Rook

in the corner of the room. Clutching at her ear with one hand, she fumbled the phone onto speaker setting.
    “Hello?” she said.
    “I am Graaf Gerd de Leeuwen!” shrieked the unmistakable voice of the skinless Belgian she’d met the previous evening.
    “How did you get this number?
I
don’t even know what this number is,” said Myfanwy, too tired and cranky to be polite. This man’s organization was the cause of her recent bout of examinations. In addition, her fear of him was much diminished by the fact that she didn’t have to look at him.
    “Do not question me! I possess the knowledge of the ages!” he gargled.
    “Big deal,” said Myfanwy with a snort. “You know, fifteen minutes before I met you I had drinks with a vampire. The man has been dead since the eighteenth century, and he still manages to be quite well mannered.” She paused, waiting to see if her mention of Alrich would elicit an incriminating reaction from the Grafter—perhaps some evidence that the Bishop was the traitor.
    “Where is Ernst von Suchtlen?” demanded the voice, apparently willing to ignore her remarks.
    “Are you on crack?” asked Myfanwy. “You said three days! And you said that ten hours ago.”
    “Where is he, that you need three days to produce him?” came the triumphant voice down the phone.
    “Oh God.” Myfanwy sighed as the Belgian launched into a long-winded diatribe. “Look, hold on a moment, I have another callcoming through.” She pressed the button, cutting off a scream of impotent rage. “Hello?”
    “Rook Thomas, I have your coffee.”
    “Excellent, Ingrid. Bring it in.” Myfanwy switched back to the Grafter’s line and rocked slightly from the blast of seventeenth-century Belgian abuse. The bodyguards opened the doors, and Ingrid came in with a large mug of coffee and a new mobile phone and froze when she heard the torrent of shouting. Even though he was speaking in an unintelligible language, the caller was clearly neither polite nor businesslike. Ingrid cautiously approached the desk.
    “Does this have anything to do with that Graaf Ernst von Suchtlen you were asking about?” whispered Ingrid, wide-eyed at the language spewing out of the speakerphone.
    “No, this is his partner, who has no skin,” said Myfanwy, pushing the mute button and looking longingly at the coffee. “They’re the leaders of the Grafters. This guy waylaid me last night and demanded to know where his partner was.”
    “You’re talking with the Grafters?” exclaimed Ingrid. “Why don’t you have the call traced?”
    “We can do that?” asked Myfanwy in surprise.
    “As long as you keep them on the line,” said Ingrid.
    “… and I shall unleash the terror now!” screamed de Leeuwen, breaking into English and then hanging up.
    W ell, what do you want from me?” snapped Myfanwy. “I’m a genius in administration, not telecommunications.”
    “So now what are we going to do?” asked Ingrid.
    “I don’t know, wait for fungus to carpet the Cotswolds?” said Myfanwy with irritation. Then the phone rang and Ingrid went to answer it but hesitated over the empty cradle.
    “Where is the phone?” she asked.
    “I threw it into the roses,” said Myfanwy, hitting the speakerphone button. “Hello?” she said wearily.
    “This is Graaf Gerd de Leeuwen,” said the voice of the skinless Belgian.
    “Oh, hi,” said Myfanwy, gesturing frantically to Ingrid and knocking the coffee over. In her haste, Ingrid slammed her shin into a footstool before limping out of the office to her own phone. The precious caffeinated nectar spread over Myfanwy’s desk, saturating various documents of national importance and engulfing her new mobile phone. She gave a little anguished moan and tried scraping some of the coffee back into her mug using her laminated security pass.
    “I have been advised that I may have acted rashly,” said de Leeuwen. “With that in mind, the original offer of three days is reinstated.”
    “Three days from now?” asked Myfanwy, pausing in her coffee-reclamation efforts.
You bloody bipolar Belgian bastard.
“Or three days from the time of the original offer?” She looked through the doors to Ingrid, who was talking rapidly on the phone and making frantic gesticulations to keep him on the line. Myfanwy made a face indicating she had no control over the conversation, and then tried in vain to catch up with the thread of the Belgian’s diatribe, which unfortunately had just ended with the