Prologue

“It’s all right, come out. I was sent to find you.”

A young woman, no more than a teenage girl, emerged from the
darkness of the cave. The man at the entrance reached out and caught
her just as she stumbled upon a root and fell. She was so light that it
didn’t take any effort for the man to scoop her up into his arms and
carry her a little farther off.
By the way he was acting so familiarly with her, it can be suggested
that he knew who she was. And this was true, to a point. He had been
sent to recover the girl after the young spy had failed to report back in.
He had tracked her from her last known location and from that point to
the cave where she had been hiding.
The girl had been missing for two weeks and now, she was safe.
But the two weeks of malnutrition had taken a harsh toll on her
body. She was underweight, underfed, suffering from a bad cold, and
there was a deep infected knife wound in her side. She was in bad
condition – that was certain.
Blue eyes flickered for a moment to his face warily before they
closed as the girl dropped into a much needed sleep. He laid her gently
down on the floor of the woods and swiped her infected wound with a
disinfectant swab he ripped out from a packet in the pocket of his vest.
Briskly, he pulled out a bandage and bound up her side.
Hoisting her back into his arms, he started down the path that
marked by broken twigs, pile of rocks, and slashed bark back to the car
that was waiting for him and the girl.
From what he knew of the poor creature he carried in his arms, she
was an orphan that wanted nothing more than to serve the country she
loved with whatever she could, including undergoing harsh training to
become one of the best spies in the world, meaning that she was the
best because she was only a child.
She was one of the United States’ deadliest weapons and they had
put in thousands of dollars to have her trained. This was the reason
why they sent a trusted man to come retrieve her after a failed mission
that had gone terribly wrong.
The man, Felix, opened the door of the car and handed the girl in to
a medical orderly in the backseat who immediately began to treat her.
He shut the door and climbed into the front passenger seat and the
black car sped off down the road.
Chapter 1
Area 51: The Hospital

I woke up to the sound of a machine that was sounding out with

regular beeps that matched the rhythm of the beating of my heart.
Recognizing the sterilizing smell that only one place could have, I
opened my eyes to find myself staring at the white walls of the hospital
around me. The hospital, I knew, was one that was hidden far away,
deep underground in Area 51 in a Nevada desert. The technology they
had here was far more advanced than those of normal hospitals, which
is probably why I was here – the agency wanted me back as soon as
possible again. As always, they had something for me to do.
Looking straight up the wall, I saw the glass window of an
observatory where people, or guests, could watch me without
disturbing me or becoming tainted if I carried a disease. Sometimes,
this gave me the feeling of being a lab rat, but, I got used to it.
A lock of hair that had fallen into my face while I had slept now
slipped into my eyes. Reaching up to brush it away, I felt the stiffness
of a cast on my arm. Raising the other hand, I saw that an IV drip had
been attached to my arm. Giving up on using my hands, I just shook
the lock of hair away from my eyes with a toss of my head.
“She’s awake,” a voice said on the intercom. A doctor that I didn’t
realize was also in the room with me came over to me. The woman had
a kind smile and warm eyes and she used both now as she smiled at
me.
“How are you feeling, honey?” she asked me, looking over my head
at the monitors above my head. A small clipboard appeared in her
hands and she wrote down several notes on it before it vanished again.
“Rested,” I replied with a smile.
She smiled again as she leaned over me with her stethoscope and
placed it on my chest. “Breathe,” she told me and I obeyed, breathing
in and out slowly with deep breaths. “Well, I can’t blame you for saying
that, seeing as you’ve been deprived of sleep in the two weeks you
were missing.”
I nodded. “How long was I out?” I asked her.
She seemed satisfied with her examination of my breathing and
clipped her stethoscope back around her neck. “About two days,” was
her reply. She picked up the clipboard again and began writing down
some notes. Suddenly, she stopped and pressed on the earpiece
attached to her ear, and no doubt to a radio. “Yes, you may see her
now.”
And even before she had finished talking, the door of the room
opened and in walked three men. I knew them all, of course. There was
Mr. Wayne, who was in charge of the welfare of all of the agents of the
agency, Mr. Leon, who was the head of security at the agency when Mr.
Reynolds, the man in charge of the agency and the third man in this
group, went out on visits, such as this.
They stepped into the room and were almost halfway across the
room when the door opened again. In walked a man I did not know, but
I recognized as the one who had brought me to safety a few days ago.
Mr. Reynolds, always very observant, must have caught my glance
to the newest person in the room and smiled. But what he said when
he took my hand, the one without the cast, was, “How are you feeling,
young lady?”
I couldn’t help but smile back. He was a fatherly man who was kind
to everyone. He was also kind and he didn’t treat me like a child unlike
everyone else. “Fine, sir,” I replied.
He smiled back. “That’s good to hear,” he told me.
“Sir, I wanted to ask you something.”
“Ask away, youngling.”
“How did you find me?” I asked him. Then as an afterthought, I
added, “Sir.”
There was a pause. “Last summer, when you had that surgery
because of your broken collarbone, we also had a tracking device
implanted, as with all of our agents, so we can find them if something
goes wrong,” he finally said.
“Oh.”
Mr. Wayne, who was having a quick exchange of words with my
doctor came over at this point and put a gentle hand on my shoulder.
“Can I get you anything?”
“Food would be great,” I replied. He nodded and hurried off.
Mr. Reynolds now beckoned forward the man who I didn’t know.
“This is Felix Richards, Nik, he’s the one who rescued you. Felix, this is
Nikole, but we call her Nik.”
“Thank you very much for coming for me,” I told Felix.
He was a handsome man, probably no more than four or five years
older than me. He had dirty blonde hair and glittering, intelligent blue
eyes. He held himself as if he knew all the secrets in the world. And
under the stern and professional look that was set into his features,
there was a hint that he was also a kind person.
And now, that stern look dissolved and I found myself looking into
the eyes of a kind man who smiled more with his eyes than with his
lips. “You are quite welcome. You weren’t exactly in a good state to be
rescuing yourself, you know,” he said to me.
His words startled me into a laugh and he smiled briefly. Looking
around, I noticed that the other two men had already left, no doubt to
resume the work they had left off to visit me as a formality. The doctor
offered Felix a stool and he took it and sat down beside me. “You know,
all this time, I thought I was one of the youngest agents working under
them, but I guess I was wrong,” he told me with a smile.
 I smiled. Most of the agents in the agency were under the
impression that I was the daughter of one of the workers here, but this
impression was good – it provided me safety in ignorance. “Well, I was
one of those things that they said was Level 5 Security Clearance,” I
replied.
“Wow, really?” he asked me.
I nodded. “I think that I may be the United States’ secret weapon.
They wouldn’t want everyone to know about me,” I explained. “And I
bet that you’re not allowed to talk about me and what I do with anyone
unless they’ve also been cleared.”
“Yeah, they told me that when they briefed me for the rescue
mission.”
We trailed off into a silence for a moment. The silence was
interrupted as the door to the room opened again and a man dressed
in a mess hall uniform came in, carrying a tray of food for me. “Would
you like to join me?” I asked, gesturing at the tray. A sliding table
installed in the side of the bed was pulled out and the man set the tray
on it. The doctor quietly left with the man from the mess hall.
He smiled but shook his head, standing as he did so. “No, I have to
go to a meeting in a few minutes. I’ll see you later,” he told me and
without waiting for my reply, he left.
I managed to handle my fork and other utensils in an awkward fist,
using the odd shoveling method that probably belonged to people
using their utensils for the first time. It was embarrassing to know that
people in the observatory would be recording this on the security tape,
but I was famished.
As if on cue, another man dressed in a mess hall uniform appeared
at the door that opened for him just as I finished off my last bite. He
took the tray from me and helped me stow the sliding table back into
the bed again before leaving. I thanked him as he walked out past the
doctor who also just entered. “Well, you seem in well enough shape to
feed yourself, so I’ll let you have a few minutes walk outside in the
hallways, and then its back to bed for you,” she told me, taking the
needle for the IV drip out of my arm.
“What happened to my arm? I remember only dislocating it.” I
waved my cast for emphasis on the subject.
“We had to break your arm in order to fix your arm as a whole.
Sorry, but it was necessary. At least you didn’t feel it and we’ve given
you enough morphine so that you don’t feel any pain at the moment,”
she told me. As an afterthought, she added, “Just be careful.”
I nodded in agreement and shuffled out the door, eager to stretch
my legs for a bit.
And just as I left the doorway of the room, a shadow detached itself
from the wall and began to dog me. I turned to look into the
expressionless face of a young Marine guard and then sighed. Of
course, they would put a guard on me to watch over me and to protect
me, even if we were inside our own base deep underground.
I considered an attempt to lose my guard but with a broken arm and
the fact that I had just recently recovered from two weeks of
malnutrition made me forget the idea. Besides, I’d probably get yelled
at later because of it.
Instead, I just ignored my silent guard and walked down the
hallways. Some people stared at me, mostly because I was so much
younger than them. Ignoring them, I moved on.
A few minutes of wandering and exploring allowed me to easily
draw the conclusion that this floor held nothing but the hospital and its
infirmary and the biological research laboratories. I headed straight for
the elevator to go the second floor where the more interesting stuff
were but then my guard reached out and held me back. “Sorry, miss,
but the doctor says that you are to stay on this level,” he told me.
I sighed and turned back around after freeing my arm gently from
the Marine’s hold. “All right, if that’s the way it has to be,” I murmured,
starting down the hallway.
Chapter 2
Family Relations

There wasn’t much for me to explore so I set back after I walked

around for about an hour or two, except that I didn’t know the way
back since I had been aimlessly wandering about. Even my Marine
didn’t seem to know the way. “How long have you been here?” I asked
with a sigh. The last time I had a Marine guard, he knew where
everything was so he allowed me to wander more freely – because he
would be able to get us both back.
Apparently, the same could not be said for this Marine.
“Only about three months, miss, but I thought that since you had
been here before, you would know the way back,” he protested, a little
embarrassed.
“I only know my way around on the top-most levels, and I’ve never
been down here before,” I snapped, getting impatient. We’d been
standing here for about ten minutes, trying to figure out how to get
back. “But you’ve been here for three months! How could you not
know the layout of the hallways down here?”
“Because most of my time here has been spent guarding the top-
most levels, ones that I do know,” he snapped back hotly. “And it was
only because of you that I had to come down here to guard you
because we were so short on staff ever since 9/11 and –“
“Is there a problem?” a smooth voice interrupted.
We both turned to find ourselves under the scrutiny of Felix’s tired
blue eyes. “Yes, my Marine didn’t know the way back and I’ve never
been here before, so we’re lost,” I told him with a smile. He managed a
smile in return. “How was the meeting?” I asked him, stepping up to
walk beside him, leaving my Marine guard fuming behind us.
“Tiring, and boring, as all meetings are,” he told me with a yawn.
“But it’s over, and I can’t wait to get to bed. It’s been a long day for
me.”
“It’s not even dinner yet,” I pointed out.
He turned us down a hall. “I know, but I take midnight watch, so I
have to sacrifice dinner for a good night’s sleep sometimes, like
today,” he told me.
“That’s not fair.”
He shook his head in agreement. “Yes, it’s not fair, but yet, I must
do it. Next week, I get the 5 a.m. watch, and I’m looking forward to it,”
he told me and I chuckled at the unexpected enthusiasm in his voice.
Before anything else could be said, we reached the doors of the
infirmary room I had been staying in. “Here we are,” he said, pressing
a button off to the side. The door opened to let us in.
The doctor, whose name I still haven’t figured out yet, looked up
from the tablet computer she was looking at in her arms and set it
down. “Good, you’re back, I was getting worried – thought I might have
to send a search party,” she said, looking pleased. I almost laughed
but instead, Felix and I shared a look of amusement and irony.
“You probably should for the Marine you set on me. He isn’t very
good at directions,” I told her. The doctor turned towards a cabinet full
of medicines and pulled out a syringe and needle as Felix helped me
up onto the bed and after I was settled, he touched my hand and left.
After the door closed, the doctor returned with the syringe filled
with a clear liquid. I backed away from it. “No, sorry, I want to go into a
natural sleep, not medically induced,” I told her. She smiled.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t for sleep, it’s your daily injection of nutrients
that your body still lacks. It’s easier than eating a bunch of vitamins,”
she told me, attaching the IV drip to my arm again and injecting the
liquid in the syringe. After she finished, she pulled out a blanket and
tucked it over me. “He’s cute.”
“Who?”
She smiled. “Felix.”
“Hadn’t noticed,” I drawled and she laughed.
“He hasn’t looked this happy since he’s met you. You’ve been
making him smile way more these days, almost like how he used to,”
she told me. “It makes me happy to see him happy.”
“Why?”
She smiled. “I’m his stepsister. Older stepsister. But we’re close
siblings, so we usually get rid of the ‘step’ part,” she told me. “And a
while ago, he lost his girlfriend to someone who wanted to use her to
get to him. And before that, his father in the 9/11 incident. His father
was in the Twin Towers when it blew.”
“Oh,” I said softly.
She nodded. “Ever since then, he’s cut himself off from everyone
that he used to love in the attempt to save them. We don’t talk any
more, besides from the usual greetings and goodbyes. He doesn’t
come see Mum anymore, either, and she gets worried about him.
We’ve almost lost all hope for him, but then you came and –“
“He’s started to laugh more,” I finished for her.
She nodded. “Please, if you could, make my brother happy, don’t
cause him any more grief. This is the first time I’ve asked this of
someone, but if I don’t do something, he’ll cut himself off from
everyone permanently,” she told me.
I nodded. “I’ll do everything I can to help, Dr. Richards, I promise. He
did, after all, save my life, for which I owe him,” I replied.
She smiled. “Call me Maddy, and get some sleep,” she told me.
As if obeying, my eyelids closed and then I was asleep.

“The girl escaped?”

“I’m sorry, sir, she did,” a voice out of the shadows of my dreams
said.
 I couldn’t see, couldn’t move, or couldn’t speak. In other words, I
was in the dream world, but it seemed so real. Suddenly the darkness
disappeared and the scene was as vivid in my mind as if I had been
there.
“You will give us what we want and we will spare you this pain,” a
voice, the voice of my enemy, I couldn’t remember which one,
growled. There were so many and the pain was too great. The tongue
of the whip flicked across my skin again and again. My vision burned
red and then black and I wanted it all to end, but I couldn’t give in. I
wanted to pass out, but they had anticipated it and kept throwing
bucketfuls of ice-cold water over me to keep me awake.
As the tenth bucket passed over my body, I suddenly felt myself
drowning in a small tub with a grate locked over the top of it. This was
ridiculous – I was drowning in three feet of water, unable to get out.
The grate locked over the top actually locked so that it was partially in
the water – no way for me to get any air.
“We’ll end this, once you give us what we want,” the same
resonating voice filled with loathing and hate said again.
Give us what we want and we’ll end this…..
Give us what we want and….
Give us what we want….
Give us what –

I woke with a scream from the dream of endless tortures from my last
mission. And when I realized it was a dream, I started to cry, even as
ten fully armed Marines poured into the room, alert and ready for
anything.
Maddy was soon at my side, chasing everyone away and holding me
as I cried.
After a while, my tears stopped flowing and I sat shaking in Maddy’s
arms. Out of the corner of my blurry vision, I saw someone quietly
come in and stand at the doorway as if undecided about coming in.
Maddy raised a hand and beckoned the person to come in and then her
arms unwound themselves from around me, only to be replaced by the
firm, reassuring arms of Felix Richards.
“Are you all right?” he asked me, breathing the words into my hair.
For a while, I didn’t answer, and finally, my eyes closed again and
this time, I fell asleep, protected by the knowledge that Felix was there
with me, and I didn’t dream again that night.

“…post traumatic stress. She’ll probably need at least a month of rest

before she’ll be completely well again.”
“No, it just can’t be done. We need her out there and –“
“And she needs this, Mr. Leon. She’s gone through a hard ordeal for
someone her age. It’s about time that she gets to have a break to relax
and be like someone her age should be – going out shopping, the
movies, making friends, swimming, and all that other stuff,” the firm
voice of Mr. Wayne said.
“But –“
“That’s enough,” a new voice – Mr. Reynolds – cut in. “She’s awake
and I have decided to give her two weeks. It should be enough to
recover – she’s a tough kid. She’ll make it through.”
I sat up, still a little woozy from sleep. Felix, who was sitting in his
stool besides my bed smiled at me and I returned the smile sleepily.
“What’s going on?” I asked the three men who apparently decided that
the best place to have a meeting about me was in the very room I was
sleeping in.
“We would like you to take two weeks off on vacation before you
come back to us again. We’ve realized” – here Mr. Wayne said this with
a glare at Mr. Leon – “that you need some time to catch up with what
normal teenagers your age would be doing now, instead of what you
consider normal. It’s all really a good lesson to learn, but mostly, we
want you to go and have some fun,” Mr. Wayne said to me with a
smile.
Almost as if in forced agreement, Mr. Leon gave a stiff nod before he
stalked out of the room. “Felix will go with you,” Mr. Reynolds added.
“To make sure that there isn’t any trouble. Kids aren’t supposed to
wander around alone and he can be there to say that you aren’t alone.
How does that sound?”
I smiled wearily. “Sounds great. Can I have breakfast first?” I asked
them.
Mr. Reynolds laughed and called for breakfast using his earpiece
before he left with Mr. Wayne after the sulking Mr. Leon. After the door
had closed behind them, I turned to Maddy who was doing another
checkup. “When did they decide to abandon their nice meeting rooms
to start meeting in here?” I asked her.
She laughed and Felix even smiled. “Ever since you arrived,
apparently,” she told me. “Now be quiet while I check your lungs.”
After she finished, I asked, “Would you like to come with us?”
She shook her head. “I would say yes, but I have a lot of things to
do here. You two have fun. I’m releasing you today. Just be careful with
that arm,” she told me. I nodded just as the breakfast tray came in,
delivered by another man in a mess hall uniform.
Once again, Maddy helped me set up the sliding table before she
left and Felix took the tray from the man and set it on the table in front
of me. Without bothering to ask, he helped himself to a sausage on my
plate. “No breakfast yet?” I asked him.
He shook his head and swallowed the bite of sausage. “And no
dinner last night either. I was here with you the whole time and I woke
up when those three came in,” he told me. He looked tired.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him, but he smiled and shook his head.
 “It’s all right. I just wanted to make sure you were fine for the rest of
the night,” he told me, reaching out and pulling a strand of hair away
from my face.
After we finished my breakfast, the man came in and took the tray
away and Felix stowed the table away for me. After that, he climbed
onto the bed next to me and I settled into his arms. He eventually
dozed off, his arms still around me and I didn’t dare move, fearing to
wake him.
Maddy found us in the same position about an hour later, and I
realized when she came in that I had fallen asleep too. She smiled at
me and then glanced at the sleeping Felix before she finally went to
her workstation and picked up her clipboard and looked at it along with
some of the monitors over my head.
“Well, you’re fine, and I don’t see any reason not to let you go,” she
told me, reaching over and switching off the machines I was attached
too. She also took the wires off of me and managed to extract the IV
drip tube from under Felix, which I hadn’t realized it was in my arm
until she touched it. “Just eat regularly, make sure you don’t eat too
much sugar foods, eat more vitamins, and in about a week, I think
you’ll be fine.”
I nodded in reply and she smiled at me. “Have fun,” she told me
before she left.
A few minutes later, Felix opened his eyes, looking less tired than
before and smiled down at me. He climbed off of the bed and
stretched. “Ready to go?” he asked me. I knew that he had heard the
whole conversation between Maddy and me as he was waking up.
I nodded and he helped me up. “I need to get my stuff. Can’t go out
wearing hospital clothes,” I said with a smile, gesturing down at the
clothes I currently wore. He laughed and used his earpiece to call for
my things.
They arrived in a dark blue sports bag that I recognized as the one
Mr. Wayne had bought me for Christmas last year. Jinks, our gadget
specialist, had fitted a lot of things into that bag for me. It had every
gadget that any agent could possible imagine, except from the gun
that they always never gave me. But for now, it was just an ordinary
sports bag containing my things.
Felix left the room to give me some privacy as I changed. I had
some trouble with some zippers and buttons but I managed. I stepped
outside and Felix took the bag from me and together, we headed
towards the elevator that would take us thirty floors up to the surface.
Chapter 3
California

We were on a plane to California. Of all the places I’ve been too, I’ve
never really been to California. I mean, I’ve been there when I chased
some terrorists down from Washington all the way there, but I haven’t
really explored that area of the country.
The plane we were taking was a retired army jet that had been
converted to a commercial air plane. It had two rows of seats, no first
class or business class because it was so small. The plane was fast,
unsurprising since it was built for speed.
After about half and hour on the plane, we were ready to land again.
That was how fast it was. “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain
speaking. Please fasten your seat belts, we are ready to land,” a voice
said over the intercom.
There was a scramble as everyone made for their seats.
Looking around me, I recognized these people as important people
in government. There were several senators here, and even a
governor. The other people were probably their assistants. Felix and I
were probably the only ones who didn’t work in the government in the
way they did.
Before I could observe more about the people around me, the plane
started its descent and I leaned back in my seat for the rest of the way
down. Beside me, Felix stared out the window with a bored expression
on his face. His left arm was draped across my shoulders and I leaned
into his hold just as the plane landed.
“I’ve never been to California before,” he commented, turning to me
as the plane made its way off the runway and into the airport.
“Really?”
He nodded. “Never got a chance.”
“Oh.”
There was a sound of a gentle bell as the seatbelt sign switched off
and a female voice began to say the thank you’s for the airline
company. No one paid much attention to the voice and began to grab
their things from the overhead compartments.
Felix helped me with my backpack that I slung over my shoulder.
“Let’s go,” he told me after shouldering his own bag. I lead the way
out, following the line of people filing out of the plane.
Once outside, the bright Californian sun greeted us, warming our
skin as we climbed down the stairs that had been brought up to the
side of the plane and made our way to the bus waiting to take us to the
airport terminal.
“It’s great here,” I told him.
He smiled and once again, he looked weary. Why didn’t he sleep
when he had the chance? The question must have showed on my face
because the next thing he said was, “I’m a light sleeper – any noise
around me wakes me up. Sometimes it’s hell, but it’s saved my life
more times than I can count so I don’t mind.”
I looked away in embarrassment and climbed onto the bus after a
rather scrawny Chinese man in front of me who was holding an odd-
looking briefcase. It had straps all over it, but I guessed that it was just
to secure it closed because half of the straps were broken and the case
looked really old anyway.
I found a seat near the back of the bus where no one went and Felix
sat down beside me. “Here,” I told him, making room and patting my
lap. Almost gratefully, he immediately put his head in my lap and went
to sleep, stirring only when the bus started up. After that, it was silent
save for the rattling and creaking of the bus. The engines were quiet,
for a bus, but I guessed that it must be because the bus had recently
been oiled or it was just new enough not to make any noise.
We rolled on for almost forty minutes before we reached the hotel.
Our bus didn’t need to stop at the airport to check in because this was
one of those special ones where we didn’t even need to pass customs
again. Our luggage was already stored on the bus so all we had to do
was identify which ones were ours and have the workers from the hotel
take it up to our room.
As soon as the bus stopped, Felix’s eyes opened and he sat up,
rubbing his eyes. I got up and he followed close behind me and
together, we made our way off of the bus. We collected our luggage
from the bus and lugged it into the hotel’s lobby. “One room for Felix
Richards, please,” Felix said to the woman at the desk as soon as we
got there. She smiled at Felix, looking up at him through her long
lashes and flicked her long blonde hair over her shoulder.
“May I see your passport, please?” she asked.
I could see exactly what she thought about Felix and I saw that she
was around the age to be someone that he liked, but I didn’t care. Felix
and I were nothing more than friends.
Felix reached into the inner pocket of his leather jacket and pulled
out his passport, handing it over to the woman. The woman smiled
again and Felix, startled a little, at first blinked, and then returned the
smile, though I saw it was more of a polite one than anything else. He
was, after all, still half-asleep.
“Room 521 is available for your use,” the woman told him after a
moment of typing on her computer and looking at Felix’s passport.
“Sorry, but all the other rooms are booked.”
“‘Sorry’?” I asked.
She looked, surprised, at me as if seeing me for the first time. “Yes,
there is a king-sized bed in there, but only one bed,” she told me.
“Oh.”
Felix grinned at me and punched him in the back and he winced.
“That will be fine,” he told her. When she turned around to the machine
that imprinted the room’s codes onto the card keys, he leaned back to
say, “Well, it’s better than sleeping on the ground.”
I scowled at the back of his blonde head as he accepted the keys
from the woman. “Will you need help with your luggage?” she asked
him, glancing at my broken arm.
“No, we’re fine. This is all we have,” he told her, and without further
ado, he left the counter and made his way to the elevator. I followed
him in.
“Creepy woman,” I muttered.
Felix smiled. “Someone jealous?”
I snorted. “No! Definitely not!” I thought I said it a little too
hurriedly.
He only smiled and turned away to fix his gaze on the numbers that
were slowly ticking up to the fifth floor. There was a bell as we stopped
at the fifth floor and together, we exited the elevator and made our
way down the hallway to our room.
518.
519.
520.
521. Here, we stopped and Felix produced the room key from inside
his jacket pocket, where it seemed most of his important things went.
He held the key up to the door and the light flashed green. The door
swung inwards to let us in. “Nice,” he murmured. I shook my head and
followed him with my own luggage.
After flicking on the lights, I saw that the woman was right – there
was only one bed in the room, though there was room for a couch – if
you could call a lean-to sofa with padding on it a couch – a coffee table
and a television, another for a kitchen, bathroom (which had two
showers and one bathtub), and even a rather large closet.
“They could fit this much in here, but they just couldn’t fit in two
beds,” I muttered, letting my blue bag drop to the floor. Felix smiled at
my words.
“No, because they wanted us to have all of this other stuff,” he told
me with a grin. “Come on, let’s go to the pool.”
“Uh, I can’t,” I shook my broken arm. “But I’ll go to watch you
swim.”
He smiled. “Fair enough.”
Both of us changed quickly to fit the weather here and Felix grabbed
a towel. I went through my things and grabbed a book to read by the
water out of my bag. Before we left, I looked out through the window. I
must have made a noise because Felix soon was next to me. “It’s
amazing,” I breathed. He nodded in agreement.
The view from the window was stunning. Beaches and ocean
stretched out farther than the eye could see. The sun managed to
touch every inch of the tropical beauty, lighting up everything with a
light that did not seem like any light I’ve ever seen.
 “Come on, it’s not going to go away,” Felix said, tugging my
uninjured hand.
I laughed and followed him out the door. He pressed the button for
the elevator and when it came, we stepped inside and he hit the
button for the first floor. The doors slid closed and Felix put his arms
around me, drawing me closer to him. Confused, I let him and he
leaned down until I could feel his breath against my ear.
“The room was bugged, and so was almost everything else we’ve
been in since we got here,” he breathed. I froze in surprise but he gave
me a warning squeeze and I relaxed, leaning into his hold.
“Why?” I asked, reaching up to put my arms around his neck. Out of
the corner of my eye, I spotted the security camera in the elevator and
realized that Felix had positioned us so that the camera couldn’t see us
talking, only what he wanted it to see.
“Someone’s still after you. I know it’s nothing to do with me, but
they want something from you. I can tell. I’ve spotted several people
already that may be watching you, all that were on the plane and then
on the bus with us,” he told me. His lips brushed my ear and I closed
my eyes. They shot open again as they moved down and kissed my
neck instead. “Act,” he warned me with a hiss.
I obeyed and closed my eyes again. “Are you really acting?” I
gasped as he held my head in his hands gently and kissed me on the
lips.
A shock seemed to run in between us with that kiss and I could only
stare as his broke the kiss. “Maybe,” he said, his voice rather husky,
and smiled.
“But I don’t think that anyone could be possibly –“
“The Chinese man with the briefcase, Senator Julia’s assistant, the
bus driver, the plane attendant,” he ticked off. “These are just a few
people that have been watching us since we left. In fact, they are still
with us, now just properly disguised.” Here as he said this, the elevator
door opened and I turned just in time to see a group of people that had
been on the bus with us troop by with bags and towels, dressed in
tropical clothing. Felix nodded at them to indicate what he meant.
“When we said we were going swimming, we were alone. Our room is
bugged – they’re going swimming too. They just think that we haven’t
figured out that our room was bugged.”
“Where are we going then?” I asked him, sensing that we weren’t
going to the pool.
He put an arm around me with a smile. “To the beach.”
“That’s better than a pool,” I commented.
He nodded. “Yes, it is,” he agreed.
We left the hotel lobby and walked a ways towards the pool,
following the people in front of us. Just right before the gate that
opened up to the pool, Felix grabbed me and dashed off in the other
direction.
 A few minutes later, I was watching Felix dive into the sea. I lay
down in the sand under the Californian sun and picked up my book but
after a few minutes, I put it down and just napped.
I woke up to the sound of footsteps and I turned to see someone
going through our things. “Hey!” I shouted, jumping to my feet. The
thief ran off as soon as he heard me and I realized that he took care
not to show his face to me. But he didn’t need to – on his back was a
distinctive tattoo – a phoenix rising from the ashes.
My shout had brought Felix running and he came, dripping wet and
smelling of salt. “What’s wrong?” he asked, shaking water out of his
eyes.
“Someone was just going through our things,” I replied, still staring
after the retreating phoenix on the back of the man. I considered going
after him but then with my broken arm, it would be impossible because
I knew that he would do everything to lose me – including climbing
over fences and anything involved with arm work.
Felix had gone immediately to our bags as soon as he had heard
what I had said and he emerged a few minutes later, holding
something small in his hand. He showed it to me and I only saw him
holding a small coin – a dime. “I found this at the bottom of your bag,”
he told me.
“What is it?”
“A tracking device,” he replied grimly. “It’s ingeniously made to look
like a coin to avoid suspicion but I’ve seen it used before and it’s not
very effective. Most people tend to spend their coins, not leave them
lying around at the bottom of their bags.”
“Well, you can tell it’s fake. The coin’s not even steel, it’s only made
of iron,” I said, taking the coin from him and pointing out the rust
spots. “It must be the humidity here. But anyway, shouldn’t we destroy
it before whoever this belongs to finds us?”
He shook his head. “You’re thinking like a field agent with no tools,”
he said with a smile. “Think like an agent in the lab – if we destroy it,
we won’t find out who it came from. We can just disable the tracking
device with the right tools and take a look at it later.”
“What kind of tools would you need to disable something like this?”
I asked.
Felix had already gone back to my bag, which of course was my
blue sports bag. I had emptied out my other clothes onto the bed at
the hotel. He seemed to know how to use it because he came back
with something that I was sure I never brought with me and was
probably one of the gadgets contained inside the bag. “An
electromagnetic pulse,” he explained, “knocks out just about any
electroNik gadget in range and prevents it from executing its purpose.”
He held up the tool he was holding in his hands which looked more
like a laser pointer than anything else. He aimed it at the coin and hit
the button that would normally be used to turn on the laser but
instead, nothing came out, though I did feel the coin in my hand make
a little jolt. “I think that should do it,” he murmured, taking the coin
from me. He pulled out a pouch from his pocket and dropped the coin
into it and tucked both the pouch and the small electromagnetic pulse
into my bag.
“Let’s have a good vacation, all right?” he asked me.
I smiled and the next thing I knew, he had scooped me up easily
into his arms and was striding purposefully to the water. “Felix, what
are you doing?” I asked him. He grinned at me and I secured my arm
with the cast around his neck. “Felix?”
Then the sea rose up to meet me and I gasped as my warm body
suddenly plunged into what felt like icy cold water. “That’s cold,” I
gasped, clinging onto Felix.
He laughed. “Only at first, just wait and –“
But I never got to hear what he said because the next thing I knew, I
was ripped out of Felix’s hold and into the water. I managed to take a
breath before that happened. I tried everything to free myself from
whatever had me around the ankle, very much aware that whatever it
was, was pulling me farther and farther out into the ocean. I knew that
when we had gone too far from the shore, Felix would be unable to
follow me. And my captor seemed to know this too.
As a coral shot by, I reached out with my good hand and grabbed
onto it, resulting in a very painful pull on my leg, but I managed to stop
from being towed away. The person that had caught onto me now
came to inspect, as I suspected he would. But something in me told me
that this was the right thing to do.
And I was right as something fast and heavy barreled right into my
captor just as he reached out to free my arm from the rock.
It was a fight in slow motion. Felix was quick and precise, easily
disabling the diver by catching his hands around the tubing of the
oxygen tank and ripping it free from the other man’s mouth. I could tell
that Felix didn’t really want to fight the man, but the other man didn’t
either so Felix let him escape.
My vision started turning black and I realized then that I was
running out of air. I looked hopelessly up at the massive amount of
water above me, but I felt something hard press against my mouth and
I opened it to inhale more oxygen from the tank that I realized Felix
had taken from the man.
He pointed up above us once I got enough air and I nodded. He
reached out and tugged me up to the surface with him. As we broke
through the surface of the water, I reached out for Felix and we clung
to each other there for a moment, taking in mouthfuls of salty sea air.
“Sorry I wasn’t here sooner,” he told me after a moment.
I closed my eyes and leaned against him. “I’m just glad that you
were here,” I told him softly. He held me close for a moment.
“He could really swim,” Felix commented after a while.
 I looked up to see that the shore was far away and the figures
moving around on the beach were miniscule. “Yeah,” I agreed. “Do we
have to swim all the way back there?”
He laughed. “Yes, but I suspect it’s going to be mostly me doing the
swimming.”
“I can swim!” I protested.
He shook his head. “Not with that arm. Anyway, it’s fine. I’ve done
something like this before, but that was after I ran a mile, so just hang
on,” he told me.
Felix was right about his own capabilities. While I just clung onto
him, he brought the two of us back to shore within ten minutes. The
two of us collapsed onto the sand as soon as we reached the shore.
Felix put his arm around me and held me close, kissing the top of
my head. Did he really like me as he had suggested in the elevator? I
sighed and rearranged myself so that I was more comfortable. I didn’t
care, because he had saved my life and kept me safe. And I might like
him too, a little more than I’m supposed to.
Chapter 4
Nemesis Retaliation

