The Swiss are, by and large, a good-natured people. They live among beauty and in relative health in some of the most breathtaking surroundings in the world. Their government is equitable, their culture rich and cosmopolitan, and their lives free of the threat of war due to their firm policy of absolute neutrality. Dwelling within a comfortable blend of old tradition and new internationalism, they are often called the most congenial people on Earth.
There is one point, however, on which the Swiss are decidedly less than sanguine, and that is the security of their renowned banking industry. Within the vaults of Swiss banks lie the wealth of potentates and captains of global industry, the hoards of dictators and the booty of international pirates. Switzerland’s neutrality provides a safe haven for untold trillions, which in turn keep the nation running like one of its famous clocks. At the first sign of any threat to that security, the normally staid “gnomes of Zurich” become beasts of a decidedly more threatening variety.
The recent hacker attack that had wormed its way into the accounts of the Banc Internationale du Suisse and emptied the numbered account of one Elizabeth Stroud of Chicago, Illinois, USA was such a threat. The violation had been well executed, beyond the ability of the Banc’s internal security force to stop or trace, but it had been detected. The Banc informed the Swiss government, the Swiss government informed Interpol, and Interpol dispatched the Contessa to Chicago.
“Hit me again,” the olive-skinned woman intoned in a soft Continental accent, sliding her glass across the bar. The bartender fairly leaped to fill the order, tearing his eyes away from the exotic number perched on the barstool in order to pour another glassful of Glenfiddich for her.
Antonia della Forza hated Chicago. She hated the noise, the grime, the bluster of its citizens. She hated the traffic, the smog, the garishness of its architecture. Most of all, she hated her current assignment. She was a top-flight Interpol field agent, accustomed to being in the thick of criminal investigations in the capitals of western Europe. Two weeks ago she had been instrumental in busting a Russian mafia operation in Stockholm, and today she was sitting in a pub in the financial district of this godforsaken American city – not even New York! – waiting for her pager to beep on the off-chance that someone attempted to access Elizabeth Stroud’s account, an account that had not been touched in over five years.
Antonia gave the bartender a feline smile as he refilled her glass, and a toss of her long raven hair for good measure. The bartender grinned like a little boy receiving praise. American men, she sighed inwardly and took a sip of her scotch.
Her colleagues in Interpol called her the Contessa, which in fact she was, a member of Italian aristocracy whose family tree had once twined branches with the di Medicis and the Borgias. But that was a long time ago and whatever faint currency the della Forza name may have carried had dissipated with the rise of Il Duce and her grandparents’ self-imposed exile to Switzerland. All that remained of Antonia’s noble line was represented by her patrician features and cool bearing, and though her parents had been scandalized when their only daughter had announced her intention to lend her Sorbonne education and the family name to the cause of international law-enforcement, there was little they could do to stop her.
Antonia had just fished a Gitane from her purse and was about to light it when her pager went off. It took her a moment even to realize that the beeping was coming from her own device, so accustomed had she become to the prospect that nothing was going to happen with this case, but then she pulled the pager from her belt, glanced at the screen and replaced it. Hastily she put the cigarette away, stepped off her stool, and withdrew a twenty, telling the bartender to keep it as she hurried for the door. The bartender watched her bottom, nicely framed in the black slacks she wore, recede and disappear.
The agent’s pulse raced as she crossed the sidewalk and punched the keyless entry button on the key to her BMW parked at the curb. Perhaps at last something has happened, she thought as she slid into the driver’s seat, feeling the reassuring bulk of her Heckler & Koch 9mm pressing against the small of her back beneath her leather coat. It’s probably nothing, she sighed again, turning the key and pulling the car out into midday traffic. Still, she weaved through the flow of cars with the practiced hands of the true European driver, making time as she headed for the Banc.
She rounded the corner just in time to see a red-haired woman in a dark jacket, skirt, and boots fumbling hurriedly to get into a grey Volvo sedan. Then Antonia had to slam on her brakes as a black van tore around her, screeching to cut off the redhead. The side panel door slid open and the agent watched, wide-eyed, as four black-suited men with Uzis grabbed the girl and shoved her into the van. As the van roared off with its new passenger, Antonia took a deep breath, counted to ten, gripped the wheel, and followed.
Chicago had just become a great deal more interesting.
