CHAPTER 1

"Come, my dear, I'm sure Lizzie doesn't want to be bothered with our chit chat whilst she's doing the dishes." Without waiting for a reply, Jack hustled the young, beautiful but not very bright blonde out of the kitchen and into the late summer sunshine of the farm yard. They would stroll together through the trees of the farm-that-wasn't-farmed, with Jack expounding about the theatre in general and his current play in particular, with empty-headed Marlyn clinging to his arm and treating his every utterance with reverential awe.

His wife ground her teeth in frustration and glowered after them. 'Lizzie doesn't want to be bothered with our chit chat!' she mimicked her husband's avuncular tones. Dead right she doesn't - but she would be more than happy to accept some help with the washing up! Four children, Jack, the bevy of aspiring starlets that seemed to drift through the house as if they and Jack were on a higher plane, and a farm yard full of chickens, ducks and, above all, muck. Muck everywhere - dust in the summer and mud in the winter - because Jack insisted that tarring or concreting the yard would spoil the age-old patina of the place. And even more important, would make him seem to his myriad friends to be a mere ordinary commuter, instead of the born-and-bred countryman he chose to emulate. No wonder she looked like a worn out middle-aged slut. They wandered in for meals when they felt like it, and wandered out again leaving the mess to her. Oh, she could have had domestic help if she had wanted it, and she did sometimes have a neighbour in to help when they were entertaining Jack's friends, but she prized what little privacy she still had too much to have anything more permanent.

When Jack had decided that a small farm was just what he needed to get the peace and inspiration for his work as a playwright she had been more than happy to agree. She'd met Jack when her life was at a particularly low ebb and had been grateful, excited, amused, when the three-times married, distinguished man old enough to be her father had taken an interest in her. Three weeks of whirlwind dissipation and he had popped the question. A month later they were married.

She supposed she still loved him, but after fifteen years of marriage she was able to look back wryly from a historical perspective. Her hands slowed to a stop, a dishcloth in one and a plate in the other. She knew it was happening, knew it had happened a lot lately. This drifting into reverie, musing about the past, dreaming about the future, feeling and fighting the impatient longing to be up and doing, feeling the old feelings that she'd thought had died when....

Enough! She jerked her eyes back into focus and attacked the plate with a new vigour. Her life might seem boring, she might feel like a scullery maid, working in drudgery whilst her husband - randy old goat that he was - bedded every young hopeful he could find, and imagined that she didn't know. Know? She'd known for years! And had often wondered why she put up with it. Yes, life might be all these things, but it was better than the memories she'd just fought back into the closed corners of her mind.

She paused again and turned to look at herself in the old mirror hanging from the high picture rail, and saw what she conceded to be an unattractive dowd with little hope of attracting another man. She wasn't sure why that was important, whether she wanted an affair, a last fling, a divorce, or what. She had no money of her own and whilst she could get alimony she knew that without her hard-headed grip on his finances Jack would let his money run through his fingers like water through a sieve. She'd be lucky to get more than the occasional part payment from him, despite his huge earnings.

But what her mind interpreted from her eye's images wasn't entirely the truth. Certainly her hair was a mess, she wore no makeup and the blouse and cardigan did nothing to cover the shapelessness of a bust supported by a sagging bra. But her dark red hair was thick and strong and unblemished by grey. Her face had always been interesting rather than beautiful, but it was high-cheeked and fine-boned enough to only just miss the accolade of beauty. A face that most men would call attractive, and most women would call strong. But her finest feature, finer even than her hair, was her eyes. Great, green, intelligent orbs of light and life. Whilst her face was of ordinary mobility, those eyes gave it a capacity for expressiveness that transcended any mere shaping of skin by muscles. They were windows to her soul and had infinite capacity to transmit any human emotion - or to become opaque and lock her every emotion to herself.

Her body too, under the nondescript blouse and jeans, was far from being as unattractive as she was wont to imagine. She was very tall for a woman, just over five feet eleven in her bare feet. And she had nothing of the stoop that so many tall women adopt to disguise what they regard as their unattractive inches. She held herself straight and well, not exactly proud of her height but ready to spit in the eye of anyone criticising it. She was no sylphan maiden to be sure, but she had the solid, capable look of an outdoor person. Athletic in the 'field', rather than 'track' mould, there was nothing even faintly manly about her, but there was nothing fragile either. In social company she was usually an unobtrusive wallflower from choice, but when real solid action was required she was ... capable.

There had been a time when she had had a passion for physical fitness and her body had been hard and lean. Now, with four children and a wayward husband to guide through the practicalities of life, she had little time for such personal things. But she tried, and when the children were at school and Jack was away on business - or hanky-panky - she would go for long, gruelling runs, brutally driving herself to the point of collapse. And, of course, in the season she would play tennis. At other times her only recourse was to practice yoga, mostly in the quiet privacy of her room but sometimes, on rainy days, she would amuse the children by guiding them playfully through simple routines. Jack scoffed at anything suggestive of exercise - he was only too aware of his own corpulent midriff, highlighted by his five foot six height - but her need to stretch her body was almost an obsession.

When fashionably dressed in evening wear at the many social functions that Jack's fame condemned her to she was frequently referred to as 'arresting' or 'statuesque'. They also referred to her - and they were the sort of frivolous people who said it disparagingly - as quiet, intelligent, sharp witted, self-deprecating, shy and most damning of all, a dreamy thinker. All were true, and most of her detractors suffered twinges of jealousy from time to time. None of them, in their wildest dreams, had ever imagined the real Lizzie who dwelt in the secret depths of the dutiful wife and mother.

She sighed unhappily and turned back to the sink. When she'd married she'd felt so lucky. Not just to be in love and be loved, but because she'd be cared for, provided for, when she had for so long been a pillar for others to lean on. Of course, it hadn't been long before Jack and the children were leaning on her too, but Jack's macho, head-of-the-household self-image still lent the illusion of being cared for. Now the illusion was wearing thin and she wasn't sure whether she still felt lucky - or whether she just felt sad that she couldn't even feel lucky any more. Where had it all gone? That great zest for life that people had always seen in her, but which she had taken so much for granted that she had never even thought to value.

She sighed - she'd been doing a lot of that lately, too .... She jerked to attention. Was she bored - or was she uneasy? To most people it would have been a question of little importance, but her dreaming had dredged up a memory of a younger self, of times and places when her feelings were famous in her small world. Where an uneasy Lizzie would have had the people around her feeling worried enough to fear for their very lives.

Now she felt confused. She tried to remember what her premonitions had felt like - not what they had been about, but how they had impinged upon her consciousness. They certainly hadn't been visions or anything like that, more just feelings of unease, or alertness, or anticipation, or even feelings that she hadn't even noticed herself. Like suddenly finding her colleagues staring intently at her, and blankly asking them what was the matter. And being told that she had been behaving like an animal sensing an impending storm, prowling, or skulking, or just being so hyper alert that there was no room in her brain for anything else.

Her mind drifted to when she had first realised she had this strange gift - or curse. It had been at boarding school, an old fashioned place with large dormitories. Like all healthy young people confined and separated from real life by school gates and rules, they had forever been testing their bonds. Times without number they had got up to mischief after lights-out and had attracted the attention of a duty mistress. But always, without fail, Lizzie would warn that a mistress was on her way - and the dormitory would be found to contain nothing but sleeping girls. The girls had always put it down to Lizzie having extraordinarily sensitive ears - for a long time the nickname 'Ears' vied with 'Lizzie'.

It was Marie who had first started to question the assumption. Dark, elfin Marie, whose mother's family were Celtic Scots from the West Highlands. Marie, whose Celtic blood thought that seeing into the future was as natural for some as remembering the past. She had suspected, but had said nothing to anyone. Instead, she set about gathering evidence.

Lizzie started to notice Marie staring at her at odd moments, and soon learnt that when horseplay at night had been going on long enough to attract attention, that Marie would somehow cease to be a ringleader and become a quiet observer.

Then one day they had been walking together across the extensive grounds on an errand, and Marie had suddenly abandoned the usual girlish small talk and said in her quiet, confident way. "Lizzie, your ears are no better than anybody else's. You've got the Sight."

Lizzie still remembered being nonplussed by the remark, and asking in bewilderment. "What do you mean? Of course I've got sight, I'm not blind."

"No, no. Not that kind of sight. you've got the Second Sight. You can see into the future."

Lizzie shivered at the memory, even after all those years the chilled feeling was as clear as it had been that day. She had tried to laugh it off, but had known on the instant that it was true. But she'd argued, as if by convincing Marie she could change the truth. "Don't be silly! See into the future? What do you think I am? A Prophet? Or some nutcase at Lourdes?"

"No, of course I don't mean that. But you have the Sight, I know because I've tested you."

"What do you mean?" Lizzie remembered the fear of proof.

"All right, when you go from the dorm to the games room, which way do you go?"

"You know that. I always go the same way we all do, along the edge of the playing field, through the trees by the tennis court, and over the rattling bridge."

"Always? And what about a week last Wednesday, and last Sunday, and yesterday?"

"Well, okay I went by the music room. So what, I felt like a change." She said it defiantly but could feel her arguments withering as the cold hand of logic started to squeeze her heart.

Marie had laughed. "So you say! But you didn't just feel like it, you knew something would happen to you if you went the other way. You see, I arranged with Cynthia Garbert that her dorm would lie in wait for you to pay you back for that raid we made on their dorm. I told them you planned it." Marie had been the ringleader, as she usually was. Her voice continued remorselessly. "I've set a total of seven traps for you over the last month, and never once have you fallen into one. You know the spate of practical jokes lately? Well, that was me, I was trying to catch out a few people to see if you were different. I got the others every time."

Lizzie had been near to panic. "No, no. It's all lies - or just chance!" Her temper had flared. "I thought you were my friend, and now you're telling me I'm a witch or something."

Marie had been contrite, but hadn't quite stopped smiling. "Oh Lizzie! What a song and dance about nothing. I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm just telling you how you manage to do these unusual things. It's nothing to be ashamed of - I know because my mother's mother had the Sight." Her young face looked suddenly sad. "We always used to joke that Granny was a witch because she always seemed to know what was going to happen. Oh, nothing dramatic, just things like telling us to come in because Daddy would soon be arriving, things like that. We always sort of thought that he'd told her when he would arrive and that she was just playing a game with us. But she wasn't."

Marie was silent for so long that Lizzie gave in and asked the question. "Well, how do you know she wasn't?"

"We were out shopping one day. Granny, Mum and me had left early in the morning to get in a whole day’s shopping in Glasgow. We got there about ten in the morning and were going to catch the six o'clock train home. But we'd hardly got started, it wasn't much after ten thirty, when Granny suddenly said that we should be getting home. I didn't really understand it, but I remember that my mother didn't ask any questions, she just went sort of pale and turned back to the station without a word. We got home to find that my mother's brother had been killed in a car crash just before ten thirty."