We made our way back to our hotel, eventually. We were both hungry
but at the moment we didn’t feel like eating anything. “Welcome
back,” a voice – female – called out as soon as we stepped indoors.
The woman from earlier today – the same one at the reception desk
– appeared on Felix’s other side with a flirtatious smile on her lips. She
reached out and took his arm. “Are you hungry? I was thinking that
maybe we could have something together. Oh, and your little sister
came come too, of course,” she added, glancing at me. I scowled at
her.
Felix removed the woman’s clutching hand from his arm. “No, but
thanks for asking,” he said politely, with another one of his polite
smiles, but I saw that it was colder than the one that he had given
earlier. “And she’s not my little sister.”
The woman looked startled at first. “Oh, all right then,” she said
eventually.
Then she left and I relaxed. “She’s creepy,” I pointed out for the
second time today. He smiled and took us to the elevator. I reached out
and hit the button for the elevator.
“I agree. Haven’t had a woman follow me like that in years,” he said
slowly. “But unfortunately, this time she has reason to.”
“What?” I asked, then I paused to think about what he had said for a
moment. “Because of me? You think that she wants to find out about
me and to do that, she wants to get to you?”
He nodded. “Being the kind of people we are, we have to always be
very careful as to who we talk to, become friends with, and who we
choose to be our partners in life, in other words, our spouses,” he told
me. “Because like it or not, that spouse might actually be another spy
sent to spy on you and gain information from you.”
“And you trust me?” I asked him.
He smiled. “I saw the condition you were in, Nik, and I knew that
you were definitely not on the other side. You were scared to hell, even
of me, remember?” he asked me.
“Oh.”
“And to answer your question, yes, I do, but only because I know
that you aren’t on the other side because of what you’ve been through
and the things you say in your sleep,” he told me.
That startled me. “I talk in my sleep?” I asked.
He nodded. “And when you’re delirious and half-dying apparently.
The agency told me that you weren’t much of a sleep-talker but I guess
that after that last mission, it was too much for your mind so you
started talking in your sleep.”
“That’s not good, is it?” I asked slowly.
 He shook his head. “No, it isn’t and if you continue like this, you
might not actually go back to work and the agency might find you
something else to do. You might become a security risk,” he explained.
There was a ding as the elevator arrived and the metal doors slid
open. We were about to step in but coming out was the Chinese man I
had seen earlier today in front of me on the bus. He was still holding
his battered briefcase with its broken straps but the thing that
bothered me the most was that he looked very startled, especially to
see me, but then he was gone. I glanced up at Felix and seeing his
narrowed eyes, I knew that he had caught the look of surprise on the
man’s face right before he left.
But we didn’t say anything as we stepped into the elevator. The
doors closed and we were going up now. Felix put his back to the
camera that we both knew were there and I leaned back against the
wall of the elevator as it creaked up its shaft. He held me close and like
before, he kissed me.
“You have to tell me if you’re acting or not,” I breathed as soon as
we broke the kiss.
I looked up into his eyes and found that they were a brilliant color of
blue that I had never seen before. “What do you think?” he asked me.
“I think you’re enjoying this a little too much,” I retorted, knowing
that he wanted to know the same as I did.
He smiled and kissed me again. “That man expected to not see you
again, probably expected you dead,” he told me after a while.
“Yes, I realized that,” I told him.
His hands moved behind me until he had arranged his arms so that I
was pinned hard against him. “You have to be careful,” he told me
quietly, all trace of warmth and familiarity gone. I was surprised at how
cold his voice sounded. This must be what he sounded like when he
was really worried or scared for something, or someone. “Don’t shrug
this off like it’s nothing, Nik. This time, you survived only because I was
there. Next time, don’t be so sure.”
“Felix –“
“I’m serious, Nik,” he said with a sigh. Releasing me and running his
fingers through his hair. He looked really agitated and frustrated. “Next
time, I probably won’t be there and you have to look after yourself.”
“I can look after myself,” I said firmly. “Just stop worrying –“
He put a finger up to his lips and I realized that our voices had
started rising. “My point is,” he continued, coming close again. “You
have to be careful from now on. You went on your first dangerous
mission. Most of the time, a mission doesn’t end when the agency says
it’s ended. It often continues after the case is closed, and you probably
know why.”
“Retaliation,” I whispered.
He nodded. “Yes, retaliation. You must be careful. Last time you got
away with something important and they want it back or destroyed.
Most likely, they’ll destroy you to keep the information from spreading,
so you must be careful – do you understand me?” he asked, fire in his
eyes.
I met his gaze for a moment. “Yes, I do, Felix,” I replied, lowering my
gaze.
The doors slid open and I realized that we had reached the fifth
floor. “Good. Don’t let me down,” he told me, picking up our bags from
the ground.
“I won’t,” I said softly.

Like most males, Felix slept in nothing but shorts. I had put on a pair of
shorts and a camisole for bed. We slept in the same bed, but we had
our own silent rule about the invisible line down the center of the bed.
Neither of us will reach across it during the night.
Looking at Felix’s sleeping face in the half-light, I saw that it looked
more relaxed than it did during the day. And this made me wonder
what he had left behind those years ago before I met him. He had lost
his mother, father, and his old girlfriend since he had taken on this job.
It seemed to have changed him a lot.
He acts more mature for his age than most people do, I realized.
Grief had turned a young man with happy years ahead of him into a
hardened veteran soldier of an invisible war. No wonder why he’s
afraid of losing me – he cares a lot for me.
A sigh escaped from my lips and I turned over onto my side. But
then soon, I was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at my
hands. I was afraid of sleeping, afraid of my own dreams. But it had
been your own dreams that brought you where you are today, I
reminded myself.
I got up and slid the sliding door open and stepped outside on the
balcony to get a breather of fresh air. “Nik?” Felix’s voice whispered in
the dark.
“I’m here,” I called back into the room.
I felt him come to the door behind me. “Are you all right?” he asked
me after a while of silence.
I wanted to say, yes, but I couldn’t. I would just be lying to myself.
But I didn’t need to say anything because he seemed to know the
answer even before I had said anything. “It’s all right,” he said quietly,
coming up behind me. He clasped his hands around my front and
together, we gazed out over the night beach. We could hear the waves
crashing down on the sand from here.
“I’m afraid of myself,” I finally said.
He rested his chin on the top of my head. “Everyone is, at some
point,” he replied.
I shook my head. “No, I’m afraid of everything now. Even my own
dreams. I can’t sleep without something coming to me, but I don’t
want sleeping pills either because those knock you out cold – it’s not
exactly a good thing.”
“Come, I have my own medicine,” he told me, pulling me back into
the room.
I lay down on the bed and he lay down next to me. And without
hesitation, he pulled me into his arms. Once again, I felt safe, just as
like last time. He pulled the comforter over the both of us and with a
kiss on my cheek as a “Good night”, he fell asleep.
I was awake for only a few more moments after that before I finally
fell asleep too.
And I didn’t have a single dream that night either.

One of the dreams of every American is to see the famous Hollywood

sign in California. Well, I can tell you that it’s not very impressive. It’s
just a collection of metal heating up in the sun, bent and welded into
the shapes of the letters it was supposed to be. But Felix insisted on
coming, and he also insisted on hiking up the slope to the sign until I
could feel the heat coming off of the metal.
I reached out but even before I could even touch the metal, it was
already too hot for me to handle so I pulled my hand back. But
apparently, Felix wasn’t coming to see the sign. I caught him looking
around the base of the Y for something behind the sign. “What is it?” I
asked him.
He opened his mouth to say something but apparently he found it
because the next thing I knew, a door opened up behind him and he
strode over to it. “A base? That’s what you’re looking for?” I asked him
with a scowl. “Look, we’re on vacation, and I’m not going down there –“
“Even if it’s for your own protection?” he interrupted.
“Even if it’s – wait, what?”
He grinned at me and grabbed my hand, pulling me down into door
with him. I found myself walking down a cement ramp headed down
into the darkness. The door closed behind us as soon as we were far
enough away and the lights turned on. “Look, I know we were on
vacation, but like I told you last night, spies are never on vacation,” he
told me quite sternly.
I blinked for a moment. “No, you didn’t – you never said anything of
the sort.”
He paused. “I didn’t?” Then he kept moving again. “Well, now I did.”
I sighed and gave in. There was no turning him around at this point,
seeing as we were nearing the bottom of the ramp. “And how did you
know this was here in the first place?” I asked him.
He glanced at me for a moment. “Every field agent is required to
know every place that they can take safe refuge without being followed
or detected and this is one of those safe-houses,” he replied. “You’ve
been doing missions outside of the country so it would have been
pointless for you to know about this place. But had you been with
someone else other than me, you would have been stopped by
someone very insistent that you turn back. And now that you’ve been
here, you will be signed into the database and be allowed back again,
but only with permission from the head of office and during the case of
an emergency.”
“Sounds complicated,” I commented.
He smiled a little. “It is.” We exited the tunnel to find ourselves in a
lit circular room that was empty except for a desk positioned in
between two other tunnels that branched out deeper underground.
Felix walked purposefully up to the desk and I followed him. “Felix
Richards, bringing in guest, Nikole” – he glanced at me and I realized
that I had never told him my last name.
“Versace,” I filled in.
Felix raised his eyebrows. “Italian,” he commented.
I flushed. “I didn’t pick the name – Mr. Reynolds did. He basically
raised me or arranged for people to raise me when I was young,” I
explained.
Felix grinned. “Well, Reynolds has always had a taste for Italian
styles,” he said with a smile, turning back to the man who was writing
down our names on a book in front of him.
“What department will you be visiting?” he asked.
“Technology, and the Head’s office,” Felix replied.
The man nodded as he wrote, his hand moving down the page so
fast I couldn’t even keep up but to my surprise, he wrote quite neatly
for someone who wrote so fast. With his other hand, he held up two
laminated passes. “Please, keep these pinned in visible areas during
your visit and have a great day,” he murmured, still writing. As soon as
we took the passes from him, he pointed down the hall on the right.
We started down the hall he had indicated. Felix took my hand in his
as we walked. Soon, we reached the end of the corridor and the view
that met us almost took my breath away.
A mall-sized underground building spread out before us – we were
apparently on the topmost floor having just come from the surface.
Hundreds of people scurried around about their business. In the center
of the circular-shaped building stood an immense statue of a man with
no recognizable features holding the globe in one hand and a book in
the other with the word, “Responsibility” written across his chest on a
what seemed to be a sash that hung from his shoulder to his waist.
“Come on,” Felix said with a smile after letting me take in the view.
I followed him without a word and he took me to the elevator. We
boarded the elevator with ten other people. By the time the doors
closed, everyone noticed that there were two kids in the elevator and
kept throwing me and Felix inquisitive glances but we ignored them
and got off on the second floor.
He immediately turned to the right and then down the first corridor
he came to. After that, it was like a maze – I lost track of which turns at
which corridors after the tenth. I was sure then that if Felix just left me
there that moment, I would never find my way out. Eventually he
stopped in front of an immense double-oak door and he rapped smartly
on it.
“Come,” a muffled voice said from behind the door.
Without hesitation, Felix opened the door and we walked into a
room bright lit by – sunlight? The man that greeted us inside stood at
one of the windows gazing out over the view of the city. He turned with
a smile as we entered and by the look on his face, he knew that Felix
was coming and was expecting him. “They’re just illusions,” Felix
whispered from behind me. “They were installed about a year ago as a
test from Area 51 and apparently, it’s a success.”
“Felix,” the man said, coming forward, setting down the glass of
what I recognized was brandy on his desk as he passed it. He held out
a hand and Felix shook it warmly with his, though he kept an arm
around my waist. “I didn’t expect to see you back with us so soon.
What brings you here?”
Felix smiled and took his hand back from the man. “I’ve come to
seek protection for someone, sir,” he replied, smiling down at me.
“She’s been targeted by those from her last mission.”
“Hmm, I see,” the man said. “Sit down.”
“Yes, sir,” Felix said, letting go of me and allowing me to sit before
sitting next to me as the man eased himself into his chair behind his
desk. The man behind the desk shuffled the papers on his desk for a
moment before pushing them into a pile and setting them aside.
“Why hasn’t your agency provided this protection?” he asked Felix,
pulling out a new sheaf of paper and a fountain pen. He began to write,
his pen moving across the page, though not as quickly as the man at
the front desk earlier, and from what I could see of the writing, not as
neatly.
“Well, we’re supposed to be on vacation and our agency didn’t
expect us to be in any danger, but now it seems we are – or rather, Nik
is. This is just an unexpected emergency and I came to ask for a
favor,” Felix began but the man raised his hand for him to stop and he
did.
“You have come to ask me if I could’” provide for you the protection
you seek in the form of not bodyguards but technology, is that right?”
he asked with a smile. Felix seemed a little surprised but then he
closed his mouth and then just simply nodded. “This isn’t the first time
we’ve had this request today, Felix, that’s for sure, so don’t be so
surprised. You know that I’m willing to help you and any of yours. Your
father was a good man and a good friend to me. I want to make sure
that his son will be all right.”
I glanced at Felix. He seemed to be at a loss for words, undecided
about what he was going to say. “Thank you, sir,” Felix finally said after
a moment.
 The man nodded and signed the bottom of the paper that he had
been writing on and handed it to Felix. “Take this down to the
Technology department and find a Mr. Lorenzo to help you with what
you need. He’s got some pretty good stuff these days – I think you’ll
like it,” he told Felix.
We stood. “Thank you, sir,” the two of us said together.
“Stay safe, you two,” the man absently said before pulling the stack
of papers over that he had just pushed aside earlier.
We left the safety of the large office and started down the corridor
again, Felix leading the way, the paper folded in his hands. “He’s a
good man,” I commented after a moment. Felix only nodded and when
I glanced at him again, I saw that he was deep in thought and decided
not to disturb him.
But after a few moments of silence, I realized that he was thinking
of something that was disturbing him greatly. “What is it?” I asked him.
When he didn’t answer me, I reached out and touched his arm.
And to my surprise, he roughly shook it off.
I stepped in front of him to stop him and placed my hands on either
side of his face, tilting his head until I could look him in the eye. And
what I saw, I hoped that never again will I see it in his eyes.
His sapphire eyes were as cold as the gem itself. Something deep
burned there, something I couldn’t understand in a man who had been
so caring to me only just a few moments before. Then the coldness and
the mysterious emotion disappeared, replaced by warmth once more
as I stepped backwards, almost unconsciously, as I saw the look in his
eyes.
His eyes closed for a moment and then he drew me into his arms,
saying at the same time, “Come here.” He held me close to him and
we stood there in the deserted hallway.
A lump formed in my throat. “Are you –” I started to say.
“No, never, Nik, never will I be,” he whispered, cutting me off.
I let out a shuddering breath that I realized I had never released.
“Who are you so….emotional against?” I finally asked.
I felt him shrug but by the way he tensed up, I knew that he was
lying, but I left it at that. “Come on, let’s get going,” he told me after a
moment, taking my hand. He let me go and once again, we started
down the hallway.
After a few minutes, we exited the hallway to find ourselves back at
the elevator again. Felix reached out and tapped the button to call the
elevator. “What do you want for dinner tonight?” he asked me, leaning
against the railing as we waiting for the elevator. I shrugged.
“Whatever you like, I suppose,” I replied.
He smiled. “I like Italian,” he told me.
I shrugged. “Then we’ll have Italian tonight.”
There was a ding and the elevator’s door opened and we stepped
inside. This time, there was only two other people with us in the
elevator. Felix reached out and hit the button for the first floor. The
doors closed and the elevator began to move again. The elevator was
silent, save for the occasional cough, sigh, or ruffle of newspaper that
came from one of our elevator companions. Both of them avoided
looking at us and I found it odd, the way they were silent and the way
that they both wore hats and a pair of pitch-black shades that did not
allow anyone to see their eyes.
I didn’t mention it to Felix, nor did he make any sign that he also
knew.
The elevator’s bell rang again and the panel above showed that we
had stopped at the third floor. It must have been going up when we
stepped onto it. The metal doors opened and Felix and I got separated
as a large rush of people came into the elevator. Someone hit the
button for the fourth floor and we were off again.
I could barely see Felix over the heads of the people that had newly
boarded the elevator. I did see a tuft of his blonde hair, which gave me
some comfort that he was still there. The bell rang again, this time at
the fourth floor. I moved aside for people to pass but then I felt
something hard press into the small of my back. “Move out quietly, no
fuss,” a gruff voice breathed into my ear. I had no doubt then that the
object that was pressed so insistently against my back was a gun.
Breathing slowly so that I wouldn’t paNik, I gave a small nod to
show whoever it was that I would comply. He nudged me to the center
of the group and I went. Then they shuffled out, all at once, me and my
captor in the very center. I glanced back as soon as we were out and
saw Felix lunging for the elevator door as he saw me. One of the men
who had been in the elevator with us earlier hit him over the head,
knocking him unconscious. He lowered Felix to the ground and pressing
the button to close the elevator door as he went, he followed us out.
“Let’s move,” he growled.
“Felix!” I shouted, trying to wake him up. “Fel-“
“Shut up!” the man with the gun commanded, pressing the gun
painfully against my back. But there was no need for him to say
anything. It was too late – the elevator disappeared down the shaft as
it was called by someone on the lower floors.
The two men pushed and nudged me away from the elevator with
threats and the hidden guns in their pockets. We made our way back to
where Felix and I had passed just only a few minutes ago. I saw the
man at the desk slumped over his papers and thought that he was
asleep but when I saw a slight bruising on his neck and the way his
neck was twisted, I knew that he was dead – his neck broken.
“Move!” the man warned me.
I shuffled on ahead, up the ramp and back out into the daylight,
emerging out from behind the Y sign. The other man went up to the
button that Felix had pressed earlier to open the door and hit it again,
closing it. As I watched, the door disappeared and there was nothing
more than a flawless carpet of grass before me.
I promptly sat down on the grass and none of my captors made a
move or a command to get me back on my feet again, which I was
grateful for, because I needed to sit after what had happened.
But then in a few minutes, I realized the reason for their
compassion.
There was a sudden whirring sound and I looked up to see a news
station helicopter hovering over us. For a moment, I thought that it was
rescue, but then a rope ladder was released and I realized that this was
my captor’s getaway vehicle. “Stand up, our ride’s here,” the man
said, and without waiting for my reply, he pulled me roughly to my feet
and dragged me over to the ladder.
Without waiting or asking, he threw me over his shoulder and
proceeded to climb the ladder rather quickly. Scared I was going to fall,
I grabbed onto the man’s jacket to hold on as he climbed.
Hands pulled me into the chopper as we reached it and my hands
and feet were quickly and efficiently bound up. A black hood was
thrown over my head and I felt a lurch as the helicopter turned and left
the area.
I could hear nothing but the loud
clackclackclackwhackclackwhackclack of the helicopter blades as they
sliced through the air and the loud roar of the wind. But then a few
hours later, there was a small jolt as the helicopter landed and the
sound of boots hitting the deck whose surface sounded either like
metal or wood. Rough hands grabbed me out of the helicopter and I
was swung up into the arms of a man.
He carried me, while bellowing out orders to the others, all the way
to a room where he set me down gently on a chair and took off my
hood. “Stay here, we won’t hurt you,” he told me gently with what
sounded like a Russian accent, cutting the bonds on my hands and
feet. He held me down before I could do anything else, his hazel eyes
meeting mine, serious and honest. “I promise it, cooperate with us and
no one gets hurt.”
“Except for Felix, and that man at the desk,” I snarled at him.
He only gave a small smile. “It was necessary, but those two did not
cooperate.” I only scowled. “Just stay here,” he told me finally after
searching my eyes with his for a moment.
He left quickly and the bolted the door behind him, leaving me in
the empty room. Sunlight poured through a small round window on one
side of the room, which I recognized as a porthole.
Porthole. Which meant I was on a ship.
Quickly, I went over to the window and looked out. Sure enough, the
horizon bobbed up and down before my eyes and when it came close
enough, I could see that the sea was there, sparkling in the sun. Then
there was a rumbling sound and a mechaNikal groan and with a roar,
the engine started and soon, I could feel the ship bob up and down as
it went over the waves.
At the same time, the door of my room opened and in came the
man with the Russian accent. He carried a tray of food which he set
down on a folding table that I noticed had been hanging on his arm.
“When I came here, I didn’t expect to be interrogating children,” he
said with a smile. “Of course, I can’t use the method I normally use
now.”
“Which is?” I finally dared to ask.
“Torture under mental stress. The kind I specialize in would break
your young mind and I wouldn’t dream of using it on a child,” he
replied, still smiling. His hazel eyes sparkled in the dim light of the
cabin but I saw that they were cold, yet warm in a way. “Sit down,
please.”
I sat, but only because he had asked politely. He pushed the table
and the tray of food it carried over in front of me. “Eat, you must be
hungry,” he told me. I only stared at the food. With a sigh, he took the
knife and scooped a bit of the food in each portion into his own mouth,
chewed it, and swallowed it. “See, it’s not poisoned. Now eat.”
There was no more reason for me to not eat. It had been several
hours since my last meal, which I remembered, had been this
morning’s breakfast. It must have been hours ago since then. I picked
up the spoon and began to eat. The man relaxed with a smile and
leaned against the wall to watch me.
After I finished, he pulled the tray away from me and crouched
down in front of me. “How are you going to interrogate me?” I asked
coldly after a moment.
He smiled. “I’m not going to. Like I said, I didn’t expect to be
interrogating children. In fact, I was paid to come interrogate a spy,
which I had expected to be an adult spy, not a child like yourself. And
because you are not an adult spy, I cannot do my job,” he said to me.
Something of what he said provoked a memory of one of my lessons
back at the agency. “You’re one of those contract killers, aren’t you?” I
whispered. “Basically you serve anyone who gives you money for doing
what they tell you to do.”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
I didn’t say anything after that. He smiled then and reached out.
Gentle fingers brushed my skin, pushing back a stray lock of black hair
from my face. My back was stiff against the back of the chair, my good
hand gripping the edge as my other hand balled up in my lap.
“What’s the matter?” he asked me softly. “Am I scaring you?” I
didn’t reply and he sighed, standing up. “No matter, I will return later.”
He left quietly and when he did, I stood up and went over to a wall
and sat down on the ground, drawing my legs up against my front and
hugging them to me. Then, exhausted, I put my head down on my
knees and slept.
 Before I fell into a deep sleep, I thought I imagined a trickle of tears
on my cheeks.

