Level One

Prologue

       It was late in the evening as a small car pulled over and parked by the side of the road. The door opened and a woman stepped out. She paused, looking around in the darkness. There were no houses, no lights. It was a rural lane just outside the town. She set off briskly down the road. After walking for a few minutes she turned into a side road. A little way down the road a black van was parked. The woman slowed her pace and approached the van cautiously, stopping a few metres from it. A tall man dressed in black stepped out from behind the vehicle. He shone a torch at the woman revealing her to be a slim girl in her early twenties with shoulder length brown hair.

"Have you got it?" he asked.

"Have you got the money?" she replied.

"Hand it over first. My colleague will check that it's genuine, then you'll get your money. The man spoke with a slight accent.

"Let me see it first."

"You're not very trusting, are you? All right." The man opened the sliding door on the side of the van revealing another man sitting at a table with a laptop computer in front of him. The first man reached in and picked up a small suitcase which he carefully opened and held out for the woman to see.

"Shine your torch into it," the woman commanded.

The torch beam revealed the case to be stacked full of fifty dollar notes in bundles.

The man snapped the case shut. "Your turn," he said.

The woman reached into the left pocket of her jacket and produced an ordinary USB stick which she held out for the man to take. He held it up and looked at it, then handed to his friend in the van. 

The second man inserted it the laptop and looked closely at the screen. "This will take a few minutes," he muttered.

The first man nodded, then stood silently with his gaze fixed on the woman who waited restlessly with her hands in her jacket pockets.

Finally after ten minutes, the computer man nodded to his companion. "It's all here as far as I can tell, and it looks genuine. You can give her the payoff," he added with a smirk.

The woman suddenly found herself looking at a pistol in the hand of the first man pointing directly at her face.

"What's this?" she gasped, "Are you going to kill me?"

"Sorry, sweetheart, but you didn't really think we were going to give you all that money and let you walk away free did you? You can identify us. Now just move around the back of the van and I'll make it quick and painless."

"Asshole!" the woman hissed as the man crumpled to the ground.

"What the hell?" exclaimed the computer man as he brought up his gun and fired. A moment later he was slumped over his desk, and the woman was running back up the road.

Minutes later, her breath coming in pants, she climbed into her car, started it, pulled a fast U turn and accelerated down the road. As she drove she glanced in the rear view mirror and gasped in horror. A set of headlights swung out of the side road she had just come from and accelerated after her.

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