Lizzie remembered the crawling horror that she might be like that, foretelling death, but Marie, seeing how her friend had reacted, brightened up and continued. "But don't worry about that. The point is that my Granny was a wonderful person. We all loved her very much and used to tease her about where she had hidden her broomstick, and things like that. She always said that the Sight was more of a burden than a gift, but that if you had it all you could do was recognise the fact and make the most of it."

That had happened just after the last lesson of the week, and Lizzie had spent the rest of the weekend as much on her own as she could in a crowded school. She could still recall the anguish as she had tried to come to terms with being different. It seemed a bit silly now, it was every girl's dream to be a little bit different by being slightly better or wilder than the others in some way, but only a little different because being one of the gang was the most important thing of all. Being a weird witch was just the worst thing that could happen - worse even than having spots. She had sworn Marie to secrecy, and felt a wave of love for the friend who had never breathed a word to a soul. Much later, when her gift had become an asset of great importance, others had come to respect it, but Marie had never done more than smile gently when others had raised the subject.

With a sigh, Lizzie came back to the present. She'd never been able to explain or understand the strange power - only that it had never been wrong. But these last fifteen years since her marriage had been strangely protected years. Jack was about as wayward as a husband could be, but the world he created wasn't dangerous, just topsy turvy - secure and safe but topsy turvy. She supposed that she had often gone to intercept her children in play to head them off from danger, but that was the trouble with her gift, she rarely felt 'something is going to happen' she simply guided herself through life with a little extra input from a sixth sense. Only when the avoidance of danger wasn't that easy did she feel the future pressing in on her.

Now she couldn't remember the feelings well enough to compare them with her present feeling, couldn't even be sure that her unease wasn't just fear of feeling the old unease. Perhaps her behaviour was a better guide. Had she been behaving strangely of late? Jack had certainly given her some funny looks and had been unusually conscientious about keeping himself and his lady love out of her sight. But that could be just the stage of this particular affair.

Then she caught her breath. There had been something. For the past week, for the entire period of her unease, she had risen early and gone for a walk. Nothing unusual in that, she often went for walks - except, looking back, they weren't ordinary walks. She flushed at the thought of what her neighbours might have thought had they seen her - then paled as the reasons for her behaviour snapped into sharp focus.

In her mind's eye she could see herself every morning, follow her apparently aimless wanderings around their fifty acres of wooded, hedged, hilly farm. Aimless ...? Aimless as a wild animal checking it's territory - or a soldier scouting in enemy-held territory. Somehow she must have sensed danger and had been driven by some inner compulsion to check her territory. She'd felt no fear - but then she never did - but she knew now that her stealth hadn't been to avoid disturbing the wildlife, and her listening hadn't been to savour the birdsong. And her heart chilled with the certainty that her safe, cocooned existence was drawing to an end.

She finished the washing up and tidying in a dazed fever of thought. Never before had she questioned her premonitions, somehow they'd always excited her and made her eager to face their inevitable reality. But now was different. Was it just that she was growing old? Or was it that she feared that her sense of impending danger foretold danger to the children rather then to herself? Could it even be that Jack was going to leave her for some starlet? No, she didn't believe that. Always, without fail, strong feelings had foretold of real physical danger, never mere emotional upsets.

Lizzie was brought back to the present by her youngest child, six year old Jemma, bursting into the kitchen. "Mummy, Mummy, there's a great big pink car coming down our road." She positively shrieked the pink part and tugged her Mother's hand. "Come and see, Mummy, it's really pink. I'd like a pink car, a big one."

Lizzie found herself half running out into the yard, and had a fleeting moment to realise that she had no premonition about this car. A wry smile flitted across her face, a pink car was hardly likely to be dangerous - unless, which was likely, it contained some tasteless floozy of an aspiring actress come to seduce Jack away from her!

The car was pink all right, and big too, as befits a Rolls Royce. For that was surely what it was. Well, that settled it, it had to be one of Jack's show biz friends. Who else, she thought, all her own friends had long since disappeared, now all she had were Jack and the children, and decidedly second-hand relationships with Jack's friends.

Just for a moment she quailed. Please God, don't let it be some brainless junkie of a pop star. The last time one of those had come it had taken weeks to get the children back on the straight and narrow, and she still wasn't entirely sure that unwholesome seeds hadn't been planted in fertile young minds.

The Rolls lurched ponderously through the ruts and pot holes, travelling faster than anyone ought to drive a car of such breeding on such roads. The chickens squawked belatedly and fluttered for safety as the Rolls locked it's wheels in the dried mud and slid to a halt. The drivers door was flung open and a pair of dainty shoes swung out on the ends of slim, pink clad legs - hovered as if in dismay at the prospect of standing on bare earth, then resolutely continued. A small slim woman, elegantly clad in a bright pink one-piece jump suit, emerged. Many of Jack's starlets had looked out of place in the farm yard, but this one was, as the saying goes, something else. She stood out as a flawless diamond in the midst of dross, her long blonde hair gleaming like fire in the morning sun. Even Lizzie caught her breath and was sufficiently impressed to think, "My God, Jack's gone a long way up market this time!"

The children crowded round Lizzie, open eyed, like the Dalmatian puppies surveying Cruella de Vil. But Lizzie suddenly frowned, this woman was familiar. Her brow furrowed in concentration. She must be a well known actress or something. No, not an actress - but familiar from somewhere. From somewhere ... the light was just starting to dawn when the apparition spoke. "Excuse me, I'm looking for Elizabeth Caldwell, her maiden name was Smythe and she used to often be called Lizzie - she's married to Jack Caldwell the playwright. Can you help me?"

The children were uncharacteristically quiet and Lizzie found that she had to clear her throat before she could speak. "Yes, of course. But who are you?" Somehow she didn't want to reveal her identity just yet.

"I'm Tiffany Walters, but when I knew Lizzie my name was Summers."

Before Lizzie could speak her eldest daughter burst into chattering life. "My name is Tiffany too. Mummy says I was named after her very best friend." The last statement was uttered defiantly, she'd had more than one school fight with children who thought her name funny.

Lizzie came alive. "Tiffy, is it really you?" She was moving forward, pushing past the children. Now the veil of doubt had been lifted from her eyes and she could see that it was indeed Tiffany. The years had been so kind to her that the ravages of fifteen years were no more than the etchings of maturity on her beautiful face. But she had changed in more subtle ways, this sophisticated, wealthy creature with her calculated poise was a far cry from the harum-scarum Tiffy she'd known.

Tiffany blinked uncertainly. Could this middle aged frump in the denim jeans, old cardigan and apron really be the vivacious Lizzie? Typically, she spoke her mind. "Good God, Lizzie I wouldn't have recognised you. What have you been doing, letting yourself run to seed like that?"

Lizzie self-consciously brushed her hands over her hair, more hurt than she could admit that her old friend had found her like this. They drew close and Lizzie put her hands out tentatively, then withdrew them as if afraid that she might soil this glowing creature, afraid too that it was all a dream that was going to bring back cruel memories that she had thought locked away.

Tiffany stared hard at her friend's face, seeing the tiny wrinkles brought about more by uncaring neglect than by age, hell, they were the same age and forty wasn't old at all. Then she looked into the eyes and saw that the soul inside this unfashionable bundle of clothes was that of the old Lizzie. Those liquid, bottomless pools of green that seemed to swallow you up, and could flash with emerald fire in the face of danger. Witches' eyes, they used to call them. Impulsively she flung her arms around her friend. "Lizzie, Lizzie, it's so  GOOD to see you."

Lizzie had to struggle to release her arms from the embrace to be able to return the hug. "Tiffy, Tiffy. It's been so long. I never enquired about you. I was afraid that if I did I'd find you were dead." She suddenly sobbed, tears running down her face. "I wanted you to stay alive in my memory and was afraid that if I found you were dead the memory would die too."

Neither knew how long they stood there locked in embrace, but they gradually became aware through their tears that the children and Jack, with Marlyn at his side, had formed a staring circle around them. They reluctantly pushed apart, still with tears streaming down their faces. Lizzie choked back a sob. "Everybody, this is my best friend, Tiffany." Then hurriedly to forestall questions and loose talk, "We were at boarding school together." Then, "Tiffany, this is my husband Jack, his friend" she hesitated trying to remember, "Marlyn, and this is our children, Tiffany, Marie, James, and Jemma." She was maliciously pleased to see that Jack had moved away from Marlyn and couldn't take his eyes off Tiffy.

Tiffy shook hands with each in turn, even with little Jemma who was extraordinarily pleased and kept hold of Tiffy's hand as they shuffled as a body towards the house. Lizzie moved naturally towards the kitchen, thinking wryly that she was indeed far gone in domesticity to take a friend she hadn't seen for fifteen years straight to the kitchen. She should have gone to the elegant drawing room and poured drinks. Instead she continued resolutely into the kitchen and moved the kettle onto the middle of the Rayburn hotplate. She gestured to the kitchen chairs scattered around the big scrubbed table. "Sit down, Tiffy. I want every bit of your news." Then she stiffened, remembering her earlier unease.

Tiffy looked at her with that long-ago questioning look on her face. "You know, don't you, Lizzie?" She was looking deep into those green eyes, seeing that nameless thread that led by some strange path to the future.

Lizzie nodded once. "But what is it?"

"They need Gemini." She answered softly, and the disquiet in the green eyes turned to apprehension. There was a long silence as their eyes locked, then Lizzie slowly and with a great effort, relaxed. "Well, let's have a cup of tea and a good gossip, then I'll take you for a walk round our grand country estate." She smiled for the sake of the others, but it was an effort.

Jack broke in, he could never be silent for long in the presence of beautiful women. "What are you two talking about? What's all this that Lizzie knows, and what's this about Gemini?"

His eyes were on Tiffy but it was Lizzie who answered, half smiling. "Oh, we're just reliving our school days." She said no more, and it was obvious that Jack wasn't interested in anything but Tiffy anyway. Lizzie's smile broadened as she saw that Marlyn was in a huff.

Tiffy knew all about Jack, he was a famous playwright and she'd followed his career in the papers over the years, partly from natural interest in what sort of a man her friend had married, and partly to be in a position to keep track of Lizzie in case one of Jack's public peccadilloes should cause a divorce. Now, after she had dried her eyes, she subjected him to a hard scrutiny, which he mistakenly thought was admiration, and thereafter dismissed him from her mind. A poseur, definitely not good enough for Lizzie!

"Well, Lizzie, what have you been doing all these years?" She was careful to leave her friend to make the running, unsure of how much her family knew of her past.

