Special Agent Dorm Harkaway crouched in the darkness, a syringe clutched in his left hand. He’d found what he needed in the basement of the building where the drugs had lain untouched for the better part of twenty years. It didn’t matter that it was old; the shelf life of Thermodextrate was more than century and there had been more than enough to fulfill his needs. And as he had expected, as he had hoped there was Yosunkathiwed as well, which was by far rarer than the first drug but infinitely more useful for his purposes.

He raked a hand through his hair and blinked the exhaustion from his eyes. It had been a long day, far too long and now it looked like stretching into a longer night. Everything was prepared for his escape. A horse stood tied to a tree a dozen metres into the jungle, a rope was slung over the walls for a quick getaway. His satchel was on his back, full of the stolen equipment he needed. And everyone was asleep, including the guard, on the back wall where the rope had been hung. Of course the man had not wanted to sleep but Dorm had given him little choice.

The Thermodextrate he had stolen from the basement of The Hideout was one of the heaviest soporifics known to man, used to make panicked patients unconscious within milliseconds so that potentially life-saving operations could be carried out. One squirt of this anywhere in the body, even the furthest areas from the nerve center, and the recipient fell into what was little more than a coma for nearly ten hours. It had been simple enough to sneak up on the hapless sentry and plunge the syringe into his back. The man had been expecting any attack to come from without, not within and hadn’t even heard Dorm coming. He’d even propped the man up against the wall so that the other sentries wouldn’t notice anything amiss.

And here he was now, crouched in the darkness down the hall from Blake and Siph/Saffron’s room, a syringe of Thermodextrate in his hand, another in his satchel and one of Yosunkathiwed nestled along-side it. But there was