by Joe Shine
“Oh,” I said. I started seeing where she was going with this. I raised my hands. “I am not that kind of agent. I don’t care about any of this, so unless one of you tells our hosts, they’ll never know.”
We both looked at Ryo.
“What?” he asked. “I can keep a secret.”
“You couldn’t keep me being in the CIA from her!” I reminded him.
“I did not know it was a secret to keep and I do not keep secrets from Akiko. But I am sorry.”
How could I stay mad at that? I sighed and focused back on Akiko. “We, I, owe you. Do you need help with this ‘job’?”
She looked at me. Studied me. But when she didn’t say anything, I gave her some more to think about.
“I’m not that great with computers, but I’m a good blunt club if you need it.”
“You are an analog tool in a digital world,” she said flatly. She pulled out her laptop. “I can do more damage with this in ten minutes than you could in a hundred lifetimes.”
“Can you stop a man who’s about to shoot a child?” I blurted out defensively. I’d tried, but I’d never been one to handle an insult very well, and she’d pushed my buttons. “Sometimes you need an analog tool.”
“Well, when I need a tool I’ll know who to call.” She smiled viciously.
“I’m hungry,” Ryo said, louder than necessary to break the tension. “May we order in?”
I think Akiko and I could have gone at it all night, so cheers to him for stopping us. I stared at her and she at me. We silently agreed to an uneasy truce.
“I’ve already done that,” she said, breaking the stare and pointing toward the fridge. “Your favorite.”
Ryo walked over to the fridge and inside was a huge platter of sushi with boxes full of all the fixings. Never liked raw fish, so this wasn’t for me. Deep fry it, broil it, heck, smoke it and I’m all over it, but raw? My caveman ancestors didn’t invent the GrillMaster 3000XL for me to eat anything raw. Looked like ol’ Hutch here’s gonna be eating some white rice tonight. Mmmmm. Ryo was beyond excited about the food and actually clapped, so thanks to our weird connection, I was oddly excited, too. The link does weird things to you.
“Would you two mind if I showered before we eat?” he asked.
Yes, even in life-or-death scenarios he was still compulsive about cleanliness. The question reminded me how dirtbag filthy we were. I would need to shower, too, at some point.
“Go for it,” I said.
He glanced between Akiko and me. “Will you two promise to get along?” he asked.
“She started it,” I said with a smile. “I promise we’ll behave.”
He shook his head and closed the bathroom door behind him.
Once we were all alone, Akiko looked up at me and patted the cushion beside her.
“Join me?”
I could’ve used a good moment of down time. I wasn’t going to get it, though. No sooner had my head hit the back of the couch than Akiko stood. Alarm bells went off; I was now in a weaker position if she were a threat. Which she could be. How much did I really know about this girl?
“What is your real name? Where are you from? And who do you really work for?” she demanded.
“Uh . . .” The questions caught me off guard so my “Uh . . .” was legit.
“What is your real name? Start there.”
“Bobby, uh, Robert technically,” which was totally true, “and I’m from Texas,” which was also totally true.
“But ‘Sky’ certainly isn’t your real name.”
“It is, though,” I lied. I had no tells to give it away. I could tell you I was the president of Mars and no lie detector on Planet Earth would tell you I was lying.
She shook her head. “I’m very good at what I do. Very good. And I’m also very protective of my Ryo. He has become curiously attached to you. More so than with other friends. Yes, your records do pass the eye test but not the smell test. Your digital history smells . . . fishy. There is the hint of manipulation, the ghost of someone tampering with your past before you joined the band. Not to mention that there is very little of you out there to begin with. Very rare for someone of our generation, especially for one who is a pop sensation.”
I met her steely gaze. Stick to the script; that was best. “My parents were weirdos. They didn’t let me use the web much. Didn’t trust it and thought it—”
“It’s as if your online presence has been fabricated,” Akiko interrupted.
“Because the CIA scrubbed my past to make it harder to blackmail me,” I explained. Even I was impressed with how quickly I’d come up with that one. And it even sorta made sense.
“That is a lie for Ryo to believe, not for me. We both know you are not a CIA agent. They do not hunt down their own and murder US citizens in their homes.” She paused. “Now. Would you like to tell me who you really work for?” she asked.
Fine. Time to fall back on what had always worked for me my whole life—my real life—before I became a Shadow. Time to call on the old Hutch charm. “You got me,” I said as I raised my hands. “I don’t work for the CIA, as in the Central Intelligence Agency. Never have. That was a lie for Ryo. But I do work for a CIA. I work for Cinnabon International Advocacy. My job is to subconsciously get people to buy our delicious cinnamon buns. Sometimes I’ll whisper, ‘Cinnabon’ during our shows and on our albums. I know it’s unethical, but it’s what I do.” I sighed deeply. “Wow, it feels really good to finally tell someone. Load off my shoulders.”
That’s when I saw it. The faint hint of a smile. Point: Hutch.
I lowered my voice. “Ever wonder where we got our name ‘International’? Cinnabon International Advocacy. They’ve been pulling the strings since day one. We’re their bun boys.”
She snorted. Two points: Hutch.