Trailing the van from a safe, two-car distance, Antonia pulled out a cellular phone and keyed in the number for the Banc’s security chief. Within seconds she was caught up on current events. The redhead had come in, identified herself as Elizabeth Stroud, and attempted to access her account, setting off a silent alarm and the call to Antonia’s pager. The Banc’s uniformed guards had attempted to apprehend “Stroud,” who then overpowered two of them in unarmed combat and escaped.
The Contessa’s lips curled into a grim smile. Very interesting indeed. And just who else was waiting for you to show yourself, Miss Stroud?
Up ahead, the van turned out of the financial district, making its way toward the railroad yards. Traffic began to thin a bit, forcing Antonia to fall back, in case the driver of the van was watching for pursuit. She reached behind her back and eased her pistol from its holster, placing it on the passenger seat. The brief contact with her gun’s molded grip gave her a frisson. Antonia loved her guns with a passion that her superiors found unnerving. It had been her tendency toward gunplay that had earned her this current exile in America, the notion that a dull little stakeout might curb her penchant for excessive use of force. Though she had never revealed it to another living soul, the Contessa often brought an extra pair of panties with her to the firing range.
As the vehicles approached the sprawling network of tracks, warehouses, and loading docks, Antonia felt her BMW becoming more and more conspicuous among the trucks crawling along the road. Confident that she had not yet been spotted but certain that such good fortune would not last, she pulled off the road and swung into a parking lot to wait. She began subvocally counting to two hundred in Italian as she checked the H & K’s clip and transferred two spare clips from her purse to her coat pockets, Then she produced a black hair band and gathered her back-length hair into a less obtrusive ponytail. At two hundred, she gunned the BMW’s engine and pulled back onto the road in the direction the van had gone, scanning from side to side.
There. The van had stopped in front of a warehouse with a sign reading simply “Donovan Exports.” Well, it’s a front for something, she mused, finding a nearby dumpster and parking out of sight behind it. She opened the glove compartment and retrieved a miniature pair of binoculars, reholstered her weapon, and then quietly opened the car door and slipped out, rounding car and trashbin to train the binocs on the van.
The suits had emerged with their passenger and were herding her up the steps to the warehouse, but said passenger was in much different straits than she was half an hour ago. Her hands were cuffed in front of her and black straps pinned her arms to her sides. A thick bit-gag filled her mouth and the upper half of her face was obscured by a sleeping mask. The suits guided their blindfolded prisoner up the steps and inside.
The Contessa lowered the binoculars, brow knitting in thought. Whatever Elizabeth Stroud’s story may be, there was no doubt that she had been abducted and was in imminent danger. Beyond the Banc investigation, Antonia was out of her jurisdiction and obligated to call her liaison at the FBI’s Chicago field office, but she chafed at the idea. In the time it would take to mobilize special agents and get them here, anything might happen to Stroud. And upon their arrival, the agents would follow the FBI’s official guidelines for hostage rescue, which Antonia had read and thoroughly disapproved of. In her humble opinion, the large number of well-publicized, siege-related debacles laid at the Bureau’s doorstep over the last twenty years had been entirely deserved.
Besides, the Contessa preferred to work alone.
Antonia tossed the binocs back into the car and drew her gun. Jacking a round into the chamber of the 9mm, she took a deep breath and sprinted across the warehouse’s parking lot, inwardly thanking whatever impulse had made her select flats instead of pumps this morning. She flattened herself against the side of the now-empty van, peeked around the side, then padded over to the side of the building, careful not to kick or tread on loose pebbles of asphalt in her path. She slowly ascended the stairs, pistol up and trained at the steel door, the gun steady, an extension of her arm.
She could hear voices, indistinct but definitely a man and woman talking. Then the woman was shouting. Antonia’s heart pounded in her chest, but her nerves remained calm, her mind focused. The Contessa on the job. She reached for the door handle and gave it a slow, experimental turn. Unlocked. She counted to three, wrenched the door open, and stepped inside, pistol raised in a two-handed sharpshooting position. “Everyone freeze! NOW!”
Six startled heads whipped around to stare at the intruder. Three black-suited men lounged against a far wall of the warehouse. A fourth was standing over Elizabeth Stroud, who was now strapped tightly to a chair, her legs bound at ankles, knees, and thighs. This black suit held a large syringe in his hand, clearly intending to inject the helpless redhead. A tall, slim man in a tailored grey English suit stood by. All of them froze like statues, gaping at the Contessa.