I was kicked roughly awake and dragged out into the bright sunlight.
Blinking blearily as my eyes adjusted, I looked around and saw that we
were far out to sea – no land could be seen anywhere. I lost all hope of
rescue then and there.
“Put her here,” a rough voice commanded.
I was dropped onto my knees on the warm deck of the ship. I stayed
how I was, looking down at the ground, thinking fast. Mr. Reynolds had
told me that the agency had implanted a tracking device on me, but it
would be no use unless they activated it to track me down. My heart
sank as I remembered this. I wasn’t expected to be back at the agency
for another two weeks because I was on vacation. Felix was probably
still indisposed after suffering such a hard hit to the head so it would
be a while until he could tell them that I was gone, taken by two men.
I would have to save myself again, just like before.
“So, this is the spy who got away with the information,” the voice
growled. I didn’t look up at the owner of the voice, nor did I think I
wanted to. As if reading my mind, the man, a rather bear-like person,
commanded, “Look at me, girl, so I can see the face of the one who
has defied me!”
I looked up slowly, wondering what I was going to say. After all, if
this was going to be the last moments of my life, I didn’t want to go
down screaming in pain, but rather, a curse on my lips for my enemy.
But then, as I looked up at the large man with heavily muscled arms,
who I recognized as Griefe, the man I had been sent to spy on, and his
entourage that consisted of the Russian man behind him, I decided
that it would probably be better not to say anything at all.
Griefe knelt down in front of me and grabbed my chin roughly with
his thick fingers. “What have you done?” he asked in a grumbling
voice, his black eyes searching mine. “What have you done with the
information you acquired from me, hmm? Given it to your agency, I
suppose, have you?”
“No,” I replied.
The look of surprise on his face was quickly replaced by a sneer.
“Why should I believe you?” he snarled.
I smiled. “Because of the two of us, I’d say that I’m more honest and
truthful. You, Griefe, have been living your life and the operating the
way you do through a protection of mystery, lies, and deceit,” I pointed
out.
His once-handsome face twisted into a snarl and warned by that, I
clenched my jaw just in time as a hand the size of a small hand
backhanded me, sending me reeling back onto the deck of the ship.
“Silence!” he shouted.
 Slowly, I sat up. I tasted blood in my mouth and then almost smiled.
Despite my attempts to keep myself from biting off my own tongue, I
had managed to bite it anyway. I turned away and spit the blood out,
swiping at my split lip with the back of my hand. “Hitting girls – that’s
always have been your way, has it?” I snarled.
I had measured the odds and I figured that though he had his
strength, size, and brute force to help him in a fight, I was faster,
quicker, and smaller. I leaped up at him with a silent snarl on my lips.
He had not been expecting it so instead of staying on his feet, he
reeled backwards when my body slammed into his.
He soon recovered and when he did, I slid between his widely-
planted legs to his back, aiming a kick between his legs as I passed
through. He trumpeted like a bull in pain and turned with amazing
speed for one his size and grabbed me by the throat, lifting me high
into the air.
My vision began to black and as I struggled to get free, I found it
harder with every kick. “That’s enough,” a quiet voice said. There was
a cry and the hand holding me suddenly let go, dropping me to the
deck.
I gasped for air as I heard a snarl. “How dare you –“
“I dare, because she was about to suffocate and had you let her
suffocate to death, I would have no need to stay and you would not
have the information you need,” the same voice said with the same
calm tone.
“All I need to know is that she told –“
“No, you need to know exactly how much information she has given
out and what you will do. Only then will you be able to do what you
wish with her,” the Russian, I realized, replied in turn. He stood quietly
where he was, hands behind his back, his body held in a position that
showed he was completely relaxed.
There was a pause after his words. “Right, right, I’m glad I have you
with me here, Gregovich, thank you, old friend,” Griefe said after a
moment. I got to my feet only in time for him to say. “Tie her up and
leave her in her cabin. We’ll get her to talk in no time.”
Rough hands grabbed me and once again, I was bound up and
dragged to the cabin. This time, instead of the Russian’s gentle hands
lowering me into the chair, I was just tossed in like a sack of rubbish.
The door slammed closed with a shockingly loud bang and then I heard
the bolt shoot into place.
I couldn’t move. My hands and feet were bound so tightly that I
almost couldn’t feel them. I moved them around a few times to try to
get some feeling into them. As I was trying to sit up again, the door
opened and this time, it quietly closed behind my guest.
The Russian, Gregovich, came over and with the same gentleness
he had shown to me, helped me into my chair and began to untie me.
“I’ve never seen anyone stand up to Griefe the way you did in all the
years I’ve worked with him,” he commented as he worked. The knots
were tight but soon he got them free and I clenched and unclenched
my hand to get it working again.
I shrugged. “It isn’t my first time being captured and threatened.”
He smiled and looked at me curiously. “I’m sure.”
I didn’t return the smile. “Why do you want to help me?” I asked
him quietly. “You’re paid to extract information from me, but you
haven’t tried to yet. Why? Why do all of this? Saving my life….”
He hesitated for a moment. “Because…you remind me of my sister.
She died long ago, but you are exactly like her – the same fighting
spirit and defiance,” he finally said with a strained voice. “We were
close, as close as two siblings could be. Her death….” He just
shrugged.
I looked down at my hands. “How did she die?” I asked quietly.
“Terrorists. They attacked our city and burned down houses. My
sister was taken as a hostage, and they told us that we were to give
them all of our money if we wanted her back. We gave them the
money, but they killed her anyway,” he told me.
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head, standing up. “It was years ago,” said Gregovich.
He had put a smile on his face as if telling me that he no longer
grieved for his sister but the look in his eyes told me otherwise.
“I never knew my parents,” I said after a while. “I’m an orphan,
raised by the very people I worked for. They groomed me in this job. By
six, I was already undergoing small missions – accompanying the adult
spies into countries as part of their cover.”
“Do you know who your real parents are?” he asked me.
I shook my head. “No. They died when I was born.”
“Hmm,” Gregovich said thoughtfully. Suddenly he wheeled away
from me and went to the door, knocking on it so the men on the other
side knew that he wanted to leave. Sure enough, the door opened. “I’ll
be back. I need to tend to a few things and I’ll make sure you get some
dinner.”
I nodded. “Thank you, for everything,” I added after a moment’s
thought.
He smiled and stepped outside. “Don’t thank me yet,” he told me
just as the door was closing. I was puzzled by his parting words.
For the next few hours, I curled up once again in my corner, my
head resting on my knees. I thought about all the possible ways of
escaping. I could try to convince Gregovich to help me, since he
seemed like the only compassionate being on the ship or I could just
run out and drop one of the small speed boats I had spotted and get
into it. But what would I do for food and water? Besides, they also had
a helicopter.
Slowly, the light outside, and the light inside my cabin, began to
fade into darkness. By the time Gregovich came back, it was
completely dark inside the cabin but he somehow managed to find me
and hand me the tray of food.
I didn’t feel like eating so I only took a few bites and set it aside.
“Come now, you have to eat and keep up your strength,” he said
quietly.
“No,” I whispered, my voice hoarse from not speaking for a while.
“Have some water then,” he told me after hearing my voice.
He held the water bottle up to my mouth and I swatted it away,
sending it skittering across the cabin floor. I turned away from him but
he grabbed my shoulder hard and pulled me around until he towered
over me, looking me straight in the eye with his hazel eyes. I was
surprised since it was his first sign of any emotion beside calmness and
grief. “Don’t make me force you,” he murmured. I flinched as if he had
shouted.
But I still didn’t want to eat. I really didn’t. Stress causes this on me
and I usually don’t eat while I’m in enemy hands to keep myself sharp
and from the embarrassment of retching all over the floor during
torture. “No,” I told him firmly.
Without hesitation, he grabbed and held onto both of my hands with
one hand and with the other, he grabbed another bottle that he carried
from inside his jacket and unscrewed it with one hand. He maneuvered
his hands until he was forcing my jaws open and then he poured the
water into my mouth.
Water spilled over my lips and everywhere around me, running
down my cheeks, my neck. I choked, and then I was forced to swallow.
When he thought that I had enough, he held up something in front of
me. At first, I couldn’t see what it was because my vision was blurred
by tears so I flinched away, afraid that it was another attack.
I heard a sigh and my hands were gently and slowly released. “Do I
have to force you to eat this?” the Russian’s quiet voice said. He held
up what he had been holding before and I saw that it was a piece of
bread.
Without another word of protest, since I decided that it wasn’t a
good idea, I took it from him and under his watchful gaze, I ate the
bread and turned away from him. I heard him leave and the door close
gently behind him. Then I was left alone with the tray of food and my
empty cabin.
The ship slowed to a stop sometime during the night. I rose from my
vigil in the same corner that the Russian had left me in and crept over
to the porthole to look at why we were stopping. I scanned the horizon
for a moment but then I realized that what we were stopping for was
much closer than that. In fact, it was a smaller ship that had pulled up
next to ours. I could see several outlines in the darkness and managed
to identify Griefe who was shaking hands with someone who had
stepped out of the other ship. Behind him stood his usual retinue and
with them, Gregovich.
 As usually, Gregovich stood with his hands locked behind his back,
looking impassive as his employer began a conversation with the man
who had come out of the boat. Most of the crew was below decks,
probably sleeping. Realizing that this was a good time for escape, I
tried the door, expecting it to be locked and dashing my hopes to the
ground again.
But the door gently swung open as I just barely brushed against it
with my fingertips.
And to my utter surprise, the hinges didn’t creak but rather, it was
silent and smooth. I pushed it open the rest of the way and then closed
it behind me, putting the bolt back over the door like it was supposed
to be. I suspected that someone on the ship wanted me to escape that
night and had left the door unlocked because of it.
My suspicions were confirmed as I saw a note tucked behind a pile
of crates beside the door. I pulled it out and opened it. “Go over on the
opposite side of where the party is boarding and create a distraction of
some kind. Then take the boat but wait for me” the note told me.
I read it again and then I shredded it and threw it over the railing as
soon as I reached it. I watched as the white pieces drifted into the sea
and then followed the instructions to the opposite side of the ship.
It didn’t really occur to me to check whether or not the note wasn’t
setting a trap. I had to get out of here and if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be that
bad if I got punished for trying. On the other side of the ship, I found
that someone had left their lighter on the deck, probably by accident. I
picked it up as I realized how handy it could be.
Creeping my way forward, I dodged the night sentries and made my
way around them safely to the back of the ship. I knew the biggest
distraction that I could possibly set on a ship this large – my plan would
also cut the engine power.
Near the back of the ship, I saw the gas engines that propelled the
ship, along with extra barrels of more fuel. I smiled. This would work.
Looking around, I saw some wash rags hanging out to dry on some
railings. I went over and grabbed one of them, ripping it into smaller
strips and tying them together. Dipping them in fuel, I let one end trail
into the engine’s fuel tank and let the other end out until it lay out on
the deck like a slimy black snake.
Taking out the lighter, I lit the rope on fire and ran as I saw the fuse
burn faster than I had expected. Without hesitation, I ran towards the
boat, quiet and making sure to dodge the sentries on my way back.
Then just before I had even reached my cabin’s door, there was a huge
explosion that rocked the boat and sent everyone sprawling.
There were screams everywhere as there was another explosion. I
realized that one of the fuel barrels must have exploded too. Climbing
to my feet, I made a run for the boat, tossing off the lines for the
mooring as I went. As the last line was cast and the boat was slowly
drifting off, I leaped over the edge and into the other boat.
 A man came out onto the deck – without even thinking, I gave him a
hard elbow in the stomach and shoved him up and over the edge into
the water that was slowly turning black – fuel. “Good, now go,” a voice
said behind me. I whirled to see who it was but Gregovich turned me
around with gentle hands and reached out to turn the key and start the
motor. “This place is going to be in flames in just a little bit. I suggest
we get out of here.”
I pushed the throttle forward and the boat moved forward. Soon it
was speeding away from the wreckage of the ship behind us, the ship
that had been my prison for one long day. It seemed like years ago
since I had left Felix back there in the elevator – amazing that it had
only been one day. “How did you get here so fast, Gregovich?” I asked
Gregovich, who I knew was standing behind me.
He laughed. It was the first time I had heard it but it sounded
awfully like Felix’s own laugh. “You forget that I was standing next to
the boat when you set the ship on fire,” he told me. “You were looking
out of your window. I was counting on it. Please, call me Aristo.”
“Did you clear the boat?” I asked him as he moved to stand beside
me, the sea wind pulling and tugging at his loose shirt until it flapped
behind him like a hummingbird’s wings.
“Naturally,” he replied.
I wanted to ask him so many more things. Why did he help me
escape? Who was he, really? Was he working for Griefe or was he just
there by chance? But then I knew that this was not the time for it.
Chapter 5
A New Friend

As dawn broke, we reached some distant shore. I hoped it was the

shore of California but I wasn’t so certain. After all, we had been far out
to sea when it all happened. Even Aristo, who knew how to plot and
navigate by the stars didn’t know. “We’re just nowhere near any
significant constellation,” he explained when I asked him to try again.
And there wasn’t even a working radio on board. Apparently, the
former owners of this yacht were sure that they would never need one.
We had discovered this soon after we had left the wreckage of the ship
behind us.
I wanted to get to shore but there were no lifeboats and the boat
was too large to go so near shore. We could have swum but in my
current state with my broken arm and weariness, we wouldn’t have
made it. Even Aristo was too tired to make the trip. “Get some rest,” he
told me as he caught me nodding off.
“What about you?” I asked as I struggled to stay awake.
He smiled wearily. “Someone has to take watch. I’ll do it,” he
explained. “Don’t worry, I’ll wake you up when it’s your turn.”
Assured, I slept in the couch at the back of the small…yacht, I would
like to think of our boat. I was too tired to dream so I managed to sleep
peacefully for a while.
When I did wake again, the sun was high overhead and it was hot. I
pulled off the jacket I wore and set it on the couch I had been sleeping
up and got up to find that Aristo had fallen asleep leaning against the
couch near where I had slept.
I almost smiled as I saw him. The man slept with his usual calm
expression on his face as if it were permanently etched there. His arms
were crossed over his chest and his legs were crossed under him. In
the clear daylight, I saw that his spiked, soft hair was a brilliant, natural
wine-red, tipped with blonde at the end of each spike. He was almost…
beautiful.
I carefully got up, trying not to disturb him, but he didn’t have
Felix’s light-sleeping tendency so I didn’t have to worry as much.
Instead, I pulled at him until he was lying down and grabbed a pillow
from the couch and put it under his head. Then not knowing what else
to do, I decided to explore the rest of the yacht.
It was a fine yacht, worth every bit of the money it had been paid to
be made. After much exploring, I found that the ship had its own small
kitchen and even a pantry where small dried foods were kept, a small
bathroom, and a bedroom with a king-sized bed.
Aristo found me later, sitting on the platform at the back of the ship
that was just above the water, dangling my bare feet into the water. He
sat down beside me quietly, his hazel eyes gazing out over the
cloudless and endless blue sky. “Why ‘Aristo’?” I asked after a moment.
 Beside me, he actually smiled. “Because my parents have always
had a taste for Greek names. Aristo Gregovich. Sounds kind of Nice,
though,” he commented. Then he turned to me. “You know, I realized
that after all this time, I still don’t know your name. What is it?”
I smiled, looking down into my lap. “Nikole Versace.”
“‘Versace’? Isn’t that –“
“Italian, yeah,” I finished for him with a smile. “The man who raised
me and brought me up to all of this – apparently he had a big taste for
Italian things.”
For a moment, we were silent, sharing the beauty around me. Then
he turned to me. “So. Nikole. What do we do now?” he asked me
quietly.
Startled, I looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I was paid to extract information from you, which I failed to
do, and now, once more, I no longer have an employer. Plus, I’m stuck
on a ship with you,” he pointed out, ticking down each item on his
fingertips with a small smile twisting his lips.
“Well, you could try to get me back to California,” I replied with a
smile.
He lay back on the platform, his hands locked behind his head.
“What’s so bad about here?” he asked me, patting the spot next to
him.
With a sigh, I lay down next to him and he pulled me against his
side. “I just want to get home,” I said with a sigh.
“Do you have a home, Nikole?”
I closed my eyes. “No, but the closest place to home is not here,” I
replied.
We fell into another silence again. And once again, Aristo broke it.
“Do you have someone back where you came from?” Aristo asked. He
sounded half asleep and when I examined him, I saw that he was.
“Yes,” I replied, almost without thinking. Then I backtracked myself.
This man was almost a stranger to me and yet, I was telling him almost
everything about me. I realized it then. He had been lying to me from
the very beginning, from the moment he met me. He told me that he
wasn’t going to torture me to interrogate me and I had trusted him.
Then he had befriended me and even staged an escape for me. It had
all been planned from the beginning. That was why there was no radio,
no people after us.
Because this had been part of the plan from the very beginning.
This was his way of interrogating children.
Realizing this, I pushed myself away from him and without
hesitation, I pushed him into the water. He gave a small cry of surprise
and sputtering, he climbed up to the surface again, but I was already
at the wheel. “Wait, Nikole!” he shouted but I started up the engine.
Then the engine stopped just as suddenly as it had started up.
Turning to see what had happened, I got a glimpse of Aristo with a
fistful of pulled and broken electric wires and tubing dangling from a
hand. Picking up the nearest thing that could be a weapon, which
turned out to a fire extinguisher, I ran at him.
“You lying” – I made a swing at him but he dodged it with a gasp –
“double-faced” – another swing and he dodged that too, dancing
perilously close to the edge of the water – “cheating” – I kicked him
and I felt my toes brush his shins just barely as he dodged it again –
“boobyface!” I screamed at him.
Then he stopped, laughing. “‘Boobyface’?” he gasped, laughing at
the same time.
I snarled at him. “Yeah, that’s a word,” I told him. Then I hit him
over the head.
He crumpled at my feet and I dropped the fire extinguisher
somewhere where I was sure it wouldn’t roll off the yacht and dragged
his limp body back to the couch where I could keep a close eye on him.
Going downstairs to the pantry, I found some plastic ties that were
meant for tying plastic bags and other things that needed secure ties
and brought them up with me. In the next few minutes, I rigged
something sort of like inescapable handcuffs on Aristo’s feet and
hands.
I went back to the engine where he had broken the wires and
managed, after getting shocked after a couple dozen times, to twist
the correct copper wires together and fix the broken tubing. Slamming
the lid of the engine shut, I went up to the helm and pushed down on
the throttle.
The engine started just like before and I pushed the yacht forward,
making sure to stay in view of the shore, using it as a guide. I don’t
know why, but using the sun, I managed to point the boat north and
after a while, I found the autopilot button and let the yacht drive itself.
I sat down against the steering panel and pulled the fire
extinguisher over to me, throwing an arm around it like it was the
companion of my life as I watched the unconscious Aristo on the couch
first stir and then come completely awake. He jerked at his bonds and
when they didn’t come apart, he turned his head and saw me.
“A little warning next time before you hit me over the head with a
ten-pound fire extinguisher, please,” he croaked.
“A little warning next time before you trick me into thinking you’re
my friend, please,” I snapped back.
He closed his eyes and he sighed. I watched in complete
fascination. I’ve never seen someone so beautiful before seem so…
stressed? Thoughtful? “Sorry,” he told me, his eyes still closed.
Blearily, they flickered open. “But it was my job.”
“I don’t suppose you have a radio to call anyone with,” I said to him.
He shook his head and then grimaced. “No, I don’t. I was supposed
to take you back as soon as I got what Griefe needed, but I didn’t
expect to get lost,” he explained. I snorted and he managed to look
embarrassed. “Listen, my head hurts – can I at least have some ice
before you hit me again?”
I scowled at him, but only doing it to hide a smile. He seemed to
know it too because he grinned at me. “Stay here,” I told him, getting
up.
He shrugged. “I’m not going anywhere,” he murmured. Then he
added as I was going down the stairs, “In fact, I don’t’ think I can….
you’ve got me so tied down here I don’t think I can even move….”
I ignored his last remark and just kept going. I doubted that this
yacht would have carried something as heavy as a refrigerator but
then, it was carrying a king-sized bed so I guess it could. Digging
around a little, I found the fridge hidden in what I had at first thought
was a coat closet. I opened the freezer portion of it, grabbed some ice,
dumping it into a plastic bag, and shut the door.
I made my way back up the stairs and dropped the bag of ice on the
couch beside Aristo’s head and sat down at my spot against the control
panel. “Thanks,” he said wryly, staring at the ice. “Now can you put it
on my head on the lump where you hit me?”
“I’ve done enough for you,” I snapped back.
I heard him sigh as I walked out from under canopy of the helm and
to the front of the ship to stand at the bow. I let the sea wind whipping
into my face pull my hair away, letting it stream out behind me like a
black banner. I liked the feeling of it all, it just felt like flying, but I really
wouldn’t spread my arms out at my sides to try – I’d probably fall into
the sea and then get run over by the yacht and then get sliced up by –
“Hey! What are you going to do with me?” I heard Aristo shout. It
sounded like he was getting impatient with me now. I went back to
him.
“You are the oddest contract killer I’ve ever known. In fact, you’re
the first, but you’re still very odd,” I told him as I approached. He
smiled at me, looking straight into my eyes and my heart melted twice
over in pity and giddiness.
This guy knew his own charm and he knew how to use it. And he
also knew how humanitarian I was too, after spending two days with
me. “Please, just put the ice on my head,” he said, his hazel eyes
sparkling.
I sighed and picked up the half-melted bag of ice and sat down near
his head. I lifted his head into my lap and put the ice against it. He
turned onto his back to get more comfortable and flinched as his head
was jarred, probably painfully, against my legs. “Sorry,” I mumbled as
I lifted the bag of ice and wrapped it in my jacket because it was too
cold for my hands to hold. I placed it back on his head again.
After a moment, I realized that he was staring up at me and I turned
to him, meeting his eyes. For a moment I got lost in the depths of hazel
and green but then I shook my head slightly and came back to the
present. “What?”
 “You’re being so nice to me, even after all that I’ve done to you,” he
pointed out. His face had lost all of its mirth and had become the same
calm expression he always assumed. I sighed.
“Human compassion is one of the many gifts that I have been gifted
with,” I said with a sigh. “Unfortunately, because of it, I’m afraid I’ll
never be able to shoot anyone with it.”
He looked at me with interest. “Do you plan to shoot anyone?”
I scowled at him. “I have a few targets,” I snapped, glaring down at
him. “And don’t take advantage of me like that again.”
He gave a small smile. “I take advantage of whatever is best for me.
It’s human nature,” he replied. I scowled at him.
After half an hour of icing, I left his side with a bag of melted ice. I
made to stand and open the bag and dump it overboard but he caught
my hand before I could do so. “Don’t, that’s perfectly good water to
drink,” he said hoarsely. “And I don’t know how long we’ll be like this so
we might as well preserve some water, okay?”
I sighed and opened the bag and tipped the water into his open
mouth. It was a lot of water so I had to wait for him to swallow before I
poured again. “Thank you,” he whispered as I left to put the bag down
downstairs.
When I came back up again, I saw that he was dozing in the sun
that shone on him. Once again, I couldn’t help but admire his hair as
the sun brought out the ruby red in it. He really was beautiful, and he
would be a good person, if only he wasn’t my enemy and a contract
killer. He opened his eyes as I approached. “Why don’t you untie me,
Nikole? I can’t go anywhere, and I definitely wont’ hurt you,” he asked
me.
I ignored him and took the yacht out of the autopilot mode as it
began to start straying from the path. I knew that I didn’t need to pull
it out of the mode to turn it, but I just wanted the pleasure of driving
for a while, without a set speed. As we neared some reefs, I slowed the
yacht down and maneuvered it around rocks and shallow spots that it
came close to and then I pushed on again after I had gotten out.
It was near dark when I finally decided that I was hungry and to stop
and eat something. Because the area was also covered in reefs, I knew
it wasn’t safe to drive anywhere during the night so I switched off the
engine and dropped the anchor over the side. “What’s going on?”
Aristo asked as I bent over him with a knife.
Instead of doing what he had thought I was going to do, I reached
over and cut his bonds, the bonds that I had so happily and inventively
made. “Come on, we’re having some dinner,” I said with a sigh.
He smiled for the first time that I had seen him that night and he
beat me to the stairs. “Listen, I know how to cook up a great meal, and
I would like to treat you,” he told me. I gave him a look and he put his
hands up in front of him like a shield. “Oh no, it’s not what you think,
it’s not a date. Just a nice dinner, between the two of us. Is that all
right?”
I shrugged. “The only thing I know how to cook are scrambled eggs,
some pasta, and instant noodles, so sure,” I replied.
He gave me a squeeze on my shoulder and then turned to go down
the stairs. Instead of letting him, I reached out and touched him on the
shoulder, causing him to turn. “From now on, I think we should just be
friends,” I said quietly. “I mean, we’re kind of even, I guess. But let’s be
friends. I would hate to have to tie you up again.”
He smiled. “All right. We’re friends then,” he said in his quiet tone.
He held up a hand and I took it. “It’s a truce then, too.”
I nodded and he turned and made his way down the stairs.

Aristo managed to whip up something nice for the two of us that night
for dinner. He had set down two bowls of spaghetti, some kind of
canned chicken soup in a large bowl, and a glass of chilled juice each.
“It’s not much, but I think it’s enough. What do you think?” he asked as
we settled down to eat.
“I think it’s wonderful,” I replied with a smile.
He returned the smile warmly. “Good. Because I burned myself
several times trying to get the soup out of the microwave,” he replied.
“Why?”
He laughed. “The only bowl available, and big enough, for safe
microwaving was a metal-composed dish. This bowl on the table is
plastic,” he explained. “And there aren’t any kitchen mittens so I had to
use my bare hands.”
“Ouch. Need me to put some ice on that?” I teased him.
He smiled. “Nope, I put the burn under some water. I’m fine.”
I stabbed my fork into the spaghetti. “That’s good.”
We spent the rest of the meal in companionable silence, eating
everything on the table. After dinner, neither of us felt like getting up
so we just sat there. “Why did you decide to become a contract killer?”
I asked him, out of curiosity.
“Why did you become America’s first child spy?” he asked in turn.
I shrugged. “I didn’t have a choice – I was kind of raised to it.”
He nodded. “It was the same for me about being a contract killer.
See, these men in Russia – I think they were with the Mafia – come
everywhere looking for volunteers to go into their service and training
as contract killers. I volunteered because the man said that he
promised he would help my family. At the time, we were poor people,
so me getting this job was very important – it would help support my
family,” he told me, leaning forward. “And there you go, I was a
professional assassin at the age of ten, a contract killer at sixteen.”
“How old are you now?” I asked him.
He counted. “Twenty or so,” he replied. “And you?”
“Fifteen years old – sixteen in a few months,” I said with a sigh.
 He didn’t miss the fact that the sigh sounded sad. “What is it?”
“They’re going to make me drive when I get back.”
He shrugged. “So? Every teenager dreams of driving when they’re
sixteen.”
I shook my head. “No, I mean, they’re going to make me drive
planes and all of the other stuff that sixteen year olds don’t normally
drive,” I corrected him.
His mouth formed an “O” before he looked down at his crossed
hands in front of him on the table. Then he looked up, a soft, tender
look on his face. “Come back with me to Russia,” he told me softly.
I shook my head. “I would, but I can’t.”
“You don’t owe anything to these people you serve.”
“Yes, I do. They took me in, they raised me. Of course I owe them.”
He leaned back against his chair again. “It’s time you lived your own
life. And you should already be, if you were any normal schoolgirl in
America or England. No one your age should be put through all of the
things you’ve been put through.”
I looked down at my own hands. “I stay on my job because I can do
more here than anywhere else in the world. I want to help people,
Aristo, not run away from their cries of help,” I whispered. Another
hand entered my vision and covered my two intertwined ones.
“You can do a lot from wherever you are,” he said quietly. “I know,
because the reason why I don’t have a lot of money is because I
donate it to those who need it more than I do – those who can’t earn
money on their own.”
“That’s generous of you,” I commented.
He nodded. “It’s the least that I can do. It’s just, I wish I could do
better.”

