by Katy Jordan
“Yeah… look, about earlier…” Jack began but was cut off with The Spectrum raising his two palms to Jack’s face.
“No need. Absolutely no need.”
Jack gave him a slight grin, feeling grateful and respectful of the person that this man portrayed.
He turned to Bullet.
“What do I do if they find out what I’m doing?” he asked nervously.
“If you think someone is on to you, all you have to do is say: ‘I don’t think the Black Bullet is dead’. As soon as we hear that, we’ll be right there to get you out.”
“How will you get there that fast?” Jack continued, panicked.
“Boy… trust her. Trust them all,” The Spectrum instructed.
A car horn from outside broke the silence that ensued, and Jack made his way down the glass staircase towards the door.
“Good luck, Jack!” Bullet shouted.
Jack turned and gave a half-hearted wave, and walked outside.
Bullet sighed with pent up tension she had been holding in all day.
“Sleep.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We should have let him sleep. He must be exhausted; he’s been here for two days, and he was with Flare for three. He hasn’t slept in that entire time,” Bullet rambled.
“I think the boy will do just fine, my dear. He can sleep on the road there. But, I’m sure all will be okay.”
The Spectrum made his way back to his office, leaving her on the balcony alone, watching Jack and Rocket get into the car and take off like a bat out of hell. The moment had come.
Although, it felt like it never would.
Neon had a mole.
One that he’d never see coming.
Chapter Five
Colour Coded sat in the Yellow Youth’s room, crowded around four different monitors. One was the footage from Jack’s jacket that Youth fitted before he left.
Another was floor plans of Neon’s headquarters.
The bottom left was footage from Sparrow’s drone showing the perimeter of the building.
The fourth, however, was completely different. It showed an electronic mind map, Neon being the centre point, with lots of branches off of him full of information; the date on which they created Prismatic, the date on which the ones who worked under him left Neon for The Spectrum, every mission and objective they worked on under Neon’s authority, everything Neon had done since they left them – that they were aware of – and the skills and weaknesses of Neon from the time that they knew him.
Youth and Bullet were sitting in seats right in front of the monitors, while Tide, Lab and Gecko stood at the back of them with Sparrow, who was controlling his drone around the boundary of Neon’s base.
“Does Flare know what’s happening?” asked Lab.
“Yup,” answered Bullet.
“How did she take it?” Tide cut in.
“Pretty much as you’d expect,” Bullet replied, not for one second taking her eyes off of Jack’s camera screen.
The Lavender Lab, a small plump woman in her mid-forties, checked her watch.
“Speaking of Flare, am I needed for anything? She’ll need her next dose of morphine very soon, and I need to refresh her bandages.”
“Flare is your first priority, Lab. Go do what you have to do to get her back on her feet. We’ve got this,” Bullet instructed.
“Right you are, then,” Lab squeezed Bullet’s shoulder lovingly before she left, Bullet holding her hand in response.
Everyone loved Lab, she was like the gang’s mother figure.
“Lab, can I have some morphine?” Gecko giggled.
“If you ask me that one more time, son, I’m going to start getting really worried.”
“What do you mean ‘start’?” He scoffed.
Lab chuckled as she walked away.
A few minutes later, Rocket walked in.
“That was fast,” Tide claimed.
“Remember who you’re talking to, Tide,” Rocket said proudly.
“Did Jack sleep in the car?” Bullet asked, concerned.
“No. I think he tried to. But, his head is kind of all over the place. He was quite quiet all the way there,” Rocket explained.
“Probably fearing for his life,” Tide jeered.
“Once he’s in there he’ll be fine,” said Gecko.
“I was talking about Rocket’s driving,” she confirmed, giving Rocket a look of disappointment, but was met with a look of sheer pride on his part.
“I’m going down to the garage to service everyone’s cars. If we get the distress code from Jack, we need to be ready, and I don’t want to take any chances,” Rocket said, but only received mere grunts from everyone too concerned with the monitors in front of them than with his sense of initiative.
“You know, it’s great working with you all. I feel so appreciated!” Rocket mocked, as he walked away.
Nobody said anything, but they were all smiling amongst themselves for keeping up their pretence.
As his footsteps got quieter, Tide had a very visible epiphany.
“Rocket! Can you fill up the water tank in my car in case it’s needed?”
“Comes as part of the service!” Rocket’s voice echoed back down the hall.
Satisfied, Tide turned her attention back to the monitors in front of everyone.
Gecko leaned closer to Jack’s monitor over Youth’s shoulder.
“Are they wearing uniforms?”
“I think so,” said Youth, “I’ll get a screen grab.”
He hit some keys as though he was a pianist, and a picture loaded up on a fifth monitor to the left of the clustered four. He had screenshot a man walking past Jack, and zoomed in on his chest.
A dark grey one-piece suit fitted the man, and a white triangle with a grey ‘P’ was on his chest to the left-hand side.
Bullet pressed into her ear to activate the gel earpiece.
“Jack, how many men does Neon have working for him?” she asked, her eyes boring through his camera screen.
He didn’t respond.
