“It was a very good speech,” Em said, glancing over to H. “You with me?”
H was silent for a second, then, “I’m with you,” he said. Turning to the twins, he called out, “We’ll do anything to save our world.”
For a moment the only sounds were the wind whistling through the canyons on every side of them and the whoosh and crash of the waves. After a moment of silence, the twins glanced at one another, silently communicating.
“So will I,” the twins said in unison.
Em and H looked at one another, confused by the reply. The twins began to advance toward the agents again.
Em’s hand fell to the activation switch for the weapon as the Dyads came closer. She had it set to the minimum power setting, the same one that had annihilated miles of desert. She looked to H. H swallowed and then nodded. Do it.
But before she could press the button, there was a loud humming and the hiss of static electricity, then two loud cracks as bolts that looked and sounded like purple lightning struck the twins, disrupting their human façades, turning them into out-of-phase humanoid silhouettes of glowing white particles. Right on top of the disrupting lightning came twin fireballs of brilliant golden energy that struck both twins and sent them scattering into millions of particles of white energy, each particle going dark and falling to the ground, remaining still, unmoving, dead.
Both agents looked in the direction of the discharges. On the other side of one of the crevasses, standing on a high rock outcropping, was High T. A massive MiB weapon that was a bit like an over-under double-barreled bazooka was slung over his shoulder.
“Nothing in this universe is unkillable,” High T said, patting the side of his weapon, “with the proper voltage.” He grinned and gestured for H and Em to join him on the other side of the rift. By the time they had taken a good running start and crossed the crevasse, T joined them near the stairs to the dock.
“Are you both all right?” High T asked.
H nodded. “Yes, sir. Never better.”
Em’s attention was on all the dark, dead particles scattered on the ground. She looked back to T.
“But, sir, how did you find us?” she asked, obviously puzzled.
“‘Experience,’” High T said, then tsked and shook his head at H. “Riza again, H? When are you going to learn?” H looked sheepish, and High T placed his hand on his protégé’s shoulder, no explanation needed. “I knew I could count on you,” he said more softly, “that in the end you’d pull through.”
H beamed like a boy given a kind word by his father.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“You too, Em,” High T said. “Agent O had a feeling about you and she was right. The universe has a way of leading you to where you’re supposed to be at the moment you’re supposed to be there.”
Em stepped away a few feet as H and T talked. She wasn’t trying to distance herself from their conversation, far from it, but she just felt… off. The stellar compression gun was folding and retracting itself back into the puzzle box in her hands. She looked back again at the remains of the dead Dyads. Something felt wrong, like an important page in a book was stuck to another page, or she had skipped over a critical part of a mathematical equation. Maybe life was just more messy and chaotic than that, not always fitting neatly into some formula. Maybe this was just the crash from the adrenaline high—perhaps she was just finding out, after so much had happened, that she wasn’t fully ready for it to be over, to go back to what had been before all this.
“Shall we go home?” High T asked. He paused a moment and scrutinized H’s once pristine, expensive new outfit. Now it was rumpled, torn, and bloody. “Better clean up first.”
31
It was night when they arrived in London. H and Em, cleaned up and back in their black suit uniforms, were greeted on the main floor of MiB headquarters by thunderous applause and a standing ovation from all the agents, support staff, and aliens. High T walked behind them, the massive Dyad-killer gun slung on his back by a strap, Vungus’s puzzle box in his hand.
An agent and a forensics technician approached High T, Em, and H. The tech carried a high-tech, evidence-room strongbox.
“Let’s keep these safe,” High T said, handing the huge gun to the agent and the puzzle box to the forensics tech, who secured it in the strongbox. The two hurried away to carry out their duties.
H had an easy grin on his face.
He drifted through the crowd like an old pro, exchanging high-fives, fist-bumps and thumbs-ups as he made his way through. Em was overwhelmed by the attention and the accolades. She smiled, nodded, and waved awkwardly a few times, but all the time she was trying to find a way out of the crowd. In the churning mass of people, H and Em were pulled in different directions. It reminded Em of that one time her bestie in school, Stephanie Kepros, had talked her into going to a club to see a bunch of punk bands at an all-ages show. The crowd had been too much for her and when people started stage diving, and pulling her toward all that churning chaos, she was out.
