Page 28 of The Spy Who Loved Tea

She couldn’t see the lock. She couldn’t see the hinges. But she could feel the door—old wood, like the frame downstairs, weakened by age and dry rot.

She stood up, swaying, dizzy from the smoke and the pain. She raised the knocker.

And she swung.

The impact jarred her arms, sent fresh waves of agony through her burned wrists. But she heard wood crack—a satisfying sound, the sound of progress.

She swung again.

Crack.

Again.

Crack.

The door shuddered. She could feel it giving way, the old timbers splintering around the lock mechanism.

One more. She gathered everything she had—every ounce of strength, every year of training, every stubborn refusal to die in a burning building at the hands of a corporate assassin—and swung.

Crash.

The door burst open. Cool night air rushed in, sweet and clean and beautiful.

Vera staggered through the doorway, out onto a metal gantry that ran along the exterior of the mill. She sucked in great lungfuls of air, coughing, retching, her eyes streaming.

Behind her, the fire roared its frustration.

She didn’t stop to celebrate. She couldn’t. The grain dust could ignite at any moment.

The gantry led to an external staircase—rusted, precarious, but functional. Vera half-ran, half-fell down the steps, her hand scraping along the railing, her feet finding each tread more by luck than skill.

She reached the ground and kept moving. Away from the mill. Away from the fire. Into the darkness of the overgrown field.

She had covered perhaps fifty yards when the night turned white.

The explosion was less a sound than a physical force—a wall of pressure that picked her up and threw her forward into the nettles. She hit the ground hard, covered her head with her arms, and felt the heat wash over her as the mill’s upper floors erupted in a column of flame.

Debris rained down around her. Burning timbers. Shattered glass. Fragments of two hundred years of history, reduced to shrapnel.

Then silence. Or something close to it—just the crackle of the fire and the ringing in her ears.

Vera lay in the nettles for a long moment, breathing, existing, confirming to herself that she was still alive.

Then she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees.

The mill was a torch now, flames shooting fifty feet into the night sky. The old timbers burned with a ferocious intensity, collapsing inward as she watched. By morning, there would be nothing left but a blackened shell and a pile of ash.

All the evidence. The maps. The files. The Calloway dossier.

Gone.

Julian had won this round.

But Julian had also made a mistake.

Vera crawled through the nettles, back toward the perimeter fence, her mind already working through the implications. Julian had said he would “relocate to a new base” and “be on a plane to Zurich” before anyone started asking questions. That meant he was leaving tonight. That meant he needed transportation.

His Range Rover was too conspicuous now—it would have been seen at the mill, might already be on a police watch list after the fire. He needed something anonymous. Something untraceable.