“Like I said, you’ll be in an agency jet. Consider yourself lucky. It’ll have you there in two hours.” He looked like he was going to say more, but stopped himself. “Good luck, Abby. I have total faith in you.”
“Really?” I asked, my eyebrows snaking up on my forehead though I didn’t mean for them to. According to Chuck, I wasn’t exactly worthless, but I sure was bumbling. It wasn’t my fault because I’d never really been trained. Instead, I’d had a bunch of skills downloaded into my brain. It made it so I could hack into a computer or Kung Fu the crap out of an attacker, but I didn’t have the sort of situational experience needed to get out of tough situations. I was more a hammer and less a precision laser.
When dealing with a group of bad guys, it usually wasn’t an issue, but trying to get out of certain situations had turned out dicey at best. It was why most of my training at his hands had involved placing me in ridiculous situations designed to foil even the most experienced operatives.
“Yes. I’ve been training you for something exactly like this,” Chuck replied, placing one hand against the glass. “Give ‘em hell.”
“Will do,” I said, suddenly brimming with confidence as I turned and made my way to the door.
“Um, excuse me,” the medic mumbled, and as I turned toward him, I realized he was bright red.
“Yes?” I asked as he held out a pen toward me. At least it looked like a normal pen and not a nice one either. Just one of those cheap ones I always stole from my teacher in homeroom.
“Take this,” he said, pressing the object into my hand. “It’ll help.”
“What’s it do?” I asked as he stood there empty-handed. It was almost like he didn’t know what to do with himself now.
“It writes, but if you get into trouble, try throwing it at the enemy.” He paused and smiled at me. “It works especially well on bears.”
“Okay,” I said a little slower than was probably necessary. Why the hell had he given me a normal pen? I thought about asking, but what if he was playing a trick on me and it was something I was supposed to know about. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” he replied, spinning on his heel and moving toward Chuck as the pen vanished into my suit. I sighed. I was going to have to get a handle on the whole suit holding everything thing, or I was going to wind up absorbing a kitchen sink.
I let out a slow breath and made my way outside. Agents had managed to clear the stairs so I wouldn’t have to shimmy up any elevators, but I was still several floors from the runway. It took a lot longer to reach than I’d have liked, but when I arrived I was surprised to see a plane sitting in the middle of the hanger. Not surprised by the plane being there, more by the fact it sort of looked like one of those old fashioned prop planes and was painted bright fuchsia.
There were two seats on the plane. One in front and one in back, but the first one appeared to be filled by a massive mechanical octopus. I wasn’t sure what the agency’s deal was, but this facility, unlike the others I’d had the displeasure of visiting, seemed filled to the brim with ridiculous robotic creations.
As I approached, the purple octopus turned toward me and flashed me an infectious grin. “Hello, Abby. Are you ready to go?” it asked in a voice that sort of reminded me of Neil Gaiman.
“Uh, yeah,” I replied, the urge to head back down the sixty-seven flights of stairs and smack Chuck upside the head filling me to nearly the brim. “Are we going in that?”
“Yup, Coraline here is the best plane we have!” He smacked the side of the vehicle with one tentacle. The thwack of it was strangely wet sounding. “The fastest too. It will get you wherever you want, lickity split!”
I rubbed my temples with one hand as I approached and climbed into the plane without muttering a word about how insane everything seemed. The passenger spot was strangely roomy, and I had enough room to stretch my legs out. I buckled my seatbelt as the octopus spun around and watched me, eyes strangely focused on the harness.
“Ready?” he asked, and when I nodded he spun around, his tentacles flew over the controls in front of him. A glass hood raised from the sides of the plane, covering the cockpit in a shell. The propeller at the front of the plane began to spin, but the sound of it was drowned out by music as Like A G6 by Far East Movement began blaring inside the cockpit
“Now put your hands up,” the octopus called, and the next thing I knew we were airborne and hurtling through the sky so quickly, my stomach hurt.
