Archive of Our Own ^beta

Prologue

"If people can fly around and move things with their minds," said Adam Klaus, "what the hell am I going to do in the show?"

"I don't know," said Jonathan Creek. "Does it really matter?"

"Of course it matters."

"I really don't see it. Look, I know we say it's all magic, but nobody really believes that apart from the kiddies, and I can't remember the last time you did a show aimed at children. They know it's trickery and sleight of hand, they just don't know how we do it. And yes, they probably know that there's a woman in California who can fly, but they're not really going to think that she's taken time off from fighting crime to appear in a magic act. Unless we tell them otherwise they'll still assume it's skill, not weird mystic powers. And they're paying to see the skill."

"I hope you're right. If not we might be heading for hard times. We might have to tighten our belts."

"This is because I asked for a pay rise, isn't it?"

"Don't be absurd," Adam said glibly.

Jonathan wasn't fooled. "If you want me to design the best tricks, you've got to pay the going rate. When I think of the offers I've turned down…"

"All right, I'll think about it. Something might be possible…"

"With all of these Orphan attacks audiences are going to drop," Adam said nearly a year later.

"I haven't seen any sign of it," said Jonathan. "We've been sold out for weeks. People like to have their minds taken off things, and there haven't been any incidents in Britain for months. You know what, you worry too much. Not that long ago you were saying we'd be out of business because there were people with superpowers, and look how that one turned out."

"Why would that affect audiences? People come to see my skill, nobody really thinks it's magic!"

"Riiight… Okay, moving on, how's the new assistant working out?"

"Selene? Not a patch on Yasmin, but she'll do until Yasmin gets her leg out of the cast. Lovely figure, limber, looks fantastic in the slave girl outfit, good at following instructions, just a shame about her personality."

"You mean she won't sleep with you."

"Who said anything about sleeping?"

"Silly me, what was I thinking?" Jonathan said with thinly veiled sarcasm. "Okay, I've got to get a move on or I'll miss the last train. I'll take another look at the guillotine illusion, see if there's anything we can do to make it scarier, but I can't see the Hitchcock trick working without at least three bird trainers, even then they'll probably crap on the audience. Maybe you could revive the old Psycho stunt instead?"

"I suppose it's been a year or so…"

"I'll see if I can improve that one too. Talk to you next week."

As Jonathan pulled on his anorak he noticed Selene using a phone in the lobby. She was a slender grey-eyed blonde who wore surprisingly unflattering clothing off-stage, baggy jeans and a thick sweater despite the warm weather. "…taxi to Victoria… Yes, Victoria. Twenty minutes? You can't make it any sooner?"

"I'm headed to Victoria," said Jonathan, "I've got a taxi booked already, should be here in about five minutes. Want a lift?"

She eyed him appraisingly for a moment then said "…never mind, I've got a lift," and hung up the phone and picked up a small suitcase. "Thanks, that'd be great if you'll let me pay my share of the fare. You're a life-saver."

"No problem. Which train do you want?"

"The Caterham service."

"Should make it easily enough," said Jonathan, leading the way onto the street. "There's a couple of trains an hour."

"How about you?"

"Horsham, I've got an old windmill there. It's a bit of a commute, but at least it's a reasonable distance from Adam."

"He's not so bad," said Selene. "A bit handsy, but he didn't push it once I showed him how hard it is to get out of an arm lock." At his expression she added "I was on my school's martial arts team."

"Don't break his arm, he pays our wages. Bruising would be okay though."

"I'll bear it in mind."

The taxi arrived, and they set off for the station.

"If you don't mind me saying," said Jonathan, "you don't strike me as a typical magician's assistant."

"How do you mean?"

"You're not the model or starlet type, you aren't even a little bit star-struck around Adam, and you don't dress to impress off stage."

"You're very observant."

"Not really, I just like to know what makes people tick. My guess would be you're a journalist, or someone trying to size up Adam for some other reason. Maybe a private detective in a divorce case. You wouldn't be the first."

She smiled. "I did study journalism, but it's really very simple, I needed a job and a friend pointed me at Adam. I will admit that the whole business is fascinating, I never realised how complicated conjuring can be, and I was a bit disappointed he wouldn't show me how to take a rabbit out of a hat. But I'm not going to make a career of it, I just need something to tide me over for a few weeks, then I'm hoping I'll get a Civil Service job."

"That makes sense, I suppose." Jonathan wasn't really convinced, and made a mental note to keep an eye open for anything odd going on. Maybe she was working for another magician, some of Adam's tricks were still ahead of the competition. They spent the rest of the journey in a slightly uneasy silence, and parted in the station concourse as he ran to catch his train.

The next Caterham train wasn't for twenty minutes. Selene waited ten, to make sure he wasn't coming back, then walked down to the underground station and spent the next half hour changing trains and lines to shake off any tail, getting home a little after midnight. She checked the time and decided to make a call before she went to bed.

