision. Oh. Damn. So this was how it worked. Metal cabinets were stacked neatly to her left alongside a small bowl of crisps and a well-stocked inventory of adorably tiny wine bottles. A porthole beyond shone out a brilliant white that hurt. Right on cue she realized she must've been shot. Her left arm dripped a shapely stain on Royal Blue carpeting. She held her other arm and tried not to look. Yep, that side of her shirt was noticeably dark.

She took pressure off for a second to drop the kittens and tried to steady for long enough to read the bloodied tag on the key. It confirmed her suspicions. It was airplane mode. Putting pressure back on she winced for the first time as the shock passed enough to feel for the serrated end of a broken key embedded. Oh, not shot then. God knows what had happened to the other part. A third realization hit her in the form of cloying steam and an odd mix of spices from warm trays of foil-wrapped dinners. It was Cajun chicken on this flight. The flight would be long-haul. Momentarily she thought that for airplane food that wasn't too bad.

Okay. So it was real, and the coast was clear for a moment. Quite how clear that coast would continue to be was up for debate. Don't think about who was screaming. There'd be time for that Just focus. She knelt down and swore as she rummaged around past bent laptop casing and freshly-bloodied maths. Was it Scott? At the bottom she grabbed a handful of keys and looked at their tags. There was a moment of thanks that she'd chosen 'Airplane mode' at the hospital. Each one of them was a little different, but all had the same tags written in beautifully-neat block lettering. The 'delete' key looked more like it was meant for a locker. A brass one apparently made in the USA stated it was 'print screen', which made no sense. She didn't want to have anything to do with the menacingly- complex mass of teeth that proclaimed 'end'. That one couldn't be much fun at all. Scott was closest, wasn't he? Did the shrapnel get him? She became conscious of the fact that she was on the corridor outside the cockpit. It was not a good place to stand unsupervised normally, and probably more so bleeding.

Amy reckoned she needed two things right now- a first aid kit, and a lack of people in uniform. That would not be a good conversation. "Hi, sorry, do you mind giving me a hand here? You see my laptop's exploded and embedded parts of itself into my shoulder. Yes, it's half of a security deposit key. No, I don't want to explain why." Somehow she reckoned that wouldn't go down well. Help from others wasn't really an option, especially on a plane in her state. That state being 'not a passenger'. She tried another approach. After some struggle she concluded pulling out the key herself wasn't going to happen, and would probably be one of those 'medically bad decisions' no matter how she did it. A first aid kit and some bandages might be on the cards, though. She snuck a look through the curtains of one of the two corridors. Bored-looking passengers transfixed to a ménage-a-films completely failed to make eye contact while clouds raced past beyond windows. Good. She reached towards a cupboard marked with a promising green cross and tried upmost to not look dishevelled. A make-up consisting in part of basement parking dust didn't make that possible. Of course her hair hadn't recovered from the tap incident either. Just keep smiling and take the box. Of course it would be on the top shelf.

One pair of tiptoed steps and a soft close of the cupboard later she gave a nod to no-one in particular and disappeared again into the Cajun steam. The kit was added to her faithful shredded kittens, and she once more reached down to see if any more keys were available. She was sure as hell not using 'print screen', even if it was the best out of the three others so far. There was no telling what that did. She reached around a black flattened one which turned out to just have a single question mark on it, as well as F1 printed in a corner. Right, that made sense. Airplane mode was also F12 on the top row of the keyboard. There were still a good dozen or so in there. She pulled out something else. It was tiny, and looked like her old bike lock key from back home. Its tag proclaimed it was 'enter'. She turned and looked back at the cockpit. It had a lock that sure as hell wouldn't fit the massive 'end' key, but 'enter' it might do. Scott deserved her thanks and a hug, even if his promise of explaining it never happened. They weren't moving. Raynes was moving, but Raynes was blocked by the door.

Okay. She could start bandaging herself here, and risk getting caught like an idiot by somebody serving Cajun. She could use the keys again, and you know, risk suicide. Or she could go bandage herself in the loo. Now that she mentioned it, she'd been dying to go for ages. Amy Packard headed for the loo, closed the door and opened the first aid kit.

