The Female Charm (9 page)

She carried it
through to the living room and dunked it into her handbag. As much
as she wanted to figure out what it was for, if she didn't leave
now she would be late for her lesson.

Once she was
walking on the usual route to the fitness centre, Amelia opened the
envelope that had been with it.

NAA DD:DD WEEE
BB:CC

A grin spread
across Amelia's face. This was what she'd needed the three previous
numbers for. But she hadn't seen anything for D or E yet. The smile
was immediately replaced by a frown. It was possible she'd missed
her last two clues.

Before she could
decide what else she'd seen that might be a clue, Amelia arrived at
the fitness centre. As usual, Tom was already changed and waiting
for her to begin.

She hurried into
the changing room and locked away her belongings. It wouldn't be a
good idea to enter into a lesson with Tom with something else on
her mind. She'd done that once and regretted it until the bruises
her distraction had earnt her had faded from sight.

After a
half-an-hour warm-up Tom spent an hour putting her through her
paces practising all the moves he'd taught her. Now that she'd been
learning for several months, he was being more picky with her exact
stance, as well as the precision she put into each attack and
block. By the time he told her to relax, she panted and her muscles
ached.

“Sit for a minute
with me and close your eyes,” he said and plonked himself down on
the floor in front of her, crossing his legs. She mimicked his
position and immediately felt the relief in her calf and thigh
muscles, now that they weren't supporting her weight.

He stared at her
for a few seconds until she remembered that he'd asked her to close
her eyes, as well. A few seconds later, she was blind to anything
but the bright light of the sun streaming through a side
window.

“I want you to
tell me when my hand is within an inch of you,” he said.

“Without opening
my eyes?”

“Without opening
your eyes.”

She raised her
eyebrows at the request, but steadied her breathing so she could
focus on the rest of her senses. It wasn't the first time Tom had
done something odd for the second half of their Saturday lesson so
she knew to trust him.

Before she could
properly focus, she felt Tom's fingers brush past her cheek. She
flinched but it hadn't hurt her, merely taken her by surprise. A
minute later he tapped her ankle.

She sighed and
doubled her effort to focus, but after the fifth time he gained
contact with her skin before she could sense him, she opened her
eyes.

“Did I say we were
done?” Tom gave her a serious look.

“I can't do it,”
she replied and glanced at the clock. Immediately she groaned.
“That wasn't even ten minutes. It felt like ages.”

Tom laughed.

“Close your eyes
again. We'll try just a few more times.”

She huffed out her
breath but obeyed him.

“The trick with
this isn't just to rely on only your sense of touch to feel me
getting closer. It won't warn you in time. You need to use your
sense of hearing and smell. To some degree you'll even use your
sense of sight. There's enough light in here that some movements
will cast a shadow. You need to detect my movement with every sense
you have.”

“Okay.” Amelia
calmed her breathing again, and this time she focused on her
hearing. It didn't seem to help. Three more times he tapped her or
brushed past some exposed skin. She switched her focus to trying to
smell a difference.

The next contact
came as unexpectedly as the rest had, his hand brushing past her
knee cap. She didn't let this deter her and focused on the
background smell of the gym. Then the smell of sweat and cologne
appeared.

“Now,” she said, a
second before his finger tapped the end of her nose.

“Good. I hope you
smelt that one?”

She nodded.

“Try a different
sense for the next one.”

A few seconds
later she thought she saw a shadow moving over her eyes.

“Again,” she said,
snapping the word.

“Good. How did you
detect that one?”

“With sight. You
cast a shadow.”

“All right. It's
the sense I want you using least at the moment, but that's the sort
of thing that helps you when it's almost dark. Let's try one more.
See if you can hear it this time.”

Amelia didn't
pre-empt any more of Tom's touches; instead, she grew more and more
frustrated as time and time again he surprised her.

“All right. I
think that's enough. Take a break for a moment, then we can
spar.”

“What does all
this have to do with martial arts, Tom?” she asked when he handed
her a bottle of water.

“Directly, it's
not part of the course, but I'm not just teaching you to fight. I'm
training you to cope in dangerous situations. A lot of those
situations will need other skills for you to survive, not just how
to beat up the bad guys. You'll need to know what to do in any
situation if you want to do anything of any importance for Myron.
He's not an easy man to work with.”

“You sound like
you've worked with him quite a lot,” Amelia replied, fishing for
more information. But Tom only grinned.

“None of which I
can talk about, as you should never talk to me about anything he
gets you to do. The only thing I know about you is that you're a
damn fast learner and Myron seems to trust you. I may be damn
curious about what he's training you for, but I can never know.
It's safer for both of us that way.”

“You think I'm in
danger, then?”

“Myron pretty much
is
the UK government. Just knowing him puts you in danger.
Dozens of foreigners and spies could see you with him and think you
know more than you do, or find out you do know something they want
to discover for themselves. And Myron has to tread carefully with
other countries. He won't start a war to protect just one
life.”

A shiver ran down
Amelia's spine. Although she'd considered that being around Myron
was dangerous – it was even a little dangerous being near Sebastian
– she'd never thought that she'd be in danger just because she
might be seen with him. It put her trip to Scotland with him in a
whole new light.

“What do you
advise?” she asked a moment later.

“Whatever you do,
don't betray Myron's trust... Now come on, time to spar. You'll
come to no harm on my watch.”

She nodded and
tried to push the thought from her mind. If trouble was in her
future somewhere, the best thing she could do now was train, and
hope she'd learnt enough by the time it did come. In short, she had
to trust Myron.

After twenty
minutes of sparring with Tom, Amelia felt her concentration slide.
Seconds later, his fist smacked into her torso, getting through her
defences much more easily than it usually did.