Just talking wore me out. I put my head down at the table just to rest
but apparently I fell asleep because I vaguely remembered someone –
Aristo – carrying me to the master bedroom and gently placing me on
the bed, pulling my shoes off and pulling the blankets up to my chin. I
was more aware as the door closed silently behind him.
But he hadn’t left. I heard the sound of shoes dropping to the floor
and a rustle of cloth as he pulled his shirt off over his head. The bed
sank to one side a little as he lay down on it but as he made himself
more comfortable, it righted again. After a while, he rolled onto his side
and I knew he was watching me. I tried to even and slow down my
breathing because I just didn’t want to say any more but then his voice
said softly out of the gloom, “Sorry, did I wake you?”
“No,” I lied.
He chuckled. “I know when someone’s lying to me, Nikole, and I
know that you are. I’m sorry that I woke you,” he told me. Then he
paused for a moment. “Why are you awake when you could just drift
off to sleep?”
 I sighed and turned to him. His hazel eyes were bright, even in the
darkness. “To tell you the truth, I was recovering from post-traumatic
stress when Griefe’s men picked me up. I had nightmares of my time
as a prisoner with Griefe and they didn’t help me sleep. And so lately
–“
“You’ve been afraid of yourself,” he finished for me.
I nodded but afraid he didn’t see it, I also said, “Yes.”
“What helps you sleep then?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “Felix, just passing out, medically induced sleep, and
other things.”
“Who is this Felix?”
I scowled at him in the darkness. “For someone who isn’t gathering
information any more, you’re asking an awful lot of questions,” I
accused him.
His fingertips gently brushed my face. His other hand took mine and
pressed it to his mouth, taking my fingers and tracing his mouth with
it. From what I could feel, I saw that he had a sorry smile on his lips. So
I left it at that.
“So, this boy –”
“Hey –” I protested.
He laughed. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Felix is a boy
you like, the same one that you want to return to,” he told me.
I grumbled something about people who didn’t drop the topic when
hinted to and he laughed again. “So this boy,” he continued. “How
special is he to you?”
“He saved my life more times than I can count,” I snapped back.
My fingertips, still pressed against his lips by his hands, felt him
smile. His other hand cupped my face in his large palm. “Did he? Or
was he just doing his duty?” he asked me softly. “According to what I
know and what I’ve heard about your agency, most people there just
do what they’re commanded to do. Felix could be no different – he
could just be showing affection for you the same way I was extracting
information from you.”
“No,” I immediately said but he shook his head.
“What did he do? Give you a kiss? Promise you his heart?” his voice
asked softly from the darkness.
I didn’t want to believe what he said, but knowing Mr. Reynolds and
the agency, what Aristo said was probably true; I was too valuable for
them to lose so they had to find someone who would be able to gain
my trust and befriend me in much more ways to keep me safe. “He
kissed me,” I finally said with a sigh. “He’s the one who kept the
nightmares away when I needed it.”
“Any man, or boy, that you love or loves you could do the same,” he
told me quietly. He released my hand and leaned forward, brushing his
lips gently against mine, but not touching them. “Think about it,” he
breathed and then he was gone, already rolling over onto his side on
his side of the bed.
I did think about it. I thought about it long and hard, losing much
sleep over it. It was dawn when Aristo rose from the bed and left the
room and I was still awake, but just barely. Soon after he left and after I
heard the engine start up, I drifted off into the embrace of sleep,
welcoming it.

Felix was there this time. He stood there in front of him, his arms by
his sides. He smiled and lifted his hand, beckoning to me. A wind that
even I couldn’t feel tossed his blonde hair from side to side. I smiled at
him and took a step towards him.
“Don’t,” a voice said behind me. A firm hand gripped my shoulder
and I turned to see Aristo. “It’s a trap, don’t go to him, don’t go,” he
whispered. “Follow me. I will show you.”
I had no idea what he was going to show me but Felix drew farther
and farther away. Then the scene changed.
We were underwater and Felix was fighting with the diver who had
taken me the first time. I found that I could breathe underwater so I
drifted there for a moment before I started forward. “Nikole, help me!”
a voice cried behind me. I turned to see Aristo fighting off at least five
of Griefe’s men.
“Nik, run,” Felix’s voice told me.
I looked in between them. Felix won the fight didn’t he? And he
never told me to run. And why was it taking so long for him to fight the
diver off? Last time it had only taken a few minutes. It’s at least been
an hour. “No, I won’t run,” I told Felix, going to his aid.
I reached out to pull the diver’s oxygen tube out of his mouth and –
I was plunged headfirst into the water. I couldn’t breathe, I was
suffocating. “Give us what we want and we will end this,” a booming
echoing voice said. I was pulled up to the surface and I managed a
breath before I was shoved under again.
I struggled hard, fighting against my captor. “Give us what we want
and we will end this,” he said again. I screamed and even as I was
pulled up I screamed even louder still. I turned to my captor, ready to
attack and –
There was Griefe and we were back at his mansion deep in
Germany. I had been brought before him, thrown down at his feet, too
weak to rise up. He nudged me with his foot, just as I remembered he
had done. “What has this little girl done?” he asked his men.
“She was caught sneaking into one of your underground
compounds. We brought her up here to show you who had been
sneaking off with information. We found this in her rooms,” a man said
behind me. A leather bag – my leather bag – landed in front of me with
a thump, sending papers flying out of it, scattering across the floor.
 Griefe got to his feet, enraged and I cringed away from the bear-like
man. “Punish her!” he screamed at his men. “Make her wish she’d
never been born! And find out how much she knows!”
“Yes, sir,” the men said and I was dragged away.
Then my world was black as whips seared my back, the smell of
burning flesh reached my nose and the sound of screams of torture –
my own screams – echoed back into my ears. “Give us what we want
and we will end this,” the same resonating voice said.
Give us what we want and we will end this.
Give us what we want and we will….
Give us what we want…

I woke up with a scream and Aristo flung the door open, ready for
anything, and when he saw that there was no danger, he came over to
me and held me close to him. “It’s all right, you’re safe,” he soothed
me as I cried into his shoulder.
After a while, I managed to calm down. I still sat in Aristo’s arms,
shuddering. “Nightmare?” he asked me gently and I nodded, closing
my eyes and leaning against him.
He sat with me for almost an hour before he released me. “You
going to be all right?” he asked me, concern shining in his hazel eyes.
I nodded. “I don’t want to sleep any more,” I whispered, my voice
hoarse from screaming. He chuckled and stood.
“Come join me upstairs then,” he suggested and I nodded, getting
to my feet. It took a moment to adjust to the rocking of the boat and
then I followed him out of the bedroom and up the stairs to the helm.
As I came out from below the yacht, I felt the sea wind slap into my
face. With surprise, I realized that we were going very fast, the ship
bouncing over the waves. “Where are we going?” I asked Aristo,
grabbing onto a nearby support for balance.
“Well, Griefe and his men were originally sailing out of the California
area down to the south to Central America. They planned to cross over
into the Atlantic through the Panama Canal and then take you and
whatever other cargo they had back to Germany to his mansion, where
I’m sure you are very familiar with,” he replied.
I paused for a moment. “Were you there in Germany when I was?”
Slowly, he nodded. “Yes.”
“And did you –”
“No, I did not take any part in your torture, though I was sorry for it.
Griefe had ordered me to lead the interrogation on you but I told him
that I did not torture children and he gave the job to someone else.
And when I saw you again on that ship, I knew that they were going to
do the same to you as they did in the mansion so I had to do
something. I told Griefe that I was going to help you stage an escape,
but then I told him that I would also get the information for him and
that this would have been the best way. But of course, I didn’t expect
to get to know you very well. In fact, I didn’t expect to be talking to you
the way I have in the past few days,” he told me.
“So? You have a lot of compassion – there’s nothing wrong with
that,” I told him but he was shaking his head.
“No, with my job, there is something wrong with it. I won’t be able
to kill my victim knowing that he or she has a family, someone they
love, waiting for them back at home,” he whispered. “I was kicked out
of the school when it was found that I couldn’t even shoot paper
human targets.”
“Well, I’m glad that you are as humane as you are now,” I told him.
He smiled and put his arms around me. “And to answer your original
question, we’re going somewhere where we can dock the ship and
we’re going to find out where we are and get you back to California,”
he replied.
“I have a tracking device somewhere on me,” I told him. “My people
will find me.”
He shook his head. “Electromagnetic pulse knocked it out. In fact,
your cabin on board the ship was wrapped in it,” he explained. “Griefe
kind of guessed that you had one on you so he had your cabin rigged.
It was also why you were taken into the air and put on a ship – so that
no one can follow you or track down where you are.”
My heart sunk. “So that’s why they haven’t found me yet. I thought
it was because they thought that there was nothing wrong and that we
were on vacation or Felix just hadn’t told them that I hadn’t been
taken, but –”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get you back,” he assured me.
We sat down together at the couch in the helm. He threw an arm
around me so I leaned against him to be more comfortable, drawing
my legs up onto the couch. “I’ve been thinking about what you said to
me last night,” I said quietly.
He gave me a curious look. “And?”
“I think that you may be right. Knowing the agency, what you said
was probably true. Because I mean, I’m the most valuable weapon
they have at the moment – a child spy. They put thousands of dollars
into training me, finding me the best teachers and masters in the
world. And they would do anything not to lose me – including hurting
my feelings,” I said slowly.
He nodded. “I’ve met your Felix once before, or at least I think I did.
We kind of ran into each other while he was on a mission in America.
He was chasing down my employers who had hired me to protect him
so I had to fight him. I left him for dead, not dying, giving him a chance
– a knife. He took it,” he told me. “He’s a blonde isn’t he?”
I nodded. “Sounds like it,” I replied.
“Ah, well, that was the only time I ever ran into him. He’s a cold-
hearted person. He’d already killed several guard in trying to get at my
former employer,” he told me.
 I only nodded. “They told me he had a sister and a father who died
because of his job,” I started to say but Aristo shook his head.
“No, his father died because he had a mental disorder that causes
stress on him – he killed himself. And his sister? Well, she inherited the
same disorder. Threw herself in front of a car one night. Killed her
instantly,” he told me.
I turned so I could look at him. “How do you know this?”
He shrugged. “I know a lot of things that people don’t. And like I
said, I have connections inside your agency. That’s how I knew about
you in the first place and about everything else,” he told me. “And after
I met Felix in America, I was curious about him because he had chased
us across the whole country, tearing it apart just looking for us. And
that was what I found.”
“What else did you find?” I asked him.
“I found that he went to live with his aunt after the deaths of his
family. He had the same disorder, but it wasn’t as strong. At eighteen,
he signed up for the agency and after that, no one has ever seen him.
All that is left of his life is in the files that are kept in your agency’s
building,” he told me.
“Does he have a stepsister?”
He looked at me curiously. “No, he doesn’t, what made you think
that?”
I shrugged. “Just a hunch,” I murmured, leaning back comfortably
against him.
His skin smelled spicy, fresh. It smelled good. And it was tanned,
with a few scars here and there. I reached up and fingered one on his
belly. When he didn’t stir, I looked up and saw that he was smiling
down at me and I returned it.
I removed my gaze from his and traced my fingers over his tight
and muscled torso. As my fingers moved towards his chest, I felt,
under my hands that his calm breathing was kind of forced. I placed
my hand against his chest and felt that his heart was pounding rather
quickly. I sat up to look at him.
And then he leaned forward, cupping my face in one palm and
kissed me. It was a very tender and timid one. I returned it feverishly,
my eyes closing as fireworks seemed to explode inside of me. He drew
me slowly into his lap and then broke the kiss, leaning his forehead
against mine.
My breath came short and fast and his was the same. We didn’t
need to say a word. Eventually, he just smiled and leaned back, tilting
his face up to the sun, closing his eyes. I leaned against him and he
rearranged his hold around me more comfortably.
And just when I thought that we were getting comfortable, Aristo
suddenly sat up, his eyes alert and wary. I got off of him as he stood
up. “What is it?”
 And then, as if to answer my question, I heard it too. There was the
sound of another engine that was joining us over the sound of our own.
“They couldn’t have found us already,” Aristo whispered, lunging for
the wheel. He turned off the autopilot and pushed the ship even faster.
“Hang onto something,” he told me.
I obeyed without question. Aristo pushed the yacht to its fastest
speed, pulling out to open sea. He swerved the boat around and
around until I was dizzy. I didn’t know what he was doing, but I knew
that he was doing something that was going to help us. “What if we
get lost again?” I called out to him over the roar of the engine and the
screaming of the wind in our ears.
“We won’t!” he shouted back, pulling on the wheel. “I know where
we are now!”
“Where are we?”
He shook his head, indicating that this wasn’t the time for
questions. I got to my feet and made my way over to him, and this was
hard because of the wind pushing me backwards and the sudden
violent tilts of the deck of the yacht. He saw me coming and he
reached out, wrapping an arm around my waist, pulling me safely to
his side. “I thought I told you to grab onto something!” he shouted in
my ear. I could only give a nervous smile at him because at this point,
the wind was much stronger and it took my breath away every time I
tried to speak or breathe. Aristo didn’t help much with this problem by
being there at my side.
I then felt his lips brush my ear as he said to me, “Check for me and
see if they’re behind us.” I nodded to show that I had heard and he let
me go so I could turn and go to the back of the boat and see.
The shore we had been using as a guide back to civilization was no
more than a dot in the distance now. But then, steadily behind us,
about a few dozen feet away, was a sleek, black boat behind us,
bouncing on the waves. “They’re still behind us!” I shouted back to
Aristo.
He raised a hand to indicate that he heard and put it back on the
wheel. He stared straight ahead and I wasn’t sure what he was
thinking. His face was straight and expressionless, not even a hint of
his usual calm. “You do have a plan don’t you?” I shouted at him after
a moment.
“Yes, but then we would have to take a swim,” he shouted back.
I made my way back to him, grabbing his shoulder for support. He
safely roped me in again with an arm around my waist. “What do you
mean?” I asked him.
As an answer, he viciously swung the wheel around until the boat’s
nose was pointed at the boat behind us. “Get what I mean?” he asked
me grimly. I nodded. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” I whispered.
 He pushed the throttle forward until the yacht was at full throttle
and then pushed the autopilot button. Before I knew it, he had grabbed
me and jumped into the water. I gasped as the cold water hit me and
then I choked as I inhaled salt water. I sunk a few inches and then after
a few seconds, I recovered and held onto Aristo.
Then I turned just in time to see our yacht slamming into the black
boat and erupting. Aristo and I turned our heads away as the heat from
the explosion swamped over the water.
Instinctively, Aristo had covered me, his back to the surge of heat,
but it was nothing more than that – just a surge of heat. After a
moment, he released me and we both turned to look at the wreckage
of the two burning ships. “It worked,” I whispered.
He gave me a wry look. “Obviously.”
I laughed then and he even smiled and then joined in. After we ran
out of breath, I leaned against his chest and he took me in, his arms
tightly around me, smoothing down my wet hair. “Now what?” I asked
him breathlessly.
He smiled. “Get to shore,” he said, pointing at the dot in the
distance. “There may be survivors from that explosion. We need to get
away if any of them are alive.”
I shook my head. I had seen something that he couldn’t see
because his back was turned. Now, I turned him around so he could
see too. A white speed boat was bouncing over the waves towards us.
Red and blue sirens bolted to the top of the shiny grey roof told me
that it wasn’t any enemy but the police. “Okay, new plan,” he
whispered.
Then he hit me over the head, so hard that it knocked me into the
water.

When I woke up, my head hurt so much that I at first couldn’t think
straight. Then I remembered – Aristo had hit me over the head. Angrily,
I sat up.
Big mistake.
The whole room reeled and spun as I did so until I couldn’t tell which
way was up or down and with a groan, I lay back down. “That was a
bad idea,” a familiar voice said to me quietly. I slowly turned my head,
slowly so that the room wouldn’t dance in front of my face again.
Aristo’s handsome face stared back at me, a smile on his face. He
was sitting, completely relaxed, in a chair beside my bed. “Why did you
hit me?” I demanded in what I hoped was a defiant voice but to my
disappointment, it came out little more as a croak.
“Take a look around you,” he said, waving his hands.
I obeyed, almost hesitantly, and saw that we were in a hospital
room. “How–?”
 “I hit you, and I’m sorry about it, but it was necessary for my story –
we were in the collision accident and that we were the only survivors,”
he told me, standing up and coming over to sit beside me on the bed.
I scowled at him. “A little warning next time would probably be a
little better,” I told him. He smiled and leaned over me. Then he gave
me another whooping kiss I was sure I would never forget – it was just
as memorable as the first.
My scowl and anger with him instantly dissolved in that moment
and when he released me, I winced. “My head still hurts,” I told him.
“Well, now we’re even,” he whispered, at the same time a nurse
came in and said:
“That’s because you have a bruise there. Any harder and you could
have had a concussion.” She was holding a set of folders in her arms
and now she set the whole stack down on a side table and brought
over a glass of water for me to drink. I took the glass gratefully and
drank the water down slowly in sips.
“Are we free to go?” Aristo asked, taking the glass from me after I
finished.
The nurse smiled at him. “You are, but your girlfriend here needs to
stay for a few more moments,” she told him, taking the folder on the
top of the stack and opened it.
“What? Why?” Aristo asked, standing up.
She pointed to the moldy cast on my arm. “She’ll need a new cast.
This one won’t do to help fix whatever broken bones she may have.
We’ve taken the liberty of putting her under an x-ray scan when she
was unconscious and we saw that her bones were broken to fix a bad
dislocation in her hand. So this’ll only take a moment,” she explained.
“A doctor will be here shortly to give her a new cast and then you two
are free to go.”
“Oh, can we have some clothes, please?” I asked as she was about
to leave.
She paused, her hand resting on the door. “Don’t you have
clothes?”
I shook my head. “No, we lost all of our things during the accident,”
I lied.
She nodded. “I’ll have something arranged for you,” she told me
and then she left, closing the door softly behind her.
After she left, Aristo let out a breath and sat down beside me again.
I leaned affectionately against him and he held me close. “Ok, now that
we’re all checked and healthy and on the way to recovery, where are
we going now?” he asked me with a smile. Then the smile faded.
“What are we going to do now?”
I knew what he meant. Without a way of travel and with no money,
we weren’t going to get very far. “I don’t know, but we’ll figure
something out, all right?” I said to him, reaching up to touch his face. I
felt him give a small smile. “Do you have money in your account?” He
nodded. “Then we can go to nearby bank and pick some of it up. That
all right?”
He nodded again. “Of course.”
“And we need to get a way to travel. Another yacht would be handy
but I doubt they come cheap. We might have to get a car instead and
drive all the way back,” I said, thinking out loud. Then I looked up.
“Wait, where are we?”
“Apparently, we’re somewhere that’s like Mexico – everyone’s
speaking in Spanish around here,” he told me. “I didn’t want to ask too
many questions about it in case someone got too suspicious.”
“Who would get suspicious? We’re two people that got into a
boating accident and got lost on the way back and –” I started to say
but he was shaking his head.
“No, the ‘someone’ I’m specifically referring to was any people that
are loyal to Griefe. If they find out that we’re not actually against each
other, then we’re in trouble – especially if they know where we are,” he
told me.
I nodded. “I see.”
He smiled at me. “You’ll learn after some more experience,” he
assured me.
I smiled. “Will you teach me?”
“Teach you what?”
“Survival.”
He smiled. “Of course – I want you to survive,” he said. Then his
eyes turned color, turning into a shady wood color I had never seen
before, flecked with specks of green. “I want you to survive, because I
think I love you.”
My heart pounded at the word “love”. I couldn’t say a thing. My
throat seemed to have tightened and I threw my arms around him to
express my feelings and he held me back just as tightly.
Then there was a knock on the door and the two of us broke apart
just as the door opened and a doctor came in with a push cart. The
cart held a pair of scissors and the material needed to make a new
cast. “Hello, my name is Doctor Sanders,” the woman said cheerfully
as she came in. She closed the door after her and wheeled the cart
over to me. Aristo got off that side of the bed and came onto the other.
Dr. Sanders pulled the scissors off of the cart and gripped my cast in
her free hand. Then she slid one blade of the scissors under my cast
and began to cut through my cast. “You two look American – are you?”
she asked us curiously.
Aristo gave me a look that told me to remain silent. “Why is
everyone here speaking perfect English?” he asked the doctor instead.
Dr. Sanders smiled, finishing the cast and pulling it off. A wet smell
came to my nose and I wrinkled it as I realized that it was my arm. She
indicated for me to get off of the bed and I obeyed and she brought me
over to the sink and helped me wash my arm. “It’s because you’re in
an American hospital,” she told him as she rinsed my arm with the
hose and cleaned it with soap for me. Skin and sweat peeled off and
my arm was clean again. She brought me back over to my bed and I
sat on it again and she began to cast it.
After a few hours, she was done, and we were free to go. I put on
the second-hand clothes that the hospital had brought me and stuffed
the rest into a backpack and followed Aristo out the door. In no time at
all, we were back out in the bright sunshine, but now we knew that
something else other than lurked here in the innocence of the sunlight.
Aristo and I walked down the street, his arm around me. We saw a
small stand with free tourist maps in the rack and I picked one up and
Aristo did too. “I can’t read Spanish,” he said with a sigh, opening up
the map and scanning it.
I smiled, looking at the map. “I can, and I can tell you that we’re not
in Mexico,” I told him. He looked, confused, at me. “Everyone speaks
Spanish both here and in Mexico, it’s easy to make that mistake.”
“Oh, all right then,” he said, tucking the map into his pocket. He
guided me down the street as I glanced down at the map.
“According to this, we’re not in Mexico – we’re in Nicaragua,” I told
him after a few moments of examining the map.
Chapter 6
Latin America

“What?” he asked, stopping and bending over the map in my hands.

He took it from me, tracing the outline of the city on the map with his
eyes as if it could tell him all of his answers.
“We need to somehow get out of here,” he told me, handing back
the map and taking my hand. Then he pulled me down the street at a
fast walk that I found hard to keep up with.
“What? Why?” I asked him as he pulled me along.
He ducked behind a group of people as he saw two policemen
walking by on the opposite street. “Because I once ran into some
trouble here with the government,” he hissed back. “I didn’t mean to
offend them, but they knew me as a contract killer so they wanted me
behind bars and dead. And this happened in this very city – I recognize
the buildings.”
“So that just it?” I asked him, turning to face him. “Just because
you’re a contract killer doesn’t mean that you –”
He shook his head, cutting me off, a small sad smile twisting his
lips. “Some people don’t understand as well as you do, Nikole, about
who I really am. All they see is someone who kills for money, as you
did, the first time we met.”
I sighed and rested against him for a moment. He held me close. I
remembered the moment that I had met him and discovered that he
was a contract killer – I had refused to talk to him. “All right, let’s go,” I
told him, stepping back, giving him a smile.
He knelt down in front of me and took my hands in his. “Thank you,
Nikole, for understanding,” he said quietly.
I pulled him to his feet. “Stop kneeling,” I told him, but I was
smiling.
He gave me a sweet and tender kiss and took my hand. “Let’s go.”
He pulled me down street after street, seeming to know his way
around the city, but I guess in a way he did know the city, since he’s
been here before. After a moment, we stopped by an ATM machine. He
went up to the machine, looking over his shoulder at the same time.
Then he pulled a wallet out of his pocket and drew out a card and
inserted it into the slot.
As he withdrew some money, I watched the street as people passed
by, holding my cast to my body. I watched the faces in the crowd,
making sure that none of them even looked suspicious or that I had
seen before. My gaze was drawn to a man who could have been
Spanish because of his features who paced back and forth on the
pavement before me. He seemed lost, looking at his watch and a piece
of paper in his hands, and then pacing again. He looked at the building
behind the machine, his watch, and then repeated the process over
and over again until I grew tired of it and went over to him.
 “Are you lost?” I asked him in Spanish.
He stopped pacing and took a look at me. Aristo had finished with
the machine and now he came to stand at my side. I watched him for
any sign out of the corner of my eye. “Si,” he replied, showing me the
paper. It was slightly yellow and had several addresses on it. A side
was torn, as if torn from a book. One of the addresses was circled in
bright red. “Please, can you tell me where this is?” he asked me in
Spanish. There was a slight lilt in his Spanish, as if he was memorizing
a line out off of a paper. It sounded like he was familiar with the
language, but it wasn’t his original language.
I looked at the address. “This address is in Honduras, senor,” I said
coldly in English, finally recognizing the accent after a moment. “I’d
say you either circled the wrong address or you’re just in the wrong
country.”
Then I ducked as Aristo hit him with his fist, sending him sprawling
onto the street. He grabbed my hand and pulled me through a
confused crowd who naturally crowded around the victim of the fight.
“Come on,” he hissed as we weaved in and out from in between
people.
Once we were far enough away from the scene, we stopped to catch
our breath. “Who was that?” he asked me.
I shrugged, too out of breath to speak.
“How did you know that he was watching and following us?” he
asked me.
I finally found the breath to speak. “Because the building behind the
ATM machine was closed. His phony address, the way he kept pacing in
the same place for a few minutes, and his accent also gave it away,” I
gasped. Then I looked at him curiously. “Don’t you know that?”
He smiled. “Yes, of course, but I couldn’t have figured out the
Spanish part and the address because I don’t speak either one of
them. I’m glad you were there,” he told me.
I reached over and kissed him. His lips were warm and sweet under
mine. He kissed me back so sweetly that I thought that I would fall into
a swoon. We breathed as one – we inhaled at the same time and
exhaled at the same time. “I love you,” I breathed after he released
me. He leaned forward but I stopped him. “We have to get going.”
He nodded, his eyes hazy, the green flecks bright in his eyes. Then
they faded as his eyes cleared, returning to their normal shade of
lovely chocolate brown. “We’ll continue this somewhere else,” he
sighed, taking my hand again.
Eventually, we made our way to a local motel. Aristo paid for one
night’s stay. The man at the desk, a rather lazy man with a stained
shirt, tossed Aristo the room key looped onto the room number. He
propped his reeking bare feet onto his desk and licking his finger, he
flipped the page of the grubby magazine.
 We made our way up to our room door and Aristo inserted the key
into the door and turned it. It was jammed a little so he forced it until
there was a rusty-sounding click. The door was jammed too so he
shouldered it open. I entered the room after him and he closed it after I
had entered. I flicked on the lights, lighting up the room. It was a small
dingy room with a double bed, a lopsided lamp on a rickety side table,
a large stain in the corner of the room, and a closet-sized bathroom.
We dropped our backpacks on the bed. Aristo walked around our
room, examining things and exploring as he went. I settled down on
the bed and lay down on my back. Aristo was soon beside me. He lay
down on top of me and I smiled up at him. His body fitted perfectly
against mine. It felt good; it made me feel whole, as if I had found
something precious that I had lost.
“Perfect,” he whispered into my ear.
“What?” I asked him with a smile.
“You. Perfect,” he said. And he didn’t need to say any more as he
leaned forward.

