"You didn't send Spider, he's not reliable." Said Sarah.
Ruby realised that everybody was unreliable to Sarah, that was just the way she was made. She might have a point with Spider, but Ruby had him fairly well under control. For a start she was one of the few people who knew his given name was Rupert Bailey. She'd once asked him what his real name was and felt the ocean of bile and resentment fill his head. A boy child who was half Bengali and half Glaswegian and they'd called him Rupert..... Hell, it was almost guaranteed to turn him into a complete fuckup.
"He's good at handling things like this," she said, "he's got the right experience."
"That's because he's a drug dealer Ruby !"
She cringed. Sarah would never have said anything like that on her home phone, but she seemed under some illusion that mobiles were encrypted and safe. Probably she'd watched far too many TV shows where gangsters ran their empire with anonymous cell phones. Ruby knew a lot of obscure info about the intelligence community, she met quite a few of them at embassy parties and other social events. She knew that there was no safe phone system, someone could listen in to all of them.
"You're exaggerating Sarah."
She knew it was a mistake as soon as she said it. Never tell someone with OCD that they're exaggerating, she'd be telling her to pull herself together next.
"No I'm not. You've told me he's into far worse, maybe even murder."
Ruby was on her own phone, it had a personal contract on it and she didn't think simply throwing it away was an option. She had two people in London who she thought of as....friends, yes friends, people who'd be there for her. The trouble was that both of them were damaged, maybe even as damaged as she was.
"I'll be in London tomorrow, at my place. Come over in the evening and we can chat then."
"You can't just ignore what I said..........."
Ruby ended the call. Sarah would call back, at least a dozen times, which was why Ruby had never activated the voicemail service. Sarah would turn up at her flat, complete with a bottle of wine and an apology, they'd been through the routine many times. Ruby set her phone to silent and dropped it into the fruit bowl, watching as it lit up. Last time Sarah had called her eight times, the time before twelve. Today was likely to be a record. Always an even number of calls though, Sarah had a morbid dread of odd numbers.
