This evening, once she’d decided she needed to get to the duplex, she’d contacted Dave, the primary guard Brom had assigned to Bette. He’d said he’d need a couple of hours to prepare, after protesting that he’d have preferred more advanced notice, given his cautious nature.

As she crossed the street with a large crowd to walk into the heart of Time’s Square, she thought about what Dave had said about tonight’s impromptu visit to the duplex being tricky. It made Bette feel inexplicably worse. How had things gotten to a point wherein it became tricky for her to get home? To her family? To Tina’s warm embrace?

So she’d been relieved when, half an hour ago, Dave reported that things seemed quiet around the duplex, and around Bette now, also. A quick reconnaissance from Veronica, who was trailing Tina, indicated Bette could visit the duplex, likely after 11.

After getting off at the subway stop closest to the duplex, Bette went through the turnstiles, and slowed as she paused to wait for a foursome trailing her, and who seemed to be heading towards the same exit as hers. As they slowly went up the stairs leading to the street-level, she paused at the foot of stairs, to consult her watch. She was right on time.

When the foursome was a few steps from the top of the stairs, she ascended the steps quickly, and by the time they got to the street-level, she had neared the top also. They were heading to the same street crossing she was, so she crossed the street with them, and then melted into a dark corner at the opposite side of the crossing.

Bette leaned against the wall and shut her eyes, settling in, to wait for Dave’s signal. As she massaged her neck, and began rolling her head lazily from side to side, she mused, “Maybe there’s more to the story of the gold that they haven’t told me. If there were, could that give me the clues I need to make all of this fall into place?”

xxxxxxxxxxxx

London, 1855

Scotland Yard had close to 7000 men in the force in the 1850s – they were charged with the nearly impossible task of keeping the peace in metropolitan London, an area covering 700 square miles that housed over two and a half million people. Almost from the days of its founding by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, the Yard was viewed with some skepticism by the public, given that its ranks were as likely to be filled with former criminals as with policemen. It didn’t help matters that at that time, the criminal populace was also bolstered by former policemen.