“Look, just know that whatever I am—super-agent or cinnamon bun preacher-salesman—Ryo is safe with me and I’d die before I let anything happen to him, okay? I promise.”
She shrugged and pulled out her phone, flopping back down beside me. The conversation appeared to be over. Or so I thought until I saw that she was typing my name into her phone. Ugh, well, she’s persistent, I’ll give her that. Whatever. She’d never find anything and if she did, I’d just have to kill her.
“So I had an idea,” Ryo said, stepping out of the bathroom freshly dressed. His showers usually last close to twenty minutes, so by his standards it had been a pretty short scrub. He must have been really hungry.
“Let’s post a video online, let everyone know we’re alive, and tell them the CIA’s trying to kill us. No way they can still come after us if we out them like that.”
I knew this was coming. I’d been waiting for it.
I raised my hand and said, “It’s not a bad idea. The problem is, if we do that, we’re still running. Yeah, the outrage of it all could shield us for a bit, but then some other issue would zap everyone’s attention away and we’d be left right back where we were—only, now we’ve really, really pissed whoever’s trying to kill us off even more. We’ll always be running unless we can figure out why they’re coming after us and how we can fix it. Right now we’re names on a list, but if we poke the bear, well, bears can be really mean when they want to be. Give me a chance to fix this, okay? If I can’t, we’ll go with your plan. Deal?”
He had been munching during my whole spiel, so he had to swallow before he could say, “Deal. Can I at least call my parents?”
I shook my head. “You love them, right?”
“Of course.”
“Then it’s better to keep them out of this. I know these people and if they see you’re in contact with your parents, they’ll use them against you without blinking. Give me a few days, okay?”
He nodded, but then his eyes widened as he thought out loud, “So they could have my parents right now? We must go fin
d them!”
“They don’t have them. They are watching them, keeping tabs on them, yeah, but they don’t have them.”
“How can you know this?” Akiko asked for Ryo before he could.
“Because there’s no play in that move right now. Look, my people are vicious sometimes, but they’re not cruel for cruelty’s sake. They won’t go after your parents until we give them a reason to. My advice: Don’t be the reason your parents are dragged into all of this. Let them mourn. Let them believe you’re dead. They’re safer that way.”
Chapter 23
The Blunt Club Swings Into Action
We caught up on the news while we ate. All the channels were reporting that a terrorist group had claimed responsibility for firing the surface-to-air missile that had taken us out. All members of the band were confirmed dead. There were candlelight vigils and plenty of videos of crying, once-adoring fans. I’m a cold-hearted monster now, whatever, but Ryo wasn’t and it depressed him a lot and that depression seeped into me a bit, too. It made him think of his parents and how badly he needed to talk to them. I talked him off the ledge, but he was in a funk and had gone to lie down. Beaten down and tired from travel, stress, you name it, he was asleep within minutes.
“Very clever to blame terrorists,” Akiko muttered. She’d been on her computer, directing only half of her attention to the TV throughout dinner.
“They’re not stupid people.”
“They employ you,” she joked. “Well, I believe it’s time I get to work.”
She put on some headphones, and began hammering away at the keyboard faster than anyone I’d ever seen. It was depressing. I started to feel like the analog tool in her digital world. While she hacked away—or did whatever she was doing—I scanned the channels. No HBO. No ESPN. Great. I ended up on some really bizarre game show and couldn’t stop watching. In the first challenge all the contestants stripped down to their underwear and got into a small pond. While they were in the water these small sucker fish latched on to them. After sixty seconds they all stood up and, from what I could tell, the person with the most sucker fish dangling off them won. It was disgusting, disturbing, and amazing and it kept going. Each challenge was weirder than the one before it. I was addicted and before I knew it, I’d been watching for over an hour. I hoped it would keep going all night. Japanese TV—gotta love it.
“Kusoooo,” Akiko hissed angrily.
I ignored her.
It wasn’t until she started muttering, “No, no, no . . .” that I had to ask.
“Everything okay?”
“No,” she said, knocking her headphones off with her shoulder to keep her fingers dancing across the keys. “They have live security,” she said, as if I would understand.
“Ink and paper kinda guy, remember,” I said, pointing at myself.
“They have an actual human monitoring their servers. They detected me and now he’s trying to hack me.”
“So, unplug or something.”
She groaned. “I can’t. The job isn’t done and this is the only chance to do it. I fail and the weakness I’m exploiting will be fixed and lost.”
“Oh. Sooooo . . .”
“It’s an endurance battle now. I will attack him. He will defend. He will attack me, and I will defend. The first person to make a mistake or gets tired loses.”
“Sounds really stressing,” I admitted. Looks like someone may be in line for good ol’ fashioned Hutch neck massage . . .
“It is, but it’s also fun,” she said and actually smiled.
Fun? Wow, we are very different people.
“Good luck, I guess. You need me to turn the TV off?”
“Actually,” she said, “and it pains me to even ask.”
“Anything.”
“This could last all night and I’d prefer it not to. I may . . . be in need of a blunt club.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I joked. “You mean to tell me that there’s something this old analog tool can do that you can’t? That’s impossible. No way. Inconceivable,” and in my best-worst English accent, “Not bloody likely.”