"Hermione? Luna here… Sorry, I've been made… There's a man called Creek that works for Klaus, I thought he was looking at me a bit oddly back-stage so I arranged to share a taxi. It turns out that he realised I'm not a typical magician's assistant… no, he thinks I'm a journalist or a private detective checking on Klaus… Jonathan Creek, Charlie Romeo Echo Echo Kilo. He designs the equipment Klaus uses… No, I don't think it's an immediate problem, but if we do ever decide to use Klaus, Creek might remember… Well, Klaus does look like L but it's superficial, I don't think it would fool anyone who knew him. The body language is all wrong, about all they have in common is king sized ego and thinking they're God's own gift to women. L might be able to impersonate him if he could pull off the illusions, but there's no way Klaus could double for L… Well, maybe at a distance, or if we needed a body and could disfigure it a little, but I think anything more than that is a non-starter, and he does have some friends and relatives who might notice if he went missing… Recommendations? Well, his usual assistant should be back in a week or so, I might as well keep on working until then. I've got the photos and voice prints we need, and sent in some hair samples for DNA testing. I'm not finding anything to suggest Klaus isn't exactly who he says he is. But Creek looks interesting, he spotted something wrong as soon as he saw me. It might be worth opening a file…"

Four Months Later

"Good afternoon, everyone," said Hermione Granger. She pressed a mouse button and the plasma screen behind her showed an aerial view of a large mansion in sprawling grounds with woods leading up to hills behind it.

"Our target is Gerald Grunning, managing director and majority share-holder of a company called Grunning's Drills. They make drills and precision tools, and have fingers in a lot of pies including the gas and oil industries, with experience in underwater construction techniques. We've found their products in several of the Collective bases we've raided. That wouldn't have been particularly suspicious on its own, it's a well-known company that sells globally, but in several cases we couldn't find any payment trail. If anything, money seemed to be flowing the other way. That got us interested in the company, and we found that a subsidiary had made some custom chips and printed circuits that have surfaced at Orphan sites, and aren't on sale generally. So we took a look at their upper management. Mostly they seemed okay, but all important decisions are made by Grunning. Again, nothing especially suspicious… except that we took a look at older records, and found that it was set up in the 1930s by his alleged grandfather, Gerhardt Grunning, who claimed to be a Swiss national."

"Should that mean something to me?" General Jack O'Neill asked over the Skype link.

"Probably not." She switched to a pair of grainy black and white photographs, both showing a man in his twenties, then another pair, then a third. Someone in the audience swore as he saw the third photograph, with the man on the right in German military uniform, an eagle and swastika on his chest. "Well spotted, Neville. In the pairs of photographs I've just shown you, the man on the left is Gerhardt Grunning. The man on the right is an Abwehr agent called Gerhard Grunewald, who may have been involved in the Nazi research programme that eventually led to the creation of the Breslyn Orphans. Facial recognition gives a ninety-five percent probability that they're the same person. It would probably be nearer ninety-nine if we had better photographs of Grunning." She took a sip of water then continued.

"It's our guess that the company originally supplied the Abwehr with economic and technical intelligence from Britain; fortunately Grunewald was killed and his headquarters destroyed during the war, and we think most of the plan died with him. The owners of record were a Swiss holding corporation and bank, and without Grunewald pulling the strings they simply let the British management run the place. There may have been an Abwehr agent in place somewhat later, when Germany tried to flood Britain with forged bank-notes a few thousand were found in areas near the factory, unfortunately nobody made the connection at the time."

"Eighteen years ago Gerald Grunning moved from Switzerland to the UK and took direct control of the company, with papers that identified him as grandson of the firm's founder and owner of the company. Someone got him a residence permit very quickly - much faster than should be possible for a non-EU citizen. Added to that, we've no real evidence that his parents ever existed, they're supposed to have died a couple of years earlier but everything we're finding looks like a cover. We got some hair from his washroom at the factory a few days ago, a DNA test showed that he's an Orphan. In itself that isn't damning, some Orphans weren't recruited or wanted nothing to do with the conspiracy, but putting it together with everything else, we initially decided that he's one of the Collective's money and logistics men."

The screen went back to aerial views of the mansion. "Mansions like that don't come cheap, and there are some discrepancies between the reconnaissance photos and the plans filed with Surrey County Council which suggest that it's been fortified to some extent. That wouldn't be necessary if his only role is financial, so we think that he also had a leadership role, probably their equivalent of a regional commander for the UK. With the collapse of the main Orphan organisation we suspect he may be trying to leverage that into leadership of the surviving European members of the Collective."

"It's plausible," said Jack, "the Midwich operation wouldn't have been possible without some serious preparation on the ground in the UK."

"Definitely. Again, it's possible that someone smoothed the path, we have people looking into it. The bottom line is that if we can take Grunning down he should be able to answer a lot of questions. The trouble is that he isn't on his own, and as I said the mansion he lives in is an easily defensible target."

"Are you sure you don't want Terawatt there?"

"Definitely not, they're ready for her. When we began watching the house we started picking up some weird interference on our scanners, it turned out to be leakage from one of the anti-Terawatt weapons they developed; that's what the circuit boards and chips were for. We're sure that they've got Faraday screening inside the walls but that's optimised for normal radio frequencies, the weapon uses much shorter wavelengths and enough of the signal escapes to be detectable."

"It shouldn't harm her if she doesn't change to her silver form."

"If she can't do that she loses a lot of her edge, and it's possible it's been set up as a trap for her. It shouldn't be necessary, I hope, we're playing on our home turf which gives us a lot of resources. But until we know it's safe I think it would be better to keep superheroes out of this one."

"I guess you're right."

"Okay. The purpose of this meeting is to brainstorm a plan of operation, hopefully one we can execute quickly. There's still a lot of money movement going on, and we need to shut it down fast."

