Black Tie: Book One of the Sparrow Archives

by Kieran Strange

  “So, all of the ones without any red on them...?”

  “Normal, everyday, ordinary folk, I’m afraid, like your good friend here.” Elliot waved a hand in Cabe’s general direction.

  “And what about these ones?”

  Elliot sighed as he regarded the couple of scans clustered together in the bottom-right corner, sliding his hands back into his pockets after having tucked FLYNN, Q’s scan away into a drawer in one of the cabinets.

  “The ones down there with the weird red lines?” he asked the young woman, tilting his head ever so slightly to the left. “Science Girl, I’ve got three hundred dollars in my pocket that says that’s the exact reason somebody is looking to buy whatever technology it is that allows me to do what I do in this laboratory.”

  “What are they?” demanded Ronnie, with as much politeness as she was able to muster given the fact that she was probably about to explode from curiosity.

  “Those people,” he said, with a sense of almost Dr. Frankenstein-esque pride, “haven’t become Anomalies yet.”

  Thirteen

  “I’m sorry, wait like, maybe five-and-a-half seconds here,” Ronnie was spluttering. The junior agent was taking the news a lot more vocally than Cabe, who was simply sitting on the patient table of the C.T. scanner with his jaw in his lap. “You’re saying... you’re saying you’ve developed a method you believe actually predicts who might or might not develop Anomaly abilities...?”

  “Not might or might not, will or will not,” Elliot corrected her, almost as if he were offended.

  “So... you’re saying it’s pre-determined?”

  “I am.”

  “And you can tell?”

  “I can.”

  “Using this machine?”

  “Using this machine. And fifty C.C.s of the special serum I’ve cooked up to help the helium compound show up on the scan.”

  “Wow. Okay, I... I think I need to sit down,” Ronnie breathed, and before she could finish her sentence, Cabe had hopped down off the patient table and Elliot had retrieved a stacking chair from against the furthest wall for her. She sank into it with their help and leaned forward, putting her head in her hands.

  “This is really heavy, guys,” she murmured, almost entirely muffled by her fingers, thighs, and hair. “Oh my God... oh my God, you’re like an actual legit mad scientist, but for some reason this might be the coolest effing thing I’ve ever seen... oh my God...”

  Cabe let his eyes make the upward journey from his handler to their client.

  “If I were to be a massive fan of yours,” he started, “and want a laboratory just like this so that I could start testing all my buddies and trying to figure out what sort of superpowers we might develop one day... what would I need to obtain from the recurring floor that I wouldn’t be able to procure from any other source, legal or otherwise?”

  Elliot tapped one long, slender finger against his lip. “Well, the machine is just one of the top-line C.T. scanners on the medical market, the only configurations I’ve made to it are to improve its efficiency, speed, and zoom.”

  “But the serum?”

  “My own personal recipe, developed and brewed in-house. I suppose that makes it craft?”

  “Could anyone replicate it?”

  “Not unless they have something I don’t know about.” Elliot grinned a bit. “When I was... let’s just say poking around after the Megaflare, I recovered a radioactive substance from the Bay Area which read like nothing I’d ever seen before. Now, I’m not saying it’s from another world, but it’s definitely at least charged with whatever radiation hit the Earth at the exact time of the Megaflare.”

  This was starting to sound like science fiction. Cabe released an exhausted lungful of breath. “Anything else?”

  Elliot shrugged one lean shoulder loosely. “My research, I suppose? Which is all housed on an internal cloud accessible by plug-in or WiFi connection in this room only. But I mean, that’s all just fasting for twelve hours before you inject the serum, how much of the serum to inject, how to correlate the results back to which areas of the brain may be related to which abilities, how to bond the atoms for the compound...”

  “Oh my God...” came Ronnie’s tiny voice from behind them.

  “Okay, so our first order of business is just ensuring this room remains as locked down as possible,” said Cabe, with a firm nod of his head. “How many people currently have access to or know about the recurring floor?”

