Agent Q, or the Smell of Danger!

by M. T. Anderson

Lily didn’t see how anyone was going to make it out of this alive. She and Katie clamped hands. Katie was crying. She wiped away the tear with her wrist.

  “Is everyone ready?” the Committee called in his gravelly voice.

  The crowd was going completely crazy. About twenty people were about to be fed to sharks.

  “Are you ready, Citizen Bvletch?”

  Bvletch was looking around. He was realizing that it was do or die. He didn’t want to die, and he didn’t know what to do.

  He looked around, blinking.

  The camera moved toward him. His face, warped with confusion, appeared on a giant screen behind him. His doubt was huge.

  “Pull the lever,” said the Committee. “Pull it now.”

  And Bvletch reached up with his hand to yank.

  CHAOS OVER SHARKS!

  The band blasted a swing tune. Lights zipped up and down the aisles, along the edge of the stage, overhead, and the tank-cam showed the sharks chomping their teeth in readiness.

  Bvletch stood, miserable, his acne glowing like the fairground lights around him.

  The Committee watched him.

  The traitor-cam showed Bvletch’s doubt.

  The Committee raised a mittened hand. . . .

  And then Bvletch launched himself onto the television camera right in front of him. He jumped and grabbed and the camera rolled backward, knocking over the technician, skidding toward the edge of the stage. Bvletch swiveled the lens toward the audience, and as everyone erupted into screams, he himself yelled into the microphone, “Real great audience, super audience—see, Greater Wilmington?—super!—SPIES! ALL OF THEM! YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS! GREAT PEOPLE! REALLY TRUSTWORTHY! SEE THEIR FACES? AREN’T THEY SUPER? DON’T YOU LOVE THEM? AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU’RE THEIR FRIENDS?” The spies in the audience were diving for the floor. They couldn’t be seen, or everyone would know that they were informing, turning people in to the Ministry of Silence—and so they panicked and plunged down behind their chairs or stampeded up the aisles. There were fruit sellers and fish sellers and grannies and old men and little rope-jumping girls—all of them instantly broadcasted to every television set in Wilmington—so everyone knew who was secretly skulking for the Autarch.

  And in that moment of confusion, everything went haywire: Folding chairs clattered. The Committee bellowed. The gorgeous assistant assassins went karate on the Resistance! The Resistance blocked and smacked with blistered wrists. Dazzle was everywhere. The band played on. Lily grabbed Katie and squatted her down low so they wouldn’t be hit by stray punches. Katie was still stunned by events and bewildered. Over the screaming, Lily shouted the news that Bvletch had been sarcastic.

  Drgnan and Jasper were doing a little move to knock out slinky spyettes in glittering dresses: Jasper picked up Drgnan and spun him so he flew off the ground—Drgnan kicked, knocked out a gal with a pistol, and landed on his feet in time to swing and lift Jasper—who scissored his legs, whopped a chick’s crossbow out of her hands, and skated to his feet so he could twirl Drgnan—and they made a slow progress through the security babes trying to catch hold of them.

  The stage was crowded with fighting. The audience was emptying. People were fleeing for the exits. Bvletch was still holding on to the back of the camera, broadcasting the faces of informants as Drrok, the gardener, held off the director of photography, who hurled himself at Bvletch in an attempt to protect his own life and his ratings.

  Drgnan and Jasper had reached the edge of the ring of guards when they ran into Taylor Quizmo, Secret Agent, who was trying to kayo Resistance fighters with darts from his cell phone.

  “You betrayed us and the safe house that took us in,” said Drgnan.

  “And you are unsportsmanlike,” said Jasper.

  “Cry me a river, dudes,” said Taylor, and raised his thumb to punch a button.

  With that, the three set to fighting. Drgnan lashed out with his foot to knock the cell phone out of Taylor’s hand—only to be struck by a dart himself.

  Taylor exclaimed with pleasure as Drgnan yelped. The boy spy aimed for Jasper. Jasper grabbed Taylor’s wrist. Grunting, Jasper steered the business end of the phone away from his face. Taylor stomped at Jasper’s feet. Drgnan reeled from the knockout drug on the dart.

  “You’ll never succeed,” said Jasper. “Democracy always wins in the end.”