“Interpol! Step away from the girl!” Antonia barked, her voice ringing through the empty warehouse. She shrugged off a fleeting concern about the utter lack of cover – with luck, they’ll be the only ones who need it, she thought – and trained her sights on the man with the needle. “Back off, you.”
The man in the grey suit held up a hand, his voice calm and even. “Easy now. Stand down. We’re FBI.”
“Of course you are,” Antonia said, smiling coldly. “And I’m Madonna.”
“You’re out of your jurisdiction, Miss—“
“Inspector della Forza. And by all means, feel free to call Brussels and report me after the young lady and I have gone. But for the moment, my jurisdiction is this room, my authority is in my hands, and I will exercise both with impunity if you do not step away from the girl—“ She leveled her gun at the black suit’s forehead. “—now.”
Jack sized the dark-haired girl up quickly, her gun stance, the hardness in her dark eyes. This one’s a pro. Another lethal femme, like Bethany. Play this carefully. He turned to his subordinate with the needle and nodded. “Back away, Mister Carlyle.”
Carlyle’s jaw muscles worked as he glared at the woman for a long moment, then he took three begrudging steps backward. Jack turned back to Antonia. “You’re making a huge mistake, Inspector.”
“Perhaps, but it is a mistake I can live with. Impede us in any way and you will not have the same luxury.” Antonia stepped forward toward the bound girl, gun still in her doubled grip, unwavering and unmistakably deadly.
She had crossed half the open distance when her trained eyes caught movement from the far end of the room. Reflexively she pivoted and fired, slamming a black suit against the wall, deep red blossoming across his shirt as the gun he drew clattered onto the floor. The blast reverberated deafeningly in the warehouse.
And then all hell broke loose.
#
On the whole, Madeleine Weld would have preferred to remain stuffed in the laundry hamper.
She was on a private jet, coasting somewhere above the American heartland, destination unknown. It was a plush affair done in soft cream and rich burgundy, the kind of plane CEOs must use to bolt from meeting to meeting without being disturbed by the common folk. The lavatory had been done in chrome and gold and there was actually room to sit down in comfort, though Maddy had hardly been comfortable peeing with her hands tied.
The seats were roomy and soft and they swiveled for easy conversation with anyone sitting in the cabin. Maddy could have swiveled her chair had her ankles not been bound to her chair’s support column, and as she squirmed beneath the blond woman’s cold, appraising stare, she fervently wished to do so. The woman, who had identified herself as Madame Ducharme, was looking at her in that icy, distant way that Maddy imagined Countess Bathory must have had when sizing up local virgins from which to fill her bathtub.
“I must apologize for my people neglecting to bring you a change of clothes, Madeleine,” Ducharme said in her rich Gallic tones. “Fortunately we are going someplace warm, and you will be provided for there.”
Madeleine said nothing. She was still clad in the T-shirt, panties, and pointe shoes she was wearing when Ducharme’s hirelings had abducted her, but her trembling had nothing to do with the cold.
The girl had been taken aboard the jet and unceremoniously dumped on the floor until after takeoff, then her gag had been removed and the hogtie released. As she fought not to retch onto the thick burgundy carpet, Sarge cut the ropes digging into her thighs, calves and ankles, and the “housekeeper” had led her to the lavatory, yanked her panties down, and stood over her while she reluctantly relieved herself, her arms still painfully pulled back and bound. Then she was led back to the cabin, where Sarge seated her in the chair, roped her ankles, and secured them so that her legs were bent and her toes remained an inch off the floor. The screaming pain in her shoulders was relieved when the arm-bonds were cut, but her arms were swiftly secured to the armrests by fresh cords at wrists and forearms. Maddy’s pain had lessened, but her helplessness and fear were still very much at the fore.
Ducharme tilted her head and spoke again. “You have questions. I have questions. I suspect, however, that your questions have easier answers, so why don’t you go first?”
Maddy’s fingers fluttered uselessly over the ends of the armrests as she screwed up her courage and looked back at the woman defiantly. “Yes, you could say I’ve got questions. Like ‘who are you people?’ and ‘what do you want with me?’”