She found that the mirror didn't lie, but it was still terrifying. Maybe it was just her opinion, or maybe someone really had messed up and gone for 'Bloody Amy' three times in the ritual instead. You never knew with Satanists. Tallow candles do things to people. A second face-dunk of the day in freezing water had helped. She had underestimated the frankly ballistic force at which water shoots from an airplane bathroom and now everything was soaked. At least getting drenched again had helped against the heat. The heat cycled. It had lowered after the explosion, but was now steadily rising. The shoulder seemed sort of better, excruciating pain beat numb shock any day. Half a roll of bandage trailed against her foot. The adorably small pair of aircraft-friendly scissors were similarly relegated to the floor. The worst part had been biting open the plastic to get at the antiseptic cream. As for painkillers, she gave up when she realized it had a child-safe lid. Whoever made it that way deserved a high-velocity 'Insert' key to the groin. "Hey Frank, did you design the bottle so you need two hands to stop the pain? And wedging it does nothing? Oh, you did? Nice. That'll show 'em good." Fuck Frank and his imaginary job.

The smell of Cajun anxiety receded a few minutes ago. She prayed they'd rolled dinner past without a glance, and that no-one was too worried about the one loo which always seems engaged when you walk past it throughout the flight. At worst she could probably kick a trolley down an airplane corridor at some speed. She abandoned even the thought of trying to clean up the room with just one hand and took a peek out onto her corridor. There wasn't much out there. She slid the door all the way and was thankful there wasn't a queue staring her in the face. People seemed to be temporarily placated by chicken and whatever the mysterious vegetarian option was.

Amy's head span when she stepped away from the safety of the sink. She could be forgiven for rounding the corner to come face first with a set of opened cabinets, a trolley of after-dinner drinks and a woman desperately trying to make sure she didn't spill the tea like last time. Her pair of stylishly-cracked nails from many an aluminium cabinet were too busy fiddling with a hot-water dispenser and a set of teabags. The air-hostess was used to things being this infuriatingly small and cute. The trolley to her right boasted a set of rich tea packets more plastic than pastry and bite size muffins stacked in chocolate-chip pyramids. Amy beyond them boasted an ability to stand rigidly still. Her eyes widened a fraction at the spectacle. Comic timing and theatrics like that wouldn't help. At least a fortunate aluminium door and a preoccupation with hot drinks blocked the woman's vision for now. That said, the water was coming to a boil.

The hostess turned to a crouch to reach for a second pot intended for coffee. Determined eyes set on a well-brewed batch didn't spot shredded kittens backing around a corner. Amy couldn't rely on this weighty trolley edifice of sugar and as a sufficient distraction for long. She tried to the best of her ability to avoid a rising temptation to peek again. A squeak eventually signalled a rolling set of reinforced muffin piles trundling into the adjacent aisle. The remaining keys were sifted through. 'Page up' was unlikely to help. God knows what physical manifestations of 'tab' or '#' could be used for. Most of the others were equally cryptic, especially the letters. What the hell would a 'Y' key do? Would a 'K' key just produce cake? She put that mystery aside to settle later. As for the miscellaneous electronic car key she would prefer not to touch the buttons. Depending on which way on the tag was up the block symbol could mean either of two very worrying things. She had a pretty good inkling what it could do whichever way up was correct. With the trolley out of the way Amy passed the miniature kitchen and approached the cockpit lock. It was the moment of truth. She double checked the 'enter' key. At the very worst she supposed she might just startle the co-pilot. She put the key in the door. To her surprise it held in the lock.

"Excuse me, can I help you?"

Some asshole from the last shift failed to refill the armoured dessert tank trolley with mini-sugars. Apparently it wasn't their job. Leave it to someone else to get the sugar. Somehow the air hostess always felt she was picked to be 'someone else'. Now she had a crisis consisting of a man in 2B holding a coffee with rising anger. Maybe one day he'd be able to stomach it black without sugar. The girl facing the air-hostess here needed a cup even more. A blood transfusion wouldn't be amiss as a matter of fact. The words 'can I help you' had dissipated a while ago. Amy unfroze.

"Me? No, no I'm alright. Thanks." Amy twisted the key with her back to the door and waved her hand as if to say 'nothing's wrong, this is just my everyday like any other'. There was a brief moment of self-doubt from the hostess that comes with the uniform and the training mantra of 'the customer has some lee-way'. Wait, of course this passenger should be here. No, wait, she absolutely shouldn't.

