Most wonderful of all, on the opposite side of the floor from the desks, among the sea of black suits, there were beings of every imaginable shape, size, and color—a rainbow of aliens! There were so many, all so different. The aliens streamed across the MiB headquarters in lines, almost as if they were in the departures hall of an airport. Most of the aliens carried bags, trunks, packs, and other containers. She even saw a basket of weird alien fruit and some New York City souvenirs being examined by the Men in Black standing behind oval-shaped, illuminated counters. These MiBs were checking the visitors’ travel documents and interviewing some of them. Many of the aliens sat on padded circular benches looking bored and frustrated, while others gazed around the Earth terminal with the same sense of wonder with which Molly was watching them.
She saw a mass of yellow grapes about the shape and size of a large Christmas tree shambling through the line. She suddenly realized that the “grapes” were in fact eyeballs, and they were boggling around the terminal in every conceivable direction, including at her. A tentacle of yellow eyeballs waved to her as she descended. Molly found herself waving back.
Another alien in the line was only a few feet tall, and the space around it shivered and warped constantly, like it wasn’t fully connected to this reality. As it moved up in the queue, the alien’s distorted after-images remained behind it for a few seconds. Each reflection moved and behaved like an independent entity until they faded away.
Then, suddenly, Molly’s elevator dropped. The descent became a fall as the car plummeted into the subterranean darkness.
5
The elevator doors opened and Molly found herself staring into a sparse, white room. Light seemed to radiate from the bare walls. There was an illuminated pedestal with a black leather and chrome swivel chair mounted at its center. The chair faced her. The wall opposite the elevator door contained only a large mirror, most likely for two-way observation, Molly surmised.
Confidently, she strode over to the pedestal and sat down in the swivel chair as the elevator door closed behind her with a soft hiss. She spun the chair around, facing the mirror, and crossed her arms and legs. “For the record,” she told the mirror, and whoever was behind it, “you didn’t catch me. I caught you.”
There was a small part of her that was afraid, but the rest of her that had been looking for this, waiting for this, her whole life told the fear to shut up.
* * *
It was late morning the next day when the grande dame of MiB arrived, though none of her subordinates had ever had the nerve to call her that to her face. Agent O, Chief of Operations for MiB’s North American station, strode into the observation room behind the mirror with her usual commanding air of detached calm. O was a slender woman with short, gray hair, dressed in an impeccable black dress with a high white collar and cuffs—and, like so many of the people in MiB, there was a lot more to Agent O than met the eye. She had been the first female MiB agent in America, and very few of her fellow agents knew that she had also created the portable neuralyzer. She had run the New York station with distinction since the passing of Agent Zed, and she was keenly interested in how this young woman had compromised their organization. She took a place at the observation window next to a gray-haired veteran agent, who was observing Molly’s reactions and responses through the glass. The young woman looked tired after the long night of questioning; a lie-detector device was attached to her forearm, but the MiB agent questioning her didn’t look satisfied with her answer.
“Who is she working for?” O asked, removing her wire-rimmed glasses.
“Nobody,” the gray-haired agent said. “She claims to have been working alone.”
O examined the young woman’s face as she continued to spar with her interrogators.
“So, a civilian with zero training just waltzes in off the street?”
The senior agent handed her the interrogation transcript. “Hell of a story,” he said.
“Mmhmm…” O scanned the report, flipping through the pages. “Mmhmm… Mmm…” She handed the papers back to the senior agent and flipped the switch on the observation console that turned on the intercom in the interrogation room. “Neuralyze her.”
In the interrogation room, the lead interrogator drew his neuralyzer out of his jacket pocket. Molly’s face changed when she saw the silver wand. It was clear she knew what it did, and that the prospect made her frantic. “No, no, don’t. I know what that thing is,” she said, getting to her feet.
O gave her subordinate a questioning look.
“She had… an experience once,” the veteran agent started to explain, but Molly was talking again, this time looking directly into the mirror, as if she could see them.
