Yes

On his way back to the merchantman, Brenan performed the hard old task of looking around to make sure that he wasn’t being followed without having it appear as though that was what he was doing.

If he was lucky, Brenan thought, the Veer Spider Bitch would know the location of the redheaded psychopath and head there straight away, allowing him to follow her without there being a great risk of discovery, as she was bound to be haughty enough to want to travel with a few of her henchmen there to make her feel important, and it was always easier to shadow a group of people.

If, on the other hand, she didn’t know where that angry little ginger midget might be hidden away, then Brenan would have a harder task as he would have to find something to do to appear less conspicuous as he waited for her underlings to find Sasha and Shorty and her to set off to confront him. And circumstances would be worse still if the boy had decided to betray James and Julien, though Brenan considered that unlikely, as the boy was probably clever enough not to have any loyalty towards his temporary masters, loyalty that they would neither need or deserve. And he was most likely young enough to be somewhat shocked by the callousness with which Spider Bitch was bound to the news that two of her underlings had been murdered by her associate, which almost made Brenan regret having had him sent in there to deliver the news in the first place.

Having reached a point from which he could watch the merchantman without much risk of anyone spotting him doing so, Brenan spent a few minutes worrying that he’d been too slow and that Spider Bitch had already set out to find Shorty, and was relieved when he spotted a woman who fit the description of her disembark from the merchantman.

Equipped with dark skin that was lighter than Ruben’s, the woman had jet-black hair, a relatively slim build and a fairly large following consisting of five men all in all, with one particularly large man walking by her side and the four others following in their tracks in sets of two.

Such a large group was good news since it meant that Brenan’s hopes of having an easier time following Spider Bitch had just been realized, but fairly bad when one considered that it meant that she either considered the psycho-midget carrot top to be dangerous enough to warrant such a large escort for what Brenan expected to be a confrontation that was sure to be somewhat tense, but shouldn’t run an especially large risk of turning violent, or that the underage sadist had a few henchmen backing him up.

Of course, Brenan thought as the group walked past the spot where he’d been standing and he allowed a comfortable gap to form between him and them, there was also the possibility that Spider Bitch had taken such a large group with her because she wanted to remind the evil little rat-bastard of the fact that she had the advantage when it came to numbers, and that it would remain so even after he’d stabbed a few of her goons to ****, but that would be fairly amateurish and not something which even a mildly competent ringleader would attempt.

Brenan was now following the unappealing sestet and considering the appearance of Spider Bitch as she had gone past him without offering him so much as a glance, as he’d made sure to keep his Defender hidden underneath his coat and to look as busy as possible. He soon decided that she belonged so a reasonably typical category of female agents: the plain and ordinary one, who formed a marked counterpart to the sort of female agent who could make good use of her good looks by instead relying on hard work and a different set of skills to rise through the ranks, if she even was an agent at all.

Knowing what he did about the Veer, Brenan wouldn’t have been too surprised if it turned out that Spider Bitch was the sort of intriguing, back-stabbing bureaucrat who would on occasion be picked to lead an espionage mission thanks to some lovely administrative infighting.

And if she was there as the result of some lovely conflict where one part of the Veertor Empire’s collective of tin-pot dictators and pompous paper-pushers had decided that the mission wasn’t vital enough that they couldn’t run the risk of having it turn out a bloody failure by reaffirming their own independence, then that would be both a good and a bad thing for the exact same reason: her inexperience, which would allow him to play her more aggressively and with far greater ease than he would an experienced field-agent, but also mean that she was an amateur, and as such more likely to make decisions that were so dumb that they would be impossible to think out in advance, and therefore prepare himself for.

As the group took a turn and started down a back-street, Brenan began to suspect that he would soon find out what sort of a figure Spider Bitch was, and started searching for a spot from which to follow the confrontation without risking discovery.