by Kyoko M
As if his miserable thoughts weren’t enough, Jack also couldn’t help feeling unnerved by the CIA agent seated across the aisle, calmly sipping coffee from a paper cup and working on his laptop. He had no idea why, but Agent Fry set his internal alarms off something fierce.
“So,” Fry said about three hours into their thus-far silent flight. “How long have you two been together?”
Jack glanced up from his textbook. “Sorry?”
Fry nodded to the slumbering scientist next to Jack. “You and her.”
“What makes you think—”
“The way you talk to each other. The way she looks at you. The way you smile at her. Ray Charles could see that shit, and he’s both blind and dead.”
Jack peered at him. “Helluva way to start a conversation.”
“I like to be direct.”
“No kidding. Why is our relationship length of any importance to you anyway?”
“I like to get a read on people I’m going to work with. Makes the job easier.”
“I thought the stereotype goes that all CIA agents are like Sherlock Holmes and can instantly do an accurate cold read of any person they meet.”
Fry grinned. “That’s mostly true, but it doesn’t hurt to just ask. Then you can gauge a person’s honesty and integrity despite what you’ve already deduced about them.”
“Does integrity come up a lot in your line of work?”
“Not as much as it should.”
Jack weighed his options. “A month and a couple weeks, but we knew each other a year before it happened.”
“I’m guessing you asked her out?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Honestly, she can do better, so I figured you were the one who was smitten first.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Fry shrugged. “Just sayin’. Lady’s got options. Her reputation precedes her. It’s in her blood. I’ve seen a few of her father’s lectures. Brilliant man. More stuck up than a tampon.”
Jack grunted. “That part I agree with. We both agreed not to tell him about the relationship until we absolutely have to. He’s gonna blow a gasket. She’ll never hear the end of it, God bless her. If I had it my way, I’d introduce him to Pete and be done with it.”
“Very diplomatic of you. Let me know how that goes. I can make a phone call and you’ll never hear from him again.”
“I believe it.” Jack shifted in his seat a bit, though careful not to wake Kamala. “If you don’t mind me asking, how’d you get assigned to us? I sensed Agent Dunham wasn’t thrilled about it.”
“You sensed that, huh?” Fry’s voice was dry and flat enough to light a match.
“Yeah, I could give Spider-Man a run for his money.”
“Dunham’s a good agent. Smart as hell, but she’s got a stick up her ass the size of the Washington monument. She’s extremely by-the-book, and I’m much more…” Fry licked his lips and smirked a bit. “…creative.”
“How many missions have you run?”
Fry wrinkled up his nose in thought. “This one’ll make forty-five for my career.”
“How many of those have been in Japan?”
“Maybe ten? It gets blurry after a certain point.”
“I know you can’t go into detail, but what’s your primary role?”
“Surveillance, recon, crisis management, and the like. Most people get confused about what an actual CIA agent is. I’m a field officer, not an agent, as they say on the silver screen, but it’s a term people are more familiar with so we still use it. Hollywood’s not doing us any favors making it look all flashy and glamorous. Don’t get me wrong: the work’s not boring, but it’s not five-star meals and three-thousand-dollar suits.”
“Interesting. Anything I need to know about you?”
Fry offered him a thin smile. “Just keep your eyes on the prize and do what I say. Other than that, I don’t see us having a problem, Dr. Jackson.”
A chill brushed through Jack, like opening a window just as a wintry breeze rolled by. Jack didn’t break his gaze despite the discomfort. “Don’t suppose you have any theories about why someone tried to kill me tonight?”
“From what I gather, the Japanese are divided in terms of how they feel about you. Some are excited about the project and want to be as involved as possible to help it along. Others have reservations about what kind of future these dragons will create for us. However, the latter party isn’t the kind to send out a professional hitter. I think the jack-holes who bred Baba Yaga hired a local gunner to take you out in an effort to stall our investigation. Killing you would serve their purpose just fine, but it’s more of a distraction than anything else. Hell, they’ve already set us back since the Cambridge boys-in-blue now have to investigate the shoot-out.”