“You erased my parents’ memories, but you didn’t get mine. My whole life, everyone told me I was crazy. ‘Molly off her trolley.’ They said I needed therapy—” Molly nodded grudgingly “—which I did, but not for this.”
Behind the mirror, Agent O’s arms were crossed; her face was stone. The steel cuffs attached to the swivel chair’s arms restrained her, but she struggled against them nonetheless, still keeping her eyes on the mirror, still pleading with her own image and the shadows behind the glass. “You start to think you are crazy, but I never stopped looking. It took me twenty years, but I found you.”
The agent with the neuralyzer popped it open and began to adjust the control dials. Molly glanced from the wand to the mirror.
Behind the mirror, O frowned as she leafed through the agent’s notes again, stopping at the point that had been troubling her. She re-read a part that had stuck with her. “She really hacked the Hubble Telescope to look at Andromeda Two, and we didn’t catch her?”
“In the old days, we’d have hired her,” the senior agent commented, a little wistfully. O looked at him and then at Molly. Then she strode into the interrogation room.
“So,” O said to Molly, “you found us and proved you’re not crazy. Now what?”
“I want in,” Molly replied, without missing a beat. “We don’t hire; we recruit.”
“Then recruit me.”
“Give me one good reason.”
“Because I’m smart, I’m motivated and—”
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Agent O told her. The neuralyzer in the lead interrogator’s hand was whining now, at full power, ready to discharge. Molly looked O straight in the eyes, and the older woman saw the steel and determination fixed there.
“Because I have absolutely no life whatsoever,” Molly blurted out. O cocked her head a bit at that. “No dog, no cat, no Netflix, definitely no chill. Nothing I can’t happily walk away from. I’m perfect for this job, and you know it.”
O looked at Molly as if she were weighing her soul against a feather. Finally, she said, “Well, that’s all rather… sad.” Molly glanced quickly at the two agents who had been trying to steal her memories. They nodded sadly in agreement.
“No love?” O asked Molly. “Relationships?”
“They just distract us from what’s important,” Molly said.
“And what’s important?”
“The truth,” Molly responded. “I want to know how it all works.”
O nodded for the lead interrogator to put away his neuralyzer. The other one clicked a release on Molly’s chair, and the arm cuffs retracted. Molly rubbed her wrists as she stood.
“You really think a black suit is the answer to all your problems?” O asked.
“No, but…” Molly sized up O, “it looks damn good on you.”
O let a smile slip for the first time.
* * *
The tailor, a tall, middle-aged man with a widow’s peak and a measuring tape draped over his shoulder, helped Molly out of the makeshift MiB suit she had bought at Ross, so that she was just in the vest top she’d been wearing underneath.
Different styles of suits for male and female agents hung from transparent bars along either side of the room. Illuminated transparent shelves were fitted discrete
ly into alcoves at the far end of the room. She stole a glance at the tailor and his assistant in the mirror. He was dressed in a stylish black vest and white shirt; the young blonde woman with a severely short hairstyle wore a black sleeveless dress with a white, long-sleeved blouse underneath it.
The tailor ran a scanner over Molly, temporarily bathing her in a grid-like hologram. An unspoken instruction passed between him and the woman. The assistant noted something in the electronic tablet she held, and moved away to pull a suit from the rack.
O’s words to her echoed in Molly’s memory as the tailor helped her into the chosen suit.
“You are a rumor, recognizable only as déjà vu and dismissed just as quickly.
“You will have no identifying marks of any kind. You will not stand out in any way. You are no longer part of ‘the system.’”
She was hustled to another section of the room. There the assistant picked up one of several closed, black-lacquered boxes. The tailor opened the box to reveal a row of identical, triangular-shaped MiB wristwatches. The tailor studied them and then Molly for a moment, and nodded sagely. He plucked one of the watches out of the box and strapped it carefully to Molly’s wrist. She admired it, holding up her wrist. Cool.