“Jack, can you hear me?” she asked, worried.
Jack did a 360-degree turn as he walked, showing two men on either side of him.
“He’s being escorted,” Youth confirmed.
“They’re taking him straight to Neon,” Bullet thought out loud.
“Youth, send that screen grab and a couple more to my account, maybe even a short clip too. I’m going to start working on mimicking that outfit,” Gecko stated before disappearing out of Youth’s room.
Youth battered the keyboard, taking shots from Jack’s camera and emailing them to Gecko.
“Wait,” Bullet exclaimed, “isn’t it going to be noticeable whenever Jack has to press his ear to talk to us?”
“He doesn’t,” Youth replied, “he has the prototype, which was the one that had a continuous outgoing frequency. I just connected it with ours.”
“So, he can hear everything we’re saying without us having to press it?” Tide quizzed.
“No, because we still have to activate ours,” he sighed, “that’s the only difference. Our gel pieces have a pressure point that, when pressed, allows us to be heard. Jack will be heard any time he says anything.”
Bullet nodded in understanding.
“I’m going to go for a swim in the lake,” Tide announced suddenly, leaving Bullet, Youth and Sparrow by the monitors.
Youth turned and watched her leave, smiling.
“It’s cute that they think we don’t know they’re sleeping together.”
“Youth, Gecko’s gay,” Sparrow mocked.
“It’s a good thing I’m not talking about Gecko then, isn’t it?” Youth retorted, turning to look at him.
The penny finally dropped.
“What? Tide and Rocket?”
“Are you seriously saying you didn’t know?” Bullet laughed.
Sparrow looked as though he was trying to calculate a very large sum in his head and failing miserably.<
br />
Ignoring their stares, he looked back to his tablet.
“It looks like there’s approximately sixty to eighty people outside. Men to women ratio about… three to one.”
“They all seem to be wearing that uniform,” said Bullet, squinting at the perimeter screen.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have lift off,” Youth announced, as Jack’s camera approached a large dark grey door in the converted warehouse building. His camera turned to see the two men walking back down the corridor.
“I don’t recognise this hall…” Bullet whispered anxiously.
“Neither do I,” Youth agreed, as he zoomed in on the floor plan, “and it doesn’t seem to be anywhere on this either.”
“Has he moved premises?” Bullet asked.
“He can’t have. Rocket dropped him off here, and I have footage of them entering,” Sparrow said.
“Then where the hell are they?” Youth enquired.
Bullet took a moment to examine the situation.
The building was the same size as before, but Jack’s camera image revealed vents on the walls up by the ceiling.
It was clear to her now.
“They’re underground,”
The revelation took a minute to sink in for Youth and Sparrow.
Neon was expanding.
He had a plan.
Jack stood nervously at Neon’s door as the distant footsteps of his escorts quickly faded away into silence. Hesitantly, he chapped the door, made of thick steel.
There was no answer.
He just stood there, unsure of what to do, until suddenly the doors opened, slow, mechanically.
The room was dark.
A small light illuminated a desk with papers and a computer on it. Jack eased his way into the room, as the thick doors shut behind him just as slowly as they opened, scraping along the stone floor as they did so.
“You have a lot of explaining to do, Jack,” said a voice.
Jack jumped.
“I do?”
He shook his head, annoyed with himself.
“I mean, yes, I do. I know I do.”
“Well, that’s a start,” said the voice.
Movement at the desk had Jack freeze like a statue, filled with nothing but fear and discomfort.
Neon leaned forward into the light. His baggy eyes were much more baggy than when Jack last saw him. His face was pale, his grey hair usually combed neat and tidy was a frantic mess atop his head.
“Where’ve you been, Jack?”
Jack tried frenziedly to remember what his cover story was.
All he could remember was the Black Bullet and The Spectrum staring at him.
“Sit down,” ordered Neon.
Jack made his way over and sat in the seat in front of Neon’s desk. As he sat down, he recalled how comfortable the seat in The Spectrum’s office was in comparison to this one.
“Where. Have. You. Been,” Neon growled.
Jack swallowed nervously.
“They found us. I had to stay low to make sure I wasn’t found before I could come back.”
“How did they find you? You were in a safe house,” Neon grilled him.
“I don’t know how they found me. They just showed up.”
“How?”
“Sorry?”
“How did they show up? In a car? On a boat?”
“Three cars and a helicopter, sir.”
Neon stood up and slowly made his way around the table before leaning on it and facing Jack. He glared at him menacingly.
Calculating.
Was he on to him already?
“It’s been almost a week, Jack. All you had to do was grab her and question her about Bullet.”
“I did what you taught me.”
Neon jumped up and kicked his table.
“If you did what I taught you, you wouldn’t have been caught!”
The table screeched back across the concrete, paper slid on to the floor, tubs fell over. Jack felt the sweat drip down his forehead and stream down to the tip of his nose.
“The girl, Flare, is she still alive?”
Jack nodded, anticipating Neon would be angry about this as well.
Bullet, Youth and Sparrow watched with bated breath as they witnessed Neon leaning over Jack, his camera viewing the top of his wrinkled suit.