"Let's start with an overview of the mansion and its defences…"

"Afternoon, mate," said Harry Potter, using a South London accent and breathing a carefully blended mix of garlic and stale cigarette smell at the gate guard. "Where's the oil tank?" He revved the fuel truck's engine slightly, and the exhaust belched a cloud of black smoke towards the gate house.

"What oil tank?"

"Your biodiesel tank," Harry said patiently, with the air of someone who was used to dealing with idiots. "I've got eight thousand gallons of fuel to deliver here, where do you want it?"

"I didn't know we used it," said the guard. "Eric, do we use biodiesel?"

Another guard came out of the gate house. "Not here, mate, it's all gas and electric."

"Then what the fuck did you order it for?" asked Harry.

"Got a delivery note?"

"Yeah." Harry handed down a clipboard and 'accidentally' revved the engine again. More smoke belched into the guard house, and the engine got louder.

The gate guard scanned it then said "This isn't for us, it's for Drummond's Farm."

"That's right, Grunnings Farm."

"No, DRUMMOND'S Farm," the guard shouted. "This is Grunning House. No farm here."

"Give me that," said Harry, and pretended to read the scribble on the delivery note. "Looks like Grunning to me."

"Get your bloody eyes tested, it's Drummond."

"Sodding hell. Okay, which way is it from here?"

"About three miles that way," said the guard, gesturing in the direction the truck had just come from.

"Bugger, I'll have to turn the sod round. Can I use your driveway?"

"No bloody chance."

Harry made a rude gesture and started to turn the truck around in the lane instead, putting noise-cancelling ear-plugs on as he did so. When the back of the tanker was aimed toward the gate he floored the accelerator, and rammed nearly twenty tons of truck and concrete-filled tank backwards through the gate. The steel grilles smashed open and spikes rose from the gravel, totally ineffective against the steel discs inside the truck's tyres. As he passed the gate-house Harry shot the nearest guard with a TASER; the other was smashed into the wall by the gate. A siren began to wail, and Harry heard bullets ricochet off the tank and the armoured body of the cab. He hit a button and the windows slammed up. He was reasonably sure he had their attention as he drove on, still in reverse, wincing as he ploughed into and over a parked Ferrari 550 Maranello, and flicked a switch to activate four 140-decibel air horns, loud enough to cause pain, disorientation and hearing loss. The ear-plugs gave him some protection, insulation in the cab walls and floor also helped, but it was still horribly loud.

At the back of the mansion camouflaged figures were advancing through greenhouses and outbuildings, taking up positions to cover the doors and windows, as two RAF Puma HC1 helicopters swooped in from the west, each dropping an SAS team onto the mansion's roof. Within seconds they were through and into the top floor. From there it was mostly supposed to be a mopping up operation.

"Mister Creek?"

Jonathan stood at the doorway in his pyjamas and a moth-eaten dressing gown, blinked at the early-morning sunlight outside the windmill, and at his unexpected visitors. "Selene? What are you doing here? Adam said you'd got a job in Brussels."

"Actually the name's Lovegood. Luna Lovegood."

"Like Bond, James Bond?"

"We don't talk about that." She ignored Jonathan's incredulous stare and held up an ID card, but Jonathan was more impressed by the Land Rover full of soldiers he could see behind her. "I'm sorry to turn up unannounced like this. We need your help."

"We?"

"I work for the Secret Intelligence Service."

Jonathan looked at the card more closely, then realised that he had no idea what a real ID card for the service should look like. About all he could say was that it seemed to be professionally made and laminated, and had some sort of holographic foil embedded in it. "Is that like MI-5? Special Branch?"

"It's sometimes called MI-6, but that's a bit of a misnomer."

"Let me get dressed. Want some tea?"

"That would be lovely."

"Get the kettle on, I'll make some once I'm properly awake."

Luna dug into a copious bag and pulled out a slim folder, and opened it to an official form. "Before I begin, I need to tell you that everything I'm about to tell you is covered by the Official Secrets Act 1911 to 1989, and I need you to sign a declaration to the effect that you're aware of the Act and that violation of the Act can result in fines, a term of imprisonment, or both. Plus we really wouldn't like you. Sign there with the date and print your name below it."

"I signed one a couple of years ago."

"Yes, I know, it's one of the reasons I'm talking to you. And now you need to sign it again. It's just a reminder, the law still affects you even if you don't sign. But if you don't I'm not allowed to tell you anything more."

"Wonderful." Jonathan signed it as directed. Luna carefully put it back in the folder and into her bag. Jonathan thought he saw the butt of a pistol as she did so.

"You know about the Breslyn Orphans?"

"A bit. Evil buggers that want to take over the world?"

"Some of them," said Luna. "I'm with the branch of the Intelligence Service that's handling the problem in Britain. We raided one of their bases yesterday afternoon, and we've run into a bit of a problem."

"A problem that needs me to solve it? This ought to be good." Jonathan finished pouring tea, and put the mugs, milk, sugar and half a packet of Jaffa cakes onto a tray. Luna took the tray out to the soldiers, came back to the table, and took a sip of her own tea.

"From what the police told us about you it ought to be right up your alley. When our troops moved in their leader sealed himself into a panic room; well, more of a panic bunker. It took us most of the night to get in, and when we got there the cupboard was bare. He's nowhere to be found." She clapped her hands together then flung them apart and said "Pfffft. Just like magic! So we thought of you. Eventually."

"Okay. Does sound up my street. Got some building plans, photos, that sort of thing?"

"We have, but they're not here, they're at our mobile control centre. We were hoping you could come and take a look."