“So I’m a pawn once again,” Jack sighed, massaging the bridge of his bruised nose as it stung sharply. “That never gets old.”
“Well, at least you were smart enough to survive the hit. I know a lot of civvies who would have frozen up and died on that street. Give yourself a little credit. Same for the doc. If she hadn’t noticed that car following her, who knows what would have happened?”
Jack’s stomach balled up into a painful knot. He swallowed past the lump forming in his throat as he thought about walking through caution tape and seeing Kamala lying in a pool of her own blood. He shut his eyes and took a steadying breath, abolishing the image from his mind. “Yeah. Who knows? Anyway, what’s the story on the other two people they’re looking at for the team?”
Fry shook his head. “Before I left, they hadn’t nailed down who’ll be there. I guess we’ll find out who said yes after we land.”
“Saying no was an option?”
“Heh. Not everyone’s as noble as you, doc. Some people value self-preservation.”
“All the more reason to help. Who knows how far Baba Yaga could travel and how many people she could hurt before someone stops her? Kind of makes you responsible if you had the ability to stop her and didn’t, don’t you think?”
Fry eyed him. “Maybe, maybe not. But that’s a moot point now, wouldn’t ya say?”
Next to him, Kamala mumbled something and stirred. The blanket tumbled down her front as she scratched her nose without ever waking. Jack tugged the soft wool to just under her neck and brushed a kiss over her forehead.
“Guess it is.”
The two scientists had seen their share of horrors in the past month, but nothing could truly prepare them for the aftermath of Baba Yaga’s rampage in downtown Tokyo.
It took them quite a while to get there from Haneda International Airport, even with the police escort, as the city had been all but locked down to ensure its citizens protection. Traffic was gridlocked on the major highways due to the evacuation of the affected areas. Entire families uprooted to stay with relatives in neighboring towns. A general gloom had descended over them much like the early morning fog.
The cops had offered them hospital masks while they were inside the police car, and Jack and Kamala knew why as soon as the doors opened and they stepped into the street sectioned off with traffic cones and caution tape. The building had originally been four stories tall and mostly made of glass and now only one level remained. Clumps of ash coated the half-melted cars, the dented road, the damaged store fronts, and what remained of the building itself, as if a nuclear bomb had gone off only days prior.
After they were waved through, an average-height man wearing a mask, gloves, and coveralls greeted them. He held a clipboard in one hand and used the other to shake their hands.
“Good afternoon. Thank you for coming. I’m Jin. I’m the equivalent of the CSU on the scene, if you will. Please follow me.”
He stepped over the rubble that led to what used to be the lobby. Nearly everything was smudged in black ash or grey sludge from the water they’d used to put out the fire. The lobby had been a hundred square feet, but m
ost of the floor had sunken into the earth. A hole the size of a residential swimming pool gaped open in the center, making the two sub-level floors visible. They could see other people in coveralls, masks, and gloves hurrying back and forth with carts of items to be logged and identified later.
“Based on the footage we recovered, the initial explosion came from Sub-Level B,” Jin said, pointing to the furthest floor below them. “The cause appears to be some kind of combustion rather than an actual incendiary device. The roof collapsed only a few minutes after the explosion and the fire took care of the rest of the building. There’s not much up here, so let’s head down so you can have a look.”
He led them straight ahead to the staircase, which was still mostly intact due to being surrounded in cinderblock. Once they reached the bottom floor, Jin stopped one of the workers and asked for gloves, then handed them to Jack and Kamala. “So far, I’ve managed to isolate the site of the explosion, even if the blast itself is a little unclear. They were holding the dragon in this cell.”