  “You’ll enjoy a nice long stay in Fort Delaware,” Taylor replied. “By the time you get out, your stupid books will be another forty years out of date.”

  He lunged—and Jasper saw what Taylor was grabbing for: the lever that would dump everyone in the center of the stage into the shark tank!

  He was desperate. Drgnan was knocked cold now, crumpled on the floor. Jasper had to stop the crazed secret agent from pulling that lever, or many of the Resistance (and some of the Ministry of Silence’s guards, at this point!) would be dumped into the drink.

  Jasper struggled. Taylor turned toward him—opened his mouth—and dazzled Jasper for an instant with his retainer light.

  Then he reached for that fatal lever.

  And he would have pulled it too, if Lily hadn’t grabbed his ankle and yanked. Taylor fell, and Jasper pounced on him in an instant, grabbing the kid’s shirtfront and declaring, “It is time for evil to say, ‘Uncle!’ Or ‘Pax!’ Or whatever it is fellows say nowadays when you’ve lost at fisticuffs fair and square, and you want to shake hands like men and end a dustup.”

  Taylor started crying with rage. His face was red, and he kept his hand outstretched toward the lever like a baby toward its bottle.

  So went the fighting.

  But most important, in the middle of all this chaos, was a little struggle going on by the back wall of the stage. Two men.

  The unnamed monk and the skinny Committee of Wilmington.

  The monk was trained to fight and capture, being a secret agent. The Committee of Wilmington was not.

  “Let go of us, citizen!” hissed the Committee. “Or you shall feel the wrath of our iron fists!”

  “Is that iron?” said the unnamed monk. “The pom-poms look more like brass.”

  “Yes, all right, fine, the pom-poms are brass. But my grip is iron.”

  “Lily,” called the unnamed monk. “Lily, get me a microphone.”

  Lily ran, ducking, through the battle, and picked up the mike from the floor. She rushed it to the unnamed monk and held it toward his mouth.

  “TESTING!” he shouted.

  Everyone shut up.

  And the unnamed monk, holding the Committee in a clinch with one arm, declared loudly, to the echoing room, “I ARREST THE GOVERNING COMMITTEE OF WILMINGTON IN THE NAME OF THE LAW! ALL THE MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE!”

  “STOP!” said one of the female assassins. “Let the Committee go! We’re aiming right at you, secret agent!” She pointed her gun.

  The unnamed monk swiveled. “I wouldn’t do that, ladies,” he said. “You’ll hit the Committee. And he’s legally under arrest. You’d better start making arrangements for us to get out of this Castle.”

  Everyone stood in confusion. No one really knew what to do. It was kind of unclear who was winning.

  People looked around. They totted up a score in their heads. I often have to do this too, because I think fights are boring, and it bugs me that people think problems can be solved with a stupid one-two punch and a nest of sharks.

  People who looked around saw that the Resistance had done a pretty good job of freeing themselves from their guards. People saw that Jasper was sitting on top of Taylor Quizmo, arms crossed, waiting for the boy spy to admit that he had lost fairly in a fight. Bvletch, of course, had broadcast the identity of most of the Ministry of Silence’s operatives in Wilmington. Most of those double-crossers had run away. And even though many of the guard women in their cocktail glitter dresses were still standing, the unnamed monk had really gotten the better of the vile Governing Committee.

  As if to underline the final point, the unnamed monk declared, “THE GOVERNING
COMMITTEE OF WILMINGTON IS HEREBY SUSPENDED FROM ITS DUTIES AS THE RULING BODY OF THIS CITY UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE!”

  There was an instant of confusion. Then almost everyone cheered. Freedom! They were all leaving the Castle! They were all going home. The prisoners would be freed; the crazy Committee would never rule there again.

  Some of the guards and goons looked frustrated, but there wasn’t much they could do. If they fired on the unnamed monk, they’d hit the arrested Committee.

  The nameless monk asked, into the microphone, “Will the band please play a little something to celebrate the arrest? For freedom, my friends—freedom deserves a louder fanfare than tyranny!”

  “Don’t play anything!” hissed the Committee. “I command you, citizens!”

  “Committee, you have the right to remain silent,” said the secret agent monk. “And I really wish you would.”

