(Part O, II )
It was three in the morning and I had been called out again, from sleep, for the third time this week. My line of work was no piece of cake. In fact my line of work had nothing to do with cake at all.
The call was way on the other side of town, and Agent Carter met me there. Carter was pretty but tried to hide it behind a career demeanour and a cool temper. At three thirty in the morning she was more frayed than usual but still could take a grisly sight and a shocking absence without reaction.
On the pavement there was a blackened patch, a chalk outline without the chalk. Houses loomed beyond the pavements and front gardens in this surburban district and a few silhouettes could be seen looking from lit bedrooms. Carter was waving the sensor and studying her display. I took a peek. Ambient temperature of the pavement shadow was ten to twenty degrees higher than the surrounding surface and cooling rapidly in the night air. I guessed it had been red hot a little while ago. The street was dead silent. No other unusual radiation traces.
Sergeant Mullins of the regular force approached, carrying bags of evidence found nearby. It all looked fairly routine. I asked the question, "Where is it?", and then Mullins produced the inevitable item, the reason we Agents were always called in to the scenes of mysterious incidents, ever since the Dada riots of 1932. Eighty-per-cent of rioteers back then had been injured seriously or killed and we didn't take these things lightly any more. Never again. Occasionally a police constable would joke and be taken to one side, never to be irreverant again.
Mullins handed it over, vacuum wrapped and boxed, and then wrapped again. The instigator of all those problems for more than fifty years and now this new disappearance and probable death. Light shone gently off the brown ridged surface. It was a plain chocolate digestive.
And the game was on.
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