He stepped around a corridor that had clearly been converted into a cell, as its walls weren’t cinderblock but plain dry wall and beams like a normal office building would have been. It was eighty square feet from corner to corner. The floor had deep claw marks scored across it everywhere, as if the dragon had been trying to dig itself out with no luck, as the walls weren’t stone, but the ground was.
A small folding table had been set up next to the cell and had items that were already bagged, tagged, and ready to be taken to the lab for analysis. Jin picked up a twisted, half-melted lump of metal and handed it to Kamala. “What do you think this is?”
Kamala flipped it over in her hands a few times. “It looks like it used to have a hinge of some sort, but honestly? I have no idea.”
Jin pointed to the spot she’d mentioned. “Look closely. See the bend in the metal? This thing is solid steel. It was her muzzle.”
Jack’s jaw dropped, though it went unseen thanks to his mask. “You’re kidding. I mean, steel melts at—”
“1,510 degrees Celsius,” Jin said, nodding grimly. “We think that the dragon somehow slipped out of it and that accounts for what happened to her muzzle.”
Jin stepped further into the cell and pointed his pen at the wall, particularly at a chunk that had been burrowed deep into it. “I’ll try to put a timeline together for you. First, let’s say the dragon wasn’t being monitored closely and got her muzzle off. The only other evidence we have that still remains is this hole in the wall. We can tell she didn’t get out through there, but it’s still rather curious. If she blew fire that destroyed the front wall where you’re standing, why did she dig into the wall?”
Jack held his hand out to steady Kamala as they walked over a large dirt mound to where Jin stood. He dug through the damp grit until his hand touched something solid. He grunted and tugged it forward, discovering that he’d found a pipe.
“Son of a bitch,” Jack muttered. “I think we found your explosion. This is a gas pipe.”
Jin took a cotton swab and wiped it along the inside of the half-crumpled pipe. He smelled the tip and then hurried over to the small table where there was a microscope. He rubbed the residue from the swab onto a fresh slide. After a moment or two, he lifted his head and nodded. “That’s gas, alright.”
Kamala passed the pipe over to Jin, who slipped it into an evidence bag. “That just raises more questions. How did she get out? The hole in the wall isn’t through the other side. Are you telling me that she survived an explosion?”
“It looks to be that way,” Jin said. “We’ve gathered what remained of the glass so we could test it, but the initial analysis shows it was pretty much melted completely down to liquid form. She basically lucked out while she was trying to crawl out and set off a homemade bomb inside her own cell.”
“How on earth did she survive that? For that matter, how can she produce fire that is 1,510 degrees Celsius without bursting into flames herself? Did any of her files survive the fire?”
“We haven’t found anything yet,” Jin sighed. “No DNA, no scale samples, nothing is here. However, I’ll send someone around with you to take a look before you head to the next site. I heard earlier that they might have at least recovered some chemicals at the GiGo arcade building. If you find anything while you’re on your walkthrough, let me know and I’ll make it a priority. In the meantime, I’ve got to get back to it.”
“Thanks," Jack said. "We’ll do our best.”
“One more thing before you go,” Kamala said. “Were there any survivors?”
Jin blew out a long breath. “Do you want the short answer or the long answer?”
Jack and Kamala exchanged glances and both said, “The short answer.”
“No. However, my people have swept this place at least ten times and we keep coming across a pair of footprints that doesn’t match up with our movements. All the people who were in the building when it blew are either dead or in critical condition unable to talk to the police. We’ve been trying to keep this site under lock and key, but we think someone returned to the scene. Not sure how, when, or why, but we know someone came through here that wasn’t part of CSU.”
“How long before you can find out who it might have been?”
He threw up his hands. “In the middle of this mess? Days? Maybe a week? The lab will be backed up for a month at this rate. I told uniforms to be on the lookout for suspicious activity outside of the site. They’ll let me know if anything turns up.”
“Right. Good luck and thanks for your help.”