"Come where, exactly?"

"Surrey. It's about an hour's drive."

"That's not so bad, I was worried it was going to be the Hebrides or something."

"Why the Hebrides?" Luna asked, nibbling a Garibaldi biscuit.

"It's the sort of place Bond villains hide, isn't it?"

Luna appeared to give it some serious thought, then said "Not in my personal experience. It isn't really handy for the shops, and with all the giant sea monsters the Orphans let loose it isn't a good time to be beside the sea side." She sang the last few words.

"Fair point. Okay, I wasn't planning to do much else today."

"Lovely." She finished her tea and added "We'd better get going."

"Okay. Just one question before we go, though, my curiosity is killing me."

"Oh, you don't want it to do that. What's the question?"

"Why were you working for Adam?"

"There was an idea that he might be an Orphan," Luna lied. "He's really a bit too old but he has the right sort of personality. Someone thought we'd better check him out."

"And?"

"He's just your everyday sort of self-centred narcissist, a bit of an arse but not an Orphan."

"How can you tell?"

"DNA tests. That's why I was there, to get some samples."

"And this is probably just me being a suspicious sod, but was Yasmin breaking her ankle part of your plan?"

"No, we just got lucky. Well, she didn't, but I did. Originally someone else was supposed to go in as theatre staff, but the assistant's job was a better way to get someone close to him."

"Okay… so… tell me more about your locked room mystery."

"Once we're on the road."

There was still a pall of smoke rising from one wing of the mansion, and Jonathan stared at the crushed car and the holes in the roof and walls as he climbed out of the Land Rover. Luna led him to a blue and white coach with dark glass windows, painted livery on the sides identifying it as belonging to Saga, a company specialising in travel for the over-fifties. Two armed guards on the door suggested otherwise. She whistled, and another woman about the same age stepped down from the bus. "Mister Creek? I'm Hermione Granger. I'll be briefing you and arrange any resources you need for this."

"Thanks," said Jonathan. "It looks like someone's been a bit… well, careless probably isn't the right word."

"Try thorough," said Hermione, leading him aboard the coach, which was set up as a mobile command centre. There was a big map table with plans of the building and its grounds, several computers, radios, and a lot of electronic equipment he didn't recognise. "How much did Luna tell you on the way?" asked Hermione.

"It was a bit confusing, to be honest," said Jonathan. "She told me a little about Grunning, but most of the time she was going on about a weird conspiracy theory, something to do with Emmaline Pankhurst actually being an agent provocateur working for the Tsar, and her sister Christabel spying on her for Lloyd George. Or was it Lloyd George working for the Tsar, and Christabel spying on him for Emmaline?"

"I was afraid of that," said Hermione after checking that Luna was still outside. "She does occasionally get… enthusiastic… about some of the odder lacunae of intelligence, but I thought that our request might come better from someone you already knew."

"It did. Boggled me a little, but never mind. Is her name really Luna Lovegood? It sounds like a Bond girl."

"It really is her name, but we don't talk about that," Hermione said, with a slightly annoyed edge to her voice.

"Like Fight Club? The first rule of spying is that you don't talk about spying? Or is it just James Bond?"

"Something like that. Fleming's books revealed a lot of information that could have got British agents caught or killed. He isn't popular in our community."

A man about Hermione's age, with unruly hair and a faint mark that might have been a scar on his forehead, looked up from one of the computers and said "I just thought of something; my uncle worked for Grunnings and I'm pretty sure he has shares. I'm guessing the company will fold once the news gets out. Should I tip him the wink? Would it be a security breach, or unethical?"

"Afraid so, Harry," said Hermione, "and I'll put that in writing if you like."

"Eggcellent…" His voice was momentarily a perfect imitation of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. "Now if the bastard complains that I didn't tell him, I've got the perfect excuse."

"Jonathan Creek," said Hermione, "this is Harry Potter, one of our agents. Harry, Jonathan is the expert Luna found us."

"Pleased to meet you," said Harry. "This is a bit of a mess, anything you can suggest would be very helpful."

"Can we start from the beginning?" asked Jonathan. "I'm still a bit hazy on the layout and sequence of events."

"Okay," said Harry. "I was basically the decoy in this operation; my job was to make a lot of noise and get everyone's attention, so that they had less warning of the real threats." He pointed a remote at a big plasma screen, and it showed the recorded view from four cameras in the truck he'd driven the day before. "We disconnected their phone line and activated radio, radar, and cell phone jammers about thirty seconds before I drove through the gates. I've checked the recording, they fired the first shots almost as soon as I was through the gates. That implies a very high state of readiness, which possibly means that they were gearing up for some sort of operation of their own." He talked Jonathan through the main details of the raid. "We've been watching movements into and out of the mansion for the last four days and we think that everyone else who was there was captured or killed. But Grunning is missing, none of the survivors are talking, and we think they're all lower ranks. We're still waiting on complete DNA test results, but there's a fast test you can do with a blood sample, it's usually reliable. It doesn't look like any of them are Orphans, they're mercenaries."

"The problem," said Hermione, "is that there are more beds than people we've accounted for. Some of them are guest rooms, but our best guess is that four or five more people were living here but left before we began surveillance. That may mean that they're out in the field somewhere preparing an attack."

"Could they be in the bunker Luna mentioned?"

