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their hundreds.
    â€˜Here’s as good as anywhere,’ Con decided, sitting down on a small plateau halfway up a hillside.
    Patch dropped his rucksack and set about removing the food. ‘As her ladyship commands.’ Con grabbed a chicken leg and bit into it hungrily.
    â€˜Route-wise,’ said Tye, ‘to keep a low profile I think I’ll fly us into the tiny airport at San Angelo and take a hire car down to San Antonio. Should take us three, maybe four hours on the interstate.’
    â€˜Or twelve if Jonah’s driving,’ Motti put in.
    â€˜Ha, ha,’ said Jonah. ‘And what do we find when we get there? What’s the dirt on Blackland?’
    â€˜Coldhardt gave me his file.’ Motti cracked open a beer. ‘Blackland’s from a rich family, Texan to the T-bone. Had his own fort built from scratch in honour of his ancestors who fought in the Texas War of Independence.’
    â€˜Sweet,’ said Patch, hefting a huge, clumsily cut sandwich with chutney oozing out of it. ‘So Blackland don’t need to work, he just sits on his bum reading weird old books all day, is that it?’
    Motti shook his head. ‘Daddy was big in the oil biz, but Blackland prefers digging other shit out the ground.’
    Con hazarded a translation. ‘An archaeologist?’
    â€˜All nice and respectable on the surface. But Coldhardt reckons he’s more of a tomb raider on the sly. Not declaring all his finds and smuggling them off to his stronghold.’
    â€˜Just how fortressy is Blackland’s place?’ Tye asked, hunkering down. ‘I mean, it’s not like we’re going to be storming the Alamo, right?’
    Motti pulled a face. ‘Can’t promise you Mexican bandits, but we’ll have a small security force in the grounds to take care of.’
    Jonah nodded. ‘I hacked into Blackland’s bank account, found the firm supplying his security and checked out what he’s bought from them. Afraid the rest of that fort’s defences are a little more high-tech than men with old rifles wearing racoons on their head.’
    Motti took a big swig from his beer bottle. ‘Don’t diss my heritage, geek.’
    â€˜So what shouldn’t we know about this place?’ asked Patch.
    â€˜I’ll come to that,’ said Motti. ‘But once we’re past security, biggest problem we might run into is that every book in Blackland’s library has been fitted with long-range active RFID tags, our target included.’
    Tye frowned. ‘
What
tags?’
    â€˜Radio Frequency Identification,’ Jonah clarified, as Motti passed him a picture of the house. ‘Kind of like barcodes with go-faster stripes. Inductively powered chips that transmit all kinds of information using radio waves.’
    â€˜Including their location?’ Con wondered.
    â€˜Yep.’ Jonah lowered the picture. ‘And it looks like Blackland’s got high-gain antennae to keep tabs.’
    â€˜So even if we can make it away with the manuscript,’ said Patch, spitting sandwich everywhere as he spoke, ‘its little tag’s gonna be shouting for help.’
    Motti nodded. ‘And an aerial like that could track it a hell of a way.’
    â€˜Can’t we take it out?’ asked Tye. ‘I mean, if it’s a tag –’
    Jonah shook his head. ‘They can be as small as half a millimetre and thin as a piece of paper. A tag’ll take time to find – time we may not have. But maybe if we make a conductive foil box to damp the tag’s signal …’
    The five of them planned and ate and drank all afternoon, discussing the problems they would face, throwing thoughts and doubts and suggestions at each other. And as the plans began to crystallise, Tye felt a twisted surge of pride.
All our lives we struggled to be something, to be taken seriously. And look at us now. We can do this
. And since Blackland had most