"Miss, you can't be here. That's the cockpit. Are...are you alright? Is this your first flight?"

"Well, if you want to know the truth I don't feel too good." Amy pointed to herself and gave a sly look. The air stewardess stepped towards her, clutching her sugar. "I've been stabbed by a serrated piece of metal, so yeah. Perhaps not the best."

"What? Where are you sitting? How did this happen. Just stay calm-"

Amy shook her head. "I'm taking it well though, I think." She tried another smile. "I suppose you're right. This isn't the bathroom after all. I did suspect something was off." Amy leaned on the door as if for support.

The air-hostess was now convinced this woman needed more than one form of help. She looked to the mini-sugars for inspiration. She was caught off-guard, wedged between multiple different passengers who needed her attention.

"Wait there. Wait. Hold on a moment. Just stay there. I'll get help."

The uniformed gaze fell away and the stewardess she weathered mild turbulence and bobbed out of sight to an empty first-aid cabinet. She dropped the sugar on a side-table as she went. Amy took two steps back, turned the handle and glanced through the crack in the door behind her. No, it certainly wasn't the bathroom.

"Thanks, I've got to get going now," Amy called back. She pushed open the cockpit door and stepped backwards into a forest. The door was plastic aluminium on one side, tattered mahogany on the other. Looking at where the aircraft door and the other door joined together into one gave her a headache. She gave it a push to close and even mouthed 'sorry' at a stunned air-hostess about to rip into her about theft and the state of the bathroom. The door slammed shut and the sound of turbulence cut out. The doors unpaired. Back on the long-haul London to Singapore flight a stunned woman in uniform had to raise her voice over the cabin phone. No. The co-pilot hadn't seen whatever the hell she was on about. They were sure. No-one had opened the cockpit door. She left shaken and squeezed past her parked trolley check the seats for missing passengers. The flight was fully booked. No-one was missing, and the emergency landing eventually came an hour later in Warsaw.

***

The mahogany door and its opulent frame were gorgeously carved in geometrics, and it wasn't even the main entrance. It was a shame that the rest of the building on the hilltop had collapsed so spectacularly. The mahogany had opened to reveal rubble. If she was to guess she'd say the sandstone could've equally formed the building blocks of a temple or a bank in its heyday. Maybe the building could be seen as both in the minds of those in sharp suits or wearing enterprising cassocks. It depended on what your moral values were. That said, out here on a silent hilltop in the middle of nowhere would be an odd place to put your financial services. The grass, sharp sandstone edges, everything was tinted a light shade of purple from a burning sunset of a sun that looked far larger than back home. Purple and pink-leaved trees stretched out in a wide valley and climbed up the sets of misted mountains miles beyond. It hurt looking at the mountains and it wasn't an illusion. The sun and the sunset really were slightly purple, and the mountain range really did extend in every direction she looked beyond the forest. The grass was faintly green, but a green that felt tinged a bit unnatural. She walked around the temple-bank and found the main entrance along with its set of marbled steps. The angle was more or less right with the sunset in the left hand corner of her vision when she climbed to the middle of the stairs. Deep shadows in the middling distance fell dramatically where the forest gave way to a vast walled city in the valley before her. From what she could make out those marbled spires, citadels and red-tiled rooftops would have given fantasy writers a run for their money. She recognized the view instantly. She'd probably seen it hundreds of times but never in person. Usually when she looked at it bits and pieces of the city were obscured. She wished she had a camera to update the view to this resolution after all these years. For the sake of novelty she shifted a few steps further up to make her view as close to the original picture as possible. Nothing happened when she got to where she thought she should be standing, which was a bit disappointing. All in all this whole thing made for a bit of a strange way to interpret 'enter'.

Towards the top of the stairs the main temple-bank entrance deteriorated into squared blocks and mortar sprinkled with a dash of powdered roof tile. The mahogany side-door hadn't had a keyhole on this end. There weren't any other doors in sight. That could be a problem. She shaded her vision and squinted towards the pricey renaissance towers. There really must've been very little consideration for practicality or cost there. She leaned forward a few inches for a better look, and almost lost her footing. It took her another moment to notice that at this distance leaning towards the far-off buildings made no difference in how well you could make them out through the mist. It looked about eight or ten miles, maybe more, which struck her as a long way to walk for someone with half a security deposit key in their shoulder. On the bright side it wasn't painfully hot anymore here in the land of purple sunsets. In fact here the heat was gone, but that benefit was balanced by the stillness. There was no wind. Not a cloud. Or birds, or any wildlife at all. Purple-tinted foliage and renaissance (with a hint of art deco, looking at you, temple-bank) dominated absolute.