They shook hands again and Jin left. Kamala and Jack took out their phones and began photographing the remains of the cell. They toured the rest of the facility, but there was little to find other than mostly destroyed lab equipment. None of the files, hard copy or electronic, had survived the explosion.
“This is nuts,” Jack said, staring up at the gaping hole through the center of the building and then trailing his gaze down to the collapsed roof. “How the hell did this happen? How long were these experiments going on? Why did no one catch on to the fact that they had a twenty-five-foot dragon being raised in the middle of the city?”
“She had to have been bred here,” Kamala said, pacing as she flipped through the pictures on her phone. “There is no way she was transported in. It also explains how no one found out about it. Two floors down would provide excellent sound-proofing. However, it does beg the question if this was truly an accident. Almost all the evidence is obliterated and there aren’t any viable witnesses. True, the dragon stumbled onto this escape, but the timing is too unusual to ignore.”
Jack faced her. “You’re thinking someone wanted this to happen? Sabotage?”
Kamala nodded. “If you consider the other interested parties, it doesn’t sound so crazy. The last thing we heard is that the Inagawa-kai and the Yamaguchi-gumi enacted a ceasefire and possibly collaborated on this project with the Sugimoto siblings. With Okegawa out of the way, they wouldn’t have to worry about someone being reckless running the operation. That might also explain our mystery guest who came back through the site after the explosion. What if someone else interested in the dragon let her out of that muzzle so she’d break free?”
“The plot thickens,” Jack said. “We’ll have plot-porridge soon at the rate we’re going. We’d better head to the second site and see what they’ve found.”
Unlike the research facility, the GiGo Sega arcade appeared largely unharmed, except for a few crevasses dug into the roof’s ledge where Baba Yaga had leapt off to chase after the police helicopter. Jack and Kamala rode the elevator up to the top floor where a much smaller team had gathered to snap photos and search for more evidence.
The rooftop had claw marks as well, but what drew the eye most of all were the darkened trails along the ground leading to the ledge where she’d taken off. As they approached, a woman with a long ponytail wearing a lab coat stood
and greeted them.
“Good afternoon. Thanks for coming. I’m Caroline.”
“Nice to meet you. What have you found so far?”
Caroline shook her head briefly. “Just more questions. Take a look.”
She rummaged through her coat and withdrew a magnifying glass. Kamala and Jack knelt in front of the twin trails, examining them closely. To their surprise, what had looked like dried crust trails were burns in the concrete.
“This is what caused her fire-breathing?” Kamala asked.
“We think so. I’ve already begun testing the substance left behind and I’ve found trace amounts of sucrose, sodium chlorate, and sulfuric acid.”
“Ingredients for a chemical fire,” Jack said, glancing up at her. “But did you get the report from the site where she escaped? Her fire melted through steel. How the hell did it get to that kind of heat if it was biologically produced?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Caroline said. “That shouldn’t be possible of any living creature, but we are in the realm of biological engineering. If they have been designing this dragon, there’s no telling what kind of alterations they’ve made to her DNA. It could be that they miscalculated something at the earliest stages that produced this side effect.”
The two scientists stood and Jack handed Caroline the magnifying glass back. “Were you able to find any scale samples?”
“Not scales.” She beckoned them towards the ledge. They leaned over to see a faint brownish crust flaking on the stone. “Dried blood. We’ve collected a few samples and they’re on their way to the lab as we speak. I don’t have the equipment here to study it, but I thought you might be able to make some observations.”
Kamala snapped a couple photos and held them up so Jack could see as well, rather than dangling precariously over the side. She expanded the photo and peered down at it, tilting her head. “The pattern is different. The blood didn’t just drip down like she was already wounded and there’s no trail leading up to it. I would guess that she gripped the stone at a bad angle and it dug in between the scales on the bottom of her claws. She must have multiple layers of epidermal and that was some kind of soft spot. She survived an explosion without a scratch, and yet here she got a cut. Curious.”