"Me? Oh, you know. Not much, raising a family, that sort of thing." Lizzie gestured vaguely around the room, embracing Jack, the children, Jack's extra-marital activities, and the domesticity of the kitchen, all with a flutter of her hand. "We lived in London for a few months after we were married, then when Tiffany was on the way we moved out here. Been here ever since." Her shrug showed that there was nothing in her life that could remotely interest her vivacious friend. "What about you? Are you still in the same job?"

"Good Lord no. I left that years ago and got married." Seeing Lizzie's surprise at the thought of her friend being a wife she continued. "We've got two children, both girls. The eldest is seven, her name's Elizabeth, and the other is five, she's Marie." Their eyes locked as they considered the strength of the ties that had resulted in their eldest children having each other's names, and the fact that both their second children were called Marie.

The significance of the names wasn't lost on the sharp witted Tiffany. "Who was Marie named after, Mummy?"

"She was a very good friend of ours, a special friend. We were at school together."

"Why do you say was, Mummy? Is she not your friend any more, or is she dead or something?"

"Yes, she's dead. She died in a terrible ... accident when we were all working together years ago. Just before Daddy and I got married."

Lizzie turned back to her friend. "But what do you and your husband do now? It must be something terribly important to be able to run a Rolls Royce?" She smiled at the thought of Tiffy ever driving an ordinary car or having an ordinary life.

"Oh, when we got married Wallace was an executive with a big company making electrical fittings. It was just about the time that electronics were creeping into household things - you know, light dimmer switches, touch-control cookers, that sort of thing - so we decided to get in at the start and set up our own firm. We started right from scratch and worked eighteen hours a day for the first ten years. Really worked, I mean. We both spent most of our time in overalls doing real work with our hands." She smiled at the memory. "Oh it was hard work, but we had good times and lots of fun, too. We used to keep decent clothes in a cupboard in the only toilet in the place. When an important customer arrived we'd dash into the loo and come out as if we were different people."

She saw Lizzie smiling at her enthusiasm.

"You can laugh, Lizzie, but it was a good time, it was FUN. We were often teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, moving money and materials around to make it look as if we were solvent when we were in debt up to our eyebrows." She became more serious. "And it was all worth it. Gradually the firm became established and gradually we started spending more and more of our time with clean hands and wearing decent clothes. We even started to make money. Now we could sell up and live in luxury for the rest of our lives on the proceeds." She sighed and looked a little sad. "Maybe we'll do that. It's not so much fun now it's a business instead of a battle."

This time Lizzie couldn't suppress a little chortle of laughter. "You haven't changed, Tiffy! You never did have any interest in ordinary things, you always had to be where the excitement was. You know what you are, don't you? You're an incorrigible gambler and an excitement addict!."

"Maybe so, but there must be hope for me. After all, you seem to have settled down alright." She continued, almost inconsequentially, "I've kept an eye on you, mostly through the achievements of your famous husband," she smiled sweetly at Jack, "but I couldn't visit until I'd got it made and could hold up my head among you wealthy showbiz folks. A few months ago we took stock and found that we had indeed made it - so Wallace got his Porsche and I got my Rolls, and here I am!"

Lizzie smiled at the deceit, and set down her empty cup. "Come on, I'll show you our rolling acres." She continued quickly to forestall any moves to accompany them. "Tiffany, clear the table and then take the children and get them to clean themselves up for lunch." Jack had also risen so she hurried on. "We won't be long, Jack. We'll be back in less than half an hour. Lunch will be ready in about an hour so we'll be back in time to put on the vegetables."

As the door shut behind them, Tiffy started to speak but Lizzie quickly held a finger to her lips and led the way past the old barn in silence. Finally, when they were well away from the buildings she turned to her old friend. "Sorry about that, but none of them know anything about my murky past -and I want it to stay that way. Now, what exactly is going on?"

Tiffy pursed her lips and hesitated before speaking. "Dimitriov has been seen, the word is that he's back in business and looking for us." Her voice was flat.

"What? There must be a mistake. He can't have survived. Even if the explosion didn't kill him it would have been days, even weeks, before they could have found him. He'd never have survived. Good God, even if he'd been completely uninjured he couldn't have survived for more than a day or two without shelter at that time of year, and it was more than a week before the weather cleared enough to get a helicopter in to rescue him." Lizzie had stopped and her voice was urgent, she didn't want to believe.

"Sorry, Lizzie, but there's no mistake. The people who have seen him knew him in the old days - there are photos too. I've seen them and there's no doubt that the bastard is still alive."

"Okay, so he was lucky and survived. So, what's it got to do with us? We're past it now, they've got younger ones to deal with him, what could they want us for?"

"They don't want us."

Lizzie laughed with a mixture of relief and exasperation. "Tiffy, I could strangle you. You've been winding me up, haven't you? You said in the house that they wanted Gemini."

"No, Lizzie. Your memory has gone the same way as your dress sense. I didn't say that they wanted us - I said that they needed us." She paused to let the words sink in.

"Needed us? Why would they need us?" Lizzie looked blank.

Tiffy's sigh spoke eloquently of her frustration. "I don't know, I don't think anybody does for sure. All I know is that the word is out that Dimitriov is back on operations and that he's out to get us - you and me, that is." She shook her head. "Nobody seems to know why he wants us, but the assumption is that it's something more than just personal revenge for screwing up that last operation."

"But, dammitall Tiffy, it's been fifteen years! Surely he can't have been out of commission all that time and has only now got fit enough to look for us. What the hell has he been doing all this time? Doesn't the Department have any clues?"

"Not as far as I know. Look, all I know is this. Early this morning I got a ‘phone call, I'm always an early riser, even at weekends, but I was just up. I answered it and said who I was, you know 'Hello, this is Tiffany Walters', like you do. It was Duncan Lawson, but I didn't realise that 'till afterwards. All he said was, 'It is urgent that Andromeda see Castor. Be in his office by oh ten hundred hours today. Try not to be seen.' Then he rang off before I could ask questions. I woke my husband and spun him a tale, then got in the car and drove straight up to town and spent half an hour dodging around the shops before going to the Firm. I went straight to Duncan's office - did you know he's Section Controller now? - well he is. He thinks that we must know something that we shouldn't and that Dimitriov has been put onto us because he knows us. Anyway, I was told to go straight back home and prepare my family for a surprise holiday at the Government's expense, then come on here to get you." She chuckled. "My Wallace has gradually learned something of my past over the years, so he took it all philosophically - said he'd always known that no good would come of marrying me! I'm looking forward to seeing how you break the news to your husband!"

"Thank you for those few kind words of support!" But Lizzie's answering smile faded quickly. "What on earth could we know that matters now but hasn't for the past fifteen years?"

"How the Hell would I know? You're the brains of this team! Dammit, I've been cudgelling my brains ever since I left Duncan's office and I still haven't a clue. Maybe something that didn't matter fifteen years ago has become important now. Who knows, we may hold the secret to the Star Wars Strategic Defence Initiative in our tiny minds! I don't know - but I do know this, little old Alexi Dimitriov is a very nasty man and I'm not about to take any chances."

Lizzie walked the next fifty yards deep in thought. "The question is, does he want us to interrogate us, or does he just want to kill us?"

"I don't know, what does it matter anyway?" 

"It matters a lot. If he just wants to kill us he'll have every incentive to do it quietly without involving anyone else. On the other hand, if he wants to squeeze us, he's quite capable of using our families to apply the pressure."

"Damn, you're right, I hadn't thought of that." She smiled a little weakly. "Same old Lizzie, an absolute bugger for thinking! Well, the Department have arranged to get our families out of harm's way until it blows over."

"We need to get the Department to get us ALL out of harm's way until it blows over! For God's sake, Tiffy, surely you can't seriously be suggesting that we go back on active service! We're FORTY years old, remember, not wild twenty year olds any more!" She realised she was shouting and calmed down with an effort.

"I'm just telling you what the Department want. Their attitude is that if Dimitriov wants something it must be important, so they want it too. The only way is for us to take an active part - at least, that's what they think." She could see her friend was unconvinced and her tone became wheedling. "Come on, Lizzie, we can't just stand back and wait like goats staked out to attract tigers. Not us, who were once tigers ourselves. Let's get in there." Her eyes sparkled. "Please, Lizzie, just one more time. Let's show these young whippersnappers in the Department what Gemini were really like!"

Despite herself, Lizzie laughed. "See, I told you, you're an excitement addict. Now you've got your business on its feet you crave some new madcap adventure. I, on the other hand, am a respectable married lady, a quiet house frau, a middle aged coward!"

"Lizzie Smythe! You ... you are ... I know what you are, you are a wolf in sheep's clothing, that's what you are." She wrinkled her nose. "And the sheep whose clothing it was had absolutely no dress sense!"

Lizzie became thoughtful again. "The point is, do we have a choice? If we hide out with our families, and this thing is important enough, will Dimitriov keep on looking until he finds us? Jack's a public figure, he'd die if he had to fade into obscurity. Sooner or later we'd be found." She sighed. "Dammit, Tiffy. I hate to admit it but you're right. The only thing we can do to protect our families is to get the Department to put them somewhere safe for a few weeks whilst we try to bring things to a head. If the worst comes to the worst, we can come into the open and let him have a crack at us. Once he'd got us I don't suppose he'd have any further interest in our families."

"Very noble, old friend, but I hope you aren't thinking of giving yourself up. Not only would the Department not like that, I wouldn't either!"

"Of course not! But we'd have to clear it up quick. Sooner or later they'd get hold of one of our children. How long would you hold out if you got a message saying that Dimitriov had got his hands on Elizabeth or Marie?"

Tiffy shivered visibly. "Please! Don't say things like that! You're right, we must get the kids away to safety. The Department know that and they're going to have a car down here early in the afternoon to get your family away. Mine will have been picked up by now." She brightened as if with that settled they could get on with the exciting work. "So you agree? Gemini is back in business?"

They would soon be in sight of the buildings so Lizzie stopped and grinned as she held out her hand. "I agree. Gemini rides again! Shake on it, Partner." They were laughing as they shook hands but the intensity of the clasp belied the levity. Both knew that they might never see their loved ones again after this day.

When they arrived back, the others were all in the kitchen. The children had actually showered and dressed, and were a far cry from the urchins who had met Tiffy in the yard. Normally dinner would call for getting properly cleaned up but lunch usually merited no more than washed hands and the most obvious marks dabbed off faces. Lizzie thought wryly that it was an indication of how few friends she had that a visit from one was so special as to cause her children to shower and put on clean clothes for lunch.

Lizzie sat her friend down where they could continue to chat, and set the children to work setting the table. She quickly put the vegetables on the Rayburn and put the finishing touches to the main dishes. Jack tried to chat up Tiffy, and Marlyn sank even further into a fit of sulks.