  The band struck up the Fanfare for the Common Man, but with swing. “Wow!” said Katie, looking longingly at the snoozing Drgnan. “It kind of makes you want to dance.”

  The nameless monk said, “Freedom always makes you want to dance.”

  Jasper agreed sternly, “There’s nothing like a waltz with Lady Liberty.” Contentedly he batted away Taylor Quizmo’s prying fingers, which were trying to gouge at his eyes.

  “When you dance with democracy,” said the nameless monk, “you dance with millions.”

  The Committee grumped, “All those feet get in the way. . . . There’s much less tripping when there’s only one man onstage and the audience is in the dark.”

  “But now the spotlight of justice,” said the monk, “is burning through the—”

  “Hey!” said Katie. “Hey!” And when they stared at her: “Um, don’t we have a ferry to catch?”

  And she was right.

  It was time to go home at last.

  ANCHORITES AWAY!

  They were allowed out of the Castle without resistance. None of the guards or soldiers wanted to risk harming the grim-faced Committee.

  It was a big crowd of them: the nameless monk, Lily, Jasper, Katie, Drgnan Pghlik, Bvletch, Drrok, about twenty men and women of the Resistance, and assorted other political prisoners who they released from the dungeons. They walked right out the front gates of the Castle, through the portcullis. The morning air was bright and blue.

  The nameless monk was looking around suspiciously, worried about how they were going to get down to the docks. But he needn’t have worried.

  Because all over the city, a daytime fiesta was going on. Everyone had seen This Is Your Double Life! They’d seen the bad spies unmasked and the Committee arrested. The Autarch’s authority in Wilmington—at least for the moment—was broken. And so everyone was celebrating in the streets.*

  There was the sound of music—Delawarian rock from boom boxes and old tunes from streetside fiddlers and accordion players—and there was cheering. As soon as the band of prisoners strolled out of the gates, people in nearby apartments began to whistle and hoot and clap.

  The unnamed monk and his charges hadn’t walked far before an ancient festival cart pulled up, carved with the face of some mountain-squid god, pulled by four oxen. The citizens around it gestured for the kids to get in, so they could be whisked to the boat.

  They tied the Committee up in the front. He was off to face trial in Washington, DC. He sat grimly in his ropes, scowling.

  The others climbed on the cart. The nameless monk and the kids said a fond farewell to Drrok.

  Lily said to him, “I’m sorry that we brought Taylor Quizmo to your house. We endangered you all. I feel awful.”

  Drrok shook his head. “Dearest girl, the gods arrange all. Yes, we lost our house, but now the spies of Wilmington have been unmasked—and the Committee is no more.”

  “I am too ‘more,’” rasped the Committee.

  “You have done us a great service,” said Drrok to Lily. “And we shall one day do such a service for you.”

  He bowed, putting his hands over his eyes, in the Delawarian gesture of respect.

  Lily bowed in the same way, and they parted friends.

  The ceremonial cart rumbled over the dirt roads down the hill toward the mighty Delaware River. Katie spent the time fawning over Drgnan, who was just waking up. Jasper sat up in the front of the cart with the nameless monk and the Committee, talking shop. And Lily spent these minutes catching her final glimpses of the magical land of Delaware—drinking in the strangeness and the antiqueness she had come to love.

  She saw the dry fountains, the old rows of Baroque houses, the puttering diesel trucks. She saw the people tumbling out of the factories to see their oppressor, the Committee, hauled out of his roost for the first time in decades. They laughed and waved. Where there had been only frowns before, now there were smiles.

  It is a dream, that any place could be transformed like this, but it is not a bad dream to keep in mind. Although it may be impossible in any realm outside of that most mystic of mid-Atlantic states, this is what we need to wish for.

  Of course, there was still hardship in the world: The Autarch still ruled, and he would doubtless send some other servant to take over the city. But by then the Resistance would be dug in deeper and would have created even more places where people could hide and be happy. They would strengthen themselves and gain allies and prepare for the glorious day when they might rise up and replace His Despotic Highness with the truly elected Governor once more, and with that shining figure sitting upon the Chicken Throne of the Blue Hen State, the throne of gold and lapis lazuli, the whole land might feel this happiness.