"I was coming to that. We captured the hard disk recorder for their security cameras. I've edited together the bits that show Grunning's movements, and the view from a camera that covered the bunker entrance." The screen showed two views, both paused. The one on the left showed Grunning in an office, the one on the right a stretch of windowless corridor ending in an alcove containing an indifferent copy of the Venus de Milo. "Okay, the recorder stored a picture every two seconds for each camera. I'm going to run this in real time first, and pause if I need to say anything." For several frames Grunning sat at his desk, then looked to one side and clapped his hands over his ears. "That's when I arrived and things got very loud."

Grunning stood between one frame and the next, still covering his ears, and was moving towards the door when the windows exploded inward. "At this point the SAS troops were fast-roping down onto the roof from helicopters, with soldiers in the woods giving them covering fire." The left screen switched to a corridor with several men in civilian clothing carrying guns, moving in one direction while Grunning went the other way. "And that's the mercenaries deploying. Grunning gave them some sort of order here, you can see his mouth open and close, but you can't read lips from a series of stills."

Another camera switch, and Grunning was running down a flight of stairs, two at a time, caught mid leap while vaulting the balustrade to jump down to the next flight. "That's a fifteen foot drop. Not that difficult for someone who's been trained in parkour, Hermione and I could both do it, but he's making a very fast recovery, really keeping up the pace." Behind him another window exploded, and he continued downstairs. The left hand camera switched again, showing the same corridor as the right-hand view. In both of them Grunning ran along the corridor and did something to the statue, his body blocking the exact move. The statue, and the wall behind it, swivelled around to make an opening. Grunning went in and the wall continued rotating, revealing an identical statue and stopping to close off the end of the corridor again.

"We've checked the views from all of the other cameras," said Harry, "he doesn't go anywhere else, he doesn't come out, and nobody else goes through that entrance."

"What's behind the entrance?" asked Jonathan.

"More stairs down, with a bloody strong steel door at the bottom, like a bank vault. We found it about fifteen minutes into our search, but it took five hours to get it open. We could have probably done it in less, but the Orphans have used biological and chemical weapons, we didn't want to take any chances."

"And behind the door?"

"A suite of rooms; a living area, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and a big store room with enough food for a couple of months."

"And Grunning?"

"We found his clothes in the bathroom, and the shower running. No sign of the man."

"Any other exits?"

"Nothing," said Hermione. "We've been through there with every instrument we can think of, it really is a sealed concrete vault with walls a couple of feet thick. No other entrances, no secret panels or trap doors."

"Did you look under the bed?"

"Yes."

"Inside the mattress?"

"Yes. And inside the settee in the lounge, and anything else big enough to hide someone."

"How about the floor?"

"Carpet and tiles, with concrete underneath."

"What about air supply, heating and electricity, phones, that sort of thing?"

"There are air pipes in and out, about three inches wide, with laboratory-grade air filters and a pump to keep the air circulating, and a bloody big battery and a hand crank to keep it going if the power goes out. The other services are simply connected to the pipes and wiring in the house."

"I'm missing something," said Jonathan. "Wait a minute, you said there was a bathroom in the bunker?"

"That's right."

"What about the drains? Where do they go?"

"To the sewers, I suppose," said Harry.

"That can't be right," said Hermione, looking at the plans. "There is a sewer running along the lane, but it's only about two feet underground, and if I'm reading the contour lines right it would be well above the vault floor. The rest of the house is high enough that the drains just run downhill, but that can't be true of the vault. There has to be some sort of pumping mechanism, or a septic tank or something. And I think we would have heard a pump if it was running."

"It'd have to be a big tank," said Harry, "that shower was running full blast for up to five hours." He entered a few words into his browser. "Google says a shower needs twelve to fifteen litres a minute. Say it's fifteen, that would be nine hundred litres an hour, nearly five thousand by the time we got in. That's… okay, not that huge, it's a maximum of five cubic meters."

"Big enough to hold a man," said Jonathan, "If there's some sort of access you've missed."

"We've scanned all around the building with ground penetrating radar. There's nothing else underground apart from the vault and the usual pipes."

"Bugger. Okay, let me think for a bit. I've got a sort of idea but it isn't quite there yet. I need to have a look at the bunker. Can we do that?"

"We're still checking for booby traps and hidden compartments," said Hermione, "but we have a route cleared and secure. We need to put on hazmat suits before we go in, just to be on the safe side. Apart from anything else, they'll keep our hairs and epithelial cells from contaminating the forensics."

"Why hazmat suits? Usually forensics peope just wear white coveralls, bootees, and shower hoods."

"You remember the Downington blob? The silicates? The hate plague? Or what Umbrella Corporation had in their basement?"

"I was on the team that took out their British HQ," said Harry. "It was a bloody nightmare."

"Good point."

"Right." They took him to a tent near the front door of the mansion. The hazmat suit was light-weight but felt claustrophobic and smelled of plastic and disinfectant.

"Follow me," said Harry, "and don't go wandering off on your own."

Harry led them through the huge entry hall, up a flight of stairs, along a corridor, then down the stairway Grunning had used for his parkour exercise. "That's his blood on the floor," said Hermione, "it's one of the reasons why it couldn't have been faked." Eventually they reached the corridor with the entrance to the basement. The remains of the statues and the wall were in a pile a little way from the entrance to the bunker. There was a guard near the entrance, who checked their ID and the visitor's card that Hermione had given Jonathan, then let them pass.

"Okay," said Jonathan. "Obvious stupid question, has there been a guard on this entrance since you got it open?"

"Of course."