CHAPTER 2

Lunch started as a pleasant, cheerful meal. Even Marlyn emerged from her sulks far enough to be almost normal. That was thanks to Tiffy, who drew her out and made it clear that she envied Marlyn her youth and beauty. This quite cheered Marlyn up, and only Lizzie, knowing Tiffy as she did, recognised the heavy irony in her friend's words. If there was one thing that Tiffy couldn't stand it was a weak-willed wimp who wasn't prepared to fight for what she wanted.

Jack continued to try to capture Tiffy's attention, and at first thought he was having his usual success. Gradually, though, he became aware that Tiffy's attention was wandering, and his eyes followed her gaze to see what was attracting her. To his surprise, he saw that she was watching Lizzie intently, and he kept glancing from one to the other to try to deduce what was going on. Lizzie seemed to be completely oblivious of the scrutiny, but she did seem to be a bit preoccupied - mind you, she had been like that a lot lately. It crossed his mind to wonder whether Lizzie and her friend were perhaps lesbians - but immediately dismissed the thought, he knew Lizzie to be normal, and Tiffy exuded sexiness.

Tiffy had started the meal feeling in the position of a guest who had to be communicative with her hosts. This she was very practised at, and she had them all eating out of her hand - until the moment when she met Lizzie's eyes. The dreamy, faraway look sent her nerves jangling, and her interest in Jack's, and everybody else's’, conversation became peripheral.

With uncharacteristic clumsiness she allowed a drop of gravy to trickle over her lip and onto her chin. With similarly uncharacteristic forgetfulness she ignored her napkin and instead hoisted her small handbag onto her knees beneath the table. A small piece of fumbling and she had a tissue in one hand and the handbag was back on the floor.

Nobody noticed that a small automatic pistol now nestled between her upper thighs.

They had just finished eating, and Lizzie had risen to get the coffee pot from the Rayburn, when the door crashed open. Everyone except Lizzie and Tiffy stared open mouthed as two men burst in with levelled handguns. "Still! Don't move and you won't get hurt!"

Their eyes swept the room, dismissing the children and Jack as of no interest. Tiffy they immediately singled out as a target, but they were obviously confused by Lizzie and Marlyn. Lizzie's dreaminess evaporated on the instant and she took in the situation, and the visitors' uncertainty about her, in a single glance.

She was immediately frightened, flustered, even distraught. Wringing her hands and screwing up her face in pathetic terror, she fumbled with words. "What, what ... what's the matter? What do you want? Who are you?"

Far from answering her, every word she uttered made them less interested in her. Their answer was directed primarily at Tiffy. "We're looking for Tiffany Walters and Elizabeth Caldwell." They were both concentrating on Tiffy. "You're Walt..."

The thing that stopped them short was the frightened sobbing woman suddenly starting to move with bewildering speed and purpose. Even as they dragged their eyes from Tiffy they couldn't believe what they were seeing. The drab, distraught figure was actually ATTACKING them!

Lizzie had been standing when they entered, and whilst talking she had shuffled forward until she was a but a step from the right side of the nearest man. She'd have liked the angle to be better so that she could have side-kicked him somewhere vital. But he was positioned badly - and she doubted that her jeans would have allowed her to raise her leg far enough anyway.

Her left leg lashed upwards and caught the arm just behind the wrist. The gun flew upwards and the man instinctively tried to retrieve it in mid air. His eyes followed it upwards and his head tilted back slightly in unison. As her leg came down she was already twisting and her left hand was accelerating upwards from near her right hip. Edge upwards, and with all the energy of her legs, hips, torso and arm behind it, it smashed into the underside of the exposed nose.

She felt the fragile skull bones and gristle surrounding the nose break and push smoothly upwards. Felt the travel that pushed the broken ends into the brain. In that instant he ceased to be a threat and she was already turning to engage the second man.

But there was no need. When the men had burst in, Tiffy's left hand had clutched dramatically to her breast, and then slid innocently down to her groin. The instant Lizzy's move attracted their attention she shot the man nearest her - two throaty coughs and the small 0.22 calibre bullets, fired with the pistol still resting on her legs under the table, punched into him just above the frontal bone of the pelvic girdle. They lacked the smashing power of a .38 or .45 but, taken together with Lizzie's distraction, they confused him for just long enough for her to get the pistol from under the table and shoot him neatly in the head.

Lizzie recognised that the two men had ceased to be a threat, but she knew that where there was two their might be more. Her movement towards the second man checked and diverted to scoop up the gun the first man had dropped. Without conscious thought she recognised it as a Czech Auto Pistol, and without a further glance, checked that the safety was off.

Jack was still sitting open mouthed, his theatrical background perhaps blunting his response by leading him to believe that the men were acting. More likely it was simply that it was all so far beyond his experience that he didn't know what to do, and did nothing. He had been mesmerised by the men when Lizzie first started to move, and everything had then happened so quickly that his brain didn't catch up until he saw her pick up the gun. He became even more confused. When they had married he had owned a number of sporting guns. Lizzie had asked him to get rid of them, and at first he had refused. Then he had seen the strength of her feeling, her dislike bordering on a sickened revulsion of all firearms. It wasn't just that she hated them, she had a genuine phobia and would shiver and sweat if there was a gun in the room. Now she was handling the heavy automatic as if it was second nature.

Tiffy was on her feet and quickly checked the two men and picked up the other pistol before speaking. Despite, or perhaps because of, the danger her eyes were sparkling with excitement. "Same old Lizzie, I see! You never did learn to hit them and leave them alive!"

Lizzie had an animal alertness about her, and she spoke as if they were alone in the room. "Both dead?"

"Yes."

"There'll be more. We'll go out the back way, there's old pens that'll give plenty of cover." She seemed to see the others for the first time, and her voice as she spoke to them owed nothing to the domesticated Lizzie they knew so well. It was soft, but it compelled total obedience. "Jack, take them all through into the pantry and close the door. There might be more out there and they might have grenades." The pantry had no outside windows and the walls were two feet thick.

Before Jack could speak, she had led Tiffy through the house to the back door. It was standing open on this late summer's day, and they could avoid that dangerous instant of attracting an enemy by the movement of an opening door. They hesitated briefly and Lizzie explained the situation with just a few words and gestures from their never-to-be-forgotten past.

They burst out and separated, running crouched and silent to the cover of the broken down walls of the old outbuildings. Nothing. With a minute gesture, Lizzie sent Tiffy round the far corner, whilst she herself took the shorter route round the other way. She knew every nook and cranny intimately, and could guess where a professional would choose to hole up to back up the intruders.

She was right, crouched in a niche between a building and a wall, almost invisible in the shadow, she saw the figure. Cautious that he might not be alone, she hesitated just out of his sight and carefully quartered every possible hiding place for a companion. She could see none, and she had to move fast to take out the man before Tiffy ran into danger. With one swift movement she stepped round the corner, brought up the pistol in both hands, and squeezed off three swift shots, then ducked back to cover. She didn't need to wait to see whether she had hit her target, the meaty thud of bullets striking flesh was unlike any other sound in the world.

Peeking round the corner she saw Tiffy sidling towards her close to the wall, the captured pistol held poised in her right hand. Covering each other's moves in turn they quickly and efficiently searched the farmstead until Tiffy stepped out of the last building. "Well, there seems to have been just the three of them." She peered down the road. "They must have left their car down by the main road, I suppose." For a moment she stood with her face up to the sun enjoying the glad-to-be-alive feeling that accompanied surviving, then she broke the moment by striding towards the Rolls Royce and opening the boot. "Come on, there's a lot to be done before the Department arrives." She heaved out a large khaki holdall and dumped it at Lizzie's feet, "Here, cop that," and then lugged out another one for herself. "I picked them up at the Department, Duncan had arranged for full kit to be ready for both of us."

They dumped the bags on the kitchen floor. "Come on, give me a hand to get the bodies out to the shed before the children come back in." Lizzie grabbed an arm of one of the dead men and started to haul him towards the door. Tiffy grabbed the other arm and together they hauled him to an outbuilding and dumped him unceremoniously on the floor. They returned to the kitchen for the other one, and then collected the one Lizzie had shot outside. Lizzie carefully shut and bolted the door. "I'm going to let the dogs out and I don't want them messing about with the bodies. They'll bark if anything comes near the place. If I'd had any sense I'd have let them out before, then none of this might have happened."

"Don't you believe it, all it would have done would have been to warn them too. Now, come on, we've got less than an hour before we must be going."

They entered the kitchen, quickly wiped up the small amount of blood, and then Lizzie called out, "Okay everybody, it's safe to come out now." And waited whilst they slowly emerged.

Jack had clearly got his wits back and was not pleased at being left out of things. "Lizzie, just what the hell is going on? Your old school friend arrives and you immediately start communicating by some sort of mumbo jumbo. Then, less than a couple of hours later, two men burst into our kitchen and start waving guns about. You kill one of them with your bare hands as if it's all in a normal day's work, and your dear old friend shoots the other dead with the sort of gun you need a good reason to get a Firearms Certificate for in England. Then you both dash outside and do some more shooting. Christ! For someone with a phobia about guns and violence you seem to have gone off your rocker!" He opened a cupboard door, removed a bottle of whisky and slopped a generous measure into a tumbler. Gulping down most of the contents, he refilled it and turned back to face his wife. "I hope I've been a fair and open husband to you, Lizzie - whilst you have obviously deceived me all along! So what have the pair of you got to say for yourselves? Are you just common murderers or do you excuse your barbaric behaviour by being in some way legal?"

Lizzie's flinching from his verbal attack was in stark contrast to her decisiveness in dealing with the intruders. Her voice was almost plaintive as she tried to calm him. "I'm sorry, Jack. I will try to explain but there isn't much time. Some men will be arriving within the hour to take you all to somewhere safe whilst Tiffy and I try to sort this out. Before then we must get all our stuff packed." She turned to Marlyn. "I'm afraid you're involved as well for the moment. Tiffy and I have things to do here so will you take the children upstairs and get everything packed for a holiday lasting, say, two or three weeks?

Marlyn was still pale and shaken but she was obviously of sterner stuff underneath because she rose and nodded calmly. "Of course. Where will I find everything?"

Jack tried to take over again. "Wait a minute, ..."

"No time, Jack." Lizzie cut in with her gaze still on Marlyn. "Tiffany knows where everybodys’ stuff is kept. You'll find the suitcases in the big cupboard on the landing, pack a small one for each of the children - just their day to day play things - and a big one with dress clothes for all the children. Then pack another big one for Jack. Oh, he won't be needing formal clothes, you'll be lying low out of the public eye so public functions are emphatically out. Okay?"

"Yes, okay. What about you? Shall I pack for you as well?"

Lizzie shook her head. "No, I'll be travelling light. I'll throw a few things into a bag before I go."

"Alright." Marlyn collected up the four children and ushered them towards the stairs. She might not have the finest brain in Christendom but she was the eldest of a large family and could handle children with practised ease.