7
Two hours later, we were in Athens, and while I was thanking my lucky stars the journey had been quick, I wasn’t exactly happy with the robot pilot. For one thing, his music collection left something to be desired. For another, well, his drop off plan was a little… extreme.
“There’re all these open fields around here!” I cried one last time, scrambling to fasten the straps of my parachute on as the plane circled over the heart of Athens, Greece. “Can’t we land somewhere a little more low key? Please?”
“Ready, set, go!” the robotic octopus pilot screamed, ignoring me like it had every single time I’d voiced a concern. It was like the thing was designed to piss me off.
The ground beneath my feet evaporated. I plummeted downward, the Athena Parthenon barely visible below me. My heart leapt into my throat as I fell, suddenly supported by nothing but thin air. I shut my eyes for a brief second and let my body do its thing, trusting in the instincts implanted into my brain to keep me from ending up splattered on the sidewalk. Thankfully, my hands found the ripcord and jerked on it. My parachute exploded open, catching the wind and slowing my descent to just this side of absolutely terrifying.
I’d never done a night jump before so this one was particularly scary, especially since I was pretty sure we were over protected airspace. The only other time I’d even used a parachute was when I’d had to escape a blown up helicopter. I guess, in comparison to that time, this was fairly pleasant.
My feet touched down a moment later, and the impact was a lot harder than I’d expected. I found myself tumbling forward as my knees buckled. My hands instinctively released the parachute’s straps, detaching the fabric from my body before it could catch the wind and pull me off the cliff. I stumbled forward, barely able to catch my breath in time to see a flashlight beam coming up over the cliff.
I glanced around as a gust of wind caught my parachute and whipped it against a marble pillar with a sound like a thousand flapping bats. I cringed inwardly, hoping I hadn’t just destroyed a two-thousand year old shrine to the gods and sprinted off toward the exit, careful to keep out of the flashlight beam. I wasn’t exactly sure what the punishment was for leaving my parachute inside a temple dedicated to a Greek deity, but I was pretty sure I’d just accumulated some very bad karma. I sighed. Bad karma was exactly what I needed now…
The octopus had decided to drop me here because Morris’s beacon was only a couple of blocks away. Evidently, this place was relatively empty since it was well after midnight, and the Parthenon closed at 8 PM. I, on the other hand, had argued parachuting into a national landmark was absolutely insane.
Unfortunately, my answer did not compute. The octopus had even told me so in a tone deaf robotic voice, but I think he was mocking me since most of his other phrasing had carried some semblance of normal human speech, even if most of it seemed to be ripped directly from hip hop songs. It made me wonder about the guy who had programmed him.
The flashlight beam swept by me, fixing on my parachute, and I heard a sudden intake of breath. A radio crackled to life a moment later, but I’d already slipped by the thin, pencil-necked guard in the dark, my suit blending in with my surrounding like it was made of chameleon skin. I was instantly happy I had stolen the experimental suit even though I was one hundred percent positive it was dissolving my liver.
The marble stairs were surprisingly slick beneath my feet, but after almost slipping once, the grip on the soles of my boots changed, and I no longer had any problems. So the suit learned… Hopefully it a
lready knew how to deflect bullets. I wasn’t keen on it learning to do that after the fact.
I scrambled down the stairs as quickly as I could, now more worried about being spotted than slipping over the edge and falling a couple hundred feet to my death. Hadn’t the Greeks heard of handrails? As I was about to reach the exit, I realized I had not one, but two problems. Firstly, not only were sirens cutting through the air, but there was another person coming toward the gate. The second problem? The gate was locked.
I glanced around, looking for another exit. Finding none, I sprinted toward the chain link. I hopped over it with a grace I’d never before possessed and landed on the other side just as a flashlight beam caught me in the face. My suit reacted by darkening the material over my face as I sprang forward, slamming my fist into the guard’s temple and knocking him unconscious with a single blow. Mike Tyson had nothing on me. As he slumped to the ground, I sort of felt bad because he was pretty much the definition of wrong place wrong time.