Morning found me in Aristo’s arms. I looked around, slowly, still bleary

from sleep. During the night, Aristo had pulled the comforters over us,
rolling our bags to the ground in the process.
“Good morning,” Aristo breathed. He lifted a hand a brushed back a
strand of black hair away from my face.
I twisted in his grip until I was tucked up against his chest, closing
my eyes as the bleariness passed over me again, gently and tenderly
urging me to sleep. Aristo gave me a little nudge. I felt him kiss the top
of my head. “Come on, time to get up, sleepyhead,” he whispered into
my hair.
I sighed and obeyed, sitting up in bed. I sat there for a moment,
letting myself get oriented with the morning and our little room. Aristo
reached out and drew small circles on my back. They were soothing
and gentle, calming me, assuring me. I have never felt safer before in
my life.
“What are you thinking of?” he asked me softly.
What was I thinking about? Home? When I didn’t answer, he sat up
to watch me. “I think we should get moving,” I replied slowly, after a
moment. I made to stand up but then he reached out and grabbed my
wrist.
“I know you too well, Nikole, to know that you’re worried about
something,” he told me. He sat up and moved over beside me.
Reaching out, he took my face into his hands. “What’s wrong, my
love?”
“We just need to get moving,” I said, gently releasing myself from
his hold.
He nodded behind me as I got changed in the bathroom. I could
hear him moving around in the other room and I knew that he was
getting ready. I grabbed a comb off of the counter, broke the plastic
wrapping on it and used it to comb my hair down. There was a sharp
rap on the door and I dropped the comb in surprise.
“Someone’s here, in the parking lot of the motel. Black car,
probably off-road, men dressed in suits, even in this heat. Sound
familiar?” he called quickly through the door.
“Yeah, it does,” I replied, stooping to pick up the comb.
“You were right – it’s time to get going,” he told me. “Hurry, intend
to leave now without saying goodbye to our landlord and drop the
money on his table.”
I tossed the comb into the sink as soon as I was finished with it and
opened the door, running outside. Aristo was already waiting for me at
the door, our bags in his hands. He handed me mine and we made our
way quickly down the stairs. I started for the desk as we got to the
bottom but he grabbed my arm and shook his head. “I left the money
and the key by the door, let’s go,” he whispered.
I nodded and then he pulled me away.
We found our way to a wharf on the side of the ocean where we had
come in from. I had gotten some information about a man who rented
out his boat for cruises for those traveling far across the ocean. We had
decided to go see him, since his name didn’t sound familiar to Aristo or
me, so he had to be an innocent, not someone loyal to Griefe.
The wharf master could have been the twin of the owner of the
motel. He was just as fat and grubby as the other man and I thought
that I would have to force him to cooperate with us but then he had a
smile on his face, a welcome look, and he looked rather cheerful.
“Bienvenido! Welcome! What can I do for you?” he said, wiping his
hands clean on a rag that he immediately threw aside after he was
finished with it. I hadn’t missed, nor had Aristo, that he had switched to
English as soon as he saw it. He spoke it perfectly.
“Yes, we need to charter a cheap boat that can take us to
California,” I said to him.
He came forward a little, beckoning for us to follow him, and then
turned. Aristo and I fell in step with him on either side. “Yes, yes, there
are many boats here like that. But the problem is, they’re all cheap and
desperate. But I’d suggest that instead of choosing the cheapest and
best, you should choose a trustworthy captain to take you on your
journey.”
Aristo smiled. “Well said.”
The man shrugged, his smile now showing his white teeth. “Ah, well,
it’s from experience. I had once the unfortunate pleasure of enduring
the same mishap myself. The captain of the ship? Well, he paid a lot,
mostly because none would ever sail with him. He drunk heavily,
crazily sailed through deadly storms, endangering his crew and his ship
and his own life. I was desperate of course, so I took the job of being
one of the members of his crew,” he said, strangely happy. He looked
over Aristo and winced. “Bad idea.”
“Then perhaps you could show us who is the most trustworthy of
captains here, so we don’t make the same mistake,” Aristo suggested.
The wharf master laughed. “Of course, my friend, of course,” he told
him, slinging an arm around Aristo’s neck and patting his chest like an
old friend. The look on Aristo’s face told me that he would rather it be
me hanging around his neck than the fat old man who smelled like salt,
fish, and tar.
As politely as possible, Aristo extracted himself from the man’s hold
but the man was letting go anyway. He was walking up to another man,
speaking fast in Spanish, and smiling again. “I think I’ll need a
shower,” Aristo confided in me.
I laughed, pulling his shirt collar straight for him. “You smell fine,” I
told him.
He smiled back and leaned forward to kiss the top of my head in
answer just as the man came half-waddling, half-trotting back to us.
“You’re in luck,” he told the two of us. “That man I was just talking to?
He’s one of my best and most loyal friends. He is very trustworthy and
is very willing to take you to America.”
“Good, when do we leave?” I asked.
He slung an arm around the both of our shoulders, smiling at each
of us. I wrinkled my nose. Maybe Aristo was right – we’d both probably
need a shower after this. “Tonight, with the evening tide. Alejandro, my
friend, is in port to restock. He was on his way to California so he can
take you there. It’s a two week journey,” he told us. “And I was hoping
that as new friends, we take a siesta from the heat. Allow me to buy
you each a drink, hmm?”
“Very well,” Aristo sighed.
The Spanish man gave a laugh and clapped his hands together,
kissing me on each of my cheeks and shaking Aristo’s hand viciously.
With some disgust, I wiped his kisses off of my cheeks. “Good! Please,
call me Jorge!” he said, still laughing. He began to walk away. “Meet
me in La Rose Tigre!” he called back to us.
I sighed as soon as he left. “Too friendly,” I commented.
Aristo nodded in agreement. “Well, at least now we have a way out
of here and get you back home,” he said quietly. I turned to him and
saw that he had a sad look on his face. I realized what he meant – the
look on his face told me as much.
He was going to leave me.
Emotions – despair mostly, flooded through me. “Aristo –”
He held up a hand. “I know how much getting home, wherever that
is, means to you. I’ll help you get there, because I can’t bear to watch
you look so lost and lonely like this, even if I know our paths will
uncross after you return,” he whispered. I moved towards him, tears in
my eyes but he stopped me again, this time with his eyes. “Don’t. To
make this easier – for both of us – we can’t” – he gave a great shudder
and his eyes closed.
Tears streamed down my cheeks, and inside, I was screaming in
pain. This hard, cold relentless thing – why couldn’t it just go away? But
then I understood what he meant by all of this. He was trying to
protect the both of us from hurting each other, like we already had. We
both had seen that this was coming, but we probably had been blinded
by our love for each other to see that the very moment we dreaded,
was now.
“Isn’t there any other way?” I asked him, my voice trembling. I
wiped away at my tears angrily with the back of my hand. “Come back
with me.”
He shook his head. “No. I can’t,” he whispered, backing away.
“Why not?” I demanded. “You’ve come so far with me and now
you’re just going to turn away from it?” I almost screamed it at him.
Aristo, my Aristo, he understood and heard the pain in my voice, but
still, he backed away from me.
“You’ll thank me for this in the future,” he told me.
“Aristo, you are my future,” I whispered. “Nothing will be the same,
ever again.”
He avoided looking into my eyes. “I’m counting on it.” He pulled his
wallet out of his bag and pulled out a stack of bills and handed it to
me. “That should pay for the trip and anything else to get you back,”
he told me quietly. I took the money and pocketed it. “This is goodbye,
Nikole.”
I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak, nor could I breathe as I
watched Aristo walk away, out of my life. And then….
And then, I felt like I had died.
But instead of going to heaven, like I had thought I would have, I
had gone to hell. A very cold, dark, and lonely hell.
Chapter 7
The Trip

“Here,” the man, Alejandro, said showing me my cabin for the next two
weeks. “Where’s your friend?”
I drew in a shuddering breath and had to keep myself from glancing
at my side where Aristo had stood for the most amazing days of my
life. He wasn’t there. A cold, dark, empty space filled the void where he
once was. “He’s not coming,” I said quietly. I grew numb at those
words.
“All right. We will set sail in ten minutes. The tide has already begun
to withdraw,” he told me quietly. And then he left me there in my
empty cabin. And as the door closed behind me, soundlessly, it
provoked a memory….

The door of my room opened and in came the man with the Russian
accent. He carried a tray of food which he set down on a folding table
that I noticed had been hanging on his arm. “When I came here, I
didn’t expect to be interrogating children,” he said with a smile. “Of
course, I can’t use the method I normally use now.”
“Which is?” I finally dared to ask.
“Torture under mental stress. The kind I specialize in would break
your young mind and I wouldn’t dream of using it on a child,” he
replied, still smiling. His hazel eyes sparkled in the dim light of the
cabin but I saw that they were cold, yet warm in a way. “Sit down,
please.”
I sat, but only because he had asked politely. He pushed the table
and the tray of food it carried over in front of me. “Eat, you must be
hungry,” he told me. I only stared at the food. With a sigh, he took the
knife and scooped a bit of the food in each portion into his own mouth,
chewed it, and swallowed it. “See, it’s not poisoned. Now eat.”
There was no more reason for me to not eat. It had been several
hours since my last meal, which I remembered, had been this
morning’s breakfast. It must have been hours ago since then. I picked
up the spoon and began to eat. The man relaxed with a smile and
leaned against the wall to watch me.

It wasn’t a nightmare, but it might as well have been. I woke up

breathless as I saw his beautiful face again in the half-light of the
prison he had rescued me from. It had felt like long ago since it had
happened.
My cheek was cool. I touched the side of my face and found that it
was wet with tears and I wiped them away with my sleeve. “Miss? I’ve
brought your breakfast,” Alejandro’s voice called from the other side of
the door.
 Glancing out the porthole, I saw that it was morning. Tiredly, I
opened the door and took my breakfast – a burrito wrapped in plastic
and a bottle of milk – from the man with a smile of thanks. “Is there
something wrong?” he asked me gently.
Alejandro was a kind man – I had found that in the beginning of the
trip. He was a kind and caring man, somewhere in his late forties. He
had no children of his own, but I could see that he had a soft spot for
children. “No, I’m fine,” I told him. I lifted my breakfast. “Thanks for
bringing me my breakfast.”
He smiled at me. “No problem at all,” he told me gently. Then he
turned and climbed up the stairwell back up to the deck.
I set down the burrito and the milk on the desk in the room and
looked out the porthole. We were out to sea already, the old ship
cutting neatly through the waves, thought not as quickly as the yacht
that Aristo and I had ridden or Griefe’s boat with its modified engines.
We had pulled quickly away from the shore.
There were excited footsteps outside the door and then a knock on
the doorframe. “You might want to come see this – there are dolphins!”
Alejandro exclaimed.
I had to smile at that. I had never seen a wild dolphin before. I
followed an excited Alejandro up to the deck and as I gripped my hair
so that it didn’t lash at my face, I leaned over the rail and saw them.
Oily grey bodies sliding, weaving, and ducking through the water like a
game.
“In some cultures, dolphins are a sign of luck. Some believe that if
you make a wish when you see a free dolphin, they will carry the wish
with them until it is true, never resting until the wisher is satisfied,”
Alejandro said softly beside me. I turned to look at him, his eyes still on
the dolphins.
“They must be pretty busy creatures then,” I commented.
He chuckled. “Yes, yes indeed,” he said, looking up at me with a
smile. After a moment, he turned with his back to the dolphins, his
gaze up at the clear blue sky. “Oh, I was once like you – a teenager in
love.”
“Love is –”
“Love is what makes us human, Nikole,” he said quietly, looking at
me. “It’s what makes us whole, what helps us grieve for those we lost,
and it helps us care about those who love and who we love in return.
It’s a very important thing.”
I nodded, looking down at my hands. “I know. It’s just, what if it’s
betrayed you?”
He gave a small smile. “For you, young one, it hasn’t. What your
young man did yesterday, was to protect you both. Even though I don’t
know the whole story, I know that you two were arguing about
something. You looked so distraught and he looked so ripped apart. It
was a heartbreaking scene, even for someone outside to see,” he told
me.
My fish clenched. “He wouldn’t come with me,” I whispered.
“Instead, he runs off.”
Alejandro was shaking his head. “No, he didn’t run off on you. He
cares for you – I can see it in his eyes. He cares for you very much. He
wouldn’t leave you alone if he knew it was for a good reason. Any man
or woman who has loved would know that,” he replied.
“Thank you for showing me the dolphins,” I whispered. Then I
turned and went back down to my room and didn’t emerge again for
the rest of the day.
By the next day, the shore, Nicaragua, and Aristo was gone.

After two long weeks, a surprise visit from a United States helicopter
that landed on the wide open deck, I was back in Washington state,
back into the life that I had known. Felix remained affectionate but I
had seen the truth in Aristo’s eyes and the love in me for Aristo burned
away any urge to return his affections. Eventually, Felix was just there
at my side, nothing more than a shadow set to follow me.
“Why hadn’t I been found earlier?” I had asked, angrily. If I had been
found before I had gotten to know Aristo, had gotten to love him, then I
wouldn’t feel as cold as I did now.
“Your tracking device had been recently activated after entering
American waters. Don’t worry, you’re safe now,” Mr. Reynolds had said
calmly. He had looked me in the eye and he hadn’t even told me sorry
for what he had done.
But of course, men like Reynolds didn’t have any regrets.
“You have a new assignment – will you take it or do you need
another vacation?” he asked me quietly. I snarled at him when he said
it. But he had already seen the answer in my eyes. “Good. Your next
assignment will take you to Russia –”

Then he looked up, a soft, tender look on his face. “Come back with
me to Russia,” he told me softly.
I shook my head. “I would, but I can’t.”

“– and it’s nothing more than a surveillance and recon mission. Can
you handle that?”
“Who am I watching?” I asked him, swallowing hard to get rid of the
lump in my throat. He shuffled through the papers for a moment,
looking for the answer to my question before he replied.
“A suspected millionaire who we suspect are working with the
Mafia,” he replied. I nodded and turned to leave but he called me back.
“Is there something wrong, Nikole? You’ve changed since the last time
we spoke.”
“Yes, everything’s fine,” I lied.
 I turned to go but he called me again. I turned to find him holding
out the thick folder with the mission information on it. “You forgot
these,” he told me. I took it from him and turned to leave for the
second time. “And make sure you check in to see the doctor to get
your cast off. I think you’re fine now.”
I walked right out that door, never looking back once.
I went to the infirmary, since that was the closest department on
the way to either that or the technology department. “Hmm, yep, Mr.
Reynolds was right,” the woman said, pulling out a saw. She put on
some protection goggles and switched the saw on and set to work
cutting off my cast. “You don’t need this thing to hold you back any
more.”
The cast came off faster than it did coming on. I moved my hands
as the doctor told me and answered the questions about whether it still
hurt if I moved it – the answer was no. Then I was free to go.
But instead of heading for the technology department, I headed
straight for the elevator that headed to the surface. None of the guards
stopped me so I stepped out the elevator on the surface. I put the
mission file on a desk to pick up later and opened the door and
stepped outside to embrace the cold and rain that was Washington.
The rain cooled down my skin, soaking into it and my clothes, until I
was shivering and trembling. The wind made it worse, but I welcomed
it. I made my way over to the road where a steady line of headlights
made a procession down the road.
I stopped a car that belonged to a friendly lady. “Dear! You should
get a jacket on!” she said as she saw me.
I was shivering and her suggestion would have been a good idea
had I had a jacket. “Please, can you give me a ride to wherever you’re
going? I’ll move on from there. Please, I can pay you,” I said, shivering,
to her.
I don’t know if it was from sympathy or not but she smiled and
unlocked her door. “Sure, dear, climb on in. I’ll take you with me,” she
told me kindly. “And I don’t want any money – you’re not wasting any
of my gas.”
“Thank you,” I told her.
“It’s no problem, sweetie, no problem at all,” she told me, moving
the car forward.

A person can only run so far until they have to stop or risk completing
a circle. But no matter how far I ran, I couldn’t even seem to set one
foot in front of the other. I didn’t know where I was going – nor did I
care.
For me, the only thing that I had ever cared for the most was gone.
And it was all just because I couldn’t quit the life of secrecy that I had
been brought up in. It could have been so easy. I could have escaped
with him to Russia, to anywhere in the world. But instead, I had to
show him that I couldn’t let go and that I must go back to something
that even I wasn’t sure of. And because of that, he was gone forever
from my life.
Alejandro’s words to me on the deck of his ship came to me every
night in my dreams. But what I wanted to ask him, and I wished that I
had, was: If love made a human, human, what if love suddenly
disappeared? What would happen then?
“Maybe next time you should just ask him,” Tyler, a young man
whose car I had stopped to get a ride, said as we drove down into
Oregon. He was a nice person – a nice soul. And now, as he said it, he
glanced at me.
“I can’t,” I whispered, hugging myself. Then I fell silent, staring out
the window as the scenery changed and the trees shrunk. Then we fell
into a silence.
I had no idea where I was going, nor did I think I cared. I just wanted
to get as far away as possible from everything I knew and to find out
more about what had happened to me, what would become of me now.
I knew the agency could come pick me up any time with the new
tracking device in my system, but so far, they haven’t. Yet.
“Tell me what happened. Who was he?” Tyler asked me.
I didn’t know where to begin. Nor did I think I had the strength to do
it. I hadn’t eaten a lot for a while, nor had I slept. But in the end,
everything came out. Tyler held me as I cried. He was a good friend. He
cared and understood about people’s pain, and he knew how to fix it.
He knew advice too. “Talking about him might ease your stress and
your pain,” he told me quietly. “Aristo sounds like a good man. He
deserves to be known. There aren’t many good people in this world
and if one is known, then all can step up.”
“You really think so?” I asked him in a whisper.
He nodded, his green eyes serious. “Yes, of course.”
“Thank you,” I told him.
“For what?” he asked me curiously.
I smiled. “For listening.”
Then I fell into a sleep without dreams – the first that I’ve had in a
while.

The car was stationary when I finally woke from my dreamless sleep
that came as a blessing. With a start, I realized that I was the only one
in the car. Looking out the windshield though, I saw Tyler striding
towards the car, something in each hand.
He opened the door and sat down next to me in the driver’s seat.
Then he offered me a hotdog. “Want some?” he asked. I nodded and
took it from him and began to eat.
“You know, the thing I don’t get is,” he paused to swallow. “Where
are you going?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I replied, dusting off my hands.
 “Aristo is in Nicaragua isn’t he? That’s in South America. You’d need
a passport to get across,” he told me.
I nodded. “I know, but I’m not going to him.”
He glanced at me. “Then where are you going?” he asked me.
I smiled. “Wherever fate takes me, I guess.”
He smiled too. “You sound crazy, you know that?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I replied and we both laughed. It was the first time I had
laughed in a while and in me, it felt good, like I was alive again.