Another wooden box came off another shelf. The tailor opened it and Molly smiled. With a reverence she didn’t realize she possessed, but apparently did, she lifted the MiB sunglasses to her face and slipped them on.
Her final stop was the armory. Molly felt like a kid in a candy store. So many ray guns, blasters, De-Atomizers, Tasers, lasers, phasers, masers, sonic bowel disruptors, melters, maulers, fusion projectors, photonic shotguns, and space-time staplers were displayed along the walls, mounted on transparent screens, or resting on shelves.
When the armorer opened a small black box with rows of a tiny pistol neatly arrayed, her voice dripped with disdain. “C’mon on, guys, are you kidding me?” The armorer frowned, then shrugged and retrieved another box from the alcove. She opened it to reveal a large, silver-finished, futuristic pistol, something Robo-Cop and Dirty Harry might fight over. A Series-4 De-Atomizer.
A wide smile came to Molly’s face. “That works.”
* * *
Molly and O entered O’s elevated, elongated oval-shaped office, which overlooked the agents’ work desks and the arrival and departure terminals for the aliens. O explained that the agency had now completely deleted all traces of Molly Wright from the Internet. All that remained of her old life, her old name, was the letter M on an MiB computer screen.
“We’re above the system, over it. Beyond it. We’re ‘them.’ We’re ‘they.’ But we are still, I’m afraid, called the Men in Black,” O concluded. The two women looked at one another a bit awkwardly for a moment.
“The Men in Black?” Molly sounded incredulous.
“Don’t,” O said. “I’ve had the conversation. They can’t let it go. It’s a process.”
O sat behind her desk, plucked a manila envelope from it, and handed it to Em. “Your first assignment.”
Em seized the envelope as if it held the secrets of the universe. “Okay, but when do I get my…” She held up her hand, made a neuralyzer gesture with her thumb.
“It’s called a neuralyzer,” O explained, “and you don’t get one, you earn one.” Off Em’s crestfallen face, she added, “You’ve been accepted for a probationary period. Impress me… and we’ll see.”
Trying to contain her disappointment, Em opened the envelope and slid a sheet of paper out. When she saw what was written on it, she looked up at O with a hurt and almost accusatory glance.
“You’re a fan of the truth, aren’t you, Agent M?”
Em looked back at the paper. The transfer paperwork had a letterhead that said, “MiB London.”
“We may have a problem in London,” O began.
6
MAYFAIR, LONDON
The private gambling club’s empty rooms and hallways were lined with rich mahogany paneling and empty, high-backed leather chairs. Most of the club’s exclusive membership had made their way home hours ago, when the club closed down for the night. Only a single circle of light remained above a table of players, a ring of onlookers around them. There was a scream from the table that echoed through the rooms. A second later, a cheer went up from the audience watching the game.
Two burly, tattooed bodyguards dragged a convulsing player, clutching his wrist, eyes bulging, away from the table, still in his chair. Only six players remained at the table, now. Agent H, sporting a three o’clock shadow and wearing a brown corduroy jacket and green T-shirt, was one of the remaining players. In the years since he and High T had saved the world in Paris, something had changed in H. Something indefinable about his demeanor. Some of the light had gone out of his eyes.
H proffered his empty tumbler to a uniformed waiter who was so unobtrusive that he almost blended into the woodwork. The waiter poured a viscous purple liquid into H’s glass from an ornate decanter of smoked crystal. The liquid sloshed and moved about in H’s tumbler of its own volition. The agent tossed back the moving drink and winced as the kick hit him. “Oh, that’s smooth,” he said to the waiter, gesturing with his glass again. “Keep ’em coming.”
At the center of the table was a cage. Inside it was a three-headed, viper-like creature. H knew it was a Fmekian Trench Viper, a nasty species of animal with one of the most lethal venoms in the universe. The viper was coiled, its heads scanning and hissing only a few feet away from the players. Covering the floor of the viper’s cage were poker tiles, each marked like a terrestrial playing card. If a player wanted to make their hand, they’d have to risk the viper’s bite.