The children took it all remarkably well and seemed to be less afraid than simply excited and proud of their Mum. "What's happening, auntie Marlyn? Why did Mummy hit that man in the kitchen?" Little James' voice was steady and his eyes serious.

"Don't be silly, Jimmy. They were going to burgle us and Mummy and Tiffy stopped them" Tiffany believed that she should always act as a knowledgeable intermediary between adults and her siblings.

"Shush, children! I want you to be very good and help me to pack. We're all going to go away on a surprise holiday. Marie, you go with Tiffany and get the suitcases from the big cupboard. Bring the two big cases and a small one for each of you."

"You two come with me and help me to get your clothes ready for packing." Marlyn led James and Jemma towards their bedrooms.

Back in the kitchen, Jack set down his glass with an angry thud. "Okay, enough shilly shallying, what the hell is going on?"

Lizzie hesitated a moment, then silently cleared the remnants of lunch off the table and wiped it down with a cloth. Then she pulled the bag that Tiffy had given her over to a chair by the table and sat down. Tiffy mirrored her movements and sat down opposite her. "Right, Jack, pull over your chair by the table and I'll tell you what I know."

As she waited for Jack to pick up the bottle and glass, and slide the chair to the table using his knee, she reached down and unzipped the bag. The first thing she drew out was a package wrapped in oiled cloth. She laid it on the table and reached down to rummage for a little canvas bag. Opening it she extracted a small can of oil and an assortment of rags. Then she unrolled the oiled cloth to reveal two knives, one in a sheath and the other a big pocket knife.

Extracting the finely balanced throwing knife from its sheath, she ran a finger along its edge to test its sharpness, and then started to speak quietly and soothingly. "As I said earlier, Tiffy and I, and a girl called Marie, all went to boarding school together. We were the very best of friends and did everything together." She smiled disarmingly at her still-truculant husband. "I think we must have been rather mischievous children because we always seemed to be getting into scrapes - rather like our Tiffany does now."

Jack refilled his glass and took another swallow. "Okay, okay, never mind the ancient history, just get to the point." His words were a coarse sneer.

Lizzie saw a shadow of disgust flit across Tiffy's face, and spoke quickly to forestall her volatile friend. "I will, I will, but the background is relevant." Her voice hardened perceptibly. "But before I go on, you must stop drinking. A car will be here to escort you to safety soon, but it would be best if you were in a fit state to drive your own car with the children and luggage. I don't know how many men the Department will send but there won't be any to spare for driving you around when you're too drunk to do it yourself." As she spoke she smeared some oil on the blade and carefully wiped over the whole knife with a rag. Then she reached for the other knife and pressed a switch in its brass handle. There was a sharp click as a slim, evil looking blade flicked forward.

Jack leaned forward and crashed his glass on the table, splashing whisky over her hands. "Don't you tell me about getting drunk, wife. So I might be under the influence and might, just might mind you, be involved in an accident. And in that accident I just might kill somebody. But at least it would be an ACCIDENT! Not like you two bloody murderous bitches who kill people deliberately in cold blood!" His face was a snarling mask of fury.

Before Lizzie could unlock her eyes from his and mouth a reply, Tiffy broke in. She picked up the intruder's pistol from near her elbow, tore out the magazine, ejected the round from the breech and threw the pistol across the table so that it landed with a crash in front of Jack. Her voice was shaking with suppressed fury as his eyes and hands moved involuntarily towards it. "That's right, pick it up! What the hell do you think it is?" Not pausing for him to reply, she continued. "I'll tell you what it is. It's a Czech CZ75 Auto Pistol." She flung the round she'd removed from the breech down in front of him so that it bounced off the table and hit him on the chest. "And that's what it fires, a 9 millimetre Parabellum cartridge."

He had been jarred by her action but his drink-induced truculence refused to be cowed. "So the little lady knows something about guns, so what?"

She ground her teeth in fury, but deliberately softened her voice. "Did National Service did you?"

"Yes I did, just after the War. So what?"

"What in?"

"The army - the Educational Corp if you must know - but we were still soldiers." He was less sure of himself now, more on the defensive.

Her voice was silky, and her lips parted slightly in a smile. "I'm sure you were - and you would have fired the Lee Enfield 303 and the Webley revolver. Right?"

"Yes, that's right."

"At targets - bullseye ones for the rifle and life-sized ones of men in German helmets for the revolver?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

Her lips straightened. "But you never fired at real men, did you? Never heard the smack of a round hitting flesh? Never saw living people being torn apart and turned into dead meat?"

He was quieter now, less comfortable. "No, of course not. It was peace-time when I was in."

"Ah, peace-time." Her voice was rising and her eyes were flashing fire. "It was peace-time when we were in too - at least, that's what the papers and the politicians said. But, believe me, friend, that was all a front. The Cold War was a bloody hot war where we were. We didn't use Lee Enfield rifles that you could think of as sporting rifles provided by the Army for your amusement. And we didn't use revolvers that could transport you back to the cowboys and Indians of your childhood. And we didn't finish our two year stint and buy matched Purdys for the grouse, or a nice walnut-stocked Mannlicker for the Roe deer. We used things like these." She stabbed her finger at the pistol in his hand.

He looked at it dumbly. "Look at it, man! It won't bite you, and it's no delicate target pistol so you don't have to treat it like fine porcelain. It's a heavy calibre military pistol with a fifteen-round magazine - and it's made for just one thing, killing and maiming men! It's not the sort of thing you can buy in your nice, air-conditioned, carpeted gun shop either - it's the sort of thing that's bought by the thousand by shadowy figures working for duly elected governments. And then they're given away free to young men and women, along with an owners manual that tells them how to use them to kill people."

His truculence was draining away and he waggled the pistol back and forth vaguely.

Her voice continued with inexorable fury. "The men who burst in here, and the one in the yard, weren't here to sweet-talk us. When men point pistols like that at you they mean business - and the business is kill or be killed. Your sheltered life may have led you to believe that violence is a punch-up in the pub, and death is being written out of a script. But not for us, pal, not for us. For us it's the smell of nitro-cellulose, blood and shit when you tear open the guts and bowels of somebody you don't even know well enough to dislike - but who you fear to the bottom of your very soul because you know he intends to do the same to you."

Jack laid the pistol down and pushed it away from him. Keeping his eyes downcast, he mumbled, "Killing human beings can never be justified."

Tiffy's hand slapped palm-downwards on the table with an explosive crack. "The hell it can't! Listen to me, my friend. The civilised world you live in is just a paper-thin veneer - one that's denied most of the population of this planet. You think that because there is literature and art in the world that peace and democracy are assured for ever and ever. Like hell they are! Democracy, yes and peace too, have to be protected continuously - fought for too if necessary. There's no end to the would-be tyrants of the world who think, for one reason or another, that they would be justified in taking us all back to the Dark Ages - and that's just what they'll do if they aren't fought every inch of the way. Grow up, man! People like us don't fight for political systems like capitalism, socialism or communism - all of them can be good, bad or indifferent. We fight for democracy - and that's a universal concept."

The anger started to leave her and she sighed heavily before continuing in a softer voice. "Believe me, Jack, the best we can hope for in the way of democracy and peace is that the vast majority of the populace will believe that they're theirs by right - and that the fighting for it will be done by as few people as possible. A handful, Jack, just a handful - people like Lizzie and me. Almost always, the people we hurt are the denizens of our own little clandestine world." She shook her head sadly at the knowledge that he would never really understand. "We're like the mechanics who get dirty repairing your car, or the undertakers who bury your dead. We're seldom seen, and few people with any sense would want our job, but we are essential, Jack, believe me, we are essential."

The white-hot intensity of her words had sobered him, and their obvious sincerity had impressed him more than he could bring himself to admit. He lifted his head slowly, almost fearfully, and looked from one woman to the other. "Yes, well, maybe you're right - and maybe if there were fewer secretive bastards stirring things up all around the world we'd all have a better chance of peace. Anyway, quite apart from whether the cause is just or not, did you have to kill these people? Couldn't Lizzie have knocked her one out just as easily as killing him? And couldn't you have just wounded the other one?"

"For God's sake, Jack." Tiffy spoke as if to a backward child. "This isn't the Roy Rogers, or the Lone Ranger of old-time kids’ films. This is for real and for keeps. Sure Lizzie could have hit to stun - but to do that she'd have had to pull her punch, and that would have slowed her down and made her more likely to fail. By putting everything she had into it she wasn't deliberately trying to kill, she was simply maximising her chances of stopping him - and maximising all our chances of survival. Remember, she didn't know I had a gun. Oh, she knew I'd have a go whenever she attracted their attention - but she knew that there was a high probability that the second one would shoot me before I could get him, and that she'd have to take him out too." She saw understanding start to dawn in his eyes, and waited for the realisation to strike home. "Yes, Jack, think about that. Lizzie was prepared to sacrifice me because she knew that if we didn't take out these men they probably wouldn't leave any witnesses behind. And don't think that I'd have got away with a neat flesh wound. When a nine mil Parabellum hits you at close range it NEVER makes a neat wound."

He knew he was beaten. "I ... I just thought you could have done it without killing." 

She shook her head sadly. "I wish we could have - the old cowboy thing of knocking someone out with a quick punch, or shooting the gun from their hand, or shooting them neatly in the shoulder so that they drop their gun unfired. I'm afraid life isn't like that. A well-trained man is bloody difficult to put down with a single blow, and if he has a gun in his hand one blow is all you get time for. Same with shooting guns out of people's hands. I've known some excellent shots - Lizzie for one - and some of them could do it if they weren't in a hurry, but none could do it in the heat of combat. As for a nice clean shoulder wound - a myth if ever their was one. Even if you could fire that accurately, all sorts of muck gets carried into the wound. Besides, a shot from that little peashooter of mine wouldn't have upset his aim one little bit unless it hit something immediately vital. Sorry, Jack, but if you are fighting for something important, like your life or the life of someone dear to you, you go for as fast a kill as you can possibly get. Nothing else makes any sense."

He was stung by the simple logic of her words, and by the fatalistic sadness of their delivery. "A council of despair if ever I heard one." He saw her hackles start to rise again and waved a placatory hand. "Okay, okay, I know. This isn't the time nor the place to discuss such things so, please, go on with your story."

Lizzie took up her story as if the outburst had never happened. "Later, when we left school, the three of us wanted to stay together and, like many young people, wanted to do something exciting. We didn't know what exactly, but this was in the swinging sixties and excitement was in the air so we wanted to see the world and have fun.

Of course, we had not the slightest notion of becoming spies or anything like that, rather the opposite in fact. We didn't want to be poking around in dark corners, we wanted to be out in the sun having fun."

She smiled softly at the memory of their innocence. "As it happened, Marie's father was something high up in the Naval side of the Ministry of Defence, I forget what exactly, and he suggested that we might like a job with a Government Department he knew. He said we could learn to become couriers and carry special government papers and things like that all over the world."