The older blonde smiled that chilling smile again. “There. We have begun a dialogue. That was not so hard. As for who we are, the answer is that we are a small but determined organization with certain… outre interests.” She waved a diffident hand. “Money, power, that sort of thing. As for what we want with you, we have extended our rather forceful invitation for you to be our guest for awhile, in hopes that your – our – friend Bethany will eventually join us. We have a great deal to discuss, she and I.”
“So what you’re saying is I’m a hostage,” Maddy said bitterly, “and you’re using me as bait for Beth. You expect her to come after me and then you’re going to kill her.”
“Not at all, cherie,” Ducharme chuckled, pressing a button on the side of her own chair’s armrest. “Killing Bethany is very low on my list of priorities. She has something I want, something that will bring my partner and I a great deal of those things I mentioned a moment ago. And as for you… you are a pretty thing, and I like to have pretty things around me, like Paulette here…”
As Ducharme spoke, a door at the forward end of the cabin opened and a slim, bobbed brunette shuffled in, carefully bearing a tray with a full glass. She wore a tight black dress, cut low in front and high up the thigh. Paulette set the tray down with difficulty, hindered by the thick leather cuffs on her wrists, separated by a mere two inches of sturdy chain. Similar cuffs encased her ankles above her four-inch heels, the hobbling chain accounting for the peculiar shuffle in her walk. Above her plunging decolletage a wide band of leather snugly encircled her throat, and above that was a wide strap buckled around her head, creasing her cheeks and tightly covering her mouth. Maddy stared at the girl in wide-eyed horror. The girl met her eyes for an instant.
Maddy had never seen eyes so haunted, so full of accumulated pain and defeat, as the deep brown pools that looked into her own at that moment. If Maddy had feared Madame Ducharme before, now she knew stark terror. She was in the clutches of a monster.
Paulette quickly looked away, setting the drink before Ducharme. The blonde picked it up and smiled at Maddy over the rim of her glass. “Indeed, I can think of a great many uses for you…”
#
It is a documented fact that the legendary frontier lawman Wyatt Earp never took a bullet wound despite the countless attempts of young gunslingers to prove their mettle against him. Earp had not been a particularly fast draw, nor was he reportedly interested in being one. Earp knew a secret, that speed hinders accuracy, that it is better to draw second and aim than to draw first and miss.
As Antonia dropped the first of the three black suits across the warehouse, the other two drew pistols and returned fire, their guns’ reports booming off the corrugated metal ceiling. The first shot missed wide, the second stirred her trouser leg as it blew by. The Contessa held her ground, focused only on the pencil-thin corridor that ran invisibly from her 9mm’s muzzle to the kill-zones she had already selected and locked in when she entered the room. Like a samurai, the agent did not draw her weapon unless she was prepared to kill. She squeezed, shifted, squeezed again. Both suits went down, each drilled precisely through the forehead.
Though it took mere milliseconds for Antonia to drop the three suits, it was more than enough time for the fourth, Carlyle, to draw on her. His hand was a blur as his gun flew up to take out the intruder, his finger tightening on the trigger in mid-arc.
Bethany moved, swinging her bound legs out and her torso forward for leverage, and the chair to which she was strapped lifted off the floor. With a grunt she pivoted on the balls of her feet and spun, her tightly wrapped body a centrifugal hub, whipping the chair around to smash against the suit’s gun arm. His shot went wide as he stumbled. Bethany used the chair’s weight for momentum and spun again, slamming the chair legs into the backs of Carlyle’s knees and the man buckled. He barely had time to look up before the captive threw herself backward, her weight atop the chair as it landed solidly on him. He screamed as sternum and ribcage shattered.
The warehouse reeked of cordite. Five seconds. Three men dead, one dying.
One running. Antonia turned to see the man in the grey suit sprinting for the far door. She raised her pistol for a cripple-shot, but the redhead shouted, “Let him go! We need to get out of here now!”
Antonia lowered her pistol as the man dove through the office door. Quickly she went to the redhead, still struggling on her back in the straps. Beneath the chair, Carlyle groaned, blood from his punctured lungs dribbling from his mouth. Antonia flipped the catches on Bethany’s leg straps and they fell away, then she hauled the chair upright and flipped the ones holding the other woman’s arms. “Nothing I can do about the cuffs, I’m afraid.”