According to her watch it was still only around twelve o'clock in London. She made a quick mental calculation, got confused about which time-zones go forward and which go back and concluded that she should be somewhere in India, or the middle of Russia in terms of longitude at least. It wasn't either. For one, the sunset hadn't shifted at all, even when she tried to benchmark the bottom of the sun with a branch to see the small movements clearer. There was no point sitting waiting for it to go down if it refused. Not so much 'time is money' as 'time is slow blood-loss', so she took each step gently and tried her best to absorb most of the shock away from her bad arm. On the base of the steps she scraped out her notepad, folder and a thin primer book entitled 'Basics in Set Theory' from her satchel and piled them all reverently at the steps. They'd only be dead weight. She felt a bit bad, and returned to the pile to rip out the most important pages from their bindings. No matter whether it was a bank or a temple, she hoped her mathematical offering was well received. It could even be considered a blood sacrifice if the temple-bank was into that sort of thing.

Last of all the broken laptop emerged from the bag. It was far too heavy to lug around. The casing had split and was close to spilling its printed circuit organs over the grass. The whole thing rattled and a melted hole of jagged-edged aluminium lay in place of what had once been a keyboard. The screen looked like it had never been flat. Rather optimistically she tried turning it on as she balanced it on one knee. The screen stayed blank, and it made none of the usual crunching noises she associated with a boot-up. Yeah, that had been rather optimistic. It would have been pretty odd to see the same view on the screensaver and the real thing.

With her one good hand she reached up and threw the computer upwards against the marbled steps. Recycling be damned. Quite anticlimactically it bounced off four stairs above and slid down to her feet for the most part unharmed. Amy saved herself from further embarrassment and crouched down to this time pry back the casing at the seam with a hand and a foot. The computer may've been ungodly in its sturdiness, but Amy was on a mission here and willing or not the laptop split in half. She had most of her important things backed up on a USB lying next to a stack of unwashed breakfast bowls in her room, but there was a lot on that hard-drive she'd rather keep, not least of all an image of this world she was currently inhabiting but in screensaver form. She picked what she hoped was the right bent silver-coloured box and tore out the hard-drive's connections. Beneath it she discovered what had caused the rattling. It was a rather sly house key with a '5' printed on it. She supposed it could be useful in some remote way, like entering all buildings registered on Fifth Avenue in New York, or forcing people who were stabbed by it to give constant high-fives. Or some other weird double-meaning interpretation like 'enter' had been. The hard-drive was dropped into the hole-ridden kitten satchel, the key was stuffed with difficulty into her pockets with the rest. She could kill for a lose-fitting pair of baggy jeans with normal-sized pockets. Amy checked her bandage, swore and descended down the path into the fuchsia undergrowth.

***

They'd locked all the stairwell doors with Schofield's set of fire keys on all but parking and the fourth in preparation. They'd persuaded staff to evacuate the fourth floor stating there was a suspected terrorist in the building. Raynes was sure about that. Had they been ready a few minutes sooner they could've arrested them in the hospital room, but you had to check for accomplices, scour the building. The backup team had disabled the elevators ten minutes beforehand. Miss Amy Packard's regular house keys were in his coat along with the enamelled archery target keychain and all. But here he stood, with yet another glittering key reflecting through the parking dust. He thought to kick it, then though again and picked it up. She'd cost him half a magazine of premium subsonic ammunition. Worse than that, he'd have to take apart the whole pistol now and clean it from top to bottom. The whole nine yards, or in the pistol's case the full nine inches if you included the silencer. Unlike polishing steel, it's a bitch to get the ceramic rifling spotless and you can't use regular cleaning oils either.

"That wasn't a bad satchel bomb. A good attempt. I'll give it a seven overall" said Schofield picking himself up from the ground. "How about you Mr. Raynes? Out of ten. Come on." The huge man wheezed to his feet.

"A nine if you have to know."