  “Myself, Emiko, and my Chief of Security here, Mr. Dhawan, have access. And two of the members of the board who voted yea on United Nations funding all those years ago are invested in the project – Knapp and Flynn, both are local within a two or three hour flight. Several other board members are aware I converted several of the lower vault levels into an upper office level during the renovations, but they have extremely little knowledge of what actually occurs in here.”

  Cabe fixed his client with a long, hard stare. “Are you lying to me again, Mr. Wright?”

  “Well, well, look at the pot calling the kettle handsome.”

  “I’m being serious. Omitting this level from the blueprints you gave me, especially given its importance and relevance to the situation?”

  “I know.” Elliot beamed. “I’m just awful.”

  “Somehow, I knew you’d be fucking proud of it.”

  “All right, Sparrow.” Elliot held both of his hands up in a defensive pose. “We’ve pulled off some fairly substantial and successful pranks against each other, which is what makes us both super awesome and hilarious people. But from now on, look, things are changing. You’re opening up to me, and I’m opening up to you, and we’re sharing. We’re connecting.”

  “We’re not lying,” muttered Cabe.

  “No, we’re not. So from now on, why don’t you and I just promise to continue to be straight down the line with one another, just like we’ve been doing today?”

  One of Cabe’s ashy eyebrows slid upward several hairs. “Uh huh.”

  Elliot scowled and folded his arms again. “You’re a bleak, judgmental sonuvabitch, aren’t you? Must be all those years growing up in the land that God forgot.”

  “England?” Ronnie guessed from behind them.

  “Nebraska,” Elliot corrected her, not breaking eye-contact with the Field Agent who had saved his life not thirty-six hours ago. “I mean, I’d sort of presumed that my spendthrift lifestyle must just chap at your sweet, simple, salt-of-the-earth ass something fierce, but I had you pegged as the type of open-minded individual to look past a person’s privilege and maybe see who they were on the inside.”

  “I’m sorry, there’s more to you than that?” deflected Cabe, perhaps a little too casually. Elliot’s lips pressed together a little more tightly before finally settling into a smirk.

  “If you’re the talented individual James Flint seems to think you are, Agent Sparrow,” he said coolly, “I’m disappointed to learn that you clearly need to learn to look a little deeper at the signs and signals all around you. Who knows, you may end up finding something you like.”

  Turning his head toward Ronnie, who was now sitting upright and watching them both in silent unease, Elliot offered the much warmer side of his demeanor.

  “Science Girl, you’re welcome to stay. I want to let you loose in here and see how much chaos you can cause.” The C.E.O. gave Cabe a piercingly icy look. “Peaches, you can consider yourself dismissed. I’ll see you bright and early at seven tomorrow for the Good Morning America spot. They want to talk about... Jesus, everything.” Elliot rubbed one of his temples with a sigh. “All right, all right, get out. I’m officially done with you.”

  ◉

  The next day was the last Monday before Christmas, which meant that not only would the final stretch of the WrightTech holiday sales campaign and a whole new week of press and business engagements be keeping Elliot Wright preoccupied, but TIME magazine had published and printed its latest issue containing a rather riveting piece by a Miss Ga
briella Dasilva (ahem, ‘Santos’). The cover featured a fresh, clean, up close and personal shot of Elliot in black and white, the grain of his close-cut beard hair delicate and almost feminine in the soft-boxed lighting, along with a simple line of bold-face type reading NO MORE DIRT: Elliot Wright cleans up fact from fiction.

  “I can sort of see what she did there,” Ronnie was saying as she kicked back with an issue in their hijacked boardroom at WrightTech. By now, everything was hooked up and whirring away, the entire set-up having been transferred from the hotel suite several blocks away to this very room, allowing them a little more space and a lot more wall sockets.

  “She went the ‘squeaky clean’ route. I was talking with Flint about this the other day.” She peeked up over the pages to make sure Cabe was still listening to her and wasn’t too lost in whatever he was doing on his phone. “She’s presenting him as a pure and model citizen, and this as the interview that ignores all the gossip in favor of honesty and truth. She’s literally establishing this interview as the baseline for people’s judgment on what’s true and what’s not, using TIME’s esteemed status as a bolster. Pretty neat, huh?”