“Good.”
Jack perked up, surprised at his reaction.
He remembered Bullet telling him about repeating Neon’s words.
“You’re happy that the Fuschia Flare is still alive?”
“It’s an upside, I suppose. They’ll feel taunted now. Killing her would fuel their need to take me out. As much as it would be a mess because of their emotions, it would be within a quicker time frame. But, having her back will keep them busy for a while. Allow me to finish my plan.”
“What plan?” Jack asked curiously. “Can I help?”
“Oh, yes. You will be of much help.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to go back. I want you to turn yourself into them.”
“What?” quizzed Jack.
“Jack, repeat his words!” Bullet’s agitated voice nipped his ear.
“When you go back, they’ll interrogate you. They’ll ask you why you did what you did. What kind of things am I planning. You’re going to tell them.”
“But, why?”
“Jack, come on, man!” Youth cut in. “Repeat his words!”
“Because even if you tell them the truth, they’ll be no further ahead than they already are. They’ll then emotionally blackmail you to be a mole. You will accept the mission. You will report to me, and tell me the objectives of your mission they set you.”
“So, you want me to go back to them… tell them why I was told to capture the Fuschia Flare, and if and when they ask me to spy on you for them, accept the challenge?” Jack repeated.
“No ‘if’ is necessary, because they will ask you to do just that. But, yes. Precisely,” Neon nodded.
Bullet and Youth sat in horror, as they let Jack’s words register.
“Bullet… he knew that’s exactly what we’d do if we got our hands on Jack.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t know that we’ve already done it.”
“Doesn’t he?” Sparrow thought aloud. “How do we know this isn’t a ruse? How do we know that he doesn’t know Jack was with us for two days, and that he’s in there to get information for us?”
Bullet couldn’t find a response to settle his anxiety.
She silently agreed with them.
They didn’t know Neon’s intentions.
It made her very uneasy.
“What did you find out?” Neon asked obsessively, leaning towards him, his eyes drilling through Jack’s face. “Where is she? Is she alive?”
“Yeah, I just told…”
“Not Flare! Bullet! Is the Black Bullet alive?” Neon yelled, his patience breaking.
Jack considered the cover story that he received from Colour Coded.
He decided to go against their wishes.
“I don’t know, Neon.”
“Don’t know what, Jack?” Bullet asked through his earpiece. “We can’t hear Neon, only you.”
“You don’t know?” Neon repeated furiously. “Why the hell not?”
Jack relished in the silence to get his wits about him for the grilling he knew would come from both Neon and Colour Coded for going with his gut.
“The Fuschia Flare doesn’t know where the Black Bullet is. She claimed none of them does. I believe her.”
“What are you saying, Jack?” Neon questioned further.
“Jack, what the hell are you doing!” Bullet pierced Jack’s ear again.
Jack braced himself.
It was too late now.
He had already spoken out loud and it was nothing like the cover story Gecko gave him before he left Colour Coded headquarters.
He inhaled deeply, and slowly let it escape.
There was n
othing else for it now.
“She’s missing. The Black Bullet is missing.”
Chapter Six
Youth sat with his head in his hands in front of the monitors, while Bullet paced the room behind him, agitated. Sparrow kept his face to his tablet screen, his head subconsciously shaking in scepticism.
“Why the hell would he do that?” she moaned.
“I don’t know, but he must’ve had a reason,” Youth replied.
“Well, whatever it is, he’s not telling us. He’s not saying anything,” Bullet growled, still pacing. “Jack? JACK? Please talk to us, tell us what the hell is going on, why did you go off brief?”
Gecko came fleeing into the room hearing the commotion through his earpiece.
“Bullet, I swear that’s not the back story I gave him!”
“I know, I know; I was read in. I don’t know what he’s doing, and he’s not talking.”
“Has he used the distress code and we missed it?” Sparrow asked.
“No, he definitely hasn’t,” Youth confirmed, “I’ve set an alarm to go off whenever each distress code is spoken and there’s been nothing.”
“So, he’s just being a dick?” Gecko snarled, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Look, guys, until he talks to us, we can’t make assumptions. He maybe didn’t have a choice,” Bullet suggested, trying to be reasonable.
Sparrow shrugged his shoulders suggesting a hint of possibility, while Youth and Gecko looked at her unconvinced.
Jack knew exactly what he was doing in their opinion.
They just didn’t know why he was doing it.
Bullet stopped in her tracks, deep in thought, racking her brain for a possible reason as to why Jack would say she was missing rather than dead. She tried to put herself in his shoes.
Or in Neon’s.
Why would the Black Bullet being missing be better than her being dead?
What did Jack think could come from that positively?
Was he really on their side, or did he take the opportunity to get back to Neon? She felt really unsettled, and that’s a feeling she was never accustomed to.
“Gecko, how’s that uniform coming along?” she turned to him.
“Well, I tried to doctor the images a little to get the specific shade of grey they use, but I’m still not sure if it’s the right one. But, just the logo to get printed on and that’ll be it.”