"And someone checking that the guard going off duty is the same person that went in?"

"Funnily enough, yes. The same way that we'll be checked when we leave. Nobody's playing games here."

"Good. Okay, let's take a look."

Harry led the way, past another two guards to the steel door, burned open with some sort of cutting tool. The main room of the vault was a pleasant well-lit windowless apartment equipped with a big TV, a bar, several oil paintings Jonathan vaguely thought he recognised, if only from reproductions, and everything else a megalomaniac might need for quiet relaxation. It looked like several angry gorillas had torn apart anything even remotely likely to hide someone.

"The bedroom's through here," said Hermione, "but we can't see any evidence that he went in there. The blood trail goes straight to the bathroom."

Harry peered in, and saw two forensics technicians carefully packing a bloody suit and underclothes into evidence bags. Beyond them the shower door was open, the only sign of use a slight drip from one of the nozzles and a small sachet on the floor that had once contained shower gel.

"So with half the bloody army chasing him he rushes in, shuts the only exit, and goes to take a nice relaxing shower?"

"He was bleeding badly," said Hermione. "People don't always think clearly when they're injured. He must have stripped off fairly quickly, or the clothes would be even bloodier."

"Maybe. How was he planning to get out of here?"

"Wait us out and hope we wouldn't find the vault, I suppose. Sooner or later we would have left."

"Riiight. He comes along the corridor, leaving a nice bloody trail behind him, which ends right at his secret door, and hopes that nobody will notice."

"It's a good point," said Harry.

"Here's another," said Jonathan. "Why did they have a camera watching the corridor, when it would record anyone using the entrance?"

"Hell!" said Hermione. "He must have wanted us to be sure he was in here. But why? And where the hell is he?"

"It could be the original plan was to trap Terawatt somehow," said Harry. "If we hadn't known that they were equipped to block her powers she might have taken part in the raid."

"Block her powers?" said Jonathan.

"Without getting technical, there are ways to interfere with some superpowers. They had a jamming device which could have harmed her."

"That makes some sense, I suppose," said Hermione, "though you'd think that the middle of an armed assault wouldn't be the best time to try something like that."

"On that your guess is as good as mine," said Jonathan. "Could they have used the vault to distract you from something else. A hiding place, maybe, some way he can slip back out while everyone wondering where he went or staring at the shower?"

"We've checked every inch of the place. There's nothing."

"Okay, let's try something else. You've looked at the shower, he left it running. By now any evidence he left there is long gone down the plughole. What if that was just a distraction, to make you think that it was the act of showering that was important. What if he was washing away evidence of something else, like a way out. What's underneath the shower?"

"We already discussed that, probably some sort of drainage pump. Why?"

"Because the grout around the shower plinth and the tiles at the back are still intact, which means you haven't had a look. Humour me. Get some tools in, let's see what's what."

Ten minutes later a soldier in a hazmat suit came in with a sledge-hammer and started to smash the porcelain plinth. On the third blow a large chunk vanished downwards, and something began beeping.

"Shit!" said one of the technicians, "That's the chemical hazard sensor. Everybody out, fast!"

They hastily retreated to the corridor, and the technician set up a sniffer device with a long sampling tube and cautiously went back in. "It's coming from the shower, all right… okay, that's odd." He looked at the display again, pressed a couple of switches, and waited while it took in more air, then bubbled the air through a small vial of reddish fluid that looked like dilute blood. The liquid turned silvery for a few moments then clear, with some grey sludge at the bottom of the vial. "I thought so. It's GC-161!"

"What's that when it's at home?" asked Jonathan.

"The chemical that gave Azure Crush and a lot of other metas their powers."

"Not Terawatt?"

Hermione hesitated, then in a low voice said "Officially we have no information on the source of her powers, and the American authorities would prefer that we don't speculate."

"In other words, I might think that but you couldn't possibly comment." At her barely perceptible nod he gave a nod of his own, then went on "So Grunning used that stuff to give himself powers and escaped?"

"Probably not," said Hermione. "Please remember that this is classified information, there are some innocent Orphans out there and it could hurt them. There are a few problems with the Orphan genome. One of the big ones is that GC-161 almost always kills them. Usually they turn into a sort of silvery liquid, the way Terawatt can, the difference is that Orphans just… well, disintegrate. The fast test for Orphans is to mix a drop of their blood with dilute GC-161 in saline solution to see what happens. Normal human blood cells mostly don't react, or go silvery but turn back to normal after a few seconds, Orphan blood cells disintegrate. It works the other way too, we can use a suspension of Orphan blood cells to test for GC-161. That's the test Sergeant Robinson just ran."

"Where do you get the blood cells?"

"That's classified. But like I said, not all Orphans joined the conspiracy."

"If he was in the shower and that happened he'd… well, he'd go down the plug-hole, I suppose," said Harry.

"Okay," said Jonathan. "I think I may have been looking at this all wrong. I was thinking this was escapology. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it's a locked room murder mystery."

"There's a pump under the shower," Harry said an hour later, when they were back in the bus. "A very quiet one, which is why we didn't hear anything. Everything that goes down any of the drains in the bunker ends up pumped out and into the sewer."

"How wide is the pipe?" asked Jonathan.

"Three inches."

"Then he didn't get out that way. Have you found out how the GC-161 got in?"

"It was in the shower gel sachet," said Hermione. "Someone went through the top layer of the box of sachets in the storeroom and injected concentrate into all of them, then covered the holes with silicone sealant. There was a little bit left in the sachet, when we started smashing the shower some spilled out."