“We’ll worry about it later,” Bethany said, stretching her cuffed hands out to relieve the kinks in her arms. “Right now he’s calling for reinforcements. Unless you’ve got backup, we need to motor.”
Antonia nodded and the two women ran out the door and down to the parking lot. In the distance approaching sirens could be heard. They reached Antonia’s BMW and Bethany smiled. “Z3. Sweet. I’ll drive.”
The Contessa stared at her. “This is my car and you’re handcuffed!”
“Not a problem. Look, one of us needs to drive, one needs to shoot. Are you going to give me your gun?”
Antonia made a face. “Absolutely not.”
“Then I’ll drive.”
Behind them the steel door of the warehouse banged open and suits began to pour out of it. Antonia groaned, fished out her keys, and tossed them to Bethany, who caught them deftly in her cuffed hands. The women slid into the car and Bethany cranked it to life, stomping on the accelerator. The car screeched out of the lot as the black van filled and roared out in pursuit.
Bethany’s jaw was set with concentration but her eyes glittered. It had been years, of course, since she had done a good old-fashioned car chase in the city, longer still since she had had to do it with her hands bound, but as she braced the wheel with her knee and shifted, she could feel the synapses clicking into place, instinct taking over, her conscious mind finding her zenzen center.
Antonia was not so calm. Her eyes flicked from the van looming behind them to the redhead wrenching the wheel right and left to thread through the parade of trucks leaving the yards. “Who the hell are you?” she finally shouted. “Who are those men, and what in God’s name is all this?”
“Later,” Bethany shouted back. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for the rescue, but I’m trying to drive here!” She yanked the wheel hard to the right, cutting off a refrigerator truck, which swerved sideways. A delivery van plowed into it from behind and the black van barely avoided the accident, weaving into the oncoming lane and sending vehicles scattering.
They were heading back toward downtown, Bethany keeping the BMW at a steady 75 as she whipped through the thickening traffic, leaving angry, honking drivers and cars and trucks scattered like toys in their wake. Behind them the less agile van was striving to keep up, smashing its way through with crunches of metal and explosions of shattering glass. Antonia saw movement on the right side of the van, the panel door sliding open and a man’s head and shoulders leaning out. Suddenly a burst of submachine gun fire added to the din. A spray of bullets tattooed across the rear of the Z3.
“Shit!” Antonia rolled down her window and dropped the back of her bucket seat, turning to kneel on the seat and lean out the passenger window. She squeezed off six rapid shots, forcing the van to swerve. “Hold it steady! I’m going for their tires!”
“Don’t!” Bethany shouted back, weaving around a mini-convoy of tractor-trailers and punching the BMW to 90 mph. “The tires are probably special-issue resealing jobs. The glass is probably bulletproof too. Go for the engine!”
Antonia leaned out the window again, then pulled in as Bethany skirted an oncoming truck and almost sideswiped a semi. “Hey!” she glared at the redhead. “Try not to decapitate me, okay?”
“Sorry,” Bethany murmured sheepishly. The Contessa leaned out again as the van’s shooter let loose with another spray. Suddenly the BMW’s rear windshield was pocked and spiderwebbed, and Antonia felt something hot sizzle past her ear. She riased the 9mm, sighted on the van’s grille, and squeezed off four shots. She grinned as her efforts were rewarded with a plume of smoke billowing forth from the van’s engine. The van began to slow down.
“Did you get ‘em?” Bethany shouted.
“I got ‘em.” Antonia slid back into the car, glancing back to see the van receding behind them.
Bethany nodded. “We have to get off the street. Chicago cops tend to frown on high-speed shoot-em-ups that they’re not personally involved in.”
“I’m Interpol. I will take care of it.” Antonia looked at Bethany. “But yes, we should get off the street. You and I have a lot to talk about, Miss Stroud – assuming that is actually your name.”
Bethany sighed, pulling off the service road into a working-class residential neighborhood lined with older houses and oak trees. She turned onto another side street, deserted and out of sight of the main traffic, and killed the engine in front of a huge empty house with a “For Sale” sign swinging listlessly in the yard. In the distance, many sirens were approaching.
Antonia reached over and took the key out of the ignition, then got out of the car, fishing out a Gitane as she walked around to survey the damage to the BMW. Bethany fumbled at her door with her cuffed hands and got out as well. She studied Antonia as the agent lit her cigarette, took a deep drag, and let it out slowly, looking up into the late afternoon sky.