“Sorry,” I mumbled as I sprinted past him and turned down the trail next to a giant red and white marble rock where I’d been told John the Baptist converted the first Greek to Christianity. Shouts filled the air a moment later, and I knew someone had already found the fallen guard. Not good. I sucked in a breath and ran as hard as I could, thankful for all the exercise Chuck had made me do despite all my bitching.
I soon found myself standing in the deserted square of the town and made myself scarce as police vans filled with full on riot gear pulled up beside the path I’d just come down. I’d gotten out of there just in time.
My clothing morphed into jeans and an Athens 2004 Olympics sweatshirt complete with matching baseball cap as I walked along the street, suddenly very aware I was a girl walking alone down a dark alley in the middle of the night. That seemed… bad. I knew I could probably take on anyone who came for me, but it was still a bit unnerving.
“I wonder if the feeling of being a helpless girl will ever go away,” I muttered to myself as the phone appeared in my hand. “I sure hope so…” Despite all my super skills and new training, I’d spent most of my life being relatively helpless and more than a little clumsy. Being able to take out a squadron of highly trained ninjas was still pretty new to me, and it hadn’t quite overridden the years of being scared of dark alleys. I pushed the thoughts away and fired up the application labeled Morris.
It wound up leading me to a bar with a name written in an alphabet I couldn’t decipher. It was a little weird because as I looked around, everything was written in Greek and I, well, didn’t speak the language. I don’t know why, but I guess I’d just sort of expected everything to be in English.
I tried to shove down the fact I was pretty much the epitome of an ignorant American as I stepped up to the doors. They were made of thick dark glass and had a certain grunginess to them I didn’t understand. The walls attached to the doors were covered in graffiti, and now that I was looking around, I realized a lot of walls and doors were covered in graffiti.
It was strange because back home I almost never saw graffiti, and when I did, it didn’t cover every square inch of real estate in the center of freaking town. I shrugged it off because I wasn’t about to repaint the town myself and pushed the door open. I was immediately greeted by a blast of cool air and music so loud, it made the robotic octopus’s jams seem low key. It was a little weird because I didn’t even know there were Greek rap artists.
I glanced around, but oddly, the only people I really saw were old men clad in jeans and stained tank tops, drinking a viscous white liquid with ice cubes. It was a little weird because they didn’t seem like the type to be listening to hip hop. They didn’t even so much as look up at me as I weaved through the tables toward the bar. As I moved closer, the cellphone vibrated in my hands, presumably indicating I was close to Morris.
There was no one at the bar but the bartender. He had his back to me so the only thing I could see of him was slicked back black hair. He was wearing a bright green Hawaiian shirt, which was sort of funny because I remembered someone once telling me the surest way to be spotted as a tourist was to wear a Hawaiian shirt. Still, this guy clearly worked here.
He reached up, grabbing a bottle of clear liquid off the shelf in front of himself before glancing over his shoulder at me. His face scrunched up in thought for a split second before vanishing behind a genial smile.
“What can I get for you? Ouzo?” he asked. His voice carried very little accent as he spoke in perfect English. It was very weird because I’d sort of expected him to speak in Greek.
“Um… what’s it taste like?” I asked, pulling myself onto the stool and sitting down in front of the polished mahogany bar. It was then I realized pretty much no one else was back here. Instead, everyone else was occupying tables toward the front of the establishment, staring out through the glass windows and onto the empty street. Evidently, they were only dark on the outside.
“Sort of like licorice,” he replied, sapphire eyes gleaming as he poured a small amount of the clear liquid into an ice-filled glass that reminded me of a large shot glass. It changed into a milky white substance before my eyes as he slid it toward me. “That one’s on the house since I’m pretty sure you came in here by mistake.” He gestured at the old men at the front, smoking and drinking, but not talking. Is this what old Greek men did at midnight?
