Espionage 2

[Dante]

As the plane left the airport, Vivian breathed a sigh of relief. It would be several days before Raziel could follow her, even if he already knew where she was. In the hours before his plane landed, even if he was following her, she would be long gone.

She examined the case at her feet. It was pretty innocuous. Unlike her laptop...

Several hours later, the plane touched down in Prague. Vivian caught the connecting flight, and was in St Petersburg in hours. Elizabeth Brooks stepped into the snow and grinned.

[Anathema]

Andonlinis eyes followed the hands of the doctor as he carried out analyses on the blood sample. Since the autopsy analyses didn't show anything unusualy, Andolini figured a more extensive test was required. He took the sample to a medical research laboritory in Hamburg where they could carry out tests up to the molecular level. The doctor was an old comrade of him who could be trusted with a secret.

"Hmmmmm...." the doctor looked up from his screen. "Trostericium...the choice of a true connaisseur. Even the smallest amounts are lethal, doesn't show up on most blood tests carried out in autopsies, and in less then a week the substance has fully disintegrated and is completely untracable."

"Never heard of it before...is it hard to procure?" Andolin asked.

"It certainly is. But even so, I'm afraid it won't be easy to trace any possible suspects. People who are professional enough to use this stuff are very carefull in erasing their tracks and the few distributors of this stuff won't tell you anything."

Damnit, a dead end! Andolini thought.

"Jesse, who's blood sample is this anyway?" all his friends called him Jesse instead of Guiseppe.

"My brother, Luigi. Thank you doc, I must leave now."

As he left the building he started brainstorming about the case. He was found sitting on a bench, probably the murder had taken place there because it would have attracted a lot of attention to drag a body over a square and set it on a bench. The murderer must have been in arms reach with him, probably sitting next to him. If it were a stranger or an enemy Luigi wouldn't have stayed put. Another possibility was that the murderer sneaked up on him and then murdered him, but to Jesse it seemed to much of a coincidence that he was sitting on a bench at the time, so he assumed that Luigi had a meeting...with the murderer. Luigi said that he was on a job but that he was relaxing at the moment and that he wouldn't meet his contact until next week in Paris...Jesse didn't have enough information to draw any conclusions. He and his brother worked for the same boss, maybe he would tell him something. Time to pay a visit.

2 hours later Jesse stepped aboard a plane to St. Petersburg, where his boss was working on something secretive.

[Dante]

"Elizabeth Brooks." Vivian said, holding out the unopened case. She had circled the Pushkin building three times before entering, and was satisfied that she could be out of here. She swapped the cases with the shadowy figure inside, and counted her fee before turning to leave.

"Oh, one more thing." She said, turning around. She removed a white cloth from a pocket in her lapop, and wiped the shadowy man's brow. "You've got a bit of dirt there." She said, grinning inanely. The man frowned, then sighed. And slumped to the floor. The grin vanished from Vivian's lips. She slipped the cloth back into it's pocket, thanking whatever force of nature had delivered poison arrow frogs to her, and picked up the case from the dead man's feet. She didn't yet know what was in it, but she couldn't just leave it lying around. She wouldn't have had to kill this guy if she hadn't killed the other one... and she wouldn't have had to kill the other one if not for Raziel... He was becoming an irritant. She resolved to take care of him at the next oppertunity. But for now, Japan awaited.

Carrying both cases, and leaving the body to grow cold in the outer halls of the Pushkin building, Vivian strode out into the snowy streets.