  Do not dismiss moments of triumph just because sorrow might follow. Sure, after joy, sorrow comes. But after years of sorrow, joy comes too.

  And at ten, the ferry came, and joyfully, the kids, the secret agent monk, and their prisoner got aboard. They met Brother Grzo, who was waiting for them with the van. It was already parked in the hold of the ferry with the other vehicles.

  They went up and got a table on the upper deck, near the snack bar. Lily said she would take orders for food, since they hadn’t had any breakfast. She patiently wrote them all down, even when the Committee kept on demanding different fixin’s on his foot-long hot dog.

  “Take your last look at Wilmington,” said the secret agent.

  “I cannot bear to see the city I ruled so long and so well for the last time,” said the Committee, “while I am sitting next to a ‘snack bar.’ I, who am accustomed to hear screams for mercy, listening instead to the growling of the slushie machine. This is no way for a despot to travel.”

  “Beatific children,” said Brother Grzo, “I am so pleased we are together again. My heart broke when I heard that the safe house had been raided.”

  “We were very worried,” said the unnamed monk.

  Jasper asked, “Brother Grzo, did you know that . . .”—he pointed at the monk—“that this gentleman was the U.S. spy we were waiting for?”

  Grzo smiled and admitted, “It was my suspicion from the start. I had almost no doubt. But I could not be told, because then I could not have practiced deception, and I would have given him away.”

  “What is your name, actually?” Katie asked.

  The nameless monk shrugged. “I have no name in Delaware. In the other states, I am just called O. That is my secret name. Agent O. But because of the lack of vowels in Delaware, when I am there, I am named by no letter at all.”

  “Aha!” said Katie. “It all makes perfect sense.”

  “No, it does not,” Jasper said sternly. “We were told by the waiter to look for an Agent Q, not an Agent O. He wrote a Q on Grzo’s drinking glass with his finger.”

  “Not precisely,” said Agent O. “The waiter wrote an O. When Grzo picked the glass up and turned it around, his fingerprint made the O into a Q. I saw the error, but could not speak of it for fear I would give my identity away.”

  “Wow,” said Katie. “Because of that Q, we thought Taylor Quizmo was our spy guide.” She shook her h
ead, her mouth open. “It’s amazing what a difference a little fingerprint can make.”

  Grzo agreed, “Wise words, my child.”

  “So now,” said Agent O, “we’ll drop off the Committee with the FBI agents we’ll meet on the other shore. Then we’ll go pick up your monastery’s sacred objects—”

  “And drop off the beautiful children at their homes,” said Grzo.

  “And then we’ll come back to Delaware so we can return to Vbngoom.”

  Brother Grzo looked delighted. “You are returning to Vbngoom?”

  Agent O nodded. “I love Vbngoom,” he said. “I would like to become a monk there for real, and help in the fight against the Autarch. For many years I have been undercover in one disguise or another, working with the Delaware Resistance. Now I would like to make my disguise reality. And reality disguise.”

  “Ah!” said Brother Grzo, clapping his hands to his forehead. “I can tell already that you shall go far in monkery! Disguise! Reality! An abbot of our order could not have said it more confusingly!”

  “Since we speak of our vows and our order,” said Drgnan Pghlik, “I believe we should all incline our heads to Bvletch, who did not falter in his strong work of sarcasm even when in the den of the enemy.”

  “Bvletch, my son,” exclaimed Grzo, “you are a wonder!”

  Bvletch blushed. He looked proudly down at his knees. “It was fun,” he said. “I’d love to do it again.”

  “This is very sssweet, citizens,” grumbled the Committee, “but where’s my foot-long?”

  Meanwhile, the seagulls were crying over the water, and the boat was pulling away from the shores of Delaware.

  Lily, waiting in line, looked out the window—a last glimpse. She saw the tugs and the old purple-sailed galleons. She saw the crowds in their blrga shirts and pochbtvms. She felt sorry to be leaving.

  At the table, Drgnan said, “So now I shall see your home.”

  Jasper, assuming Drgnan was talking to him, said, “Yes, indeed. My mother will be very glad to have you as a guest.”

  Katie sighed with contentment, because she suspected that Drgnan was also excited to see the place she lived. She wondered what lay ahead for all of them.