She finished the second knife and folded its wicked looking blade back into place, wiping over the haft before setting it aside. Then she reached for another bundle and started to unwrap it. "We started doing small jobs, taking small packages between Departments in London, then to other places in Britain. Sometimes we went together and sometimes alone. Then gradually we started going further afield, to the rest of Europe, the Middle East, America, Australia -anywhere where Britain had interests. It was marvellous, and in our naivety it never occurred to us that the stuff we were carrying must have been worth a lot to justify our swanning about all over the place."

She sighed wistfully. "But it all had to come to an end. Gradually we started to put two and two together, and eventually came to realise that we weren't really ordinary government couriers at all."

She spread the piece of cloth to reveal a Walther Model P5 Auto Pistol in a shoulder holster, before continuing. Jack stared at the guns - Tiffy had one too - but forbore to comment. "We realised that we were working for one of the Security Departments, I won't tell you which. Having found this out, we didn't know whether to be excited or angry. Excited to be in what we supposed to be a James Bond world, but angry because we'd been used without our knowing it. Once the penny dropped, we realised that we'd been used in dangerous situations - completely untrained and with only our innocence as a cloak. Of course, being pretty wild in those days, the excitement won and we went straight to our boss and asked to be given something more exciting to do. And that was really the start of things."

Her fingers moved as if they had minds of their own, stripping the pistol, checking it, oiling it, reassembling it, testing the action. She reached down and rummaged for a moment, and emerged with a box of 9mm pistol ammunition. Checking the box, she slit open the seal with a nail and started to thumb cartridges into the three magazines on the table. All the time she kept talking. "We were accepted and started training proper. And what training it was! Physical stuff with the SAS where we were hounded to exhaustion and trained to fire just about every weapon known to man - Warsaw Pact as well as NATO. School work too, learning the craft and science of espionage."

"Then we moved into the Department proper, and started working. At first we just did little jobs, spying I suppose you'd call it, but more like private detective work really. Keeping an eye on the National Front, the far Left and any other potentially anti-social fringe groups, that kind of thing."

She snapped a magazine into place, cocked the pistol, put on the safety catch and placed the gun near her right hand. There was another pause as she reached into the bag and pulled out another package. "At first all three of us worked together, but three isn't really a very good number for that kind of work. Anyway, Marie had spent some of her childhood in the Middle East - her father had been stationed there for a while - and could speak Arabic. Besides, she had a hankering for the sun so she was transferred to the Middle East section. Tiffy and I had been good at languages at school, and were pretty fluent in French, German and Russian. So we became a permanent team in the North European Section."

At this point Tiffy chipped in, trying to lighten the atmosphere after her outburst. "Believe me, Jack, we were the greatest. We were inseparable, and so beautiful that our nickname became the Heavenly Twins. Well, it was inevitable that the Heavenly Twins should become Gemini. The name stuck and became our official code name. Individually, I was Castor and Lizzie was Pollux. Together we were Gemini."

Lizzie flipped back the last fold of cloth and uttered a whoop of surprise. "Tiffy! Look, it's Ivan!"

Jack had been silent for an uncharacteristically long time and, despite being intrigued, felt sufficiently out of his depth that he was unwilling to stick his neck out again. Nonetheless, he was spurred into exclaiming, "What on Earth are you talking about now, woman?"

Tiffy was laughing. "What she means, Jack, is that she's got her favourite weapon back. You wouldn't think it to look at her, but she likes that great butch monster. I, being a lady, prefer something more ladylike." She held up an Uzi sub-machine gun that she was just starting to strip.

Lizzie chuckled. "Ladylike it is! Little, fickle and dainty!. This, now is a real killing weapon, a Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 Assault Rifle. Hard hitting, accurate, and reliable from the Gobi Desert to the high Arctic. That thing" she nodded at the Uzi "can barely puncture a can of beans, but this", she slapped the Kalashnikov with her hand, "this can punch through three eighths of an inch of steel or nine inches of solid brick. And it's accurate enough to kill reliably at six hundred yards." She was unaware of the steel in her voice as she spoke. Unaware that what had started almost as a children's story had pulled her back into a past when times, and words, had been harsher.

Jack looked aghast at the crudely built, vicious-looking Kalashnikov. Then swivelled his eyes to take in the lethal little Uzi. "Good God, what the hell are you doing? Pistols are one thing - I can just about accept that you need them to protect yourselves. But these ... these things are ... are for open warfare! God Almighty, I don't know much about these things but that," he gestured at the Uzi, "is a submachine gun. What the hell do you need one of those for? And that thing," he pointed at the Kalashnikov, "what in hell's name do you need a rifle for?" As an almost plaintive afterthought he added, "And when did our Secret Service start issuing Russian guns anyway?'

Again Tiffy answered. "They use a wide variety of weapons, sometimes it makes sense to use a weapon that's common in the country you're operating in. It's less conspicuous in sight and sound, and it's easier to pick up ammunition if you run short - NATO and Warsaw Pact ammo is not interchangeable."

She chuckled suddenly. "Anyway, the Department didn't issue that gun, Lizzie took it off a Red Army Arctic Patrol Lieutenant. We were on a job near one of their bases in the north and were trying to creep out after a mission - nothing very dangerous, just getting information from a contact. But things went wrong and that Lieutenant and his six-man patrol followed us for three days and nights. We only had pistols and had to keep out of range of their rifles. It was pretty tense, I can tell you. Anyway, by the third night it was getting pretty clear that they were going to get us. What with the journey in, then the mission, and then the trek out, we were just about done. We only saw them occasionally in the distance, but they had a clear trail to follow."

She shivered as she recalled the bitter cold of that Arctic winter, and her eyes had a faraway look as she spoke. "The weather had been pretty foul all along, but then a bit of a blizzard got up. I was for making the best time possible to try to get away before the weather cleared, hoping it would wipe out our tracks. But not Lizzie! She argued that with the blizzard blowing straight into our face we'd just exhaust ourselves for little gain in distance. So she insisted that we use the blizzard to our advantage by turning around and stalking the patrol. We were dead beat and it took endless hours to make contact, but we came on them out of the eye of an Arctic blizzard and were lucky enough to get the Lieutenant on his own. God alone knows why he was out of sight of his men - but he was young and it's likely that he was unsure of his command and was minimising his contact with his men as much as possible. Whatever the reason, he was pitching his one-man tent maybe twenty yards from them - not far, but in the blizzard, and with just the moon and the Aurora Borealis filtering through the snow, you couldn't see half that distance. Anyway, Lizzie went for him whilst I covered her against the appearance of the rest of the patrol. She didn't dare use a gun because of the noise, so she went for him with a knife. He'd set down his rifle but he had a pistol in a holster on his belt. But he didn't go for it - perhaps the cold and his arctic gloves made it difficult to get the pistol out, or perhaps he thought she'd be easy meat. Maybe it was just that he'd already been using the knife to hack bits of ice clear to pitch his tent and knew it wasn't frozen in its sheath so he could get it out quickly. Anyway, he grabbed his knife and went for her. He was good - but Lizzie was better and she killed him and took that gun."

Despite himself, Jack was drawn into the story. "And what about the rest of the patrol? How did you get away from them?'

"Oh, we dumped the Lieutanant's body in his tent in the hope that they wouldn't notice he was dead until morning. Then we left them and pushed on as fast as we could all through the night - it was winter so the days were short." She stopped for so long that Jack wasn't sure whether she had finished. She was sitting with her body perfectly still and her eyes staring sightlessly ahead, but every now and then her eyebrows and cheeks twitched as her mind replayed the events of that terrible night. "It was so cold, and we were so exhausted that we just couldn't generate enough heat to keep warm, even the exercise didn't help. I was dead beat and wanted to stop but Lizzie knew that if we stopped before sunrise the cold would kill us, so she dragged me on by brute force for hours and hours ..." Her voice trailed away into silence and she was back again in the bone-chilling cold of that pre-dawn day.

A brief shivery spasm gripped her, then she continued speaking. "Gradually the wind dropped and the snow died away to nearly nothing - but the going was terribly hard and the moon had disappeared. Just before dawn the ground stopped rising, so we stopped on the crest so that we would be able to see if they were still following us when it got light." She laughed harshly. "Still coming? As if there was ever any doubt - Red Army Arctic Patrols are not noted for giving up! Come first light, there they were, away at the far end of the long valley we'd come through." Her eyes squeezed shut as if to cut off the image. "God, I was scared! We had struggled for hours to come up that valley, and there they were, all rested and fresh and fit, and coming up the slope like they were superhuman. I was for turning and running till I dropped - but not Lizzie. I can just see her now, taking off her parka and starting doing exercises to warm herself up and ease her muscles so she could shoot accurately."

Tiffy spoke in the quiet monotone of a Medium communicating with the dead. "When they were just a couple of hundred yards away, and had no cover to hide behind, she lay down on her parka so that she could see them between rocks. I can see her now, her breath like smoke in the cold, and freezing where it hit the rifle breech so that there was a long streak of white hoar frost along the side. She seemed to take an age to get ready, and all the time they were getting closer and looking like men instead of just dots. Then she started firing, just six unhurried shots and it was all over. Lizzie always was a crack shot - she'd done a snipers course for assassination jobs - so in that open territory they just had no chance at all." Tiffy sat for a long time staring into space, then she slowly came back to the present and finished almost inconsequentally, "After that she always preferred that gun."

Jack furrowed his brow as he tried to take it all in. Shaking his head in disbelief, he avoided the touchy ground of the killing, and asked the question, "Why do you call it Ivan? Is it just because it's Russian?"

Again Tiffy answered, making a deliberate attempt to lighten the mood. "Oh there was an element of that, of course, but the main reason was that Lizzie became a real virtuoso with that gun. When we had to go on the shooting range we'd all complain if we were selected to shoot against her. We knew we'd lose and we'd always say, 'It's not fair, we have to shoot against two, Lizzie and her Ivan the Terrible'. From then on we always used to refer to them as Lizzie and her Ivan."

Lizzie scarcely listened as she lovingly stripped the rifle down, cleaned, oiled and reassembled it. Then she loaded five long, curved magazines with the heavy Russian 7.62x39mm rounds, and smacked one magazine into place. Whether it was the sight of it or the story Tiffy had told, there seemed to be something immeasurably sinister about the oily metallic sound as she cocked the action and flicked on the safety catch.

Jack leaned forward and ran a tentative finger along the folding stock. "It's a crude looking brute."

