by Nels Wadycki
The card slid through the lock and it popped open. One of the tall, dark, and probably not so handsome figures slithered through, nearly disappearing against the dark wall. The second of the pair remained just outside the door, propping it open with the back of his heel as he kept watch, head swiveling back and forth.
Ana could just make out the whites of the eyes of the agent who had entered. She watched him start scanning the room and made her move before his eyes could reach the corner where she hid.
Springing from the darkness, she slammed her back against the door, dislodging the heel of the agent outside and eliciting a sharp bark before the door slammed and the lock engaged. At the same time, she drew her gun and was ready in time to fire a shot at the man inside. She held off though, hoping to keep at least one of the two in an interrogable state. The man did not hesitate once he became aware of her presence and he slapped her gun across the room. Her gun hit the wall near where she had lain in wait and she knew the man's size meant force as well as bulk. She would not hesitate to shoot if she got another opportunity.
Ana pushed off the door as best she could, but he clouted her away with a body blow that left her sprawled at the foot of the bed. Ana was incapacitated momentarily, but she had succeeded in her primary goal of splitting the pair. Marisol fired a quick shot. With the human equivalent of the broad side of a barn in front of her, she hit him easily, a palpable hit, on the opposite side of the leg from where Ana had shot Lukas Huang. The dark intruder dropped to a knee and as he sank, Marisol kept her gun trained on his dipping head. Even with the newly acquired lack of coordination, the hulk inside the room turned and looked ready to charge Marisol with the same force that had sent Ana to the floor.
A split second before he began to charge, his partner distracted the two duelists by putting four shots through the window of the room. It shattered the window and gave Marisol enough time to duck back into the bathroom. At the same time, it allowed Ana enough time to scramble through the thousands of tiny shards of glass and find her gun where it had been swept aside.
The monkey—or gorilla—in the middle must have caught her from the corner of his eye, because he turned to look in her direction. Ana was about to send more bullets his way when the lock on the door clicked and the second man burst in. In his haste to help, he'd blind-fired into the room and saved Marisol. Now he rushed into the room, clearly unaware that Ana had regained her weapon and sat crouching like a tiger in the corner. Almost as bad as Dr. Poole.
The agent realized his mistake a moment too late when he followed his partner's burning stare. The second man was shorter than the hulk with the bullet in his leg, and as Ana swung the gun through a quick arc, she realized she was aiming at his head. Her finger had already received the impulses from her brain to pull the trigger, and she retroactively decided that it would be easier to deal with only one of these enemy agents. The Valkyries would decide who lived.
She fired one bullet and hit just below where his dark hat ended and his ghost-white skin began. She made a minute adjustment to the aim of the weapon and it spat two more into his chest.
Ana worried that the bigger man would continue his assault undeterred, but in the interceding moments, he'd drawn a weapon of his own and was leveling it at her. He struggled a bit to hold a steady aim on his wounded leg, and again, Marisol came through with a perfect strike, shooting through the middle of his hand and knocking the gun away just as he'd done to Ana. Not ready to give up, he lurched toward Ana but toppled after the first step, crashing to the floor where he had laid her out.
Marisol and Ana approached the fallen man with caution, Marisol with her electrocuffs readied for deployment. The man rolled to his back and one arm reached up to brace against the bed as he levered himself to a sitting position.
"You don't need to put the electrocuffs on me," he said. It wasn't a cry for mercy, just a statement of fact. For a moment, Ana considered that he might be telling the truth. She could see Marisol hesitate as well, but waved her gun a bit and Marisol quickly engaged one end of the cuff around the wrist resting on the bed, then hauled the large black body up by the underarm, and whipped the other wrist into the waiting end of the cuff.
"You can take these off," he said, lifting his hands from the bed. "I'm not going anywhere."
Again, Ana wanted to believe him. But she stood with the gun aimed at him, ready for the game of possum to turn into one of cobra and mongoose.
"Identify yourself," Ana said.
"I have no identity."
That was more like the answer she'd expected from a Continuum agent. She was tempted to pistol-whip him, but instead just repeated herself.
"You know who I am," was the response this time.
Ana said, "You came here to meet someone."
"See," he said. "You know who I am."
He stared straight at her with his large, deep-set eyes. They were tinged with red. Weary eyes. Ana could see it was more than the pain from his leg and hand that he held just under the surface. The dark circles hanging under those strained eyes hadn't just appeared when he'd been shot. He was strong, but run roughshod and ragged. He'd tried to pursue her, even across the tiny hotel room, and had collapsed. He didn't fight now.
"You already know everything about me," he said, turning toward Marisol. "Why don't you just let me go?"
Ana's partner and friend seemed to buckle under the weight of his look.
Ana grabbed his head with one hand, keeping the gun on him with the other, and twisted it further, past Marisol to the other side of the bed.
"We don't know everything about that guy," she hissed. "Maybe you could tell us what he's doing here?"
Ana didn't see the look on his face, but she judged from Marisol's reaction to his reaction that he knew—at least on some level—Dr. Allen Poole.
"Who is he?" she pressed.
"I don't know who he is. But you already know."
"Bullshit!"