  “You’re really young, so I’m gonna give you a free pass on this, but one of these days we need to have a discussion about what the word ‘neat’ actually means.”

  “Also, look at the photo she used. Super deliberate.” Ronnie had clearly decided she wasn’t going to let Cabe piss on her parade, she was going to damn well keep on talking about whatever it was that had gotten her so excited. “It’s soft and warm, kinda makes him look harmless.”

  “Yeah, he’s pretty harmless,” Cabe agreed off-handedly. He was a smarting after waking up from an horrific nightmare where he and Ronnie crashed a jumbo jet into a bridge about an hour ago. “A playboy and a flirt and kind of a creep, but mostly harmless.”

  “I don’t think this picture is aimed at everyday people, the interview is aimed at everyday people. The picture and the headline alone are aimed at busy people who don’t have time to read the full article. Businessmen. Government officials.”

  “Yep, she’s covering his ass for him. You’re gonna make an amazing Field Agent some day, Peanut.”

  “She’s also downplaying his abilities by instilling a sense of comedic nonchalance using the word ‘fiction’ – it’s supposed to make you think of comic books and video games.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Who you texting?”

  “Your mom.”

  Ronnie stopped still and pulled a face. “Ew, why? She sucks.”

  Cabe couldn’t help a short but legitimate burst of laughter, shaking his head. “Elliot gave me access to the main C.C.T.V. system around the building on my WrightPhone. It’s this app he programmed that he uses with slightly fewer features. He said I’m not ‘technically minded’ enough for the full version,” he said, doing air quotes when needed with the fingers of one hand.

  Ronnie peered down her nose past the magazine to his hands, watching them with suspicion as he worked. “... that’s not your WrightPhone.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No, your WrightPhone is an older model because we can’t share a charger, and it has an epic crack in the screen from that one time on the bridge in Juárez.”

  Cabe smiled fondly at the memory. “Ah, Mexico.”

  Ronnie raised her eyebrow at him and smirked knowingly. “So what, he’s showering you with gifts now? Trying to buy your love?”

  “No, he actually said something about not trusting me to protect his life with an antique,” said Cabe, rolling his eyes as he entered the passcode Elliot had given him on a post-it note.

  “Which model did he give you?”

  “The Kappa. Five-Gig hard-drive.”

  “Have I told you recently that I hate you?”

  “Actually, yes.” Cabe chuckled as Ronnie regarded the sleek and beautiful piece of technology in his hand. “Did you not notice he was frothing at the mouth to science it up with you yesterday? I’m sure he’d give you anything you wanted to play with and think nothing of it.”

  Ronnie looked almost pained at the assumption. “Dude, I would never just like... he’s a client, you know? I would never want to use that for any sort of personal gain, it would feel... creepy.”

  “That’s what sets you apart from Jake on the Delta Team.”

  “Ouch! Sick burn, Sparrow.” Ronnie shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Um, hey, we’re still talking about like, physical gifts, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Okay... okay. That’s what I thought.” Ronnie glanced back down at her magazine for a moment, then looked back up at Cabe with a frown. “Wait a minute, why did you come in here again in the first place?”

  “Before I got comfortable and didn’t want to move? I was gonna ask if you wanted a frap or something from the ‘Bucks. There’s one in the lobby downstairs and it’s really starting to eat into my paycheck.”

  Before she could answer, a channel on a circuit board on the boardroom table between them lit up, catching both of their attention. Cabe frowned. “What’s that mean?”

  “It means Mr. Wright’s taking a call on his personal cell phone.” Her voice lowered considerably and she leaned in closer. “It’s one of the things he, uh, doesn’t know we’ve got access to. At least as far as I know. If he knows, he’s playing along, because he’s been using his phone all morning.”

  “It’s just a total battle of technical wits between the two of you, isn’t it?” drawled Cabe in a manner that Ronnie could never decipher if it was sarcastic or brutally honest. “So you can listen in on any of his private calls?”