"Nasty."

"Very. Terawatt told me about someone she saw die that way in India, it sounded like it was pretty horrible."

"So we're looking for someone who had access to this bunker and wanted to kill Grunning. Who else knew about it?"

"Potentially anyone with access to the house," said Harry. "We smashed the statue and the wall to get in, but on the video it looks like it was a simple catch to open it, you can see that Grunning is only standing there for a second or so when he goes in so it can't have been very elaborate if you knew how. The vault door is a combination lock so it had to be someone with the combination, I suppose."

"He was probably paranoid about his safety," said Hermione, "so there wouldn't be many people in the know."

"I'm missing something," said Jonathan. "Why booby-trap the vault, not his normal bathroom? Actually, has anyone checked that?"

"I doubt it," said Hermione, "most of the forensics has concentrated on his office and the bunker."

"The more I look at this the stranger it gets. If the killer only booby-trapped the vault, then he would only be killed if he had to use the vault. But if he's hiding in the vault something must have gone badly wrong, so why kill him?"

"I can think of one possibility," said Harry. "Grunning could be a figurehead, with someone else really pulling the strings. We've confirmed he's an Orphan from the blood traces we found, but maybe he was just the money man, with someone else around to do the dirty work. Whoever that was might have Grunning positioned to take the blame if anything went wrong."

"We haven't found any other Orphans," Hermione pointed out.

"Doesn't mean there weren't some around. We need to get more information from the mercenaries. They're really hard core, the interrogators aren't getting anywhere."

"Con them," said Jonathan. "You took blood samples to see if they were Orphans. Maybe you could pretend to have found out they've all been exposed to something really nasty, like… oh, like a virus that can cause sterility. It's something blokes might worry about, and they wouldn't spot any obvious symptoms. Or something like a slow version of the stuff Umbrella Corporation used, and they're all turning into monsters. Pretend you're worried it might spread, and need to capture the big bosses to get the antidote."

"I like it," said Harry. "Can we make it convincing?"

"I couldn't sell it, but if you can find someone to play the doctor convincingly it ought to be doable."

"Normally I'd do it," said Hermione, "but they've already seen me working as an agent. How about Elvis Black? He took biochemistry and bacteriology at uni, so he knows what technobabble to use, and he was in OUDS. He isn't actually a doctor but it might come across better coming from a 'scientist.'" She mimed the quotes.

"If we can't find someone better," said Harry. "As a first step put their guards in hazmat suits, that ought to put the wind up them a bit."

"We still need to know why he was killed," said Jonathan. "I'm betting that the answer's somewhere in the bunker. Maybe he's been sleeping with the wrong woman, or the wrong bloke. Maybe someone else wants to be the boss. Though given how that's ending up for the Orphans, you'd…" Jonathan tapered off into silence.

"You've thought of something?" asked Hermione.

"Think of the Orphans as a sinking ship. They've lost most of their power and organization in the last few weeks, and what's left is a shambles where every Orphan that's remotely capable is going to try to take control. They're going to be fighting and killing each other, and probably waste everything have left on in-fighting. I think we're agreed that Grunning is the money man, not the overall commander, but there's no real evidence of another boss here. Maybe it was someone who was killed when you went through the Umbrella base, or someone that was captured or killed in South America. That leaves Grunning holding the money. Is he going to use it to bankroll a power-grab, or would he prefer to take the money and run? What's been happening to their money since the big battle?"

"It's going to take a few hours to find out."

"You're right, I think," Hermione said towards the end of the afternoon. "Grunning stopped funnelling money to the rest of the conspiracy within a week of the Tepui operation. He's been liquidating assets, so quietly that it didn't show up in the initial reports."

"I thought so," said Jonathan. "How about the mercenaries?"

"Elvis is still working on them," said Harry. "They've all been through a nice thorough medical, and for some reason they're all starting to feel a bit under the weather in their cells."

"Should I be hearing this?" asked Jonathan.

"Oh, we're not doing anything nasty to them, we don't want them to feel really specific symptoms. Just a bit of suggestion and repeated questions about their health. And a couple of our men apparently taken ill where they could see it…"

"Nice."

Harry took another call, and added "By the way, the master bedroom and bathroom are clear. No GC-161 or other nasty surprises."

An hour later Hermione took a call then said "One of them just made a statement. The bottom line is that Grunning had them watching out for a hostile takeover, not getting ready to launch one."

"So maybe someone spotted what he was up to and killed him for that," said Harry. "A mole for a rival faction, or something of the sort. What about the people we think are missing?"

"They were pulled back to South America before things went down there."

"So there's nobody missing, no horrible plots, just greed, and someone vanishing from a… Oh, bloody hell. Have you got his credit card statements handy?"

"Here," said Hermione.

Jonathan leafed through them for a couple of minutes, then said "I need to make a phone call. Don't worry, the person I'll be calling doesn't need to know what it's about."

"Go ahead," said Hermione, handing him a phone.

Jonathan checked his address book, then dialled and after a moment said "Mabel, this is Jonathan Creek, I work for Adam Klaus. I need a favour. I've got a name, a credit card number, and a statement that says he paid some money to your agency about eighteen months ago. Can you check that far back? You can? Lovely! Okay, I need to check what it was for, verify what he told me. The name is Grunning; Gerald Grunning. I'll spell it out…"

A few minutes later he ended the call. "Can I take a look at Grunning's office? Or the house's library if it has one?"