Although Lizzie had seemed to be oblivious to Tiffy's story telling it had affected her and another layer of domesticity had sloughed off. Now she answered in a voice that was crisp and uncompromising. "It's not a fancy sporting rifle with gilt scroll work and carved stock, that's for sure. It's a military Assault Rifle, mass-produced by the million and more widely used than any other single weapon ever made." She ran a hand along its rough frame. "Like all military weapons, it's built down to a price - but only where it doesn't matter. Inside it's superbly built and will stand up to the sort of usage that would reduce a sporting rifle to scrap in no time flat. And it fires heavy slugs at a rate of six hundred and fifty rounds a minute. In fact, the mechanism is so good it's been copied by a number of other manufacturers."

Tiffy chuckled, seeing the Lizzie she remembered so well. "Okay, okay, we're not arguing - but it is a bit long in the tooth. When I picked them up, old Jerry Withers offered me more modern stuff, but I knew you'd want Ivan. He offered me one of the new Heckler Koch MP5s, like the SAS use, instead of my old Uzi. I was sorely tempted, I can tell you - but there wasn't time to get used to it so I knew you'd chew me out something rotten if I accepted."

"You're right!" Lizzie looked at Jack, and spoke more to offer the olive branch than from any need to explain further. "The modern Assault Rifles are of smaller calibre, just a little bigger than .22, so they're lighter and easier to use. To some extent they compensate for their small calibre by having a higher muzzle velocity, but for a long time the military thinking has been that a 7.62 is simply more powerful than the average infantryman needs." She nodded towards the Uzi. "When it comes to close-in stuff the Uzi is superb, it's designed for handiness and fast firing. But at longer ranges it just doesn't have the clout. It's hard pushed to punch holes in the mudguard of a military truck, whilst this," she slapped the Kalashnikov, "will reduce the whole vehicle to a heap of smoking scrap."

Tiffy broke in. "It is a hefty brute, Jack, but she's big enough to handle it. We make a pretty effective team, my Uzi can take care of most things at close range, and anything less than a properly armed infantry squad is dead meat if it comes up against Lizzie at longer range."

Jack looked at his wife for a long moment, then filled the growing silence. "You never told me any of this. You said you'd been a courier, but you led me to believe it was with a Holiday Travel firm."

She shrugged. "Well, I was bound by the Official Secrets Act. Later, when my secrets had become old hat, it didn't seem to matter any more. It was all behind me and I just wanted to forget about it. Never in my wildest nightmares did I think I'd be recalled to duty unless there was a war on."

"But why were you so against guns all these years."

The silence drew out, until Lizzie suddenly sighed. "I suppose I'd better tell you." She broke off. "Look, this sounds all very cloak and dagger, but it wasn't like that at all. Nearly all the seven or eight years we were in the Department we were doing very mundane things. Oh, we did a lot of training, of course, because you could never tell when things might go wrong. But on all but a tiny handful of missions," she tried not to notice Tiffy's raised eyebrows, "we just swanned around as holiday makers or business people and picked up bits of information from the real spies. Even if we'd been caught we'd probably have got away with it - it would have been the people on the spot who got it in the neck."

She shrugged. "But sometimes two women - two young, carefree women - can do things that men can't, so just a few times we got nearer to the centre of things." She had to avert her eyes to avoid Tiffy's admiring look. "Anyway, we were on a mission just inside Russia, near the Finnish border. The Russians had stolen some NATO gadget and we were the only team in the office at the time so we were sent to get it back or destroy it. It was thought that they might have it in one of their border posts and that we'd need explosives to blow our way in, so we took an explosives expert - it was Marie, she'd specialised in explosives in the Middle East and was the only flash bang merchant available."

She had the Kalashnikov lying on the table in front of her and was gripping it with both hands, so tightly that her fingers shone white. "We found the place okay. It was just an ordinary army building in the wilds. They must have smuggled the gadget across the border and were waiting to be picked up by helicopter. There was a dozen or so of them and there was little chance that we could get the ... thing away from them. Anyway, we realised from the notices on the walls that an adjacent building was used to store land mines for planting in the border area, so we thought that if we could get someone in there to set a time bomb amongst the mines we could blow the whole place sky high."

Her eyes were moist and distant as she remembered. "Marie was the expert so she took all the explosives she had, a lump of plastic explosive and two time pencils. We covered her as she ran towards the back window of the building, carrying the two time pencils in her left hand. One of the Ruskies got a shot at her, just one burst before I took him out, but it hit her left arm, shattered the hand and arm and destroyed the pencils." By now the tears were running down Lizzie's face as she remembered the flopping arm and the spurting blood.

"Marie kept going and dived in through a window that I'd cleared with a quick burst, even although without the pencils she had no way of setting off a timed explosion. I guess we hoped she'd find some more in there with the mines. The Ruskies suddenly woke up to what we were doing and rushed through the buildings to get across to her. She must have heard them coming because she appeared at the window holding up a big landmine with her dollop of plastic explosives stuck in the middle of it." She was sobbing uncontrollably now. "She could hardly hold it with one hand, and it was all slippery with blood. The mines weren't primed so she had no way of setting them off. She shouted for us to fire at it to set it off with gunfire - she hadn't taken a gun in with her."

She controlled her sobbing and forced herself to go on. "We were well back and Tiffy's Uzi didn't have the range so it was up to me. I couldn't squeeze the trigger and Marie kept shouting at me to fire because they were coming. So I gave it one long burst and the whole place disappeared in a huge explosion."

She wiped her eyes and sniffed. "And our best friend died with them." she finished simply as she got up, picked up the khaki suit and stumbled out of the room.

Jack glanced at Tiffy, but said nothing when he saw that tears were carving rivers through her makeup. Somehow the anguish served to reassure him that his wife and her friend were not blood-thirsty psychopaths but sensitive people who paid a high personal price for their beliefs. It was a few minutes before Lizzie returned, washed, changed and wearing the jump suit. Although it had a military air about it, it could easily have been mistaken for a trendy leisure suit - an impression accentuated by the khaki coloured trainers on her feet. In any case, it had transformed Lizzie. She had left the room dowdy, middle-aged, straggly-haired and bulging with loose jersey and sagging bra. She returned looking slim and hard and with her coppery hair tied up in a severe knot. Her face was set and her eyes were like green arctic ice as the newly awakened memories refused to leave her.

Jack cleared his throat. "Lizzie, I'm sorry for sounding off like I did. I guess I was surprised - I still can't quite take it all in. Look, I've got the story so far - and you might have told me it years ago - but what has that to do with what happened here today?" He had clearly been doing some deep thinking.

She drew a deep breath and forced herself back to the present. "We don't know really. Tiffy got a call from the Department this morning to tell her that a KGB agent called Alexi Dimitrov was after us. Nobody seems to know why, but Dimitrov was the officer in charge of the team we blew up on that last mission." She shook her head in bewilderment. "How he can have escaped I just don't know - there was nothing bigger than a man's head left in the area when the smoke cleared. I suppose he must have left the building before the explosion -probably trying to sneak round behind us - and was in good cover."

"Anyway, everybody in the Department thought he was dead, until he popped up recently in East Germany and was recognised by an agent who had seen him in the old days. At first it just caused mild interest - people wondered what he'd been up to all those years. Then word started to filter in that he was trying to locate us - he only knew us by our code names and we've been out of circulation for a long time. Why he should want us we just don't know - but you can bet it isn't just revenge. He either wants to get something out of us, something that we don't know we have, or he wants us killed for some reason. Fortunately Tiffy got here in time."

The story telling was clearly over and it was time to move. "Look, Jack, I'm sorry about all this. I never for a moment thought my past would catch up with me and put you and the children in danger as well." Her eyes were pleading now. "Please, Jack, you must understand that the one thing that must be avoided at all costs is allowing you and the children to fall into Dimitrov's hands."

He looked dubious and started to demur, but Lizzie held up her hand. "Please Jack, trust me. Tiffy and me can't hide from this, the KGB would find us no matter where we hid. But we must get you and the children into hiding -if the KGB got their hands on you as hostages we'd just have to give ourselves up. I know you don't want to go into hiding, Jack, but it's not just for the safety of you and the children, it's for our's as well."

He hesitated, torn between the feeling that he couldn't hide whilst his wife was in danger, and the knowledge that what Lizzie was saying made solid sense. "Well, alright. But where will we go, and for how long?"

She breathed a sigh of relief. "The Department has it all arranged. You, Marlyn and the children will be taken to join Tiffy's family somewhere. I don't know where, it's better that we don't know in case either of us is taken. All I can promise is that it won't be for long. Whatever the outcome of all this, it can't last longer than a few weeks at the most. You have no public engagements booked for more than a month, and the stage you're at with your current play you can work just as well at the back of beyond as here."

He smiled for the first time since the intruders had burst in. "Alright, alright, I'll be good! I don't mind the holiday but I don't like the thought of you two being in danger." His face was suddenly sombre. "I guess I've sometimes taken you a bit for granted, but, well, I'd miss you if anything happened to you." Never one to wear his heart on his sleeve, that was as near to a protestation of love as she was ever likely to get.

She smiled back at him. "Thanks, dear. The people from the Department should be here soon so Tiffy and I will go out to keep an eye on things until they arrive." As she spoke she slipped one knife inside her suit at the back of her neck and pressed it onto a Velcro strip. The flick knife she dropped into a pocket and carefully fastened its Velcroed flap. Unzipping the front of the suit she slipped her left arm out of the sleeve and quickly donned the shoulder holster. Then she checked the pistol again before slipping it into its holster and zipping herself up. Finally, she picked up the Kalashnikov, flipped the sling over her shoulder with an easy, practised movement and flicked off the safety. "Stay inside until we call you. Okay?"

Jack's head described a peculiar circling motion, partly a nod of agreement and partly a shake of disbelief at how the quiet, gentle wife he had thought he knew to the point of boredom could pick up a Russian Assault Rifle and make it an ordinary gesture.

Waiting only for Jack's nod, Lizzie led Tiffy outside, where they spoke briefly before moving to conceal themselves in positions to cover the house. The dogs ran to Lizzie but she ignored them and they eventually moved away. For what seemed a long time they leant silently against the walls, seeing nothing moving but the dogs, and hearing nothing but the soporific hum of the insects.

The dogs heard it first, and stopped their aimless mooching to stand looking towards the main road. Then the women heard it, the low hum of a slow moving car. Without revealing themselves they watched it pick its way through the potholes. As it drew to a stop, Tiffy recognised the two occupants as men from the Department - Duncan had shown her their photographs that morning. She called softly to Lizzie whilst the murmur of the engine was still masking her words. "It's the men from the Department." Then she stepped forward to greet them.

Lizzie started forward, then stepped back, filled with a sense of dark foreboding. At first she scanned around looking for anything threatening, but always her eyes came back to the car. It looked completely normal and Tiffy recognized the two occupants, but it seemed to be overlaid by a darkness that centred around the rear door. Suddenly she sprang forward and brought the Kalashnikov up to the firing position, its butt jammed into her shoulder. She squeezed the rather heavy trigger and the still of the farm yard was torn asunder by its alien belch. Two brief seconds of fire saw twenty heavy rounds tear through the back door of the car as if it was tissue paper.