"I'm sorry I can't be of more help, but there's really nothing more I can tell you."
A warm calm bubbled in the bottom of her mind. She expected to be angry, but somehow felt as though she'd just had a glass of wine. Her thoughts ran like the legs of that wine sliding down the inside of the glass.
"Marisol," Ana said. "He knows this guy. You saw his reaction. He knows him, doesn't he?"
"Yes. You couldn't hide that surprise, buddy. How do you know him?"
"The same way you do." His voice was unnervingly steady.
A sharp laugh ejected itself from Ana's diaphragm. "So you met him in a hotel room where you were waiting for yourself to come make a weapons deal?"
"The truth is always stranger than you imagine."
"That's not strange. It's impossible!"
"Nothing is impossible."
His eyes chiseled away at her confidence as Ana tried to think of the next question, or even just the next thing to say. Her mind seemed to be awash in something close to an endorphin rush. She'd had some adrenaline flowing, that was for sure, but not enough to make her stammer like a schoolgirl who just got the attention of the quarterback.
"Impossible is this imbecile," she gestured at Poole, "finding out when and where your meeting with a bioweapons engineer is going to be. This man was practically shrieking like a little girl when we grabbed him. If nothing is impossible, how did he get here?"
"The same way you did."
"He shot Lukas Huang in order to get the location? Was that before or after I shot him? I'm going to have to guess after since he didn't seem to be too shot up when we were there."
Part of Ana wanted to shoot this hulking oaf of a man, but in the head this time, instead of the leg or the hand. But then it started to make sense. Perhaps Dr. Poole had arrived at Lukas Huang's home away from home just after them, before the med-evac arrived. If Huang had been in shock, he might have told anyone. Poole could have offered to help him. Maybe convinced him that he could make the deal in his place. If Poole knew what Huang was exchanging, m
aking him believe the deal was still possible could have been trivial.
Still, how had the agent who sat before them recognized Poole if he was truly a spur-of-the-moment interloper? Or had he? Perhaps they had in fact overreacted.
No, that was exactly what he wanted them to think.
Or maybe he had simply been surprised to discover that there was yet another unauthorized person invading his meeting.
Or maybe he'd thought the man was Lukas Huang.
He was right. Nothing was impossible. It all made sense.
"You believe me, don't you?"
"Be quiet," Marisol said. "Ana?"
"You're confused, too, Twenty-Six?" Ana looked at her, hoping her eyes were not broadcasting the pleading questions that were being wrung from her mind.
"I think we'd better take them in. Both of them."
"You already have my partner," the man interjected in his serene tone. "What am I to you now?"
His gentle, deep voice reminded Ana of floating in a pool. When she was in between missions, she'd go to the Agency pool, and if there was no one else there, she'd just float. Her face was the only thing above the warm caress of six meters of water. She wondered if anyone had seen her there, arms spread as if she hung on a crucifix. His voice was peaceful like the waves that lapped at her cheeks as she lay there.
"I think we have everything we are going to get from him," Marisol said. She looked as serene as Ana felt.
"Yes," Ana agreed. "The doctor too. He's an idiot who got lucky."
"We'll send him back to the Continuum to let them deal with him."
The man stood. Ana moved aside to let Marisol remove the electrocuffs. He limped to the side of the bed and scooped Dr. Poole up and over his shoulder. He struggled with the weight as he limped out of the room, holding the doctor with his good hand.
As he passed through the door, Ana grew less peaceful. She'd been floating, but it grew harder to keep her mouth and nose out of the water as it turned icy and pulled at her limbs. She tried to take a deep breath, but sucked nothing but water into her chest. All of sudden she heard a note; it started in her chest and ended in her throat. Ana realized she was swimming for shore. She wasn't in the Agency pool, she was out to sea, far from a sandy shore, and feeling the riptide tickle her toes.
Ana grabbed Marisol by the hand and jerked her to the door. They stumbled out to the landing, Ana scanning the surroundings as fast as her drowned mind would let her. The Continuum agent was out of sight, Dr. Poole with him.
"Mother of—Dammit!" she yelled.
Marisol looked around, still unsure what was happening.
"He's gone! Fucking gone!"
"No," Marisol said. "He escaped. He tricked us."
"Yeah, he tricked us like a couple of cheap whores." Ana bent to rest her forehead on the rusty wrought-iron railing of the cheap piece-of-shit motel. She could still feel the chill of the ocean. Maybe it was just her sweat cooling in the wind off the lake. She went back to the door jamb, pointing inside.
"We have a dead guy. That's it. One dead Continuum agent."
And Ana had killed him.
The Valkyries decided who lived.
--
Ana and Marisol had no choice but to bring back what little they had. Ana took little consolation from the fact that they had succeeded in their primary mission of stopping Huang from selling his weapon to the Continuum.
A hammer swung at that consolation moments after Ana mentioned Dr. Allen Poole in her debriefing. She'd already gone over how she and Marisol had found Lukas Huang and persuaded him to reveal the location of his meeting. When she said that Dr. Poole found his way into the musty motel room, it didn't take long for the computers recording her recap to send the audio for cross-referencing by other specialized hardware appliances, which found the doctor's name in another one of the Agency's files.