“You’re enjoying this moment, aren’t you?”
“More than you could know. What can I do?” I asked seriously.
“Stop the other hacker. Be the blunt club you say you are,” she added.
“Where am I going?”
Typing with one hand she pulled out a spare phone from her backpack with her other hand, opened Google Maps, and typed in a location. “Here.”
“Got it. So what? I just look for a dude typing like crazy.”
“The servers are on the same floor as the labs. When you get there, let me know. I’ll point him out for you.”
“Then what? Smash his computer?”
“You’re the blunt club, so you would not dare tell me how to do my job, and I would not think to tell you how to do yours.”
“Can we make out when I get back?” I joked.
“If Ryo is still asleep, yes,” she said, her eyes never leaving her computer screen.
I gulped. Was she serious? I had not been expecting that. I was honestly a bit terrified of this girl. It took me a few seconds to shake it off and get moving.
I was still covered in dried blood and mud, so I patched up my shoulder and changed quickly into jeans, a T-shirt, and a hoodie that she’d brought for me. I also snagged her sunglasses and train pass. There were no weapons. There was, strangely, a baseball bat, signed by some Japanese slugger, hanging on a plaque on the wall. I took that, too.
“How do I get out of here?”
There was only one way in or out of the hideout as far as I could tell, and there were still people in the office who would question where’d I’d come from or, worse, recognize me.
“Open the oven,” she instructed. That made no sense, but before I returned fire, I figured I’d at least play along.
Holy crap, she wasn’t kidding. The oven wasn’t actually an oven. When I opened it, the door swung open on hinges like a regular door, and there was a black hole in the bottom of it that went straight down. Dangling from the ceiling of the oven was about a foot of climbing rope with a nylon loop at the end.
“Do I do what I think I do?” I asked Akiko.
She nodded. “Enjoy the ride.”
Wow. Okay. I sat down on the floor, dangled my legs over the edge, slid my hand up through the nylon loop so that it hugged my wrist, and gripped the rope with everything I had. And away we go. I slid off the edge. For a moment I was freefalling and got that feeling you get in your stomach when that happens, but then the rope around my wrist tensed up and I realized that, yeah, I was going fast, but it was controlled-ish. Luckily, it was pitch black in here, so I couldn’t see if the ground and death were screaming toward me or not. After about ten seconds of near free fall, the rope really started to pull at my wrist and a few seconds later, my feet tapped lightly on the ground.
“Cool,” I couldn’t help but say. When I let go of the rope, it shot back up into the darkness. “Cool,” I had to say again.
I used the flashlight from Akiko’s phone to look around.
I was in a small square room and on the wall to my right was a metal trap door barely three feet tall. I twisted the lever to open it, but when I tried to push it open, it barely moved a couple inches before clanging into something metal and stopping. A dumpster was blocking me. I put my shoulder into it and shoved as hard as I could. Slowly, and with some loud screeching, the dumpster moved and the door swung open enough for me to squeeze out. I was in an alley a hundred feet or so away from the main road. Even at this time of night there was plenty of foot traffic out there. Either no one had heard the screech from the dumpster, or, and probably most likely, no one cared. Everyone walked past the alley like it wasn’t there.
I put on the sunglasses, pulled the hoodie up over my head and face, tucked the
baseball bat up into the hoodie as best I could, and headed out into the masses. I kept my head down and made sure not to bump into anyone as I wove in and out of the crowd on my way to the nearest train station. I used Akiko’s pass to get on, and three stops later I hopped off. Even though I was only three stops away, it was a stark contrast from where I had been. This place felt almost subdivisional, residential. There were a few ten-story or so buildings around the train station, but after that it was all houses. I kept following the map on Akiko’s phone until it led me to the gates of a college campus. I had to double-check the map to make sure this was right, but it was. Eventually I ended up at the Advanced Science and Technology building.
The main atrium of the building was dark and deserted, and when I looked up, the offices of the professors and PhD students that lined the upper floors were dark and empty, too. A group of young students, talking loudly, burst up from a set of stairs off to my left and passed me as they exited. I walked toward the stairs where a sign with an arrow pointing down read, among other things: labs.
The stairs led down to a set of heavy, metal French doors that opened up into what I will call the Nerdery. It was a huge open space of tables with everything from projects with robots to smoky, boiling chemicals. The place was packed. It was past one in the morning at this point, but I guess science knows no hours. Off to the right were smaller, more private labs, but off to my left the entire wall was nothing but blinking servers behind a wall of glass windows.
I texted Akiko that I was there. How was she going to point the person out to me? Oh. It was faint, but it was there somewhere up ahead.
“Over here! Over here! Over here! Over here! Over here! Over here!”
I began to work my way through the room toward the sound. Those who didn’t have headphones were craning their necks to see who was breaking the unwritten rule about noise.
“Over here! Over here! Over here! Over here! Over here! Over here!”
I think I could see him now, but it wasn’t a him. It was a her. Across the room, sitting in front of some kind of main computer system away from everyone else, was a fortysomething woman with her hair pulled into a loose bun frantically slamming away at her keyboard.