Tiffy's brain was long programmed to react to certain stimuli, and the snarl of a Kalashnikov screamed just one thing - COVER! She accelerated like an Olympic sprinter and went round the corner of the house in a flying dive. Rolling over she was immediately on her feet with the deadly Uzi at the ready. Peering round the corner, she saw Lizzie approaching the car in a tense crouch, and heard her call. "Out! Both of you. Out with your hands up."

The two men made a great show of keeping their hands in sight as they edged out of the car and shuffled forward to stand together. They turned to Tiffy and started to speak, but she silenced them with an eloquent twitch of the Uzi. Lizzie stepped quietly towards the car, and suddenly jerked open the back door. A quick glance inside, then she returned to cover the men and indicated with a jerk of her head that Tiffy should have a look.

Tiffy walked to the car and looked inside. The heavy slugs had smashed through the door, and ploughed into the top of the head immediately behind it, ending up in the body. The head wasn't a pretty sight, but there was enough face left for Tiffy to be sure she'd never seen it before. She returned to stand beside Lizzie and said quietly. "I was shown photographs of these two when I was at the Department this morning, Duncan identified them as the ones he was sending here. I've never seen anything on the one in the car."

"Explain yourselves." Lizzie's voice was as cold as ice. The older man spoke quickly. "We were ordered to come down here to escort your family to a safe place. We were having some difficulty finding the place so we pulled up in a layby a mile or so west of the road end - the big one that seemed to be a loop of old road left when the road was re-aligned." Lizzie nodded but said nothing. "Well, we were looking at the map and trying to work out where we were when we saw a driver sitting in another car. We opened the window, thinking he might be a local and would be able to give us directions, and asked if he knew this place. I guess that gave the game away because he climbed out of his car with a map in his hand and came towards us. Then he produced a gun he'd been hiding behind his map, took our guns and made us drive up here." He finished rather lamely.

Lizzie and Tiffy exchanged a barely perceptible nod, then Tiffy said. "Okay, put your hands down and get your guns from your erstwhile passenger." Turning to Lizzie, she added. "So there were four of them. Either we're very valuable or our reputation has gone before us." She grinned mischievously.

Jack and the others had heard the voices and emerged to see Lizzie changing the magazine on the Kalashnikov. "What on earth happened this time?" Jack's voice betrayed exasperation, but Lizzie was pleased to see that he was getting used to the situation and was looking almost cheerful. In his younger day he had been a bit of a hell raiser in theatrical circles, and was still inclined to belligerence when he'd had a few drinks.

"Oh, just another one. He was the driver of their car and tried to get a ride up here with these gentlemen from the Department."

The younger of the two men was recovering fast. "Gee, I owe you ladies an apology. I've often heard of you - Gemini - the Heavenly Twins! Gee, I thought the stories were mostly just apocryphal fokelore but, Phew! You two are really something else!" He spoke to Lizzie. "But how did you know he was in the back?"

Lizzie just shrugged, wondering who in the Department had been telling the youngsters such guff. Ten to one it had been Jerry Withers from the armoury section. He'd been crippled whilst working in the field and had been transferred to the armoury, but his heart had remained with the agents in the field. He liked nothing better than to tell embellished tales of agents long gone to the fresh faced youngsters who joined the Department. Although women had always been employed as spies of a sort, Lizzie, Tiffy and Marie had been the start of a new trend, women who could use their special attributes to advantage but could also stand shoulder to shoulder with the men when the going got rough. Jerry had taken them under his wing and taught them everything he knew, had been the father figure they needed at times. Afterwards he had followed their careers with great pride.

Even when they were present, he used to proclaim to everyone who would listen that Gemini was a partnership made in Heaven. Tiffy, with her volatile intuition and quicksilver reactions, to win the battles, and the cool, thoughtful Lizzie to win the wars. Tiny Tiffy, who always seemed so much larger than life that people were constantly surprised when she stood close to them and they found how diminutive she really was. And the tall, big boned Lizzie who, like so many tall women, had learned to switch off her charisma and fade into the background in even the meanest of circumstances. Always the introverted thinker, her occasional metamorphosis into blazing action had frequently frozen opponents into fleeting moments of fatal immobility.

Tiffy saw the young man becoming uncomfortable as he waited for Lizzie to reply, and she laughed as she answered for her. "Didn't the stories tell she was a Witch? She can foretell the future and see through closed doors, even car doors." The young man started to laugh, then caught Lizzy's cool gaze and the laughter trailed off into uncertainty.

The older man broke in and quietly relayed their instructions. They were to travel with the others for the first sixty miles and then branch off and head for an address north of London. They'd be expected and would receive a full briefing. The two women merely nodded.

It was time to move out. The body was dumped with the others - the Department would be back to clean up and occupy the farm later. The luggage was stacked in the back of the Volvo estate and the children strapped into the back seats. Lizzie dashed upstairs and rifled her wardrobe and drawers to shove a small bundle of essentials - underwear, trousers and blouses, skirts, summer dresses - into the khaki bag and carried it to the Rolls. She surveyed the gleaming limousine with growing dismay "My God, Tiffy, couldn't you have brought something a little less conspicuous? This thing is too big to hide and too slow to run away!" Tiffy just smiled.

As she went to throw the holdall into the back seat Lizzie again noticed the big cylindrical object pushing out the side of the bag. "Tiffy, I meant to ask you earlier, what's in the big tube in the bottom of the bag?"

Tiffy smiled. "Dunno. It's a present of some sort from Jerry Withers, he said you'd like it."

Intrigued, Lizzie unzipped the bag, groped in it and pulled out a large plastic cylinder. "I suppose it's a telescopic sight."

"Probably, Jerry didn't say what was in the bags, just that everything was in first-class condition."

Lizzie opened the cap of the cylinder and pulled out a telescope with a massive, four-inch diameter object lens. A handwritten note fell out, and she picked it up and read aloud. 'Dear Elizabeth. I've looked after Ivan for you and thought you might like a bit of an upgrade. This is a combined image-intensifier/imaging infra-red night sight and laser ranging/marking sight. The image intensifier will give you a clear daylight image under starlight. The imaging infra-red function will work in complete darkness and will show a man clearly by detecting his body heat. The laser sight fires an infra-red laser at the target and automatically adjusts the aiming point to correct for range. When you activate the laser sight the infra-red sight will also activate and you will be able to see a bright spot on the target where the laser beam is striking - and that's where the round will hit. I've zeroed it in roughly on Ivan but you will need to do the final adjustments yourself. When you zero it in it will automatically compute the correct ballistic trajectory corresponding to your rifle and ammunition, and will store the information in its micro chip. To compensate for wind, just use the knobs to set the wind speed and direction - after that the sight will compensate automatically. I enclose the instruction booklet. Good luck, Elizabeth, give 'em hell!' It was signed 'Jerry Withers'.

Lizzie looked up. "Good old Jerry, he always did look after us as if we were his favourite kids." She handed the note to Tiffy and rummaged in the plastic tube until she found the small booklet. After a quick scan through it she commented, "It seems simple enough." Glancing at her watch she made up her mind. "I think five minutes zeroing it in would be well spent, don't you?"

Tiffy nodded. "I guess so. I don't suppose we'll get another chance before we need it."

Lizzie clipped the sight onto the rifle and walked out of the farm yard whilst Tiffy settled herself against the Rolls's boot and waited. Lizzie looked around, searching for a suitable target, and her eye fell on the broken stump of a victim of Dutch Elm disease. Lying down on the warm grass she took her time adjusting her position, then raised the rifle to her shoulder and flicked the sight between its image-intensifing and imaging infra-red modes, adjusting the brightness to suit her taste. Then she lined up on a mark on the bole of the tree and flicked on the sighting switch. Immediately a bright dot appeared on the tree and she shifted aim slightly to position it on the target. Then she took a deep breath, expelled half of it, and squeezed gently.

The flat crack of the Kalashnikov echoed sharply off the buildings. She made a small adjustment and fired again. Seven more times she fired before she was satisfied. Then she got up and raised the rifle to her shoulder, sighted and swung back and forth. When she lowered it she was frowning thoughtfully at the way the image and dot had slurred as she swung the rifle.

Tiffy watched through narrowed eyes, reading Lizzie's actions and deducing the reason for the frown. Their kind of shooting was likely to be snap shooting, and Lizzie was clearly unhappy about the performance of the sight in this mode. As she watched she saw Lizzie turn as if to walk back into the yard, then suddenly spin round, bring the rifle up to her shoulder, sight and fire, all in one fluid movement. This time the Kalashnikov was set to rapid fire and Tiffy was delighted to see the target suddenly erupt in a flurry of splinters. As the echos from the firing died away, Lizzie walked towards the Rolls, unclipping the sight as she did so.

Tiffy stood up. "Well, how was it?"

"Pretty good. I was a bit worried about the way the picture slurs if you move the point of aim too quickly but I guess it's as good for snap shooting as a telescope ever is. It certainly makes sniping very easy." She grinned at her friend. "Even you could hit a barn door at fifty yards with it." Nodding towards the Uzi she asked, "When did you last fire one of those?"

"Oh, fifteen years ago if it's a day. But don't worry, I never do any aiming anyway, just get in close and spray around a bit."

Lizzie started to turn casually away, then suddenly turned back, gestured towards the far side of the farm yard and shouted, "The three barrels! Go, go, go!"

As Tiffy pivoted on her heel the Uzi was already at waist level, then she was rolling forward onto the ball of her foot as she started to accelerate towards the three old wooden barrels set about ten feet apart. Lizzie had used them as flower pots but they were falling apart and she had already ordered replacements. Before Tiffy's first pace was complete she was already triggering off the first burst and the right-hand barrel was erupting in a welter of splinters and earth. Then she was gathering speed, ducking and weaving as she went, and two more bursts ripped out without pause. Slowing to a walk she turned towards Lizzie and gestured over her shoulder at the shattered barrels. "See, the old eyes haven't lost their sharpness nor the hands their cunning!"

Lizzie slapped her on the shoulder, and suddenly they were both laughing like children. Another ghost had been laid. Until this day neither of them had ever questioned their competence, in their youth their place in their world had never been in doubt. But today they had both been prey to doubts. Had the hard-won lessons of yester-year evaporated, leaving them just two middle-aged women with vague memories of their youth? Now they knew that their indoctrination had been so thorough that it would all be as natural as breathing for the rest of their lives.

Lizzie replaced the sight in its case, and turned to walk towards Jack, thumbing a handful of bullets into the depleted magazine as she did so. Jack had stood and watched the two women, but his attention had really been on his wife. He couldn't believe that the hard, competent, commanding woman in front of him could be the quiet, introverted wife who'd bored him with her lack of fire. He wo