  “Theoretically.” Ronnie grinned at him. “Does that make you nervous?”

  “It kinda scares me how much power we have over people’s lives sometimes, yeah,” Cabe said with an anxious chuckle. His eyed darted toward the light on the circuitboard again, and he cleared his throat.

  “You want to listen, don’t you?” Ronnie asked slyly.

  “Would you think poorly of me if I did?”

  “No. I’ve wanted to pick it up every single time it’s gone off today,” she replied, turning the page in the magazine. It was a busy four-page spread, with facts revealed and rumors debunked and several new photos from a shoot he had apparently done a few weeks ago that hadn’t hit the public forum yet. The professionalism of the whole display was exquisite, and Cabe reminded himself to give Dasilva the biggest of kudos for it next time he saw her.

  “But you see, I kinda have a professional reason to listen in,” Cabe said all of a sudden, the hand he’d been leaning on coming up to scratch absent-mindedly at the back of his neck. “Because, I mean, well, it’s investigative, right? So if he’s hiding something else, or if he tries to pull a fast one, me piggybacking onto a couple of his phone calls could give us a bit of an edge should we need it on a rainy day.”

  Ronnie blinked at him, slowly. “Wow. And you say I’m the one with the criminal mind.”

  “You’re the criminal. I’m the –”

  “Politician?” Ronnie finished for him. Cabe choked on a laugh.

  “It’s your call,” the brunette said eventually, sitting back in her ergonomic chair and closing the magazine across her leggings. “You’re the senior agent here.”

  Cabe sighed, and shook his head. “All right. But you have to promise me for real this time, you’re not gonna pick up on any of my really shitty habits and let them ruin your career as a W.A.R.D. operative. Promise?”

  “Okay,” said Ronnie with a broad grin, and she sat bolt upright and let her hands fall across the circuitboard. Cabe reached for the set of headphones currently plugged into the system and resting against the side of it, while Ronnie worked quickly to unravel the cable of the secondary set.

  “– later than expected, but that’s fine. The car will still be there by two without a problem. Just be at the drop point.”

  “I’ll be a few minutes tardy anyway, meeting with New York ran over.” The second voice
was Elliot’s, and he sounded marginally out of breath. “Come down to the lower level, all the way to the back. There’s another protest getting lubed up outside and they’re hovering around the parkade entrance.”

  “We should probably make sure the parkade is secure –” Ronnie was saying, but a sharp, aggressive wave of her friend’s hand cut her off. “What?”

  “Ssh!”

  Maybe she had managed to miss the woman’s part of the conversation while she’d been setting up her own headphone channel. But every nerve ending in Cabe’s entire body was still smarting from the electrical shock it had just received. Drop point. He had very clearly heard the words ‘drop point’.

  What the hell are you doing behind my back now, you silver-spoon-fed piece of...

  “Another protest, huh?” the young-sounding woman replied with a dry chuckle. From the noise in the vicinity of the call on that end and the echo on her voice, Cabe presumed she was driving with speakerphone on. “Whose side are they on?”

  “Mine, of course. Why wouldn’t they be?”

  “I have no idea, maybe they know you personally.”

  “Ouch. Miss Flynn, I thought you were a friend of mine. Didn’t you read my interview in TIME today? I’m a sensitive soul with a great amount of respect and tolerance for humans and alike everywhere.”

  Ronnie did a silent but emotive dance ending with jazz hands over the magazine still sitting across her thighs. It was probably going to be one of the ones she ended up keeping in the collection in her locker she had no idea he knew existed. The amount of awe she had in her little heart for Agent Dasilva might have been the cutest damn thing Cabe had ever seen, and he may have commented on it had his heart not currently been trying to scale the inside of his esophagus.

  “I still think you must’ve slept with her or something to get an interview that... perfect. Good job, Eli.”

  “Actually, I didn’t. I just let my shining personality speak for itself. How far out are you?”

  “About ten. Just at the bridge. Is the package with you right now?”