"Let me just check, said Hermione." She made a quick radio call. "Okay, the office is safe, so is the library. What's this about?"

"It's about me pulling a rabbit out of a hat. You don't expect me to explain it before I do the trick, do you?"

"Let's see now," Jonathan said a few minutes later, looking around the library. "You can usually learn a lot about someone from the books he reads. Business, business, law, business, Encyclopaedia Britannica, art, art, porn, art, detective stories… ah, here we go." He knelt and started going through the titles of the books in a dark corner. "Conjuring: A Definitive History by James Randi. The Lives of the Conjurors by Thomas Frost - Christ, that's the first edition from 1876, it's worth a fortune. Reprints of Houdini and Blackstone, The Illustrated History of Magic, The Prestige. Thought so."

"What do you mean?" asked Hermione.

"He's studied magic. The whole thing's an illusion. And it's not just a coincidence that he has the books, they weren't here when he moved in. I remember seeing the Frost book in an auction at Christies three years ago, I'm pretty sure this is the same copy, and it's a new edition of Randi."

"Except he did go down those stairs and never came back. If you go through the camera footage frame by frame you can see that his trousers are ripped by some of the flying glass; the clothes we found in the bathroom are torn in the same place, and there are shards of glass all over them. We have a continuous record from that camera until we found the entrance. There was no way he could fake it in advance and sneak out or something."

"That's what makes it such a good trick. I'm pretty sure he had most of it set up years ago," said Jonathan. "He just tweaked it a little with a gimmick he got from Adam's show last year. That's what I was checking, he bought the ticket on his credit card. Let's go down to the bunker again."

"I knew that there was a reason why the shower was bugging me," said Jonathan. "It's because one of the tricks I designed for Adam is a shower stunt. You put a woman in the shower and make it look like she's showering, but of course what they're actually seeing is a shadow on the shower curtain, not the real woman. Then Adam does the Psycho thing with a big knife, the shower curtain falls down, and hey presto, she's gone."

"I think I get the idea," said Harry. "The shower is a distraction, that stops the audience noticing something else? Are you saying it's stopping us from looking somewhere else in the vault? We've moved everything, checked the floors, walls and ceiling for trap doors, broken open everything that could possibly hide a man."

"You're thinking too small," said Jonathan. "It's not the shower that's the distraction. Is that sledge-hammer still around? Good… Now come over to the vault door, I want to show you something..."

They followed him back out. "It isn't the shower that's the distraction. It isn't even the bathroom that's the distraction. It's the whole vault that's the distraction." He walked back fifteen feet and swung the hammer at the bottom step, listened to the dull thud, then banged the next.

"Mister Grunning," he shouted, "It must be bloody uncomfortable hiding under there, and if you don't come out nice and slowly I think they're probably not going to be gentle about getting in."

There was a long pause, then the fourth, fifth and sixth steps silently swung down through ninety degrees, revealing a cramped chamber and Grunning, his hands raised, wearing a one-piece hazmat suit, the hood removed, and looking thoroughly miserable.

"Lovely stagecraft," said Jonathan. "When they let you out of prison you really should think about taking up conjuring professionally."

Epilogue

"It's really pretty simple," said Jonathan. "The idea was to make you sure he'd gone into the vault, been murdered and gone down the drain, so he could make a discreet getaway without anyone looking for him. So he goes in there and undresses, pulls on the hazmat suit to make sure he doesn't leave any tracks, opens the sachet, and leaves the shower running. Then he goes out again, locks the door, and hides under the steps. He had a packed suitcase with everything he needs to travel, a chemical loo, and enough food for a couple of weeks. Sooner or later you would have probably given him an opportunity to get away."

"Why didn't he just drive to Heathrow and leave the country?" asked Harry, "Why go through this elaborate charade?"

"That's obvious," Hermione said impatiently. "It wasn't just us he wanted to fool, it was the other Orphans. If he just vanished they would have known he was out there somewhere with the money. If we say he's been murdered they'd probably think that we've killed him ourselves, or maybe hidden him somewhere, either way there isn't much point looking for him."

"It wouldn't amaze me if Grunning did something to tip you off in the first place," said Jonathan. "Maybe he realised that they were going to lose and wanted to make a clean getaway. Or maybe he just wanted to pull off a really elaborate conjuring trick."

"I can see why his hiding place had to be there," said Harry. "A concealed compartment anywhere else would have shown up on the ground penetrating radar we use for searches, but the stairs were supposed to be there, and the compartment just looked like part of the structure."

"What I don't get is how he'd know when you left."

"When they put in the vault they strengthened the foundations," said Hermione, "and he had some microphones buried in at strategic points, wired to a nice little battery-powered amplifier in his hiding-place. He would have heard the footsteps of anyone moving around anywhere in the building."

"Very nice. I'll have to remember that one."

"And he would have got away with it," Harry said with a grin, "if it hadn't been for us meddling kids."

Hermione sighed, looked apologetically at Jonathan, and said "We haven't discussed payment yet. What's your normal consultation fee for something like this?"

"I don't really work like that, it's more that I like solving problems, and normally a friend writes up the story and gets a few quid from the papers. I know that's not possible this time. But if you want to give me something as a memento, there's a copy of The Lives of the Conjurors in Grunning's library, he really won't need it where he's going…"

"I'll have to okay it with our superiors, but if I were you I'd clear a little space on your bookshelf…"

End.