The other players around the table with H didn’t look like the club’s regular clientele, at least not during operating hours. H knew them to be local human scumbags—arms dealers, drug dealers, human traffickers—and worse. The man running the game, however, was not a local, far from it. His name was Anatoli, at least on this planet, and he wore a custom suit easily as expensive as H’s own. His face, neck, and hands were a looping road map of scars and tattoos. His eyes were as hooded and reptilian as the three-headed viper’s in the cage. Anatoli was a Cerulian crime lord. He’d fled to Earth years ago and had made a meteoric and bloody rise to the heights of the European underworld. It was his club, his game, and his rules, and H was here for him.
H had gotten a lead on one of Anatoli’s people quite by chance in Berlin, while there on some other business for MiB. He knew how long the organization had been trying to shut the crime boss down, and had managed to worm his way into the role of middleman in a deal involving a cargo container of Cerulian narcotics. While the drugs provided their user with a hallucinogenic euphoria, they were also addictive and tended to drive humans insane.
The deal went down and that led to a few other fake criminal ventures, that eventually got H an invitation to Anatoli’s club in London and his personal after-hours game.
“Can I just say how much I like this place,” H said, scanning the room with an eye for any hidden traps and exit routes. He’d spotted the bodyguards’ Pizimian blasters tucked in their shoulder holsters when they dragged away the now-departed Player Seven. Pizimian hardware in circulation on Anatoli’s thugs meant the truce between the Pizim and the Necdorph had collapsed. The MiB office would want to know about that. “Formal but not too stuffy, classic but modern,” H continued. He eyed Anatoli’s companion, who stood by his side as he played. The woman wore a gossamer gown with a gauzy hood that obscured her features, save her beautiful eyes. When she caught his gaze on her, her eyes widened slightly, and H was pretty sure she was smiling, perhaps blushing, beneath the hood.
“How much are we talking membership-wise, per year?” H looked to the player to his left and added some money to the pot, piled up on top of the cage. “I’ll raise you…”
The player, an East End gangster, pulled up the sleeve of his leather coat and slid his hand inside the cage slowly. He lifted the tile he needed to c
omplete his straight flush. The viper was still, three sets of dead eyes unblinking.
“It’s invitation only. No vacancies,” Anatoli said, in a thick accent reminiscent of Eastern Europe, his eyes on the gangster’s hand. He was bringing the tile out of the cage, slowly, carefully. He licked the sweat from his upper lip and began to smile. That was when the viper struck. The player dropped the tile, gasping, and jerked his arm out of the cage, clutching at his wounded wrist as his eyes began to swell and puff, like over-inflated balloons. Before Anatoli’s bodyguards could reach the East Ender, he gurgled and fell from his chair to the floor, dead. Anatoli’s and H’s eyes never left one another, even as the man died.
“I think a spot just opened up,” H said as the bodyguards dragged the body and the chair away.
“Your turn,” Anatoli replied, not missing a beat.
H looked at his tiles: 10, jack, queen, king, all spades. He spied the Ace of Spades tucked near the coiled body of the Fmekian viper. He slid his arm into the cage easily, fluidly, with no hesitation, no apparent fear. He continued talking to Anatoli as he edged closer to the tile, “And is there a gym here? Sauna? Can you get a bite to eat, or is it mostly just the lethal high-stakes gambling?” H smoothly, fearlessly, slid a hand into the cage, plucked the tile off the floor, and pulled it out, missing the viper’s strike by a millisecond.
Gasps and cheers went up around the table. H held up the tile, showing it to a glowering Anatoli, and then placed it in sequence with the other tiles. “Huh, look at that,” he said. “Straight to the ace.” H raked in the pile of cash off the roof of the cage while the agitated viper hissed and thrashed.
Men in Black International Page 3
