Ellie's the name, and acquisitions is the game. If you want it, I can get it for you. But you'd better be ready to pay. Only the very richest can afford my services, but what they get for that money is, well,
anything
. No matter how well protected it is, no matter the security systems, I can get in there and retrieve it, whatever it may be and
wherever
it may be. I pride myself on being able to penetrate absolutely anywhere, whether on the mortal or immortal planes.
For example, the strong room in Cupid's mansion in Olympus. Where
it
is kept.
You know,
it. The Bow.
I had no idea why my client wanted Cupid's bow, nor was it my business to ask. Maybe he wanted to make a love happen, or maybe he wanted to prevent it by putting the bow out of reach. I didn't care. He could afford the fee to hire me and my team, and that was that. He had stressed that the bow had to be in his hands by 6am on Valentine's Day, though, and so that's why just before midnight on the 13th I found myself dressed head to toe in black, equipped with an arsenal of gadgetry that would make James Bond's mouth water (if he could take his eyes off how the skin-tight black accentuated my curves), breaking into Cupid's place.
Getting into the mansion had been rather eventful. In true Mission Impossible style, I'd cut through a skylight and abseiled down. Unfortunately, my rope had got tangled in a giant statue of Venus that hadn't been there on the plans intel had sourced for me. (So Cupid kept a forty foot statue of mumsie, naked, in his house? The lad had some
serious
issues, I reckoned.) From the looks of it, I guessed it to be the hitherto unknown original that must have inspired Alexandros' famous Venus de Milo, except that now it was missing not only her arms, but also half her right tit, which had broken loose when I tugged my rope free.
I could only hope that Venus would forgive me the unplanned mastectomy, if she ever found out. She was known to be quite the vengeful bitch (I mean look at all the things she tried to do to Psyche when that poor girl threatened to win Cupid's affections away from mummy-dearest). In my defence the statue must have been of seriously substandard marble to have cracked like that. Maybe when I was out of here I should let Cupid know (anonymously, of course) that he'd been sold a dud.
Anyway, I'd swung round behind mummy-dearest's gigantic back, my feet planted on her arse as I waited to see if anyone would respond to the almighty crash I'd caused when I dropped my (or Venus') boob, my finger poised over the switch of the auto-winder that would haul me back up through the skylight to safety.
Luckily it seemed my intel was correct and the mansion was empty this evening. And not only that, but thankfully the multitude of alarms that protected the place did not include one to detect giant tumbling titties.
Whew!
Landing softly on the ground (though why I bothered after having caused such a racket I have no idea) I unhitched myself from my abseiling cord and slid behind the plinth on which the newly-vandalised Venus stood.
"A... are y'in?" whispered a voice from the tiny earpiece I wore.
It was Geoff, my technical backup on this job. I couldn't have wished for better. A geek through and through, his thick Scottish brogue stumbled awkwardly whenever he was around a woman, but he was nevertheless a bloody genius and perfect for this job.
Before moving into the private sector he'd worked for SIS -- the Scottish Intelligence Service -- beavering away in their technical lab up near Glenrothes, in Scotland's Silicon Glen, a superbly equipped facility that hid behind the cover of being a factory producing automatic haggis-sexing equipment for Highland farms.
Currently, Geoff was sat in the back of one of our covert ops support vans, which was parked a few hundred yards from the perimeter of Cupid's estate under the cover of being an ambrosia delivery truck.
"Yes. No problems," I whispered back, lying through my perfectly polished teeth.
"OK. Now tae yer, um, right is the corridor leading t' the strong room. Remember tae step ow'er the infra-red beams."
"Yes, yes," I hissed. Geoff's insistence on reminding me of things I knew perfectly well from the briefings was beginning to irritate me.
I tapped the earpiece to break the connection. If asked later, I could always claim it was interference and the call had dropped.
OK. I crept to the doorway and peered around. Nobody.
I kneeled and got out my phone from its pouch at my belt. Setting the camera to infra-red, I scanned the corridor ahead of me, taking note of the beams that criss-crossed it like the threads the Fates might weave after a particularly bad three-day bender.
I tapped the screen, initialising the app that would guide me through the web of optical trip-alarms. Like the phone itself, it was a technical wonder. Running under an advanced pre-release version of Android which Geoff had brought with him from the Scottish Intelligence Service labs (Android seeven-dot-twa, "deep fried mars bar"), it would constantly scan the area ahead of me, passing me directions over a Bluetooth link to my earpiece.
Just one thing to check. Reluctantly, I re-enabled the comms link to Geoff's wagon.
"Are you sure the cameras around the strong room are all disabled?" I asked.
"Oh aye," he answered. "D'ye nae trust me?"
Well I did, so long as he'd not got distracted by internet porn (the weakness that had seen him booted out of SIS), but I wasn't going to say that.
"Implicitly," I replied.
Well no point in delaying any longer. I stepped out into the corridor and gingerly lifted my left leg over the first beam. My headset beeped, and I angled the phone to see the next thread of light crossing just above waist height. I bent almost double, slowly easing myself under it and up again to cross the third beam.
Slowly, carefully, like a cross between a tai-chi master and a slow-motion limbo dancer in ninja costume, I picked my way down that corridor, bending in ways the human body should never have been able to. One final beam and I was outside the door to Cupid's strong room.
Relieved to be able to stand upright again, I straightened up and stretched to relieve the cricks in my joints. Fine. Now I just had to get through the thick armoured door that loomed in front of me, featureless save for a combination lock at shoulder level.
I leaned in and peered at it. Yes! There it was -- the maker's mark. Just as my research had indicated, it was a Hephaestus: a lock made by the very craftsman of the gods himself, the lame but incredibly skilled divine smith.
This lock would resist any attempt to pick it by earthly tools, and I suspected that a failed attempt would be fatal. Hephaestus' locks were often booby trapped; a favourite trick being to have them shoot poisoned quills at the luckless would-be cracker.
Well I had tools that were not of the mortal realm. From my utility belt I took a tiny hammer, no larger than a toothpick. It looked quite pathetic, but the miniscule head was faced with a small flake of Olympian steel retrieved from the floor of Hephaestus' very own workshop, and said to have come from the hammer he used to craft his fantastic mechanisms. The theory was that the lock would recognise the substance which had created it, and resonate in response, resonances that would allow me (or rather Geoff) to 'see inside' the lock and work out the combination.
It was a good theory, but this was the first time we'd ever had to put it into practice. And one mistake would see me writhing on the floor with a face like a porcupine's back.
I set the sound recorder going on my phone and then placed it face flat against the door just to the right of the lock. Then, ever so slowly, I tapped the actual combination dial with the tiny hammer, once from above, once from below and once from each side. Gingerly I removed the phone and breathed out. Whew! So far, so no-faceful-of-poison-quills.
Checking the recording had saved itself properly, I then uploaded it to Geoff. I could picture him sat in the back of the van, hunched over a rack of computers with more teraflops than a high energy physics mainframe, peering at a 3D image of the internals of the lock as it gradually appeared on his screen.
I clenched my fists with frustration. Damn! What was taking him so long?