Raynes read the tag on his newly-found key. He was getting quite a collection. Most were intact, even, and all had the same helpful block lettering. He didn't know what to make of a key that simply said 'shift'. He'd already collected 'escape' a few moments ago along with a bunch of others identified by various letters and numbers in a range of shapes and sizes. He'd have asked their three remaining captives, but they were too unconscious to do much right now. Go figure, gunshot wounds and shrapnel do that to you, even if they are caused by rounds marketed as a gentler, cushioning variety of ammunition with nice brass casing types largely ignored by metal detectors and radio scanners alike. He'd been given a whole two magazines of the stuff, plus a lovely box of rounds that he'd swiped from near the counter of a certain corner shop. He'd be keeping that box with its magazines, mainly because the designer for the subsonic ammo had thought to actually brand it with pictures of a blue sky, feathers and some cloud motifs against any better judgement.

Nearby two other Americans in plain clothing dragged April out of the basement and into a waiting van while another held the door. That was the first of three done.

"Where's the fourth? The sick one?" asked Schofield.

"She made a run for it up the stairs to ground. We lost her."

"Well, lost her as in dead? Like a medical drama, Mr. Raynes?"

"No."

"Shit."

Raynes took out his phone and showed his partner the product of his latest set of video requests from the NSA. It was disgraceful how much bandwidth these international downloads were going to cost him. They watched both camera perspectives side by side. One of the stairwell from moments ago. The other, a corridor on ground.

"Did they loop the corridor feed?"

Raynes double-checked the time-stamp, but he'd been assured that this was the original footage fresh off a hard-drive somewhere deep in the bowels of the hospital. The quality of the pictures on the feeds could only be described as 'granola' graininess. They were half-static and sufficient fibre. He fast-forwarded to the explosion and played it past the point where on one camera the door opened for the girl while on the opposite side it stayed worryingly locked. The video continued up to the part where it showed Raynes struggling with the handle and trying an ineffective door kick in pursuit. He cut the clip there. No need to relive that again. Raynes looked to the balding Englishman for a reaction and found Schofield had produced his reading glasses. That's how serious things were getting.

"They might've known we were coming. Why else make a bee-line for the fire escape?"

"They could've tried to be overly cautious. Virginia HQ thinks it's suspicious too, and with the data breach they're not sure what's been siphoned. They may have been informed."

"But why do it from a hospital? Why do a hack from here? And how? With a phone? Is it a distraction?" The man with the reading glasses took them off, put one end in his mouth and nibbled absently. The three captives had been given an injection to keep them dreaming, and each was well-bandaged, and zip-tied securely, he noted. Patrick Schofield reached into his coat and felt for the emergency cigar while his reading glasses hung from an unflinching frown. The cigar was cracked in half from his fall. Tobacco shards littered the pocket corners from his poor Cuban indulgence. He took the bent cigar and finished what the explosion had started by breaking the Cuban in two. Raynes declined. Schofield lit the shortened half, and thanked the two men that were getting started hauling Scott to the van. They had five, maybe ten minutes before the hospital was engulfed in uniformed police and sweet sirens.

"I want to go up take a look again upstairs, Schofield. Get a better idea, and think this through." said Raynes. "Also, I'm regretting that decision." With that the second cigar half was lit and handed over.

"Mark, we'll be back in a sec." The man holding the parking door open nodded. Raynes and Schofield ascended up the stairs and paused halfway as each turned out their pockets. Raynes left Ichor and his own phone once Mark was out of sight. Schofield followed and laid down his three phones on a step above. They continued up through the parking levels to the ground floor. Schofield tried the handle in vain.

"The cameras should be inactivated for another few minutes, so what I have to say doesn't leave here," said Raynes. "By now the hospital drives will be copied and wiped by Virginia, so what I just showed you has no evidence beyond the copy on my phone." He looked up to the stairwell camera. "We should be alone."

"Is the leash so tight? If they're listening then what's wrong with pen and paper, Paul?" asked Schofield.

"If we need it we can do that. Here. Look at these while I explain." Raynes held the cigar between his teeth and pulled out handfuls of blackened keys with pristine labels. "Read them."

"Where did you find these?" asked Schofield deadpan through his re-emerged glasses.

"They scattered after the blast." Raynes looked towards the camera and back to the door. "You see the pattern," he said.

"And she used one of these? To open the door?"