After I left Tyler, who had given me his phone number to call him if I
wanted to talk, I got onto the car with three other people. All of them
were pretty friendly and polite and didn’t ask me too many questions,
so neither did I.
We drove all the way down to California, nonstop. I paid them
money – it was the first time that I’d had to do so. Everyone else just
seemed friendly enough to refuse payment. I counted out my money –
the same wad that Aristo had given me before he left – just converted
to American dollars, with a little interest from the agency. I still had at
least a thousand left.
I went up to the closest hotel and rented a room for the night – the
sun was already setting.
The room was a small one, with a single person bed, a small
kitchen, a bathroom, and a balcony. It was beautiful, but it meant
nothing to me. I just wanted to get some sleep – then I’d be off in the
morning. To where, I didn’t know.
Just as I was going to lie down for bed, there was a knock on my
door. I got up and warily, I opened the door, not knowing what was
behind it because it didn’t have a peephole like most hotel doors did.
It was Felix.
Rubbing my eyes tiredly, I waved for him to come in and then shut
the door after him. He looked around for a moment and then took me
into his arms. I let him. “Come back with me,” he whispered into my
hair.
“I can’t,” I mumbled, pulling away from him.
I ran my fingers through my hair and sat down on my bed. Felix
remained where he was, watching me. “They sent me,” he said after a
moment. “They sent me to come get you so you can start on your
mission.”
“I don’t want anything to do with the agency any more,” I mumbled,
pressing my face against the pillow. “I just want to –”
“‘Want to’ what? Lead a normal life?” he asked me softly. He sat
down beside me and stroked my hair. “You know you can’t do that.”
“Why not?” I demanded, turning to look at him. “I’ve been through
so much in my short life than many other people older than me. Why
can’t I just leave it all behind and lead a normal life?”
 He sighed. “I know, but it’s not really your choice or mine is it?” he
said with a small regretful smile. “So you might as well bring this
argument to them, not to me.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled and turned away again.
Felix placed a hand on my back. “What did they do to you that
made you this way?” he asked me quietly. “The Nik I know wouldn’t
have such a temper right now about something she can’t control.”
“Then that means that I’m not the Nik you know,” I replied coldly.
“And drop the act, will you? I know the truth about you – you’re here
and affectionate only because you were ordered to. You don’t really like
me the way you said you did. You only were following orders.”
He gazed down at me. “So that’s what’s wrong,” he whispered.
“I saw that look in your eye, the one before we entered the elevator.
And I know what it is now – murder, hate, and evil,” I spat at him,
sitting up. “I can’t believe I even believed you. I can’t even believe that
you would lie to me like this.”
For a moment, he didn’t say anything. “You ran into Aristo didn’t
you,” he said bluntly, breaking the silence that hung in between us.
“Yes, and I was glad I did. He told me the truth of things,” I snapped.
I got up, grabbing my sweatshirt as I went. I picked my key at the
counter next to the door and opened the door. “When I get back, I
expect you to be gone,” I snarled at him. Then I closed the door and
walked out of the hotel.
Twilight found me sitting on the beach in my pajamas, staring out
over the ocean. I didn’t know what I was looking for there, but I told
myself that I would know once I found it. The stars came out in ones
and then thousands and I laid back in the sand to watch them, not
caring that sand got into my hair.
A star streaked across the sky and I smiled. A shooting star.
“Make a wish, Nik,” I sighed to myself.
To my surprise, I didn’t know what I would have wished for. Aristo to
return to me maybe, but then I wouldn’t force him back if he wanted to
leave me. But it was hope. And I wished for it. For the hope that Aristo
would return and take me away from this madness.
I heard hoof-beats on the sand and sat up to see an officer riding up
to me. “Sorry, miss, the beach is closed for tonight,” he told me.
I stared at him across the distance between us for a moment. His
black eyes shining under his Stetson seemed almost familiar. And then
I started running.
I was no match for a galloping horse and soon, he had slung me
over the saddle in front of him and took me out of the beach. I didn’t
scream, not even once, for help, even though I had a chance to many
times. My captor even commented on it but I ignored him.
After we had left, he dumped me on the ground in front of several
men who were waiting for us. He circled the horse around the whole
group at a trot to cool the horse down. “There you go. On the beach,
just like you said,” he told them.
“Did you run into any trouble?” one of them asked, reaching over to
tie me up.
“Nope. She was alone and surprisingly so,” he replied, stopping the
horse.
“Any sign of the Russian? He was said to have been with her. They
were lovers,” he asked him. The rider shook his head.
“I’ll be on my way now,” the man said. He touched the brim of his
hat, gave them a nod, and walked off with his horse.
“Take her to the car,” the man that the officer had been talking to
ordered.
“Yes, sir,” the men said, and they picked me and dragged me into a
black car.
I fought them, but only half-heartedly. It was only a quick thrashing
fight, but then it was over. I was chained to the floor of the car and the
door slammed closed, locking me in darkness. Another door opened
somewhere up in front. The car tilted and then righted again as
someone got in and the door closed. “Go,” a voice commanded.
The car sped off into the darkness. At this point, I couldn’t
determine which was worse – being kidnapped by two people who I
was sure worked for Griefe or being back in that room with that traitor
Felix.
And how did they even know that I was at the beach?
It couldn’t have been a coincidence – both times I had been
kidnapped, only one person was there with me every time. I
remembered my capture at the Hollywood base – no one had stopped
us, except for the receptionist who had died. And this time, I had been
alone and only a handful of people knew where I was, all of them miles
away, except for one. Felix.
“Stop the car,” I hissed.
“No bloody way!” the other man shouted back. I realized that until
now, he hadn’t said a word. He had an English accent – showing me
just how wide Griefe had dared to cast his net to recruit international
criminals or contract killers like Aristo. “Shut yer gob.”
“At least untie me,” I told him.
The other man in the passenger seat twisted to look at me. “Or
what? You’ll scream us to death?” he asked me, a sarcastic look on his
face.
“No, or else the police will find you,” I said.
He laughed. “Is that a threat, missy?” he asked, still laughing.
“Nope, the truth,” I told him. “I’ve got on me a tracking device.
They can trace that.”
His eyes narrowed. “Where is it?” he snarled, climbing to the back.
“Turn it off.”
 “Sorry, can’t do that. It’s inside my body – and I have no control
over its activation,” I told him. He made to grab me but I gave him a
look that made him freeze where he was. He gave a snarl and then
climbed back into the front seat.
“Drive faster!” he commanded.
The car sped up. “You’re not trying to take me back to Germany are
you?” I asked them. The Englishman angrily hit the steering wheel as
someone got in the way.
“No, we’re giving up on that one – seems you’re too slippery. No,
instead, we’re going to the desert,” the other man replied. The
contempt and the possibility of what was in his voice made me
shudder. He must have sensed it because he laughed. “Yes, Griefe is
waiting for you.”
“How did he know I was here?” I asked him.
The man seemed to be in his victory mood and seemed to like to
talk as a result because he laughed again and turned to see my face.
“You see, Griefe has eyes and ears everywhere, even inside your own
agency. He –”
“All right, that’s enough!” the other man barked, interrupting him.
“What? What’s wrong?”
The Englishman glared at his partner. “You going to tell her every
single thing or what?” he demanded. “Come on, man, think! If she
escapes again, it could mean something bad for our man on the inside
– you could endanger his position.”
The other man fell silent for the rest of the ride.
Four hours later, the car stopped and in winced as my cramped
muscles screamed a protest as the car lurched. The men got out of the
car and opened the door to the back. They climbed in and unchained
me from the floor of the van and dragged me out into the night.
Sand got into my mouth as they tossed me on the ground and went
to the back of the car to open the trunk and get something. I heard a
click and knew that they were arming themselves with guns. I spat out
the sand in my mouth and rolled over onto my back just as they came
back, wearing different clothing from earlier and a gun holster
strapped to their shoulders.
Both of them wore black clothing and now, as I watched, they put
each put on a long leather jacket that covered up their guns. “What do
you plan to do with the guns?” I asked them. The Englishman gave me
a smile and pulled me to my feet.
“Move,” he commanded, untying my feet just enough so that I could
move forward at a shuffling walk. I obeyed, not wanting to get shot or
upset these two, especially since they had guns.
We moved forward and I shuffled for a few minutes until I could see
a ring of cars parked around in a circle, their headlights shining into the
center of the circle, lighting up the gathering there. Griefe was among
them and now, he looked up, his eyes burning with revenge as he saw
me. I flinched as I saw him. Half of his face had been burned, making
him look even more menacing than ever.
“Bring her here, boys,” he called out. The group around him fell
silent as the two men behind me dragged me the rest of the way into
the circle and deposited me at Griefe’s feet. He towered over me but in
his gloating mood, he now crouched down to look at me. “Well, well,
well, we meet again – for the third time.”
“Nice face,” I sneered.
He laughed, to my surprise. “Ah, yes, it’s thanks to you, actually, did
you know that? Yes, well, I thank you for giving me this face – it’s so
fearsome and everyone fears me now because of it,” he told me,
reaching out with a thick finger. He touched my cheek and I jerked
away from him. “Aww, don’t be like that! I’m thanking you, actually.
And I’m very grateful to you.”
“Why don’t I believe you?” I asked him. He gave me a wry smile.
“Maybe because you don’t trust villains,” he replied. “Now, tell me
the truth, did you really not give any information about my work in
Germany to your agency?”
“Why don’t you ask Felix?” I snarled. “After all, he’s your inside
man, isn’t he?”
He looked very surprised to hear my words and he glanced up at the
two men standing in the shadows. “How did you find that out, you
clever girl?” he asked.
“It’s easy – he was the only one at my side every time I got
kidnapped, or he was the last one I spoke to,” I pointed out. I jerked my
chin at the two men who had brought me. “Plus, they confirmed it.”
Griefe got to his feet, staring at the two men. His own men started
forward and the two men backed away. “She’s lying!” the other man
cried. His partner, the Englishman, elbowed him in the ribs.
“I told you to keep your trap shut, you dimwit!” he hissed audibly at
him.
Griefe sighed, pulled a gun out of the nearest holster and shot.
Twice. Two loud cracks echoed through the silent air and when it faded,
there were two thumps as the bodies of the Englishman and his friend
fell to the ground. I turned to see blood pooling beneath them, their
eyes were wide open in a shocked expression, one that would be
forever etched into their features.
Griefe dropped the gun and gave it back to the man he had taken it
from. “And that,” he cried. “Is what happens if you leak any
information. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” his men replied quietly.
“Good, now I want some dinner. Put the girl in the car with our other
prisoner,” he said, smiling down at me. “It’s time for a little reunion.
After all, she earned it by telling me the truth and being honest with
me.”
 I was pulled roughly to my feet and I grunted as someone kicked me
hard in the ribs when I didn’t get up fast enough. They retied my hands
so that they were tied in front of me. Then the men stopped as there
was a click. I looked around to see a gun held to the head of the man
who had kicked me. “And be gentle to her – she’s helped me a great
deal. I would hate for her to mistrust me after all I have done,” Griefe
said quietly.
The man didn’t breathe. In fact, his eyes were closed. “Yes, sir,” he
whispered.
The gun was removed and I was scooped off of my feet into the
arms of the other man. The one who had kicked me trooped on ahead
and opened the door to a black car that I recognized as Griefe’s
personal car. The man holding me gently eased me onto the seat in the
back next to a dark figure that was already in there. Then the door
closed and they were gone, leaving us in the darkness.
“Nikole,” a familiar voice sighed with relief.
I turned and with a cry of joy, I realized that it was Aristo. I moved
close enough so that I could lean against him. He had his arms tied in
front of him and chained to the chair in front so he put his arm around
me as best he could. “What are you doing here?” I breathed.
He kissed the top of my head and leaned against me. “I was
captured. I just arrived here today with Griefe and then I saw you
there,” he replied quietly. Something about the way he was speaking
made me look up at him. As my eyes adjusted, I saw what was wrong.
His face was bruised, battered, and cut. He saw me look and gave me
a smile. “That’s nothing. I’m just glad you’re safe – well, not safe, but
at least unharmed.”
I wriggled until I could sit in his lap and leaned forward and kissed
him. He winced slightly but then before I could do anything, he
returned it with such passion that I gasped. I put my arms around his
head and held him close. His hard body molded against mine as he
held me close tightly. I leaned my forehead against his as we broke the
kiss. “I never wanted to leave you in Nicaragua,” he breathed, his eyes
closed. Mine were too. “I knew it was the right thing to do because I
knew that they would come after me first and then you so I had to get
you away before you were captured too.”
“I know,” I whispered back.
“Nikole?” he whispered.
I opened my eyes and pulled away, a smile still on my lips. “What?”
He smiled at me. “Will you marry me?” he asked me.
I was stunned. Of all questions to be asked, I didn’t expect this one.
“What?”
“Will you marry me? Look, I know that you’re only sixteen but I love
you, a lot. And we might not make it out of this alive, so I just want to
hear you say it,” he whispered.
 My heart pounded so fast I thought it was going to burst. I wanted
to scream to the world that of course I would marry Aristo. He was the
sweetest person I’d ever known, the one that had been the most
honest with me. “Yes,” I managed to say as my throat tightened as it
always did when I was overcome with emotion. “Yes.”
He smiled and I could feel his heart pounding too. “Great,” he
replied, and pulled me close to him and held me in his arms. I felt safe
there, the first time I had in the weeks since he had left me. And I felt
whole again. “Where do you want to live?” he asked me after a
moment.
“What?” I asked, looking up at him. He laughed.
“If we’re to be married, we’ll need a house, but we need to go live
somewhere,” he pointed out. I smiled.
“Wherever you want to live, I guess. I don’t care. I’m happy
wherever you are,” I told him. He kissed my neck and I smiled.
“Somewhere in Europe?” he suggested.
I shrugged and he laughed again and held me close. The topic was
dropped eventually since neither one of us could decide where to live. I
was just glad to be here in his arms, safe again, whole again.
But I knew it couldn’t last long.
The door opened and I was dragged out of Aristo’s arms. I screamed
for him and fought my captors as he was unchained and shoved
roughly out of the car. I was thrown back in and the door locked,
leaving me alone in the dark. Tears streaming down my cheeks, I
moved to the window and cried even harder as I saw him stumble and
kicked and hit as he was forced to move as best as he could with
hobbled feet toward Griefe.
“ARISTO!” I screamed. I screamed it again and he must have heard
because he turned and gave me a smile.
“I love you,” he mouthed before he was hit again towards the center
of the gathering. I beat the glass, willing it to break, but it didn’t.
Think! I screamed to myself. Think about other things than Aristo!
You can get him out if you just think about what to do! Think like a spy!
Then I knew what to do. I pulled my feet up to my hands and with
some difficulty, I managed to slip out of the hobbles that had been put
around me feet. Using my teeth and sawing at it with all the sharp
objects I could find in the car, I managed to free my hands. Then,
without hesitation, I unlocked the door and opened it.
I stepped out and closed the door behind me. Then creeping across
the open space and using the cars as my cover, I managed to get close
enough. “How dare you betray me!” Griefe was ranting on in front of
Aristo. I didn’t pay attention to his words, only on how to get free.
Then I remembered. The two men that had taken me had guns with
them. Their bodies had been moved until they lay in the shadows, out
of the circle of light. But it would be risky since they were in the open.
Slowly, I moved to the bodies, trying to ignore the sounds of flesh
hitting flesh.
Then I reached them and flipped them over. “God watch over you,” I
said with a sigh in respect for the dead as I pulled the harness, holster,
and the gun off of the dead man. I took the other off of the
Englishman. I strapped one around my own shoulders and shoved the
other set into my sweatshirt pocket. Then I took the keys from the
Englishman’s pocket.
I had a plan in mind, but it was going to be tricky. Driving cars were
easy, but driving them and maneuvering them the way I planned to
was going to be hard, especially if they were huge vans. I had to aim
the car just right, at full speed, so that I didn’t crash into another. Using
my memory, I found my way back to the van.
I closed all of the doors but the side back door and climbed into the
driver’s seat, adjusting the chair so I could see better. Sticking the key
into the ignition, I started it up and drove back to the gathering.
I sped up as I was close and opened the window before it was too
late and drew the gun. I knew that it was already loaded so at random,
I started shooting at the gathering, above their heads so I wouldn’t kill
anyone.
They scattered, some of the men covering Griefe with their own
bodies to protect him as they went and took cover behind their cars. I
kept driving and shooting until I was at the center and I honked the
horn. Without hesitation, Aristo dove into the car and closed the door
with his bound feet.
“Where’d you get this car?” he asked me in a shout over the noise
of the return fire.
The van, to my delight, was bulletproof so we were safe. A bullet
glanced off the windshield but it didn’t even shatter. I climbed into the
back to help him get untied and when we finished, I climbed back to
the front. He followed me and I handed him the other gun. “Drive!” he
shouted, taking my gun from me. I obeyed.
Backing out of a space in between two cars, I drove towards the
dunes in the distance. When we were far enough, I stopped the car and
Aristo pulled back from the window and closed it, leaning back in relief.
I pulled off the harness on my shoulders and handed him the holster
after I had pulled it off.
He put the harness on his own shoulders and put both holsters on
both sides. “How did you get free?” he asked, putting the guns away in
the holsters.
“A pair of ropes can’t hold me down,” I replied, closing my eyes. I
was tired and –
“Nikole!” he suddenly said with alarm.
“What?” I asked, opening my eyes.
Silently, he pointed to my arm. Blood dripped down my finger tips
and I realized then that I had been shot. We moved to the back and
Aristo helped me. He pulled my sweatshirt off gently and had me lie
down. Rummaging around in the back, he found a first aid kit and with
professional skill, he pulled the bullet out with something that was too
small for me to see and he bound up my arm. “Does it hurt?” he asked
me.
I shook my head. Until then, I couldn’t even feel it, but now, it was
just a throbbing numbness. “Good, then we won’t have to use pain
reliever,” he murmured, packing everything away.
After he finished, he lay down beside me and held me close to him.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“Well, what is Griefe doing so secretly that he would go to a lot of
trouble just to capture me?” I asked. “When I was at his mansion, the
notes I had stolen said something about constructing something, but –”
“Hey, you forget you’re talking to the man who worked with Griefe
during his whole project,” Aristo pointed out. He propped himself up on
one elbow. I smiled at him and moved closer to him. “Griefe was
building weapons that were powerful enough to destroy entire cities.
He plans to use it to gain control of the world and name himself the
emperor of it all.”
“I figured it was something about world domination,” I muttered. He
laughed.
“It always is, with men like this,” he pointed out.
I nodded and closed my eyes, settling against him but he shook me
awake. “Hey, we still have to get back to wherever that is,” he told me.
“We’re in California, in one of the deserts close to Nevada,” I
replied, making to climb into the driver’s seat but Aristo stopped me.
“Maybe I should drive – you’re tired and about to fall asleep,” he
suggested.
I nodded and climbed into the passenger seat. Aristo started the car
and we sped off into the night, bumping and rattling over numerous
potholes in the sand. We eventually reached a road and followed it
back to a city. From there, we drove four hours until we were back to
where I had been taken from.
I had fallen asleep during the ride and Aristo woke me so I could tell
him which hotel I had been staying at. I did and he found his way into
the hotel’s parking garage. We got out of the car, taking some spare
clothes we found in the back with us and locking it up. I still had my
key with me, to my surprise after all that had happened, so we entered
my room. I had warned Aristo that Felix might be in the room so he
entered the room first, sweeping through it with his guns.
After he determined there was no one there, he pulled me in after
him and closed the door, locking it and putting the chain on it. I hung
the clothes in the closet as he took a look around. I sat down on the
bed after I was done, determined to sleep but then I groaned as I saw
that the sun was coming up.
 Aristo was at my side in an instant. “Something wrong?” he asked
me.
“It’s dawn,” I replied.
He laughed and smoothed back my hair. “It’s all right, you sleep. I’ll
go get breakfast and everything,” he told me and made to leave but I
reached out and held onto his hand.
“Don’t leave me again,” I whispered. “Not even for a moment.”
He smiled sadly and then held me close in response, but then I sat
up again, smothering a yawn. “What’s wrong?”
“We can’t sleep until we tell the agency,” I told him, getting to my
feet. He watched me as I did so. “We have to stop Griefe. He’ll destroy
the world – there’s no time for sleeping now. Later we can.”
“All right then,” he said with a sigh and got up too. “We can catch a
plane to Washington and we can tell your agency, but after that, will
you leave the saving the world to other people? I’m tired of watching
you wear yourself out because of them.”
I laughed. It was a weary one and he knew it. “All right,” I replied.
“And we still have to get married,” he told me.
I had to smile at that. “But that’ll have to wait,” I told him, going to
the closet and taking out the clothes that I had hung up so carefully
just a few minutes ago. I changed out of my pajamas and soiled shirt,
not caring that Aristo was watching me curiously behind me.
Large hands helped me with my clothes and I was grateful, only
because my arms were stiff from the strain over the past few days.
“Aristo?” I asked him.
He paused but then he held me close to him, not caring that I was
half-naked. “Yes?” he replied. His hands ran gently across my belly and
I gasped as the touch of his fingertips seemed to set me on fire. By the
feel of his chest pressed hard against my back, I knew he had taken off
his shirt.
“What was your sister’s name?” I asked, not knowing what to say.
“Cyzarine,” he replied.
His arms surrounded me tightly, holding me close as he kissed my
neck. “What does that mean?” I asked him, trying not to fade into a
state of swooning.
“‘Royalty’,” he replied. “Why?”
“Nothing, just curious,” I managed to say. I twisted in his hold and
he seized me in his tight hold and sat up on top of a counter after
sending the magazines and papers on it flying to the ground with a
sweep of a hand. He kissed me hard and I wound my legs around him,
trying to hold him closer to me.
His hands ran down the length of my body but then he stopped and
drew away. “We can’t do this, not now,” he whispered. I was trembling
and he helped me off of the counter, steadying me as I swayed, still
weak from his touch. He helped me don my other clothes and eased
the leather jacket over my shoulders.
 “Some other time,” I agreed with him in a shaky voice.
He gave me a smile and pulled over the clothes for him and put
them on. With a protective arm around my waist, we went out into the
hall and went to the elevator. But when it opened, three men were
inside and we ran, the men in close pursuit. “The stairs,” Aristo hissed.
I nodded and led the way as Aristo drew a gun and shot at the men
behind us. There was a crash as one man fell.
I found the doors to the stairs and ran for it. I opened the doors and
after Aristo had come in, I closed it and picked up a spare piece of pipe
lying near by and blocked the door with it. “Good thinking,” he told me.
I nodded and we hurried down the stairs as we heard the men arrive at
the door and began throwing themselves against it.
“We need to get to the garage and to the car,” I told him. “It’s the
only way out of here, I think.”
He laughed. “Yes, in fact, it is,” he told me.
I smiled back and we ran on.
We had been on the third floor so it didn’t take long for us to reach
the bottom of the stairwell and then open the door for the stairs that
led to the garage. Locking that door behind us well as a precaution, we
made our way down in the darkness and out the doors at the end. As
soon as we were out, we raced for the van. Aristo pulled out the keys
and without hesitation, he unlocked and opened the door and pushed
me in first, following me in.
“Here we go,” he muttered, sticking the key into the ignition. The
engine roared to life and with a screech, we soared out of the garage
and into the dawn of the morning. Aristo was a good driver – he spun
the wheel once and we were soon on the road. He slowed down to
match the speed limit.
I sat quietly in my seat next to him, gazing out the window as the
sun rose beautifully. Aristo reached out and put a hand on my knee and
I smiled at him. I was glad to be sharing the sunrise with him – there
was no one else I would have wanted to be with me at that moment.
After a moment, he turned away to pay attention to the road but his
hand stayed on my knee. “Do you have any identification on you?” he
asked me.
“I didn’t think about it when I set out,” I admitted. He laughed.
“Check in the back. I thought I saw some bags back there with
documents in them. Maybe our friends that helped us by giving us
guns, clothes, and a car would have a traveling document for you,” he
suggested.
I did as he told, climbing into the back and into the trunk to find the
bag. After I found them, I crawled back to the front them and put them
in my lap. “Why would they have those documents with them?” I asked
him as I sorted through the bag.
“They planned on transporting us to Germany anyway because in
his own mansion, Griefe would have more power and control over
things and he felt safer there,” he told me without taking his eyes off
of the road. “And plus, he’s a lazy man – he always hires someone else
to do his dirty work. In this case, he might have had his two men,
before he killed them, go and make up these documents for his
prisoners so that they could be transported out of the country. He
probably had every detail planned down.”
I pulled out the documents on Aristo and me as I found them and
dropped the bag to the ground. There were two sheets of mug-shots of
Aristo and me clipped together and one with information on it on our
origins and our “crimes” and where we were to be transported. Among
those papers were our passports – one was a Russian one which I
immediately identified as Aristo’s without even opening it to glance at
the picture inside. “Look,” I said, showing him the papers.
Aristo glanced over at them and his expression changed from its
usual calm to annoyance and maybe even a hint of anger. “Look in the
bag, there might even been things for a U.S. Marshall,” he told me.
Picking the bag up from the ground, I dug through it again until I
found them. There were two badges that looked very real inside and
other things like phones, handcuffs, and white earpieces that looped
around your ear – the very same kind that the Secret Service wore
when guarding the president – connected to two radios. I showed these
to Aristo who nodded absently as he saw them “All right, put one on,
tuck the radio inside your jacket but don’t turn it on. Take a badge and
the passport and put it in your pockets. We should pass pretty well as
two U.S. Marshalls on their way to Washington,” he told me.
“I’m a bit young to be a Marshall,” I muttered as I obeyed.
He heard and smiled. “It’s all right, it’s the badge that matters,” he
assured me.
Then he pulled off of the highway as a sign that indicated the
airport went over our heads. Soon, we had parked the car in the airport
parking lot but before we got out, Aristo helped me put on the harness
and the holster and he handed me a gun. “To make it more genuine,”
he explained. He found two black shades and gave me one and I put it
on.
Then together, we strode purposefully into the airport. We pulled
out our badges and urged people to move along as they stared at us
and we made our way purposefully to the front of a line of people.
There were protests but Aristo and I ignored them and turned to the
lady. We put our passports onto the counter. “We need a flight to
Washington, immediately. It is an emergency,” Aristo told the lady
firmly, a sense of authority in his voice.
The woman didn’t hesitate and immediately began to type in things
and soon, we had two tickets in first class to Washington. “Nicely
done,” I whispered. He grinned in reply but we kept moving.
At the metal detector, we dropped our guns, radios, phones, keys,
and badges into the tray and walked through. The guards there perked
up as they saw us and called us “sir” and “ma’am”. They gave us a
case to put our guns in and we were told to keep it locked in there until
the end of the flight – a flight attendant on board would have the key
and if we wanted the guns back after the flight, we should go find her.
We nodded and Aristo took the case. Scooping up our things we
made our way through. We hurried to the plane which was boarding
and without hesitation, we handed our tickets to the lady collecting
them and without waiting to get them back, we boarded the plane and
found our seats in first class. Aristo stored the case in the luggage
compartment and sat down across from me at our table. “When we get
there, you have to contact your agency as soon as possible,” he told
me. “To stop Griefe, we have to act fast so that your agency can send
someone as quickly as possible.”
I nodded with a smile. “I know, Aristo,” I told him. What I didn’t tell
him was that there was a possibility that the agency might send me to
stop Griefe since it was the fastest and stealthiest way since I already
knew the layout of the mansion and where everything was. They might
also send someone with me, but usually, it was a solo job.
I sat back and enjoyed the rest of the three hour plane trip napping.
Aristo woke me with a friendly nudge with his foot just as we were
landing. We gathered our things and were the first one at the front. The
flight attendant unlocked the case for us and we left it with her,
stuffing our guns into their holsters.
After that, we quickly were out of the airport and on a taxi directed
to go to an address – one of a nearby hotel – that was somewhere
close to where the agency was really located. We flashed the badge at
the driver as we closed the little partition in between the driver’s seat
and the passenger seat to show that this was official business and I
opened the silver phone and dialed the secure line that the agency
always used.
“Yes?” Mr. Reynolds’ voice sounded on the phone.
“Sir? It’s me, Nik,” I said and without hesitation, I told him
everything that we had found out. I heard people in his office and knew
that I had been put on speaker so that everyone could hear.
After I finished, he asked, “Are you sure about this?”
“Yes, sir. I have Aristo with me – he used to work for Griefe,” I
replied.
I heard a shuffling of paper on the other line and I knew that he was
looking up Aristo’s file. “He’s a contract killer, sir, but he wants to help
us,” I said with an amused smile. He sighed.
“All right. The moment you get back, I’ll brief you on what we will be
doing. Your friend can come too,” he told me grudgingly after a
moment.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Nik?”
“Is Felix there?” I asked him.
 “Yes, of course. Do you want to talk to him?”
I gave a small smile. “No, just make sure you keep an eye on him –
don’t let him anywhere near anything he can commuNikate with,” I
told him.
“What’s going on, Nik? Felix is my most trusted –”
“Sir, just trust me on this. We’re almost there – I want to be there to
deal with him myself,” I interrupted him. The phone clicked off and I
closed the phone.
As I did so, the taxi stopped outside the hotel and Aristo opened the
partition again and handed the taxi driver several bills and left after I
did without taking the change. Together, we ran to the little building
that was just the tip of what lay below and entered. “Nikole Versace,” I
told the guard. He nodded and looked at Aristo. “Aristo Gregovich.
We’re expected.”
The guard hit the button for the elevator and the doors opened. We
went through without hesitation and I hit the button for Reynolds’
office. The elevator here had been built for speed and within moments,
we were there and we stepped out even before the elevator had
completely opened its doors.
I knocked once and without waiting for Mr. Reynolds’ reply, I entered
the room. Felix was there, watched over by an unwavering Marine.
Reynolds looked up as we came in. Felix’s handsome face twisted into
a sneer as he saw Aristo and Aristo returned it without emotion. “Sir,” I
greeted the man.
He nodded in acknowledgement. “What is it that was so important
that Felix can’t leave my sight?” he asked me.
I went over to Felix as an answer and taking the handcuffs out of my
pocket, I pulled Felix to his feet. He struggled mightily but he wasn’t a
match for the Marine, Aristo, and me and soon, he had been
handcuffed and his leg cuffed by Aristo’s set to the chair. “Felix was
Griefe’s inside man this whole time, leaking to him information about
anyone Griefe wanted to know about, including my whereabouts. He
caused my kidnapping, both times in California and that is a national
offense – in fact, it’s treason,” I explained to the confused man behind
the desk.
Felix seemed to know that he had been cornered and there was no
point in pretending that he wasn’t on the other side. “What about
Aristo, huh?” Felix snarled, all trace of warmth gone. Reynolds was too
stunned to say anything. “He’s a contract killer isn’t he? So what did
you do to make him come with you? Pay him money?”
“I trust Aristo with my life, more than I ever did you, Felix,” I
snapped back. And then I turned towards Reynolds. “Well?”
“What do you suggest we do about him?” he finally said.
“Keep him here so that we can interrogate him and get out as much
useful information as we can from him,” I told him without hesitation.
 Reynolds nodded. “Very well,” he said standing. He went over to
Felix, looking down at the young man sadly. “I trusted you,” he said
softly.
“You put your trust in people to easily, old man,” Felix said with a
laugh.
Without further ado, the Marine dragged Felix out of the chair after
he had unlocked the cuff holding him there and took him out of the
office with two more men that had arrived to escort them there.
Reynolds stood there for a moment and then turned to us. “All right,
follow me,” he told us and then he whisked out the door.
We had to trot to keep up with his long determined strides and we
ended up at the meeting room. All of the military men in there stood as
Reynolds entered and a nurse came in to see to Aristo’s cuts and
bruises but he waved her away, explaining that they didn’t matter now.
The men inside sat as Reynolds did.
“All right, people, Griefe is on his way back to Germany, no doubt to
complete his weapons. His private jet has spotted taking off from a
private runway,” Reynolds said without even hesitating. “We need
options, people, and we need them now.”
“We need to get somewhere in there, before Griefe gets there, to
destroy the weapons,” one of them said. It was the most obvious thing
to do.
“Who?”
“Her,” a man said, pointing to me. I looked up at the man and saw
that it was Mr. Leon. Curse that man.
“No,” Aristo automatically said.
Mr. Leon looked like he had been slapped in the face. No one had
ever stood up to him before. “What?” he asked, blinking.
“You heard me – no,” Aristo repeated. I reached out for his hand and
he took it.
Leon didn’t miss that. “She’s the most capable one of us – she’s
been in the mansion, been to the secret underground laboratories that
are making the weapons and plus, she knows the whole layout of the
place. The mansion is Griefe’s fort. If anyone has the slightest chance
of getting in, it would be Nikole,” he said quietly. He glanced at our
intertwined hands. “And this is about saving the world from a man who
would destroy it. You can’t let your personal feelings get in the way.”
I knew that he was right, and he knew that I would have done it – I
had been trained that way and he trained me that way too. “I’ll do it,” I
said calmly but Aristo protested.
“No! You can’t! It’s too dangerous!” he exclaimed.
“I’ve done it before –”
“And you were half-dead when they found you,” he interrupted.
I looked him in the eye. “Aristo, there’s no other way. I’m the only
whose been in that mansion and I’m the only one who can go in there,”
I told him. After some hesitation, I added, “This is my choice.” He
stared at me as if he couldn’t believe what I was saying. I took a breath
and let it out calmly. “We will be together again soon, I promise.”
“So that’s decided, let’s get a move on. Nikole, come – you have a
lot of things you need to know,” Leon said, beckoning to me.
“But –”
“Aristo,” I said quietly. He looked down at me, his eyes bright. “I love
you.”
He held me close for a moment and with a sigh, he let me go. “You
promised – we’re going to have time together afterwards?” he asked
me quietly, holding my face in his hand.
I smiled, the tears in my eyes making his face blurry in my vision.
“Yes.”
He tenderly kissed me once and let me go. I left without another
word. Between the two of us, we didn’t need a goodbye. Leon was
waiting for me outside the door and he put an arm around my
shoulders. Surprised, since the man had never been this sentimental in
the time I had known him, I looked up. “You’ll be fine,” he told me.
“I know. It’s just I’m worried about if I don’t come back –”
“You will come back,” he told me. Then he let me go. “Come.”
I followed him to the elevator and Aristo entered quietly after us and
stood next to me. We didn’t touch – knowing that it would make it
worse than it already was. And though we stood inches apart, it felt like
we were standing whole worlds apart. Leon reached out and pressed
the button for the technology department and stood back as the
elevator shot down the shaft. He watched the two of us but didn’t say a
word.
The elevator doors opened soon and we stepped out into a white
laboratory. Aristo was behind me like a shadow. How I longed to reach
out and touch his hand, to touch any part of him. “Here we go,” Leon
said as he pushed open a glass door.
Just as I stepped in, the whole floor rocked as there was an
explosion. Alarmed, I looked around but Leon was laughing. “It’s just an
experiment gone wrong,” he explained. “They’ve been trying to make
a C4 into something smaller with the same force of explosion – maybe
more. Unfortunately, it’s not working. Rocks the entire level whenever
it goes wrong.”
I had to smile at that. He led me down rows of lab tables, some with
laptops on them but all of them with someone sitting at them, fiddling
with pieces of plastic and metal. We soon approached a large square
one that was larger than the other ones, set in the corner of the room.
On it, hundreds of pieces of gear were laid out, all ranging from night
vision goggles to miniature rocket launchers. I picked one rocket
launcher up and examined it. It was pretty light and I could probably
stick it in a backpack if I had to. “Can I have one of these?” I asked
Leon jokingly, knowing that they would never let me have a weapon
like this.
 “No,” a tweedy man said, making his way over to me. His large
round glasses slid down the length of his nose and he pushed them up
again, almost automatically. His mouth was pulled into a frown, like
always, but it was deceptive. Smithers was the Nicest man that you
could ever possibly think of. It just takes a little time for you to know
him to know that he doesn’t hate everything he saw around him.
“Hello, Smithers,” Leon cheerfully greeted the scientist.
Smithers gave an “hmph” in reply and picked up several objects off
the table and shoved them into Leon’s arms. After he finished, he
picked up a paper bag from off of the floor and indicated for us to
follow him as there was another explosion.
He led us out of the laboratory and into his office and cleared a
table. He indicated for Leon to put everything he was holding on it. Just
as Leon was about to toss everything on with relief, he shouted, “No!
Careful with that!” and Leon gingerly set every piece down one by one.
I had to laugh, but I didn’t. Smithers was probably the only one who
would dare to cow the head of security.
Smithers cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up his nose again
and picked up what looked like a pair of arm braces. “Blades,” he said
simply. He put them on himself and slammed his forearms together.
Several jagged pieces of metal appeared on the backs of his arms out
of a slit that was almost invisible. “It can cut through any metal and
even a diamond and it can hold up to a weight of a hundred and fifty
pounds. Means it can help you climb up walls with out needing a
grapple or a grip.”
Briskly, he pulled them off and put them back on the table. He
picked up a vest and put it on. “Bulletproof,” he explained. He pointed
to a red tab. “If you pull this, there is also a parachute there. Don’t use
this unless it’s necessary – you will be given another parachute later
today on the plane.”
“Wait a second, I’m going parachuting?” I asked. It wasn’t a big deal
– I had done it before. It’s just that I didn’t really like falling through the
air with only a thin piece of cloth to rely your life on.
“Yes, it’s the only way we can get you into the mansion,” Leon
explained.
“Won’t I get seen?” I asked.
Smithers smiled and held up something that looked like a pin.
“Activate this and put this anywhere on you and you’ll be invisible to
radar. Griefe relies too much on technology to even bother putting out
guards except at his gates on the ground. We’re going to drop you at
the very top and center of the mansion where no one can see you. If
you have this on, then you will be invisible to radar.”
He grabbed the vest he had picked up earlier and opened a pocket,
taking out a laser pen. I recognized it immediately. “Electromagnetic
pulse,” I answered. He smiled.
 “Smart girl. Use this to knock out anything electroNik at up to fifty
feet. Useful for sneaking into the mansion,” he told me. He put it back
into the pocket and pulled out something else – it was a tube of white
gel. “This compound is made to eat up to seventeen feet of metal,
though I doubt that you would need to use all of its potential. It’s useful
for getting through locked doors. Just squeeze this into the lock and the
lock will pop off.”
He put it back and pulled something else out. It looked like a PDA.
“Scanner,” he continued. He pulled out the pen and came around the
table to show me. “You can switch in between modes using the pen.
There are heat sensors, radiation sensors, life sign sensors, and even a
game or two for you to play with if you’re bored,” he said. I grinned.
“And it also turns into a flash bang grenade. To taps and one turn to the
write on the wheel and you’ll have three seconds to get out of range.
It’s powerful enough to knock anyone out at a range of fifteen feet. Just
don’t use this too soon because after you use the grenade, it’s gone.”
“That’s it?” Leon asked, looking down at the other gear.
“Yes,” Smithers replied, looking up from packing everything away.
He put the vest onto the table with the arm pieces and pulled over a
leather elbow-length gloves and I guessed that I was to wear that
underneath the arm pieces to keep it from chafing but that was it.
“Then what’s all of this stuff?” Leon asked him curiously.
“What I’m working on, now take your things. I’d suggest you leave
pretty soon because the plane should be taking off in about half an
hour,” Smithers said with a scowl. I picked up the pile that was mine on
the table and left the room. Leon followed me, scowling as he realized
that he had been used as a pack horse to carry Smithers’ things. Aristo
followed close behind.
Leon steered me to the gear room where two men ran about looking
for gear for me. I picked up a tank top turtleneck, knowing it was going
to be cold in Germany, but I also needed freedom of movement for my
arms, a pair of baggy pants and the usual military issue combat boots.
“Take it and follow me. We have to go – you can gear up on the plane,”
Leon told me, whisking me off again.
And right before I went to the elevator that led directly up to the
surface, I shared one long look with Aristo before I stepped in. I got
close enough that he slipped something into my hand as I passed by
him.
Leon stood beside Aristo and as the doors were closing, I heard him
say something to Aristo about interrogation and I smiled. I knew that
he was suggesting that Aristo perform the interrogation on Felix to
keep his mind off of me.
I looked in my hands to see what he had given me and saw that it
was his gun and its holster. I attached it to my harness’s free side and
waited for the elevator to reach the surface.
 In no time at all, the doors opened and two airmen ran over and
guided me to the plane. They handed me a helmet with a microphone
attached so I could hear them over the roar of the helicopter that sat
waiting for me. “We’re going to take you on the helicopter to the
airstrip,” one of them said to me as soon as I had the helmet on. “You
can sit in the back and get geared up. We’ll sit in the front.”
I gave them a thumbs up to show that I had heard and immediately,
we got in. there was a lurch as the helicopter lifted up from the pad
and then we were moving forward. As the man had suggested, I got
changed in the back, putting on all of my gear, and folded my other
clothes up neatly and set it on the seat. As for the guns, I rigged
something until I had one gun strapped to each leg.
To pass the time, I tested my new gear – mostly the arm pieces. It
was the first time I had things so lethal. The panels on the inside of my
arms, I found were only able to be activated by the other piece. I had
pressed it with my fingers and it wouldn’t budge until I touched the
other panel to it and the blades jumped out. To retract the blades, I just
had to touch them again. I guessed it was something about magnets.
About a half an hour later, the helicopter set down at the airstrip.
Without hesitation, I jumped out, pulling my helmet off and setting it
on the seat at the same time. The two airmen who had piloted the
helicopter here joined me and together, we made our way up the
lowered ramp and into the back of the cargo plane and as we boarded,
the ramp began to close up and the engine of the plane started up.
I made my way over to several men who were sitting on the
benches and on the random crates stacked and tied down there. Some
of them moved over to make room for me. “What’s up, Nik?” one of
the men said after they had handed me an earpiece so I could hear
them over the roar of the engine.
I recognized him as Wayne, one of the Marines I had trained with
during my training session with the Marines. “Hey, Wayne,” I greeted
him as I sat down beside him.
“So, we dropping you into Germany, huh?” he asked me.
I nodded with a smile. “Yeah.”
“You so lucky, girl,” he said, giving me a little shake and a smile.
“Going off on secret missions and stuff.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I replied, looking down at my hands.
His arm slid off of my shoulder. He spotted the arm pieces on my
arms. “What are those?” he asked me curiously, reaching out to touch
them. “New gear?”
I nodded and with a smile, I touched the inside of my arms together
and the blades popped out. He jumped back with surprise and then
laughed. “Tight,” he commented, brushing a finger over the blades. A
drop of red appeared on the blades and retracted the blades.
“Careful, they’re sharp,” I told him.
 He looked at his finger and then put it into his mouth. “Yeah, no
kidding.”
There was a tilt as the plane lifted into the air and the whole plane
shook and rattled around us. “So, how’ve you been doing since I saw
you last?” he asked me. “Seems like you’ve made yourself important.”
I laughed and looked down at my hands. “No, nothing like that.”
“You kidding? We’re dropping you into Germany, on the very rooftop
of one of the world’s most dangerous crime lords and you’re saying
that you’re not important?” he asked me, turning to look at me.
I shrugged. “Okay, well maybe I am important, but you know I can’t
tell you anything unless you’re cleared to,” I reminded him.
He smiled. “I have been – in fact, the team here is going in with
you,” he told me indicating at his team who looked up and smiled,
nodded, or gave a small wave depending on their different natures. He
saw the look of surprise on my face. “What you thought that this was a
solo job?”
I nodded. “They never told me anything about that,” I explained.
He smiled. “What else would we be doing here? Watching you jump
off to your death?” he asked with a laugh. “No, we got some word last
minute that there might be trouble but we’re to follow you and help
you complete your job.”
“But when we jump in, they have radar and –” I started to say but
then I stopped when I saw him lift the hem of his jacket, revealing a pin
that looked like my own radar jamming device.
“We’re all set, Nik, just worry about yourself. We got your back,” he
told me, reaching over to ruffle my hair. I ducked out of his reach and
he chuckled and leaned back for a nap.
I knew why he was doing so – it was going to be a long fifteen hour
ride to Germany and the number one military personal-comforts rule –
always get some rest whenever you can – you’ll need it pretty soon. I
leaned back to do the same, waking only when someone came by with
some coffee and some bread. I rejected the coffee and took two pieces
of bread and fell asleep again.
Five hours before we reached our destination, Wayne woke me with
a small shake. “Wake up, Nik,” he said as he stood up and stretched. I
blinked until my eyes adjusted to the darkness and the light given off
by several lamps that the men had hung from the netting that kept the
cargo together.
“What’s going on?” I asked, sitting up.
“We’re almost there,” he replied. He handed me a plastic bag and I
looked up to see that everyone else was getting the same bags from
some airmen who had come down.
Opening the plastic bag, I found a radio with an earpiece inside and
a standard military issue watch that I knew had been synchronized
with everyone else’s. I put both of them on, twisting the earpiece
around my ear so that it hooked there and I tucked the radio into an
inside pocket. “Channel 8,” Wayne instructed but it was just standard
procedure – all operations communications were by default, on
Channel 8.
I looked at my watch and saw that we still had five hours. “Wayne,
we still have five hours,” I muttered, pulling the plane’s earpiece off
since we didn’t need it any more now that we had our smaller radios.
He grinned at me.
“I know, but I want you all to be awake, stretched, and ready to go.
Besides, we need to go over our plan,” he told me, pulling a laptop out
from a pile of what I thought were rags but I realized were jackets.
“What plan?” I asked him. “We just go in, destroy the weapons and
get out.”
“Yeah, boss, I like that plan. Sounds simple,” one of the other men
commented.
Wayne looked up, scowling. “Shut up, Walsh,” he said, typing some
commands into the computer. The other men laughed and Walsh
grinned. A moment later, more airmen came and handed out
parachutes but none of us put it on. Instead, we dropped them on our
seats. “All right, here’s the deal –”
“We have weapons to destroy, we don’t have an accurate layout, so
you follow me and listen to what I do,” I interrupted him with a grin.
When he looked up, I kept going. “Four guards guarding the door of the
laboratory, three on patrol in each hallway, and we’ll have to get
through at least six hallways before we reach the lab. Anything else?”
Wayne’s mouth opened and closed several times and he looked
down at the screen. I knew that he didn’t have anything there that I
hadn’t already said. Then he just shut the laptop and stuck it back
under the pile of jackets again. “All right, smart mouth. How do we get
to Griefe’s office?” he asked.
I thought for a moment. “The laboratory is underground so to get to
it from the roof, we’ll need to go down four floors. Griefe’s office is on
the fourth, his throne room is on the second, and his own personal
laboratory is on the third,” I replied, giving him way more information
that he wanted but I knew that he would want it anyway.
“Oh,” he said.
“And why would we want to go to Griefe’s work spots?” I asked him.
He grinned at me. Apparently he was happy that I finally had
something that I didn’t know and that he did. “Oh, so you don’t know
everything, do you, Miss Smarty?” he teased me. I gave him a little
nudge and he chuckled. “Ok, we need to get to Griefe’s work spots
because we need evidence of why we’re there so that it wouldn’t seem
like the Americans just suddenly and randomly attacked Germany’s
weapons plant.”
“‘Germany’s weapons plant’?” I asked, surprised.
He laughed again. “Well, Germany wouldn’t let him make weapons
without their approval and monitoring so he’s taking care of that part
by letting the government in on his plans. But it wouldn’t really matter
if he did because what we suspect he would do is to destroy their
capitol building the moment his weapons are finished as a
demonstration. This would also let him gain control of the government
and basically, he would be the ruler of Germany, and the world, if he
succeeds in finishing these weapons,” Wayne explained.
“And we need the evidence to prove that we were there for a good
reason and to give the German government a reason why not to start
World War Three,” I finished.
He nodded. “And to incriminate Griefe and prove to the government
that he is what we declare that he is – one of the largest Chain crime
lords of the world,” he added. I was confused about one word in there.
“‘Chain’?” I asked him. “What’s the Chain?”
Wayne was patient about this – I could tell – and his men were
patient enough to listen to this, probably for the thousandth time. “You
really don’t think that Griefe was acting on his own right? The Chain is
what it is – a chain of crime lords that work together towards a
common goal – domination over the world and becoming the richest
people ever. Griefe is just one of the few. If we take him down, we’ve
only taken down one link. To bring these people down, we have to
expose them, and destroy all of their means of domination,” he
explained.
“Oh.”
“And your last mission, before you skipped out on us was to go to
Russia to go into the household of Vladimir Koscovich, a millionaire and
one of the most powerful and most influential men in the world. The
world sees him as a humanitarian because he has own personal
menagerie for endangered animals – he breeds them and releases
them into the wild,” Wayne added. I felt guilty now. “But he does more
than breed them – we’ve been suspecting that he’s making a biological
weapon that could destroy the world and make him seem like the only
one with a cure – a plague derived of animal bacteria or something
worked off of that to create an incurable and complicated plague that
only he would have the cure to.
“After that, it’s pretty simple – we planned to send someone in –
disguised as someone who would help Koscovich – and start them
tearing at each other’s throats for world domination. That way, if we
see explosions, we can trace them – or we can even get Koscovich to
give up their names to our man without even knowing who he or she is
– but hopefully, it won’t lead to explosions.”
“It’s actually quite smart,” Walsh commented and the men nodded
in agreement.
“But maybe we should be careful about talking about this now
before the plan is in action because you never know who’s listening at
the door,” I also pointed out.
 Wayne nodded. “Right, okay, back on topic, people,” he told
everyone and everyone sat down in their seats as Wayne stood up and
paced in front of us.
“So, we sit here for five hours?” I asked him after a moment. He
looked up.
“No, we’re going to memorize the plan until you can recite it
perfectly,” he said with a grin. All of us groaned. “Just kidding, but I do
want you all to know the plan so that nothing goes wrong. We can’t
mess up on this one – no redos or do-overs.”
“We know,” someone drawled.
“All right, thank you for your input, Lorne, let’s get started,” Wayne
said, rubbing his hands together. I sighed.
“I thought I was leading this mission,” I pointed out.
He smiled. “You are, dear Nikki, but you still need to know the plan.”
I scowled at him. “No, I lead so I say screw the plan, just wing it,” I
drawled.
Everyone laughed and in a moment, Wayne came and had me in a
headlock. I struggled against him but he was stronger than I was.
Instead, I threw myself to the ground, dragging him with me. His hold
loosened and I flipped around and sat on him, locking his arms at his
sides with my legs. My hand went automatically to his throat. “Don’t do
that again,” I told him with a smile. He was slightly out of breath
because of the maneuver.
It took a moment for the excitement to settle. “Ooh,” his men cooed
with a laugh after they realized what had happened.
But then he laughed. “Get off of me,” he gasped. “You’re heavy.”
Without waiting for my reply, he tried to break free, his muscles
bulging under me. I leaned forward, slightly choking him with my hand
at his throat. I let him up a little for a moment but then gently pushed
him back down, feeling a slight thump as his head banged against the
floor. He winced. “Have a little respect,” I told him with a grin.
Then, slowly, to show that I wasn’t going to attack him any more, I
let him up, removing first my hand and then getting off of him. He in
turn got up slowly, rubbing the back of his head.
After that, we spent the next two hours memorizing the plan and
the rest of the time reciting it back to Wayne whenever he asked for it
and playing cards. We weren’t allowed to bet money so we just played
for fun.
Half an hour before the drop time, we cleaned everything up and
put our gear on with the help of several airmen who came to help
tighten straps and making sure our gear was all right and that
everything loose was strapped down so nothing would fall during our
jump.
“Plan?” Wayne asked me suddenly as we were finishing up.
I sighed. “Come on, quit joking around –”
“Not joking. Come on, recite it for me.”
 I let out a breath. “Land on roof. Sweep. Defense offense position.
Down the stairs. Sweep. Griefe’s office. Take whatever is useful.
Sweep. Exit and down the stairs. Head to Griefe’s lab. Sweep. Take
papers that are useful. Sweep. Down the stairs. Head to throne room.
Sweep. Pair one and two break off. Stake position. Sweep. Head
directly to underground laboratory. Sweep. Incapacitate guards. Sweep.
Knock out door lock. Enter room. Sweep. Destroy weapons – stealth: no
one sees, no one hears. Leave. Head to second floor. Sweep. Call in
helicopter. Sweep. Collect pair one and two. Sweep. Run for exit,” I said
with a sigh.
“No, you collect the pair first and then call the helicopter,” he
corrected me.
I scowled at him. “What does it matter if we call the helicopter first
and collect the pair after? It’d probably be better if we call it in and
have it ready to pick us up because by then, we’ll probably be under
fire,” I pointed out.
He shrugged and grinned. “It doesn’t matter – you’re right. But you
didn’t memorize the plan word for word,” he told me.
I stuck my tongue out at him.
“All right, Alpha leader. Is your team ready? We’ll be nearing our
target in five minutes – it’s going to be a fly-by drop, as planned,” the
pilot said on the radio just as the airmen finished checking our gear
and one ran over to open the drop door.
“Yes, we’re ready,” I replied.
“Good. Godspeed,” was all he said.
“Four minutes before drop,” a voice said.
“Three minutes.
“Two.
“One.
“Thirty seconds.
“Ten seconds.
“Five seconds.
“And drop.”
Together, the six of us jumped off of the back of the plane one by
one. I was first, Wayne closely behind me and the men after us. I
checked the meter. We were slowly dropping through the air.
Adrenaline pumped through my body, but I ignored it, my eyes on the
meter. At five hundred feet, I could see the roof of the mansion. And at
two hundred, I pulled the chute, followed by everyone else behind me.
Chapter 8
In the Belly of Griefe’s Mansion