Em made it through to the other side and was thankful to draw in a cool, uncrowded breath. Her escape had been helped by the fact that H was still at the center of the crowd, soaking it all in, gracious, and cool, just like when she first met him.
High T was behind her, watching his protégé receive his laurels.
“Quite the first assignment for a probationary agent,” High T remarked. “Marrakech, the Empty Quarter, Naples. Imagine what you’ll accomplish when you’re one of us.”
She saw H among his colleagues and it felt like nothing that had happened on the mission had been real. He seemed to be back to the same old H, glad-handing, shallow, and superficially charming. It was like he was made of Teflon, no real emotion or feeling could stick to him. It made Em’s growing feeling of apprehension even worse, and she felt very alone again. That surprised her. When had she stopped feeling alone, started thinking of herself and H as “us,” as a team?
Without turning to High T, Em said, “Thank you, sir.”
“Enjoy this moment, Em,” High T said. “They never last.” Was that wistfulness in his tone? He walked away before she could ask, and was quickly lost in the traffic of people bustling through the main floor.
Em glanced back to H. He was sitting on the edge of his desk, surrounded by fellow junior and senior agents. An agent at an adjourning desk withdrew a bottle of Glenfiddich from his desk drawer and started pouring the scotch into plastic cups and passing them around. Em slumped a little. Suddenly she was back in high school, watching the cool kids’ table in the lunch room from her lonely vantage point, eating alone, save for the company of one of Michio Kaku’s books.
Even Pawny was fitting in and had an audience. A group of office workers was crowded around the small warrior. He was on a desk, using a stack of books like a stage. “So we’re on the edge of this cliff and H is cowering in front of the Wonder Twins, like, ‘No please, don’t kill us!’” Pawny was doing his best H impersonation. “And I’m like: ‘Man the F up, H.’” His audience was eating the story up. “So I turn to these guys and I say, ‘Dudes, either you back off, or you’re not going to know what hit you.’”
Em did a double take when Agent Cee joined the circle of agents around H. He took up a plastic cup of scotch gladly and with a smile.
* * *
Cee held up his cup to toast H. “Well, H, I don’t know how you keep doing it,” the fastidious agent said, “but somehow you keep doing it.” The other agents laughed.
H glanced over and saw Em’s alien cubicle buddy, Guy, had joined her and was taking a picture of himself and Em with a selfie stick. Nerlene photo-bombed the two. Guy and Nerlene laughed, but Em had a serious and distracted look on her face. They exchanged glances from across the room of celebrating people, and H knew that Em felt something wasn’t right, either.
“I mean, what are the odds?” Cee was droning on. “That you’d save the Earth from total destruction twice in so few years?”
H ma
naged to get a word in over Cee’s monologue of praise. “I don’t know, Cee, what are the odds?” Before Cee could wind up to address the question, H set his empty cup on the desk. “Excuse me.”
He met Em at the center of the room.
“Is this what saving the world is supposed to feel like?” Em asked. “Because I’m not feeling it.”
“Me neither,” H replied. “What if we got this all wrong? The Dyads… When I said we’d do anything to save our world—”
“They said they would, too,” Em finished the thought.
“They told us they wanted the weapon ‘for the Hive,’ but what if we misunderstood what that meant?”
“Maybe they wanted it to use against the Hive—to save their world.”
“Which could mean they were never Hive at all.”
“What about the DNA, the mutations?” Em shook her head. “High T showed us the sample.”
The two agents navigated the celebration in their honor and managed to politely disengage from numerous attempts to pull them into conversation. H sat down at the closest desktop computer terminal. He keyed the voice recognition microphone in the keyboard.
“Agent H.” The computer chirped as it authenticated his voice print. “Bring up the Dyad forensic report.”
The report’s title page appeared on the screen. Across it in bright red lettering was the word: DELETED.