"The other side was not the hospital, Patrick. I know what a hospital looks like. I saw that door slam and that was not it."

Schofield leafed through the keys. He saw the pattern. 'Control' and 'escape' had caught his attention. He kicked cigar ash to the side and extinguished the stub on the railing. The stub found its way back into his pocket. There's only so much that a forensics team can wilfully ignore. "So, best case scenario, we're wrong, and these are to throw us off. Worst case scenario..."

"Worst case scenario is we can't explain this to the people who matter," said Raynes through a supressed cough. He still had half a half of a cigar left, and the curling smoke meant the atmosphere was starting to take a sharp turn towards film-noir.

"We'd better try this then" replied the one holding up a prospective 'F' that looked like it could fit. The Englishman turned to his door and found the key grit into place. Behind him a cigar end glowed a deep red. A jingling tag turned in the door and Schofield pulled.

"Well?"

"Nothing." He turned to face the cigar. "The lock's turning, but it won't open."

"The barrel's turning? Try a regular key."

Schofield obliged and rummaged around for his set of fire keys. Most British public buildings will open with a set, and emergency exits almost certainly. Ultimately it hurts hinge manufacturers who can't get paid again to replace kicked-in doors, but does stop use of battering rams on every call by firefighters. Schofield tried the door with more success, looked through the open frame to the corridor and held out his arms. "I have no idea. Both should work if the barrel turns." He looked through his key selection and tried another. Things by now really had gone full film noir with the cigar smoke. All they were missing was a raven-haired beauty to give them a case and maybe an office with shuttered windows.

"Well that's surprising, Mr. Raynes. It's completely the wrong size and yet it-".

Schofield vanished.

The American took a long breath with a line of ash on the edge of falling. Damn. Paul Raynes considered his options as he dropped his eighth-of a half-cigar through the centre of the stairwell into oblivion, forensics be damned. He was here alone, with no video or audio evidence, speaking one on one with someone after discharging his weapon, and then having that someone disappear. A number of reasonable assumptions could be made by a certain group of powerful people working on either side of the Atlantic in the state of Virginia about today. Quite a shame what he'd just witnessed wasn't reasonable. And it was maybe five minutes before cops were about on cue to show up. You couldn't really cover up a quiet evacuation of the fourth floor of a hospital, or disabling the elevators or the much larger evacuation after firing half a magazine of specialist subsonic ammunition. After a few still moments Raynes approached the door in silence. It was only a step or two. The tag of a silver key swayed. He recognised it, and twisted the lock without thought. It turned, but this time something happened. His vision went black.

"Oh. Nice of you to join me Mr. Raynes."

An American desperate for one of his strongest mints bent double leaning against one wall. It had nothing to do with the cigar after-taste. Raynes tried his best to keep the room from tilting and failed to stop the linoleum from coming ever-closer to his face.

"I was hoping you'd pull the key out first. How do you expect me to open the door from this side now with that crap lodged in door?"

"What the hell. Was that."

"The nausea should pass. I didn't think 'shift' would be literal, to be perfectly honest. Ended up teleported halfway down that corridor. You've not gone quite as far, but still a good thirty feet through the door and out this side."

Raynes spat shamelessly on the linoleum between heavy breaths and freed one hand to take multiple mints with difficulty. His muscles felt as if they'd been through a blender. And that meant on a high setting. He closed one eye to stop the double vision and read the tilting sign further down the corridor. Ground floor. He allowed himself to feel a little relieved he wouldn't have to explain two disappearances.

"Come on, get up. We haven't got the time, Paul. Mark and the boys are waiting. Start walking." Schofield hauled one of Raynes' arms over his shoulders and the duo began hobbling towards the next staircase on the opposite side of the ward. Thankfully they'd not had the time to lock an entire hospital-full of staircases, just those nearest. The American mumbled something through mint delirium.

"Yeah, I know. Let's hope they disabled the cameras across this side, too. Wiping's not enough." replied Schofield. He handed over a tissue, then thought better of it and gave him another two or three. They passed the sign for ground in the slowly-tilting corridor and struggled by a pair of modern full-length windows. Schofield looked towards the horde of hospital gowns he could see round the corner of the building that were waiting for the all-clear quickly moved on. Somewhere on the other side of the walls there might have been the wail of a distant fire alarm. Either that or the ringing from the satchel explosion was getting more musical.