“Ouch,” she said
as he backed off. A wince crossed her face as she felt the damaged
ribs. It was going to give her a very nasty bruise.

“You lost focus.”
Tom didn't look pleased.

“I'm shattered. I
didn't get much sleep last night and I was... busy for a very long
time yesterday.” Amelia stumbled over her words, remembering what
Tom had said about not telling him anything only half way through
the sentence. No one else should find out from her that she was in
Scotland with Myron the previous day.

“We'll stop now,
then, but you'd have lost a real fight if you'd let your
concentration drop like that.”

“In a real fight
I'd have had adrenaline to help.” She grinned her reply but Tom's
disappointed shake of his head wiped it off in less than a
second.

“To begin with,
the adrenaline might help you, but whoever you're fighting would be
pumped with it too. Mostly, all adrenaline does is tire you out
even quicker. You shouldn't ever need it to win anything,
Amelia.”

“Noted.” She
sighed and straightened her body. There was always something new to
learn.

“Here.” Tom
reached out to her, a small envelope in his hands. “I was told to
give you this today.”

“From him?” she
asked. He nodded as she took it. She turned it over to open it.

“Not here. I don't
want the chance to accidentally see what it says.”

“Until next week,
then.”

He nodded his
goodbye and gave her a small bow which she copied. As soon as he
was gone, she sat on one of the wooden benches and tore open the
envelope.

E:
48/2(9+3)=

“Well that's not
very difficult,” Amelia said out loud to the empty room. Shrugging
in disbelief at the ease of the sum, she grabbed her water bottle
and headed back to the women's changing rooms.

It was only once
she was part-way dressed that she realised this was clue E. She had
no idea what D had been.

With all the
current clues in hand and an empty changing room to hide in, Amelia
decided to try and solve her puzzle now. She pulled the wooden box
out of her handbag and right away she noticed the arrow on it had
moved to the other side.

As she looked over
the letter that had come with it again, she realised she was
holding a reverse geocache. The clues so far were the coordinates
she needed to take the box to so it would unlock and let her
inside. She chucked everything back into her handbag and finished
getting dressed. She knew just the café to have a cup of tea in, so
she could finish figuring out where to go to get her box to
unlock.

A fire burned
merrily in the grate in Mycroft's study while he sat as his desk
with his laptop open in front of him. He wasn't really working yet.
He'd only got back that morning from Scotland, and after destroying
the physical copies of the leaked financials, he'd spent another
hour probing through all the phones and computers owned by
McGregory and Kendel to ensure no more copies existed anywhere.

McGregory had been
naïve enough to destroy everything himself, evidently as
unambitious as he'd seemed, but Kendel had tried to keep a copy on
an external hard drive. He'd just been stupid enough to leave the
hard drive plugged into a computer. Mycroft had deleted it for him
and then gone to bed.

Today he was
dealing with a few minor internal affairs between three MPs who'd
fallen out over some bill they tried to draft. All of them were
wrong, which made it an easier problem to fix. If one was right, it
was always harder to convince the other two they were wrong. After
writing a brief fourth point of view, he emailed it to his
secretary. She would ensure it appeared to come from a fictitious
other expert.

Mycroft raised his
eyebrows as he saw the next email in his list. It was from one of
the men he'd tasked with Amelia's latest challenge.

Message
delivered to person described via a rose. Stunning woman. Is she
one of ours or is she off limits?

He clenched his
fists at the cheek of the man before he realised what he was doing.
Immediately, he recomposed himself. The question wasn't worthy of a
reply. It may not have been an official task but the agent should
have approached it as such.

Technically, she
was neither. He'd laid no claim to her and she wasn't an official
agent of theirs or off limits because she was another country's
agent, but Mycroft felt tempted to reply that she was unavailable.
If it wouldn't have implied she was an agent, he'd have already
done it.

Instead, he sat
back and summoned the housekeeper to make him some tea. It was a
little early for his midday tea but he'd upset his routine the day
before and would take a few days to fully adjust back into it.

While he sipped
the hot Indian tea, Mycroft thought over his plans for the day.
Currently he had none, but if Amelia solved her latest problem soon
enough he planned to bring forward her final task to this evening.
He had nothing else pressing at the moment, even if there was
plenty he could do with his time.

Given the message
he'd just received, he was a little concerned Amelia might read
more into it than was wise, but she'd been reading more into the
relationship between them since they met. The rose would only have
made this worse, but he knew he could put her in her place if need
be. The next time she flirted with him, an obvious rejection would
set her back a step or two. It would be simple.

Mycroft was just
placing his empty teacup back on its saucer when another email came
through. He smiled when he saw the sender. It seemed Kendel had
noticed the missing documents.

You really are
thorough. I guess I have no choice but to trust that it really is
for the best, despite my desire not to. I do have to thank you,
however, for an inadvertent gain from that article. Our chief was
so impressed with it he gave me a pay rise.

A small amount of
satisfaction rippled through Mycroft. It seemed Amelia had plenty
of written talent, and he had her completely at his disposal. It
was always good to have people who could be trusted with tasks of a
certain type. It meant he could do less of the mundane and focus
more on the strategy behind everything. Anonymous managing from his
own desk was always something he'd preferred.

He'd make sure
Amelia was rewarded as well. The perfect opportunity would present
itself after the next task. All he had to do now was sit and wait
for her to unlock the box he'd had stashed in her house.

***

The waitress in
the café smiled with recognition as Amelia sat down at her
favourite table inside. She could see the entire set of tables, and
despite her being there to solve Myron's latest puzzle, it made her
feel at home.

As soon as the
waitress placed her tea on the table and started walking away,
Amelia pulled all the letters she had out of her bag and spread
them out. She knew for sure what two out of the five clues were. So
she wrote them into the message which had been beneath the box.