With a soft thump, I dropped onto the roof of the mansion and then
almost fell over as the weight of the chute came down on me. I clawed
my way out of the cloth and unbuckled the harness, letting it drop to
the ground just as the other five joined me. Piles of black cloth moved
as the men did as I had just done. I was the first to pull my double
pistols out. Each of them was armed with a P90. I hadn’t been given a
gun – only because I was too young, but they hadn’t noticed that I had
been carrying pistols as a sidearm.
“Clear,” I whispered into the radio and we relaxed.
The men gathered around, pulling the chutes into one big pile so
that it was less conspicuous. “All right, let’s go,” Wayne said after we
all loosened the straps that the airmen had used to bind down loose
things. They turned the lights their guns on.
And as one, we moved silently and noiselessly across the roof,
melting into the shadows of the night. I opened the door that led to the
stairs and they went in, guns first and I followed close behind. The men
moved to the sides of the stairwell to let me through and they followed
me silently down the dark steps. Beams of light from their flashlights
on their P90s danced on the wall. On the fourth floor, I opened the door
and peered outside. Seeing a silhouette moving against coming our
way, I backed up and the men followed without a word, switching off
the lights.
The door that I had just been standing at opened and a guard
peered through. Everyone held their breath as the guard swept the
darkness with his eyes, first looking down the stairwell and up directly
at us. I was sure then that we would be caught but then he closed the
door after him and was gone. I let out the breath I had been holding
and went to the door again and found that there was no one there.
Leading the way, I took us down the hallway, dropping into the
shadows whenever the shadow of a guard appeared. Eventually, we
reached Griefe’s office. The door was unlocked – Griefe probably didn’t
expect anyone to come into his office – and we went in just as a pair of
guards made their way down the hall.
As the men guarded the door, Wayne and I swept through the desk,
careful not to disturb anything. He found a sheet that he tucked away
inside a backpack he wore on his back and we moved on.
Just as we were about to exit the office, the two men who had come
down the hallway stopped in front of the door. Hurriedly, the men
quietly closed it to a crack and I peered out through the door, listening.
“When do you think Griefe is going to be back?” one of them asked his
friend in German.
 “I don’t know – his plane is scheduled to land in an hour. Maybe we
should go and wait for him,” his friend suggested in the same
language.
“Hmm,” the first man said in reply.
“Did you check with the labs and see if they’ve got the next stage
complete? Griefe isn’t going to be happy if he finds that they’re behind
schedule again,” his friend asked him. I dared to open the door farther
and saw that the man speaking was wearing a military-like uniform
while the other man was wearing a white lab coat. I recognized the
man with the white lab coat was the head scientist on the project. I had
seen him before the last time I was here except that he wasn’t the
head back then. Things had probably changed since the last time I was
here.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he muttered.
The two men moved off but we could still hear voices echoing back
along the stone walls. “Nik, they gone or what?” Wayne hissed at me.
I held up a finger for him to wait as I slid one pistol back into its
holster and pulled out the PDA out of its pocket. I switched it to the life
sensor mode and had to wait as the satellite that I was sure was
programmed to triangulate my location and the location around us
activated. The screen flickered and blue dots appeared. It flickered
again and I saw six blue dots in a room and two moving off into a
hallway. A small number on the two dots that kept increasing indicated
that they were moving farther and farther away.
I let them get to a hundred feet before I nodded and led the way
out.
The PDA device saved our skins three more times before we made it
to the safety of the stairwell. Quietly, we moved forward again to the
third floor. But before we stepped out onto the landing, I stopped
Wayne. The team gathered around to listen. “What we learned from
listening changes a few things – Griefe arrives in thirty eight minutes, if
what they say was true and he’ll probably want to check the weapons
immediately and head up to his office. I’d suggest that we hit his
laboratory first and then take refuge in his throne room and wait for
him to go up to his office before we do anything – that way when we
blow the weapons, we can draw him and everyone else away from the
fourth floor and allow us to run up to the rooftop for the elevator. The
pairs also probably shouldn’t be left at the throne room,” I told him.
He nodded thinking it through. “It’s a good plan – why are you
asking me this?”
“Because you’ve done this stuff before and I want to make sure that
it was all right,” I said. I indicated at the door. “Now we have to move
because I think we’ve got thirty-five minutes now.”
Everyone nodded and we opened the door and made our way to
Griefe’s personal lab. The whole floor was deserted – it was expected
because no one would be here unless Griefe was. This was also the
floor where his scientists presented to him their ideas and their
progress. “What were you doing here when you were here in the first
place?” Wayne asked.
We reached the glass doors of the lab and found that it was locked
with an electronic lock. I pulled out the electromagnetic pulse and
aimed. I clicked the button. “I was here just to collect information
about Griefe, not what he was doing but my orders changed as the
agency realized that this was a one-time chance – to have someone on
the inside of Griefe’s mansion close enough to collect data,” I replied,
waiting for the lock to deactivate. After a few moments, it did and I
opened the door and went in, followed by everyone.
I moved to the computers and looked through them. Then I found
something and waved Wayne over as his team swept the room for any
information. “The weapons are called Apocalypse,” I told him. And they
have every piece of information that you could possibly ever want to
know about it on here.”
He nodded. “Great, put it on this drive and let’s move,” he told me,
handing me a little USB stick. I stared at the little thing and then at the
massive ocean of information I had found.
“That won’t be enough,” I told him. “There’s at least two hundred
gigabytes of information here – imagine it! All the research on the
Apocalypse, its makeup, tests, and how it operates. We can afford to
not take any of this.”
He sighed and grabbed a laptop off the pile that he spotted in the
corner. “These good to use?” he asked me.
I dug through my memory. “Yes, he uses them to transfer
information to the German government. They have nothing on them
except enough space to contain the research,” I told him. Quickly, I
downloaded everything I found onto a laptop and closed the computer,
leaving it as I had found it. I handed the laptop to Wayne and he put it
into the bag. “Let’s move.”
We swept out of the laboratory and before we left, one of the men
rigged the lock so that it turned on again. There was a metallic click as
it locked again and we headed for the stairwell. “Time?” Wayne asked
me as we entered the stairwell. We didn’t stop as I checked the time.
“Ten minutes until Griefe’s arrival,” I answered.
He nodded and we kept moving. Coming out on the second floor, I
led the team straight for the throne room – I called it the throne room
because that was where Griefe gloated over people – especially his
prisoners. I had once been in there.
We dodged guards and eventually we made it. I pushed the door but
it didn’t budge. With a groan, I realized that they had locked it. “But it’s
never locked!” I hissed to no one in particular. I thought about busting
the lock open but then we would be discovered as soon as I did as
someone came to check.
 Then Wayne pointed up at a ventilation shaft, ten feet above us on
the wall. With a sigh, I put the pistols into their holsters and put the
PDA device away and touched my forearms together. The blades
sprang out and as the men watched, I scrambled up the frictionless
wall and opened the shaft by hitting the grate hard with a blade.
Unexpectedly, the grating fell away from me and to my horror, I
realized it would hit the ground with a loud noise.
Fortunately, Walsh, who had been paying attention, reached out and
caught the grate, nearly dropping his gun in the process, and lowered
it gently to the ground. I grinned at him and pulled myself into the
shaft. Once inside, I retracted the blades so that I wouldn’t accidentally
shred myself to pieces in the tight fit of the shaft and crawled through.
At the first grate I saw, I twisted until I lay in front of it and this time,
I opened it by pulling it with my fingers. There was not enough room to
put it behind me so I held onto it as I pushed myself headfirst out of
the shaft, rolling and tucking my head as I hit the floor so that I didn’t
injure myself. I set the grating down on the ground and went to the
door and unlocked it from the inside. The men came in and as soon as I
did, I locked it.
And just in time.
“Very satisfying, very satisfying. How were things here, Mr.
Johannesburg? Are we ready?” Griefe’s voice said in German. There
was a clatter of footsteps and I knew that Griefe and his entourage had
finally arrived home.
“All is well, sir,” Johannesburg – the new head scientist – replied.
“We’ve completed the next stage of the Apocalypse and we’re ready to
start on the next one.”
“Well, what are you waiting for, you old fool?” Griefe growled. “Get
started then.”
“Yes, Mr. Griefe,” Johannesburg said hastily. “We already have.”
Footsteps fading away indicated that Johannesburg had left.
We didn’t hear any more except a jumble of mutterings, laughter,
and random voices as they echoed noisily down the hall. The silence
that followed seemed deadly. “Nik? Anyone out there?” Wayne
breathed into my ear.
I checked the PDA and shook my head. Everyone was gone and the
nearest person was heading away from us. The team fanned out to
search the throne room for anything but finding nothing, we kept
going.
“All right, this is it. Be wary – there are going to be way more
security measures taken as we get to the lower levels. Don’t touch
anything,” I warned them over the radio.
They nodded to show that they had heard and we came out on the
first floor. “Isn’t there a stairwell that leads to the underground?” Lorne
asked over the radio.
 “No, the underground can only be accessed by a separate hatch. Of
course, Griefe has a private elevator that takes him directly down to it
from his office but everyone else has to climb down a hatch,” I replied.
I moved aside a statue, revealing a metal plate that I tapped twice
and then three times. Slowly, it opened. “How do you know this stuff?”
someone asked with a smile.
I grinned. “I explored quite a bit when I was here,” I replied.
“All right, enough chatter,” Wayne snapped. He pointed the gun into
the hatch to make sure there was no one there and he climbed in. I
followed him closely behind and as soon as we reached the bottom, we
moved aside into the dark to let the rest of the team come down.
As soon as we were down, my PDA device’s screen became fuzzy. I
guessed it was because it was underground. I moved forward a bit and
then the screen vanished and the words “NO SIGNAL” appeared,
flashing in red. Turning it off, I put it away. “All right, down that hall,” I
told them quietly. They went down the hall. “No wait, stop.”
They froze without moving. “What is it?” Wayne asked.
“Security camera.”
All eyes turned towards the red light that flashed dimly in the
corner. I took out the electromagnetic pulse and aimed it. Then I
clicked. Immediately, the light went out. “Hurry, they’ll have noticed
that,” I hissed, running to the front.
We reached the door to the lab and I pulled out the tube that
contained the liquid that could eat through metal and squeezed a small
amount into the lock. There was a hiss and a few seconds later, the
lock fell out and I pulled the door open, streaming into the room
quietly, the team following close behind.
Then I saw them. The Apocalypse. Or, I should say: The
Apocalypses.
There were three of them – three pieces of metal, plastic, and
enough power to level entire cities in the center of the room, lined up
neatly together. Described, they looked like those giant telescopes in
those observatories, but I knew that the eye in the center wasn’t used
for gazing at the stars – it was for leveling entire cities.
We hid behind some tanks. “How are we supposed to destroy those
things?” Wayne hissed at me. “You never said that they were so huge.”
“I’ve never seen them before in my life – I only heard about them.
Remember – when I was here last time, they hadn’t started building
them,” I hissed back. “And we’ll figure something out. Hand me the
computer.”
Without any hesitation, Wayne pulled the laptop out of his bag and
handed it to me. I opened it and sorted through the information on
there, looking for anything in the Apocalypse’s makeup that would
prove anything weak about it.
“Wait, the Apocalypse has to send out highly explosive compounds
for it to be so destructive right?” one of the men suddenly asked. I
looked up and everyone looked at him and he smiled. “I do chemistry
as a hobby, but anyway – as I know it, and as every chemist knows it,
highly explosive compounds are also usually very unstable so if we
blow one up at its core, then it will probably set off a chain reaction
that’ll set the other ones off too.”
I nodded and sorted through the makeup. “Here it says that the
outer shell of the Apocalypse is made of titanium and bulletproof and
destruction-proof material but I doubt that it protects against
something as strong as the stuff inside the Apocalypse,” I said, running
my finger across the screen. “In the back of the base, there is a small
hatch door there that is used to for ‘refueling’ the Apocalypse once it
has been used. So just put some C4 in there and –”
“Boom!” Walsh exclaimed, remembering to whisper.
I nodded, closing the lid of the laptop and handed it back to Wayne
who stored it in the bag. “We have to act now – Griefe is probably in his
office right now and we have to be out of here the moment we set the
C4. Someone’s going to notice the deactivated camera pretty soon,” I
told them.
They nodded and Wayne handed me two packs of explosive clay –
C4, their detonators and the detonating remote. “You have to do it
because you’re small enough to not be seen. We’ll stay in the hall and
keep anyone from coming in if they do try,” he told me.
“Wait – how are we going to get out if someone comes?” I asked
him.
“Elevator –” Walsh started to say.
“Griefe,” someone pointed out.
“Door –”
“Probably blocked,” I told him.
“We’ll figure something out. The most important thing is to take
care of the Apocalypses,” Wayne told us. We nodded. “And you,
Paulson.”
“Yes, sir?” Paulson said, looking up.
“Rig the camera outside like you did with the lab door so that it’s
back again. Might buy us some time and an escape route,” Wayne
ordered. “Williams, go with him.”
“Yes, sir,” the two of them whispered and they disappeared out the
door.
“Nik, go, we’ve got your back,” Wayne told me, reaching out and
giving my shoulder a squeeze. I nodded and darted forward, ducking
and weaving in between crates, tanks, and even vehicles in the large
room.
Eventually, I made my way down the stairs to the same level as the
three Apocalypses and I positioned myself behind the middle one – the
one that would most likely set off the other two beside it. Opening the
hatch, I put in the two C4s, stuck the detonator on each of them, and
the shut the hatch.
 Then I crawled slowly out of the space and back up the steps. I
almost made it back to the men but then a guard coming up behind
me saw my hand as I moved behind a barrel and he reached over and
pulled me out. I threw the remote, making it look like I had slipped as I
did so and I saw Wayne reach out and catch it and go back to his
hiding space. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” he demanded
in German.
“I’m a messenger in the household! Please, Mr. Griefe brought me
back from his holding in America to come work with him,” I told him in
German. I hoped that my German didn’t betray who I was. Apparently,
he believed my story because he let me go.
“Who were you delivering to?” he asked me.
Almost without thinking, I said, “Mr. Johannesburg.”
“His office is upstairs,” the guard said, getting suspicious.
“I know, I was just dropping something off for him. He sent
something for the scientists down here,” I said, correcting and making
it up as I went. He eyed me suspiciously and I hoped he wouldn’t look
down and spot my guns. I held up my hands. “Honestly!”
“All right, get going, kid,” he muttered and turned away.
I let out a slow breath of relief and walked calmly to the door. Just
right before the door, I darted into hiding with Wayne and the others.
“Good job, that was close,” he breathed, reaching out and squeezing
my arm. My heart pounded from that frightening scene and now it
started to slow. “You okay?”
I nodded and caught my breath. “All right, let’s move out into the
hallway. Apparently they haven’t discovered us yet so we have to take
advantage of that,” I told them. But then I thought of something. “Wait,
do we have to take out Griefe?” I asked them suddenly.
Wayne shook his head. “No, destroying the Apocalypses are our
main objectives. We can catch Griefe any time we want – we just have
to stop him from taking over the world,” he explained. I nodded.
“Right. Let’s get out of here,” I told them.
We slipped out the door and in the hallway, we heard guns click and
we froze. “Whoa, easy fellas, its just us,” Wayne said. Then there were
sighs of relief and our men put down their guns.
“Got the job done?” they whispered.
“Yes,” I replied. “Let’s move.”
Silently, the team moved out the door and we went back up the
hatch again. I closed the hatch after the last man came out and
moved the statue back over it again and we ran up the stairwell, not
stopping until we came out onto the rooftop again. Large black lumps
in the center showed where we had left our parachutes and we closed
the door after us. “Call the chopper,” Wayne commanded. He held up
the remote and moved to flip the switch but Paulsen, the chemist guy,
put his hand. “What is it?”
 “Sir, if I’m right, and the computer is highly unstable, and if the stuff
inside the Apocalypses really can level entire cities, then maybe we
should wait until we’re far away before we blow it, in case we get
blown too,” he said hurriedly.
Wayne paused and tossed Paulsen the remote. “Good call. Here, flip
the switch once you think we’re far enough away,” he said as the
sound of a helicopter could be heard in the silence of the darkness.
The helicopter touched down, blowing our chutes up into the air
with the wind that the blades made. We watched in horror as the
chutes drifted up, carrying the harnesses with them and drifted down
towards the garden of the mansion. “Hurry, get on the chopper!” I
shouted, knowing that there was no need to whisper any more.
The men scrambled onto the chopper but just as Wayne and I were
about to climb on, the door of the stairwell was flung open and armed
guards came streaming through. “Go!” Wayne screamed at the
helicopter, already returning fire, making the guards scramble away. I
drew my pistols and followed suit. There was a cry as a bullet hit
someone’s knee and another as a stray hit again.
The helicopter hovered above us, ready to touch down and help us
but it was too late – I knew that in a few seconds, we would be
surrounded. “Go without us! We’ll figure a way out of this mess,” I
commanded through the radio. “Paulsen, blow the charge.”
I nudged Wayne and he and I were thinking the same thing – we had
to surrender, or else we would risk killing ourselves, not that there was
much to save anyway – we were possibly going to die with the
detonation of the Apocalypses. “Actually, fetch some stuff first,” I
commanded. Wayne heard and he set down his bag. I saw him tense
and on his feet.
Then the moment the helicopter swooped to obey my order to
fetch, Wayne threw the bag far up into the air and the helicopter pulled
up as someone reached out and caught it. Then they flew away,
leaving us with the light of pre-dawn and our unknown fate.
“Well, well, you must have been missing me already,” Griefe said as
he came up to the rooftop to inspect who had intruded his mansion. He
had spotted me first.
“Not a second,” I assured him.
He smiled. “Still got cheek, that one. Take her to my office. I have a
few words I need to say to her,” he said offhandedly to his men. Four
men came over and to grab me. I slammed the arm pieces together
and lunged for Griefe. I locked my arms around his neck, pulling him to
his knees with my sudden weight on his back. I held a blade up to his
throat and his men stopped.
“Let him go,” I told him and nodded at Wayne to indicate who
meant. “Let him go back to the nearest city and I’ll tell you whatever
you wish.”
 I wouldn’t have hesitated to slit the man’s throat open. After all, he
was the one who had given me the nightmares, the torture, the pain,
and the grief. But to my utter disappointment, he nodded and Wayne
was allowed to be escorted down the stairs. “Radio me once you’re
okay,” I told him before he disappeared. “And give me our codes before
you do.”
He nodded to show that he had heard and vanished. “What are you
going to do now?” Griefe asked me with a smile. The man smelled and
he was easily three times my size but yet, here I was, holding him
down only because of the blades on my arms. I had to thank Smithers
when I get back.
“Once Wayne radios me, then I’ll let you go and we’ll talk,” I told
him.
“But that could take hours,” he pointed out.
I snarled at him. “I’ll take as long as necessary to make sure he is
safe,” I spat.
He gave a “hmph” and was quiet.
Then, as the sun completely rose from the horizon, my radio
buzzed. “Go ahead,” I told Wayne.
“Alpha Sapphire One Three Nine,” he said.
“Go ahead,” I replied.
“I’m safe. I’m in the town and from what I can tell, they’ve left me
alone – no one’s following me,” he told me. “Thanks, and good luck.”
“Glad you’re safe,” was all I said before I released Griefe.
His men were waiting for that moment. They lunged forward and
with a sharp pain in my shoulder, they ripped off the arm pieces and
twisted my arm up behind my back and pressed my head into the floor.
“Sorry, should I restate that for you? I said that I would willingly talk,
Griefe,” I snarled at him, trying to get a good look at him from my
position.
He kneeled down next to me until he could look me in the eyes.
“Sorry, I’m just taking extra precautions,” he told me calmly. He picked
up my arm pieces and fingered the blades. “These are interesting.”
His men pulled me to my feet and forced me down the steps after
Griefe, into a world of who knows what. “Who made these for you?” his
voice called back up the stairwell, bouncing off the cement walls.
“None of your business,” I sighed.
The men on either side of me pulled to a stop as Griefe stopped and
turned to me. “Hey, you said that you would willingly answer any
questions that I had, remember?” he reminded me.
“All right, a guy in the agency makes these things,” I replied.
“Hmm,” was all he said and with a long assessing look, he turned
and kept walking down the stairs again. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care if
he asked me to tell him his most private secrets because soon,
everyone in this mansion would be dead, possibly blown to hell by their
own inventions. And it was because I had seen something that they
didn’t before we left the rooftop – the helicopter that had come to get
us coming out of the cover of the clouds.
The explosion would be soon, I knew. I gave orders to Paulsen to
blow it as soon as they were at a safe range. I just hoped he wouldn’t
hesitate. Goodbye, Aristo, I thought to him. I’m sorry for not fulfilling
my promise to you. Don’t hold this on yourself. I love you.
We reached the level that had his office and his men shoved me
into his office followed by Griefe who sat down at his desk. His men
roughly shoved me into a chair. “What did you take this time?” he
asked me.
“A sheet of paper from your office, and a laptop from that pile you
have in your personal laboratories on the third floor,” I told him
truthfully.
Angrily and annoyed, he slammed his fists on the table, making a
loud bang that sounded like gunfire. I flinched at the sound and his
guards raised their guns a little in alarm but then quickly lowered
them. “No!” he bellowed. “Tell me what you took! Specifically! What
was on the paper? What was on the laptop?”
“How should I know? I don’t memorize every little thing,” I replied,
sarcasm dripping from my voice. I knew I had to hold off until Paulsen
detonated the bomb because if he didn’t, then I would die and Griefe
would immediately take his weapons out and fire them.
He gave a frustrated look. “Pull her up and hold her there,” he
growled at his guards. They pulled me to my feet and Griefe snatched
a pistol – I recognized it as one of my own – from the guard and aimed
it right at me. And he fired.
There was a loud bang and pain exploded from my side. All of the
air I had in my lungs rushed out and I crumpled to the floor wheezing
and clutching my side. But thanks to Smithers’ bulletproof vest, I was
still alive and I wasn’t hurt except for the fact that my side was
bruised, and my ribs even might be bruised too – or worse, broken.
“I hear breathing – why is she still alive?” he demanded.
One of the guards stopped and touched my side with a cautious
hand. He lifted it and showed that there was no blood. “Bulletproof
vest, sir,” he replied.
Griefe shoved the guard aside with a snarl and pointed the gun right
at my head. “This time, I won’t miss and there is no bulletproof vest
here,” he snarled. I could see it in his eyes. He had already suspected
what we had taken when we raided his mansion and he didn’t need me
to talk to find out any more. He intended to kill me.
I judged distances, calculated weights, physics, and math and
figured that with carefully executed moves, I could make it.
Just as he was about to fire, I dove between his legs with the last of
my strength. The gun discharged and the bullet that had been meant
for me found itself buried in the arm of one of Griefe’s men. The guard
cried and collapsed as his partner caught him. I rolled to my feet and
protecting my head, I smashed through the large window of the study,
rolling out into open air as Griefe yelled and swore and cursed.
His voice faded as I fell away from the window.
Without hesitation, I pulled the chute to slow my descent and I
touched down on the grass of the lawn lightly. Reached out and broke
the thin cords of the smaller parachute that held it to the vest and
broke into a run across the lawn. “Blow it up now, Paulsen!” I screamed
into the radio. “And don’t you dare hesitate like that again, you hear
me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he stuttered.
There was absolute silence for about a millisecond before the world
around me – mansion and all – exploded into flames. I was only aware
about it around me as I was sent flying over the low mansion wall by
the force of the explosion and landed painfully on the other side.
Secondary explosions followed – more powerful than the first.
I ran but those explosions blew me further away from the torn
mansion.
My head slammed into something hard and then I saw no more.
Chapter 9
Returning Home