"Hobble faster," said Schofield. He got a grunt which he reckoned was less delirious than the one before. Raynes held the tissues to his face, and had completed the transformation to a rich shade of pale. The Englishman shook his head and shoulder-barged the western staircase door with his CIA employee in tow. He let Raynes clutch the railing and climbed up to first.

"Mr. Raynes, I wish you'd pull it together."

"You're not alone."

Raynes let go of the railing with one hand and looked to his pockets for more mints. He struggled up the stairs and managed to hold a tin steady enough to spill only a few when he offered them. The walk across the first floor corridor back to the east staircase went much faster. Additional mints seemed to do some good. The corridor wasn't spinning any more so much as slanting at a steady pace. Distant fire alarms harmonized with approaching cop sirens. It wouldn't be your conventional law enforcement, either. Raynes didn't much like the idea of being tackled to the ground by full riot gear. His partner fumbled, fit a fire key to the locked stairwell and burst through. He never would have thought the fat Englishman could fly down stairs that quickly. They rounded the corner, and while Raynes struggled further down the stairs the Englishman disarmed the 'shift' key from the ground floor lock the same way you might remove a spent uranium fuel rod if you didn't care about personal protection. Maybe caution was good. Their insides wouldn't forgive either of them a second shifted trip so quickly. Neither would the riot police. Schofield held it up triumphantly.

"Believe it or not, I didn't know those existed", said Raynes pointing at the key. "I know what you're like and what kind of looks you give me. I wasn't briefed about anything like this."

"The Americans didn't make these? Well, I thought that was assumed knowledge."

"No."

"You didn't make these bloody keys somewhere deep in the Nevada desert under a full moon."

Raynes just tried to ignore that one.

"You know I think I could be persuaded believe you, even. Oddly enough." Schofield looked at the key as if it were about to explode again. He pointed the offending saw-toothed article up to the camera. "So, only we know what these do."

"If someone at HQ did know about this you wouldn't be talking to me. It would be Navari, or someone higher up. What about your side?"

"Good God, no. An operation of us, Mark and a team of four against this? Fucked up teleporting keys that take you forty feet down a corridor? Knowingly? I thought this was terror."

"So did we."

"And normally we like to keep cases like this away from the spotlight, same as you do." With that Schofield turned and clopped his way down another flight of stairs. At a level lower he struggled to bend and pick up his two phones and Nokia of death. Raynes pulled him aside out of phone earshot before he did.

"So, in that case..." Schofield pointed to the phones.

"Yeah. Everyone knows something's wrong, but not what."

"Keep it quiet for now?" asked Schofield.

"We need to figure out the rest in peace."

"Agreed."

Raynes watched Schofield take his three phones, then he followed and picked up his and Ichor. He could barely imagine the problems something like the truth would cause. People in dark rooms in Virginia as it was were starting to make calls to people in Washington about it in suspicion of the truth. They'd start turning up the lights soon.

Their stairwell to the basement parking level had been expertly cleared of terror suspects and roughly bleached. Mark was nowhere to be seen. Raynes opened the door to the parking garage and spotted the dark-tinted van waiting for them with the engine running. Schofield's hybrid lay parked carelessly somewhere nearby. An impatient Mark and another man sat waiting and both covered up the inevitable blood stains from their work under think black jackets. The van had its high-beams on in preparation and Raynes struggled to make out the licence plates. He walked round the back and checked they were diplomatic. They were, as requested. That would help against the onslaught of riot police travelling in the opposite direction and either way, he was pretty sure they were surrounded. He could do without the same awkward lines of police questioning this way, and it made parking a lot more convenient, too.

"Give me a moment, boys. I need to get something from my car." Schofield walked a few paces and opened the boot of his small hybrid, oblivious to distant sirens and six sets of stares, a few of which shifted nervously between him and the exit. Schofield reached deep and produced with difficulty a hard-plastic guitar case. Raynes could take a guess and suggest it wasn't as advertised. The huge man strode back and handed the case to Raynes. Damn, it was locked.

"It'll be days before I get that car back. All my jazz, Mr. Raynes, it's all in there, gone."

"Thank God."

"I think you meant to say 'oh no'," replied Schofield and awkwardly climbed into back of the van wheezing. His three captives were out cold strapped to the deck behind them. "Alright. Drive."