An alert of the match came up on the desk where Malcolm was talking to Ana, and they both looked down. Ana read the message and slammed the table, her fist the hammer that crashed through positive emotion she'd been trying to conjure.
Dr. Allen Poole (syntax indicates name) matches a name in file alias: Surgeon List.
"We had him! We had him and a live Continuum agent! We had them!"
Malcolm was more shocked than upset and tried to calm her down.
"Ana, you had no way of knowing."
"But I knew I had a man who had found the time and location of a Continuum weapons deal!"
"And you were right. Bringing in a man like that was the right thing to do."
"But I didn't bring him in!"
"Ana," he said, as he'd said several times already, "you stopped the Continuum from getting the weapons from Dr. Huang. That was your mission."
"Right, instead I handed them someone on the Surgeon List!"
"Ana, there was no way you could have known."
"Maybe I need to memorize the list. How many names are on there? How many do we have pictures of?"
"You need to take it easy."
"You need to take it less easy!"
"Ana, look at it this way: Allen Poole could have been anywhere in the world. But now we know where he is."
"Do we really, Malcolm? Three hours ago I was only as far as a shady motel on the outskirts of Gary. Three hours before that, I was halfway between Midland and Odessa in the Greater States. Where do you think Poole is after three hours with the Continuum?"
Malcolm sighed. He had no answer for that question, and they both knew it.
--
Justin tried to cheer them up after their report was made, and he put it well, saying, "You wouldn't feel so bad if you hadn't been so close."
"But we were so close," Ana replied.
"But it's not like you came back empty-handed."
They knew he had a point. It made Ana feel a little better. Especially when he offered to take them out for a drink.
"I need to talk to Aerin for a bit," Ana said. "I'll meet you guys over there."
Ana took her time heading down the corridor to Aerin's lab. He was probably still going over the body they'd brought back, so no need to rush. Besides, she wanted to take a little time to feel sorry for herself. She had needed a win on this one. In the past few weeks, she'd recovered an escapee, only to be captured by him, and then she’d blown him up. She had found thirty-six children, undoubtedly part of a trafficking project, but had failed the primary mission of finding Senator Dilger's son. She had recovered a sample of a substance being mined by the Continuum only to destroy it during the examination. And now she had nearly captured two enemy agents and one of the members of the Surgeon List only to end up with nothing more than a corpse.
The artificial light in the hallway didn't ease her tension or lift her spirits. She wanted to get up to the rooftop and just sit with her face turned up to the sun. And she would, just as soon as she'd talked to Aerin.
The tiny blond man's smile as she approached was enough to keep her moving for now.
"Good news?" she asked as the large glass door slid aside to let her in.
The smile disappeared.
"Oh, that. No, I'm just happy to see you're all right. It sounded like a bit of a dangerous situation there with some telepath from the Continuum."
"So you think it's possible too?"
"Well, it certainly seems like one explanation. I was able to go over the clothing you were wearing during the mission and found nothing but some blood splatter from what I assume was the agent who escaped."
Ana looked down.
"No, no, no, Ana, this could prove to be truly remarkable. I know that our government has been researching anything that even has the slimmest of chances for some sort of mind-control ability. If what happened is really the result of some cognitive distortion, it was truly remarkable!"
"I'm inclined to go with truly dangerous."
"Well, clearly, yes, that too. But the ability to have that sort of impact on someone's cognitive process…"
"We're going to nee
d some sort of tinfoil hat. Preferably before we see these guys again."
"Well, you won't be seeing this guy again," Aerin said, chuckling as he pointed to the body of the agent Ana had killed.
"Speaking of him," Ana said, relieved to move away from the mind-control discussion that left her with an uneasy feeling in the back of her mind, which was actually a very uneasy feeling closer to the middle of her mind. "Speaking of him, who is he?"
This made it Aerin's turn to look sheepishly at the ground.
"I don't know," he said. "He's not in any of the universal DNA databases."
"So either he was born in a place that doesn't do genetic tagging, or the Continuum had him expunged from whichever database he had been tagged in."
Aerin knew it was not a question, not even a rhetorical one, and responded as such.
"I would bet on the former. Though I did the calculation of the odds that a man of this size, build, complexion, and apparent ancestry would be born in one of the few remaining places without tagging and let's just say there was some use of scientific notation involved."
"Okay. But how hard would it really be for a group like the Continuum to get someone taken out of a DNA database?"
"Don't they train you on things like that?"
"Yeah, but my Hacking Into The Most Secure Systems In The World class was a long time ago. I could use a refresher."
"It may come in handy in looking for that person you are trying to locate."
"You mean my long-lost friend from high school."
"Yeah, that one."
And so Aerin explained, as briefly as his technically-detailed-mind could, the rotating separation of systems. He touched on the specialized hardware that required programming at a level where one felt like they were pushing electrons through biointerfaces. He told Ana about auto-updating security keys in facilities that made the Valkyrie Project headquarters deep within the building that housed the Chicago branch of the Agency feel as open to the outside as a fast-food franchise.
"You've heard of people trying to get though the biosecurity here, right?"
