Tasìa heard the spooks laughing as they played basketball outside. At least they were not part of an advance team waiting for her upstairs.

Perhaps, she was letting her imagination get the best of her, after all.

No, no I am not.

Someone had been well prepared for her entrance. She was somebody's pet project. Just not those goons.

Tasìa jerked her head back to engage the mobile personal assistant, once more. She scanned for more information on the project file marked Sigrid Rosa.

Except for her mugshot printed above the project title, the rest of the file was encrypted. Unfortunately, Lady Spook Demona Heloïste had not set a bypass to ignore the password protection as she had done so with the operational data.

Tasìa put the mobile PA away in her pocket when she decided she was not going to contact Felicité until she got back.

That is, if she went back.

Tasìa glanced over to the door to the room where a pressurized hatch was embedded on the floor.

Tasìa had a decision to make. Open up the hatch and find out where it led, or scout up the stairs that led into the spook's dens.

The setup is luxurious. The Argentinian had told Tasìa when Felicité was selling her on the idea of breaching the tower. As a professional burglar, she could not ignore this factor.

The goods on the floors likely made the poker table loot appear austere in comparison.

However, there was something more valuable to her. The potential of freedom made the second option the more enticing of the two choices to follow through on.

She still had hours before her shift was over. What she could learn in that timespan could prove invaluable to her eventual egress even if she did not go through with it this evening.

But, if it gave her an immediate means to escape, she wasn't going back. At this point, Tasìa was quite ambiguous about the professional relationship she had with the Argentinian.

If the circumstances allowed for it, she was leaving, even if it meant leaving Felicité behind.

Tasìa once more picked the lock to the hatchway room.

Tasìa thought it quite curious that they used a pressurized hatch of thick metal. It showed that they took whatever was down there beneath the basement very seriously.

Two sets of reinforced brass pipes were attached to the base assembly of the hatch running through twin holes in the concrete.

Each pipe possessed a control valve mounted on the wall opposite the door.

Tasìa needed to be careful. The assembly appeared to be a haphazard jerry-rig. The twin valves controlled how much steam would be released into a double set of turbines that, given the weight of the hatch, were necessary to lift it.

The welded materials on the baseboard appeared to be too thin and loosely mounted to take the full force of both valves opened up at high capacity settings at the same time.

Tasìa held the two support bars and jiggled them. They rattled in her grip.

How the hell do they work this?

She gave the assembly another look over. The left-hand side pipe and valve had an extra bar attached that braced it against the cement foundation surrounding the hatch.

It also served to taper the assembly to the ground. However much hot air pressure rattled through it, it wasn't breaking anytime soon.

Tasìa jerked a nod of her head in reluctant approval as she concluded that whoever the people were who put it together they knew what they were doing. They must have been limited in the resources available to them when they came up with this solution.

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Near the ground, there was a switch between the valves. It was set up to be a master control.

Tasìa turned the left-hand valve all the way clockwise to full force.

She turned the right-hand valve one-fifth of the way short of a full-force setting. She switched the master control up, then back down. Up again, and then back down.

Tasìa repeated this motion several times, and the hatch opened slowly up higher with each flip of the switch.

With the hatch fully opened, she could now see the door's thickness. Now that she could see its fastener side, Tasìa recognized it for what it was as well. The hatch was built for a bank vault. At ten inches of solid, thick mass, and three thousand pounds in weight, it was on the smaller end for bank vault models in common use.

Before entering the hatch, Tasìa checked through the equipment on the shelves and found an electric torch.

She also took a carbine. The rogue loaded it with the four rounds its small fixed position magazine would allow. Tasìa pocketed eight more.

She grabbed her netted mesh bag as she started to make her way to the hatch. A strongly mildew scented breeze pushed into the room.

Tasìa adjusted her eyes as she peered into the hatch. From behind her, a cascade of sound caused palpitations in her heart even before she recognized it as music. She had not heard the song being played, nor the instrument it was being played on, in twenty-five years.

Even so, Tasìa knew it without question.

From up the stairs, a balalaika played Lara's Theme.

Could it be him?

She glanced over to the stairs leading into the fenced-in area outside. The two spooks were not likely to come back inside anytime soon but she also did not like the idea of being pinched in between two parties.

Tasìa twisted away from the hatch. She looked back up the stairs leading to the first floor.

Who else could it be?

Tasìa made her way up the stairs, quiet but quick. Anxious she was to find out if her suspicions were correct.

The song did not stop playing as she approached. Each note of its melody played in a tremolo as it was necessary to sustain the slow tune. It gave the song a delicate, brittle sound.

The top of the stairs entered a corridor. She peaked around the opposite side from whence she heard the music. Tasìa spied a camera over an entrance door, as she expected.

It hung limp, aimed at the carpet below it.

On the other end of the hallway, the music came from an antechamber. Walls of scarlet paint lined with antiques and grainéd trim must have given Felicité the viewpoint that impressed her as luxurious.

Tasìa hesitated to move forward, but she felt the presence of no one else except herself and the one who played the instrument down the hall.

Tasìa began to walk it; she peeked in every direction each time she came up to a door.

A placard on one desk read Demona Heloïste.

The decor was strikingly different from the other offices. On the wall behind the desk spread out a velvet mask designed to cover the top half of someone's head.

Above the mask, ensconced on a felt board, were a set of gelded hairpins beset with bloodstones running the course of their length.

A matching choker with the same design filigree was pinned on the felt board as well.

Most curious was what sat beneath these items - a lash with a silver handle, polished-to-mirrored surface, holding straps of full grain red-tinted leather.

What were they for? Personal amusement of a kinky sort, or perhaps torture?

Heloïste was IT. It would have been an odd circumstance if she doubled as their interrogator.

Tasìa dismissed this speculation as irrelevant for the time being.

That the items could be worth thousands of dollars was all that mattered to her now. At least, that is what she told herself.

She ignored for the moment the music that beckoned her forward; Tasìa slid into the office, and she made room in her fanny-pack for each of the items. Except for the lash which was too large. That she stowed in the netted bag.

Satiated with the warm feeling the theft gave her, Tasìa continued onward.

As she stood just outside the door of the last office, Tasìa peeked in. Only a few feet away sat an old man with the Russian balalaika lute on his lap.

She also had a clear view of an open vent high up on a wall with a support ladder beneath it behind a large desk in the office beyond the antechamber.

She focused on the man. He resembled the man she remembered only vaguely.

That man possessed dark thick hair with a matching trim beard. He almost always wore sunglasses on the hump of his nose with head nodded down and eyes cast at whomever he spoke.

This man was bald and his beard was long. He also squinted with deep wrinkles puffed under his eyes.

She did recognize the thick protruding bottom lip, the Cossack nose, and his dark eyes.

She could never forget those eyes, for they were the same eyes that Tatiana bore.

He looked up at Tasìa with a smile.

"Spider Monkey. I thought that old song you used to love to hear me play would persuade you to come."

She leaned up against the door frame on the shoulder that did not bear the carbine. Tasìa nodded.

"And that you are quite correct. Hello, General."

It was Tatiana's father.