“Uh… thanks, I think,” I replied, lifting the cool glass upward and sniffing the ouzo. It smelled a little strange, like the weird licorice old ladies used to occasionally give me as a tip during my former life as a restaurant servant. It would be too much to say I was a waitress and too little to say I had been the girl who asked, “Would you like fries with that?”
“Go on. It’s not poisoned,” he added, pouring another portion from the bottle into a glass and holding it out. “I’ll even drink it with you, Abby.”
If I’d been drinking the liquor, I’d have spit it out across the bar. Instead, I narrowed my eyes at him and placed the glass on the bar between us. The bartender shrugged and threw back his own drink even though I wasn’t sure if you were supposed to take it like a shot. If what the old guys were drinking was the same stuff, it seemed more like a sipping drink.
“So you know who I am?” I asked, hoping my voice sounded flat and angry. I’d been practicing it for a while, but Chuck always said I sounded more like an angry chipmunk than a badass superspy assassin ninja.
“You know you sound like a squeaky Saturday morning cartoon animal right? Like a mouse or a raccoon or something,” he replied, snatching my ouzo and tossing it back as well before exhaling a breath that smelled like musty licorice and week old bacon. It nearly made me gag.
“Making fun of me doesn’t answer the question,” I replied as I slipped my hand into the pocket of my sweatshirt and casually pointed my index finger at him through the fabric.
“Hang on there, little lady,” he said, smirking as he moved around the bar and took a seat next to me. “You’re only the most famous agency target in the last decade. They’ve shown your face to everyone, but I heard you joined up with us.”
“Is that so?”
“Yup, I heard you went totally dark side. Drank the emperor’s cool aid and everything… speaking of which, how is the blind old bat, anyway?” he asked, holding his hand out toward me. “I’m special agent Morris, but you can call me Morris. Or Agent, but then it might get confusing if we run into someone else.” He grinned, and I had the sudden urge to smack him across the face and knock his smugness into next week.
“Abby,” I replied, using my free hand to shake with him. “And the director has been kidnapped. It’s why I’m here. I have to get him back. Chuck said you’d help me.”
Morris stared at me for a long time, so long, I was starting to wonder if he’d even heard me when he reached up and rubbed his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “And how could I possibly help you or Chuck? I’m not exactly special.” He gestured toward the surrounding bar. “I’m more
of a stay here in case we run across an asset so the flit can take over my brain and turn me into an unstoppable killing machine type. Though, I guess you axed that bit of my job. I guess I should thank you for that.”
I extricated my hand from his as I tried to decide whether or not this guy was for real. Part of me wondered if he was making a joke at my expense, somehow dropping the bit about the flit to take me off guard. Before I’d decided to let Chuck train me, I’d been stalked by a computer known as the flit. It had the ability to tunnel into a person’s brain and use the body to hunt me down. In the end, the flit had deleted itself when it found humanity wanting. It was sort of sad in more ways than one.
“I’m after a couple assets named Flash and Bang. I’m told you can help me track them down,” I said, deciding to ignore his jab. Two could play this game after all. “I have strict orders to kill you if you can’t comply.”
“I doubt that very much. The killing me part,” he said, standing up and moving toward the exit without even so much as a backward glance. “But I’ll take you to Flash and Bang. Only we need to stop somewhere first.”
“Why is that?” I asked, scrambling off my stool and catching him just as he stepped through the door and into the night. I guess abandoning his post as a bartender wasn’t a big deal.
“Well, my bookie won’t take bets over the phone. If you’re going after Flash, the demon of Manchester, and Bang, a ‘I blow up small cities for fun’ kind of guy, I definitely want to put in a bet.” He turned, grinning at me. “I bet I’ll get five to one odds.”
“For or against?” I asked, trying to decide if he was being serious. Something told me he was.
“Against. You.”
8
Morris stopped suddenly. His lanky body blocked my view of the outside world. His hand tightened on the door handle as he swallowed audibly.
Meet Abby Banks VOLUMES: 1-3 Page 38