There it was again. That familiar electronic beeping sound that

matched the beating of my heart.
Except this time, I was aware that I was breathing from a tube and
something had been stuck down my throat. “She’s awake,” a gentle
voice said quietly.
Something warm wrapped around my hand. “What happened?” I
tried to mumble past the tube in my mouth but all that came out was
some kind of croaking that sounded like a cross between a bullfrog and
a dying animal.
“Don’t try to talk. You have a fractured skull, a fractured rib, one of
your lungs collapsed, and you have minor burns on your body, but
you’ll be fine,” the same voice said. I didn’t try to open my eyes to see
who it was. “You’ve been in a coma for two days now, and we’ve had to
put you in the operating room several times, each session lasting
almost two hours because your lung kept collapsing, but here you are.”
I felt sick and I wanted to throw up somewhere. “Doctor, I think
she’s fine now – she probably doesn’t need the tube,” a familiar voice
that made my heart pound faster said. To my embarrassment, the
pounding was matched with the electronic beeping.
“Yes, of course,” the doctor said. She reached over and pulled the
tube out of my mouth. And after she finished, I coughed and choked. It
is a rather weird feeling – having something stuck down your throat
and then pulled back up. But after the tube left, I didn’t feel that sick
any more.
Instead, I squeezed Aristo’s hand and opening one eye to a slit, I
saw him smile. “Water,” I managed to say and then the glass was there
at my lips. Aristo and the doctor helped me drink some of the water
though they rejected my request for food. I glared at the IV bag on its
stand and then sighed, leaning back.
“What have I missed?” I asked Aristo as the doctor left.
He shrugged. “Well, it has been confirmed that Griefe is dead, his
mansion, along with millions of dollars of research has been destroyed,
but everyone is willing to forgive whoever caused all of this damage
because the destruction would have been for the greater good and the
good of the world. The German government owes a debt of gratitude to
the United States and the whole incident had been covered up as a
bad gas leak, though no one believes it,” he said.
I tried to laugh at how he said it but instead, I coughed and then
winced as my ribs protested. The way he said it just made it seem like
all was well, though I knew better – I had been and seen situations like
this before and it wasn’t always just “all was well”. It was more like “all
is worse – because we discovered something about our enemy and we
now know its worse”.
 “You all right?” he asked me after a moment.
“Yes, why shouldn’t I be?”
“Well, I have bad news for you,” he said slowly, and quite sadly.
“What is it?”
He sighed and looked down at our intertwined fingers as if he didn’t
know how to say it. “Well, you know your friend, Wayne?” he started.
I nodded for him to go on.
“Well, he didn’t make it, Nikole, I’m sorry,” he told me. “He was
found stabbed in the back in a village a little farther off from the
mansion. The locals found him and contacted the authorities who came
and informed the United States that one of their Marines was found
dead and someone went and identified him.”
I closed my eyes. “I spoke to him. He told me he was safe, and that
no one was following him,” I whispered.
“They probably got him after he radioed you. It’s not your fault,” he
told me softly.
I couldn’t say anything else. I was too exhausted and I didn’t know
what else to say about it. Aristo seemed to know it too because he fell
quiet. After a while, I drifted off into sleep.
It was a dreamless sleep, one without any nightmares. I could say
that it was probably because the man responsible for them is dead and
my subconscious mind was now peaceful about it. But when I woke, I
was aware of a humming sound around me and that I was no longer in
a hospital.
Aristo was beside me the moment my eyes opened and he smiled.
“Where are we?” I asked him before he could say anything.
“Well, believe it or not but that last hospital was actually in
Germany,” he told me with a smile. “And now we’re heading back –
home, I guess – to the United States.”
“I thought you wanted to go back to Russia,” I whispered drowsily. I
realized I had said that with no awareness of what the topic of our
conversation was about. He laughed.
“Yeah, that’s the morphine talking,” he assured me.
I had to smile. Slowly, I sat up, careful of my skull, and looked
around. “First-class leather interior, plasma television,” I remarked as I
looked around. “Don’t tell me we’re riding on Air Force One.”
He laughed again. “No, we’re not riding on Air Force One. The
German government has decided to send their hero home on one of
their most secure and their best models of planes they have to honor
what you have done for them,” he explained.
I smiled wryly. “It was nothing – anyone would have done it to save
the world.”
He gave me an odd look. “Nikole, it’s a great honor to ride aboard
these kinds of planes. Just be honored and polite,” he told me.
I laughed and then winced as my ribs ached. “When haven’t I?” I
asked him.
 He grinned and helped me into a comfortable leather seat. A flight
attendant came out with a friendly smile. “Can I get you anything?”
she asked me in English with a German accent.
“Water would be nice,” I told her in German.
She seemed startled to be spoken to in her own language. “Yes,
miss,” she replied in the same language. She turned to Aristo who
shook his head and with another smile, she left the cabin.
Aristo sat down beside me and I leaned against him. He gingerly put
an arm around me and I noticed he didn’t hold me as tightly as he
usually did. “I’m not made of glass,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but you’ve got fractured ribs,” he shot back.
“I’m fine!” I protested.
“In fact, you are not,” a familiar voice said behind us. I didn’t bother
to turn to see who it is because my ribs hurt and I already knew who it
was. “Hello there, dear Nik,” Smithers greeted me with a smile. He
made himself comfortable in front of me. “Getting into trouble again, I
see.”
“Smithers,” I greeted the old man. “You saved my life, yet again
with your inventions. How can I ever thank you?”
He smiled and leaned forward. “Just don’t keep getting them
destroyed,” he whispered to me like it was a secret. I couldn’t help but
laugh but this time I remembered to not laugh as hard. “I suppose you
found the arm pieces very handy?”
I nodded. “Yes, they helped me out of several tight spots.”
“Hmph,” he said, leaning back. “I think I might upgrade them then if
they’re so useful. Arm pieces can carry so much more things besides
blades.”
I smiled as he started talking about all the plans he had for new
inventions. I knew that he normally didn’t share his ideas until he had
finished with his first prototype so I was honored, really. “What are you
doing in Germany?” I asked him to change topics as he started talking
about a grapple gun installed into the forearm of the arm piece and
shot up, working like Spiderman’s web spinning ability.
“Well, I’ve never been to Germany so when I heard you were here, I
thought I’d take a trip over with Aristo to come see it, and to come see
you,” he told me. The flight attendant came back with my water.
“Some scotch please,” he told her in perfect German. The lady smiled
and left. “Anyway, it was a nice two days in Germany. It really is a
beautiful country, despite all of the grief that has happened here.”
We chatted then for the rest of the plane ride. The flight attendant
even produced an Xbox out of what seemed nowhere and the three of
us played for a while on several games. Smithers was the first to stop,
protesting that his old eyes were aching. I stopped soon after because
my head and ribs hurt. Instead, I leaned against Aristo and watched
him play Need for Speed.
“Where do you want to live?” I asked him after a while.
 His fingers twitched on the remote and the car swerved in a perfect
circle and sped off again. “I don’t know. I was thinking Russia, but the
Mafia is going to realize that I would be no use to them because of
what happened with Griefe – he had to pay for my services and part of
the pay goes to the Mafia. And he paid a lot so they aren’t going to be
very happy to find that I helped bring about his downfall. So Russia is
probably a no go – we won’t be safe,” he concluded. The game came
to an end and he switched off the game console and leaned back,
pulling me into his arms.
He kissed me gently, aware of my head, and pulled back again.
“What? No more?” I teased him, reaching up to place my hand against
his cheek.
“Not until you’re better,” he replied with his familiar tender smile.
I returned it with one of my own and tucked myself up against him.
He held me close and I settled down for a nap. I listened as Aristo’s
breathing evened out as he fell asleep. I listened to his breathing for a
while before I drifted off as well, the rhythm of his breath the last thing
I heard.
Chapter 10
Two months later…

Two months later, after the incident with Griefe and after Aristo and I
had set up a nice small home in the Washington state countryside, the
call of duty – or rather, the call back to duty – came back to me in the
form of a mailed package.
It was a plain brown paper package, dropped at the front door with
no labels, no names, nothing on it. I could fit the small package into
one hand. I had found this package when I got home from work – yes, I
worked, just to maintain an appearance, not because we needed
money (we had enough with funding from the United States
government and the money that Aristo saved up) – and now, I was
sitting in the kitchen, staring at the package lying there on the counter.
I was contemplating whether or not I should open it because
opening it would mean that I would be back on duty again – assuming
that it was for me – and I didn’t want that – we had a peaceful routine
here, and I didn’t want to ruin it. Yet, I was curious about what it was
about.
Aristo found me like this a little while later, the keys to the car and
the house still in his hand, and the grocery clutched in the other.
“What’s this?” he asked, setting the paper bag and its things on the
counter next to the package. He set the keys down to and kissed me in
greeting.
“Found it on our doorstep after I got back,” I replied.
“Why don’t you open it?” he asked, opening the bag and putting the
things away.
“Because I don’t want to go back to working,” I told him.
He shrugged. It didn’t really matter to him about whether I opened
it or not. He just would care a lot if I answered that call to duty. In fact,
he would try to prevent me from going. I knew, because I knew Aristo
too well.
But in the end, curiosity got the better of me and the package was
opened.
Inside the box was a small silver cell phone. The moment I opened
it, it started ringing. “Hello?” I answered the phone. Aristo stopped
what he was doing to watch me.
“This is a recorded message. It will be destroyed after it has been
played. Please pay attention,” an electronic voice said. “You, Nikole
Versace, have been chosen to operate and lead the mission designated
as Operation Extinction. Your goal is to infiltrate Vladimir Koscovich’s
home, gain his trust, and acquire the list of all of the names of those in
the Chain. Should you choose to accept, someone will shortly arrive to
take you to the mission briefing.”
Then the voice changed. “Hello, Nikole, I’m sorry to have to
summon you like this, but this is a matter of the utmost importance
and we can’t do this without you,” Mr. Reynolds’ voice said. I knew it
was recorded. “After what you did for us with the matter of Griefe, we
can’t thank you enough – and I don’t think that we ever will.”
“This message will self-destruct in five seconds,” the electronic
voice said as soon as Mr. Reynolds finished speaking on the phone.
Immediately, I shut the phone, opened the nearest window and threw
the phone out, just in time as it erupted into a small explosion.
“What was that?” Aristo asked, coming to sit beside me.
“A summons,” I replied.
He sighed. “You aren’t going to go, are you?” he asked me.
“Thinking about it.”
He stood up and left the room right after I said that, muttering
something in Russian about how the government should at least give
me a medal of valor or something first for what I’ve done for them
before sending me off again.
I sighed and stood up from the stool and began to clear what
remained of the package into the trashcan and went to find Aristo.
I found him upstairs in our bedroom, sitting on the bed and staring
at the pictures of us that we had taken that lined up on the dresser
surface. They weren’t wedding pictures – in fact, we weren’t even
married because Mr. Reynolds, who was my guardian, wouldn’t allow it
since I was so young – but they were pictures of us. Aristo took me into
his arms with a sigh as soon as I sat down next to him.
“What are you doing up here?” I asked him softly.
“I don’t want you to go again,” he told me instead. “They have
other agents.”
“But I’m their only –”
“Child spy, yes, but it doesn’t mean that they have to keep sending
you in,” he pointed out. “Besides, you’ve been through enough and I
don’t see why they can’t just accept that and send someone else.”
“You don’t even know where I’m going,” I told him after a moment.
“I don’t need to. Because you’re not going,” he replied.
“Aristo,” I sighed.
He turned to look at me. “Look, I know you want to go, but what
about me? I know it sounds selfish, but what happens to me when
you’re gone for two months? What do I tell all the people we meet
everyday? And have you even felt what I feel like every time you go off
somewhere dangerous and I can’t go with you to protect you?” he said,
his eyes blazing.
“Aristo –”
“It feels horrible,” he interrupted, giving me a little shake. “I can’t
stand it. Every minute you’re away from me, I’m scared for you. Even
when we’re just separate for just a minute, I feel the same.”
“Aristo!” I shouted as he took a breath to continue. He blinked and
looked at me. “I know what you feel, I really do. I feel the same way,
but it can’t be helped. And I have to do this. I want to do this, Aristo.”
 He took a slow breath and his eyes closed. I leaned against him and
he held me tightly against him. Finally he sighed and calmed down. “If
you get yourself killed –”
“I won’t,” I replied with a smile.
He glared at me and continued. “I won’t ever forgive you. Ever,” he
said firmly.
Then the doorbell rang. “Expecting anybody?” I asked him and he
shook his head. Together, we went down the stairs to the front door as
the bell rang again. We opened the door to find a man dressed in a
blue uniform decorated with military stars, badges, medals, and all the
usual shiny stuff standing there.
“Nikole Versace?” he asked me. I nodded in reply. “My name is
Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Edwards and I’m here to escort you and
Aristo Gregovich to Seattle.”
“What?” I asked after a moment. Aristo?
He gave a small smile. “Everything will be explained to you on the
way. Please, take a few things with you. We’re operating on a tight
schedule,” he told us.
“Oh, well, in that case, come in for a moment. We’ll go get our
stuff,” I told him.
He nodded. “Thank you.”
We closed the door after him and dashed up the stairs. “What is this
about?” he asked me softly as we went up the stairs, taking them two
at a time.
“I have no idea,” I replied.
“What do they want with me?”
“We’ll find out.”
In a few moments, we had a few things packed, changed into our
better clothes and were soon down the stairs where the colonel was
waiting. We opened the door and as we left the house, I locked it
behind us and followed the colonel to a black car waiting for us. “How
did you know I accepted the mission?” I asked the man as we got in.
He gave a half smile. “We didn’t. We were just sent to pick you up
by Reynolds. Apparently he knew you better than you knew yourself,”
he replied.
I had to laugh at that and even Aristo cracked a grin but I could tell
that he was tense. We had no idea what this was about, but I did know
that it had something to do with the Russian Vladimir Koscovich in
Russia who bred endangered animals as a humanitarian act to the
wilderness of the world.
The door closed and then the car sped off. “As you know, this
mission is in regard to Koscovich and we have to get someone in there
that is unsuspicious to him and we need the both of you – Aristo,
because he knows Russia and you, Nikole, because we need a child,
especially a girl,” Colonel Edwards explained from the front seat.
 “What is your plan, exactly?” Aristo asked suspiciously, putting a
protective arm around my waist. I leaned against him to listen.
“Well, we need someone to get into Koscovich’s holdings in Russia.
Koscovich is known to take in wards to study at his mansion. He offers
the study of zoology at his mansion and we’ve signed you up,” he
explained, nodding at me.
I looked up then. “Me? But I don’t know the least about animals!” I
protested.
“But you have a gold lab named Darwin after Charles Darwin,”
Colonel Edwards told me with a smile. I stared at him until I took in
what he said.
“A dog?” I demanded. “I don’t have a –“
There was a bark and a whine from the back of the car and I turned
slightly and spotted a large dog crate in the back. “Oh, that dog.”
Colonel Edwards smiled. “Yes, Darwin is a fully trained lab dog that
can do many things. In fact, he’s a military trained dog, for military
purposes,” he explained to me.
Darwin started barking then. “Darwin, be quiet, please,” I shouted
to the back seat and he fell silent immediately, much to my surprise.
“I did tell you that Darwin is well trained. But anyway, you’ll go in as
a student on zoology with Darwin and Aristo and you’ll be gathering
information on all of what you did when you were spying on Griefe,”
Colonel Edwards continued.
“But I can’t go to Russia –”
“We’ve cleared it up with their government because you’re one of
our people now and they’re letting you go in. And believe me, if
anyone makes a move on you, government or not, we’ll see it as an act
of aggression, meaning we’ll take measures, so it’ll mean that they’ll
be forced to do anything in their power to keep the Mafia at bay,”
Colonel Edwards interrupted.
Aristo could say nothing for a while. I knew that he was speechless
because he had wanted to return home for a while but couldn’t. “I
don’t know what to say,” he finally said at last.
The colonel smiled. “Just do your best by us and we’ll just count the
debt paid in return,” he told him.
“But you still haven’t told me what I would be doing –”
“Nikole will need a chaperone – you seem the most suitable
because you are a former contract killer and you know Russia pretty
well,” he interrupted, leaving no room for protests.
“Oh,” was all he said.
The car turned off the road and down a dirt path. “We’ll be there in
a few minutes,” Colonel Edwards said, turning to the front again. “And
you’ll be completely and fully briefed once we arrive.”
Soon we were driving through a small wood and then the car rolled
to a stop in front of a small shed that I knew contained an elevator that
led to the rest of the underground compound.
 We got out of the car and Colonel Edwards brushed his card against
the magnetic lock on the door. The light on the door flicked from red to
green and there was a click as the door unlocked to let us in. we
stepped in as the driver of the car got out and followed us inside after
letting Darwin out of the back.
The great huge golden Labrador bounded over to me with a goofy
grin on his doggy face. The elevator required another card and Colonel
Edwards provided it. But instead of swiping it down the strip again, he
gave it to Darwin who took it gingerly in his teeth. “Watch this,” he
said with a grin when we gave him an odd look.
Darwin went over to the lock and climbing up to his hind legs, using
the wall as a support, he neatly swiped the card in the scanner. The
doors slid open and the four of us, plus a happy Darwin, entered the
elevator. “Good job, Darwin,” I told him as he pressed himself against
my leg affectionately. Colonel Edwards took his card back from the dog.
He seemed to smile up at me and barked once. The dog was huge. The
top of his head came up to my elbow.
“Thirteenth floor, please, Darwin,” Colonel Edwards said to the dog.
The dog left my side for a moment and he contemplated the whole
panel of numbers in front of him for a moment before he nosed the
button labeled “13”. The button lit up and there was a jolt as elevator
began to move.
“Good boy,” I told him as he came back to me. I knelt down until I
was eye level with him and he stared back at me and proceeded to
wash my face with his long tongue. I laughed and reached up to hold
him at bay, pulling at his collar. Almost immediately, he stopped as if
knowing and he grinned at me, panting at me.
Then the elevator stopped moving and with a ding, the doors slid
open – I had forgotten how fast the elevators were. We filed out one by
one and Darwin stayed at my side. Colonel Edwards seemed to have
noticed this. “He seems oddly devoted to you,” he said with a smile at
the dog.
“That’s a good thing, though, right?” I asked him.
He laughed. “Maybe,” he admitted.
Darwin chose that moment to give my hand a lick. “No licking,” I
told him. “That’s just gross. You don’t see me swiping my tongue all
over people’s bodies.” The stupid dog just grinned at me and licked my
fingers again. I turned to Colonel Edwards. “I don’t suppose he knows
the command of ‘no licking’.”
He laughed again as we strode forward. “No, I’m afraid not, but he
really is a very intelligent dog,” he told me. Edwards led the group
forward and then turned down a corridor. I recognized it as the corridor
leading down to one of the many briefing rooms that the compound
had.
Soon enough, we reached the door to the room and it opened to
admit us.
 Inside, five people sitting at the table stood as we came in. I was
confused. Did we rise so much in honor since the last time we had
been here? But then behind me, I heard someone clear their throat and
I turned to see that there was a well-decorated general with a jacket
gleaming with medals and stars behind us. Quickly, I sat down in an
empty seat and Aristo sat down beside me as the others did the same.
Darwin greeted the general with a soft bark and the general smiled,
placing a hand on the dog’s hand.
“Hello there, Darwin,” he said to the dog.
The dog wagged his tail once or twice and then came to lie down
beside me. The general’s pale eyes followed the dog for a moment
before he finally looked at me in the eye. Then he turned away to look
at the rest of the room. “Hello, everyone. I suppose you know why
we’re all here,” he said, his gentle and deep voice echoing through the
silent room as he made his way to the head of the table.
“No,” someone said sarcastically.
The general, to my surprise, laughed and sat down in his chair.
Everyone else sat down as he did. The general shuffled papers in front
of him, organizing them into piles until he was satisfied. Everyone else
did the same and stopped when he did, even though their piles were
already organized how they liked it. I guessed that it was to make it
seem not as awkward for the general than anything else.
He cleared his throat. “All right, we’ve got a call. Vladmir Koscovich,
one of those we have been keeping an eye on ever since the Agent
Nikole Versace infiltrated Griefe’s mansion and retrieved the data for
us about the Chain. In fact, we’ve been keeping an eye on all members
of the Chain, but Koscovich is the first to move after Griefe’s failure
with the Apocalypses a few months ago. We assume that they have
been directed by a superior to make their moves down the line – down
their Chain – should any of them fail.”
“What is Koscovich doing again?” someone called from in the back
of the room.
The general nodded in the direction of someone across from me. A
scientist stood up from where he was sitting and cleared his throat
nervously as the eyes of some of the most important people in the
world turned to him. “Koscovich is creating biological weapons through
is research of animals, under the guise of breeding extinct or
endangered animals. The world sees him as a saint for trying to save
the animals but according to data that Miss Versace acquired a few
months ago, it has been confirmed that he is close to making a
biological weapon,” he explained, his eyes dropping as he talked. By
the time he finished, he was staring at his feet.
“Thank you, doctor,” the general told the poor man. With a nod, he
dropped into his seat, perspiration apparent on his forehead.