An awful connection formed in both their minds. The nagging, irritating sense that something was just out of mind’s reach bloomed inside. It flowered into a cold, heavy fear in both their stomachs as a terrible realization settled on the two agents.
“Who has the authority to make a case file disappear?” Em whispered. Both agents turned and looked up to the window of High T’s office. Then, as one, they bolted, sprinting side by side toward the evidence room, and the stellar compression weapon.
* * *
Cee had managed to pull himself away from the celebration—it was all very well snatching victory from the jaws of the Hive, as it were, but there was always business to attend to; somebody had to keep an eye on things. He knocked on the entranceway into High T’s office and entered. High T was sitting in his chair facing the oil painting of himself and H at the Battle of Paris. For a moment Cee thought he heard the station chief muttering to himself over and over again.
“My name is Terrence Pemberton Wood… Terrence… Pemberton Wood… I am a senior officer in a non-governmental agency… My name is Terrence Pemberton Wood…”
“Sir?” Cee said, the concern evident in his voice. “Did you say something, sir?”
High T spun, surprised. “I didn’t hear you come in.” He stood up and pulled on his overcoat. “You have the helm, Cee. I’m not feeling myself.”
High T strode out of his office. Cee stared after him, utterly freaked out. He turned back to the chair his boss had been sitting in, staring at it as if at a loss, then raised his eyes to the painting of the Eiffel Tower, wondering.
* * *
“And what about Naples?” Em asked breathlessly as they bolted down the hallway, dodging agents and aliens. “How did High T know we were there? He mentioned the Empty Quarter to me. How did he even know we were there?”
“He was doing his job,” H replied. He knew it was a weak answer. Everything pointed to High T as the traitor within MiB, but his instincts told him that was impossible. There was no way the man he knew—his friend, his mentor—had sold out.
“Does his job include tracking us?” Em side-passed H the compass she had received from High T on her first day on the job in London as they skidded into the corridor that held the evidence vaults. “He gave it to me as a gift. There’s a chip inside.”
They slowed and H examined the compass as they walked together through the polarized glass doors that led into the evidence room. The same technician who had secured the puzzle box from them when they returned sat behind a semicircular desk with illuminated white panels. Past him was a room that contained smooth, flat, near-infinite walls of lock boxes of all imaginable sizes and dimensions. The attendant sat a little straighter when he saw two such legendary agents enter.
“We need to see the confiscated Jababian weapon,” H announced. There were no hints of charm, no pleasantries. He was all business.
The attendant shook his head. “Not possible.”
H bristled. “I’m the senior agent on the case.” Em had never before heard the cold steel in H’s voice she heard now. “Show me the weapon.”
Cowed, the attendant reached for the evidence case that was sitting on his desk, sliding it over to them. It seemed odd to H that it would still be lying out and hadn’t been logged in and put in a secure box on the walls.
Em and H spun the case around and the tech keyed in the code to unlock it. The case was empty.
“High T signed it out just before you got here,” the attendant explained.
H felt like he had been punched hard in the gut. As much as he wanted to fight it, to deny it, there was no other theory that made sense.
* * *
H and Em stepped out of the elevator onto the mezzanine level of the station.
“I think he’s been after it this whole time.” Em could see H’s world was turned upside down, but she needed him to step up now. She tried again. “H. High T’s the mole. He has to be.”
“A mole for who?” H shook his head, like he was trying to clear it. “Where is he taking it?”
“My guess would be Paris.” Cee came out of High T’s office. “There’s something not right with him,” he added, acknowledging what they were all thinking.
“Paris.” Em remembered the pictures of Guy’s family and the old alien depot in the Eiffel Tower; she thought back to the breached gate she had seen in the VR archives record about H and High T’s battle with the Hive monster in the same place. “He’s taking it to the portal.”
Cee blocked H’s path before he could get away. “All this time I thought he was covering for you, but he was hiding his own tracks, wasn’t he?”
H didn’t know what to say. If High T was guilty, another terrible consequence of that betrayal fell on H like a wall of bricks. In typical fashion Cee didn’t give him time to answer, anyway. “I’m going with you.”