“You’re awfully calm after a shootout, Inspector,” Bethany said quietly.
“And you after a kidnapping, Miss Stroud.” Antonia turned to look back at her. “I want answers.”
“I can’t give them to you.”
“Who were those men? They were organized, well equipped, and obviously well financed.” She looked deep into Bethany’s eyes. “They were professionals, just like you.”
Bethany held her gaze for a long moment and then replied, “Them.”
The Contessa raised an eyebrow. “NSA? CIA?”
“Higher. Deeper. They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” She raised her cuffed hands and fluttered her fingers as if trying to catch smoke. “Them.”
Antonia looked away and took another contemplative drag on her cigarette, nodding to herself. She knew exactly what the redhead was telling her. There was not a state security operative in the world who had not caught at least a glimpse of the workings of the shadow organizations so clandestine that they didn’t even have names. Subject to no one’s oversight committee, unbound by international laws, in pursuit of agendas too secretive to ever see the light of day. At one time, Antonia would have dismissed the idea as conspiracy theory and paranoid nonsense, but her years in Interpol had shown her too many loose ends, too many unexplained disappearances, too many signs of unseen battles fought between invisible opponents to ignore.
She had stumbled into something way over her head.
“And are you one of Them, Miss Stroud?” Antonia murmured.
Bethany shook her head. “Not anymore. I just want to be left alone.” She gestured at Antonia’s cigarette. “May I have one?”
Antonia produced another Gitane and handed it over. Bethany put it between her lips and moved in close to accept a light. The Contessa turned to put her lighter away and felt the girl’s fingers playing gently against her neck, into her hair, sensually. Her lips parted involuntarily at the other woman’s touch and she felt a momentary frisson like the sensation she got while shooting. She turned to look questioningly at Bethany when she felt a sharp jab behind her left ear. Suddenly she couldn’t move. The cigarette dropped from her numbed hand. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened silently as Bethany’s fingers left the nerve cluster and moved to another one at the back of her neck, jabbing hard.
Antonia’s eyes rolled back in her head and her knees buckled. Just before the world was swallowed up by a crashing wave of blackness she heard Bethany whisper, “I’m sorry.”
When the Contessa’s eyes fluttered open again, it was dark, the room she was in illuminated only by a few shafts of streetlamp light through the slats of Venetian blinds. She twisted her head, blinking, trying to get her bearings in a room she did not recognize, a room devoid of furnishings or accoutrements of any kind, save a few dust bunnies scattered about the hardwood floor.
The house, she realized. I’m in the empty house for sale. Stroud rendered me unconscious with a nerve pinch and brought me here. She pressed her back against the radiator and discovered that her gun was missing, and Antonia gave a deep muffled groan.
She lay on her side, wrists behind her back and cuffed to an old radiator with the handcuffs the redhead had been wearing. Her ankles were crossed and wrapped tightly with white surgical tape, the same tape that had been plastered in several layers across her lips and cheeks, quite effectively gagging her -- first aid kits came as standard equipment in new BMWs.
Antonia thrashed angrily in her bonds, the handcuffs clattering against the pipes. She had risked her life to save the woman, and then the ungrateful bitch had tied her up and stolen her gun and who knows what else… her identification, her passport… leaving her with no way to be found or… “MMMMMMPPPHH!” she screamed into her gag, yanking hard on the pipe.
And the pipe moved. Just a little, but it definitely moved.
Antonia gave another pull with her arms and felt her anchor shift again. Straining to look over her shoulder she was just barely able to make out a white blob standing out in stark relief to the dingy grey of the pipes, at the point where the conduit she was cuffed to fitted to the end emerging from the baseboard. She shifted her bottom on the floor, feeling along the pipe with her fingers until she felt it. Where there should have been a connecting joint she discovered tape. Medical tape, like that on her mouth and ankles.
She meant for me to get loose eventually. She just wanted a head start. Her hands twisted in the unyielding cuffs she would have to overcome even after she detached herself from the radiator. A long head start, she thought wryly.
Settling into as comfortable a position as possible, the Contessa began to pick at the tape on the radiator pipes with her fingers, her dark eyes cold with determination Round one to you, Miss Stroud, but this is far from over…
To be continued...