“No—”
“This isn’t about you, H,” Cee snapped, a little of his old snark returning.
“No, it isn’t.” Em couldn’t recall seeing H look so sad, or so determined. “If word gets out that T—the most highly decorated agent in MiB history—is a traitor, the agency will never recover. We stop him and no one will ever have to know.”
“And if you don’t?” Cee asked. H set his jaw. He banished the pain from behind his eyes and met Cee’s own gaze with a steely resolve.
“Tell them it was me. Tell them I was the traitor. Trust me, the agency will believe you.” He paused, and then said significantly, “You.”
Cee looked at H in a way he never had before. He nodded and stepped out of H’s and Em’s way, letting them pass.
They stopped only to rescue Pawny’s captive audience from any more tall tales; he climbed gladly back into Em’s pocket.
“What phase is the moon in?” H asked, as they headed for the elevators. Em looked at him, confused. Had the new discovery tipped H’s senses over the edge? “Sorry,” he added, “you seem like someone who would know that off the top of your head.”
“Full,” she said. “It reaches its perigee tonight.”
“The portal can only be opened during a full moon.” He checked his watch. “In one hour and thirteen minutes.”
“You think High T’s opening the portal? To give the weapon to who?”
“What does your gut tell you?” H asked, grimly, as he walked to the window overlooking the main floor, where the celebrations had broken up and everyone was back to their jobs.
The agents entered the elevator, headed for the underground garage, racing against the rising moon.
32
The elevator doors hissed
open on the MiB garage. H and Em stopped cold in their tracks as they turned the corner into the alcove that housed H’s Jag. The vintage Jag looked more like a crumpled beer can than a car, having been demolished in the first battle with the Dyad twins on the streets of East London.
“Oh, right,” H said. “That happened.” His gaze travelled away from the mangled heap to a vehicle covered by a tarp sat next to the corpse of the Jag. H walked over to the car and pulled the tarp off, revealing a sleek, black, brand-new Lexus. An MiB-issued replacement for the Jag.
“Now we’re talking,” Pawny said, from his place in Em’s pocket.
H tried his key fob and was greeted by a loud bloop as the car’s alarm was disabled. Em strode past him and snatched the keys from his hand on her way to the door.
“I’m driving,” she said as she slid into the leather seat. She looked over at the steering wheel on the opposite side and at the smiling H as he slid into the driver’s seat of the UK-configured car, and plucked the keys out of her hand.
“I’ll never get used to that,” she said as H turned on the ignition and the Lexus growled to life. The car screeched as it took the tight turns of the garage. As they hit the hidden garage entrance, H pulled a power turn, tires drifting. Then he floored the accelerator, and the car shot down the street, London streetlights flashing by. The chronometer on the car’s flat screen control panel said they had about an hour till perigee.
H flipped open the armrest compartment between him and Em. There was a set of very nice cup holders inside the compartment. That was it.
“There should be a big red button around here somewhere.” He pointed down into the compartment.
Em tapped the computer screen set in the dash between them, jumping quickly from menu to menu, until she stopped and cleared her throat. H glanced over. There was a menu on the screen: AUDIO, BLUETOOTH, RED BUTTON. Both agents smiled.
“Found it,” Em said.
She selected the “RED BUTTON” option and was rewarded with a graphic of a red button. She pushed the button and the graphic changed to an overhead schematic of the Lexus that rapidly began to shift before their eyes. There was a loud electronic hum and a sharp clack-clack as the car shifted into rocket-car mode. Wings and massive engines deployed, unfolding virtually seamlessly from the body of the coupe. There was a series of not-terribly-exciting tones, like you might hear on an airplane, notifying you to buckle your seat belt and place your tray table in the upright position. H and Em glanced at one another, a little disappointed. Then, several Gs of acceleration hit them square in the chest and both agents gasped and yelped a little as the rocket car bucked and lifted off. Pawny screamed as he flew off Em’s shoulder and splatted against the rear windshield, looking a bit like a piece of gum that had been spat out.
Men in Black International Page 16
