A Secretively Secret Agency
Braefoot Business Park, Lanark, 34 miles west of Edinburgh
Cooper’s head was throbbing as he regained consciousness. He was lying on his side facing a radiator attached to a gold-painted wall.
He had to struggle to turn and sit up as they’d cuffed his hands behind his back with cable-ties and duct-taped his ankles and knees together; he was in the vehicle rental reception area where Cassie had requisitioned a car the day before.
Opposite was a row of red plastic chairs bolted to the wall. To his left, Cassie was struggling against her restraints as unsuccessfully as he was. She sat propped up against the convex reception desk of the same colour as the chairs with, “iCar! Internet Car and Van Rentals,” in white lettering on the front. His staff rested against the desk beside her, but when he tried to call it to him, all that came out was a muffled sound that barely made the runes flicker.
“Glad to see you’re awake, Mr Cooper,” he looked up as Madeleine Mary Yates entered the room wearing a powder-blue suit. She bent over to check he hadn’t loosened the tape over his mouth. They’d reinforced it with another strip running up from under his chin, to make absolutely sure he couldn’t move his jaw. “Sorry about gagging you, but rumour has it that every time you open your mouth and rattle that juju stick of yours something bad happens,” she said, pointing to his staff. “Don’t worry about Ms Sloane, we took great care not to hurt her and we’ll release her unharmed as we leave.”
She sat down behind the desk, picked a red biro with the company logo printed along the side and started doodling on a rental form, ”My men are getting a car with a big enough trunk to hold you comfortably. We’ll use our diplomatic immunity to leave the city, and drive to Prestwick airport where a US airforce transport is waiting to take us back to the states. Then you can have a fair trial before we lock you up for the rest of your life.”
He started kicking and struggling at that, although the noises that got out of his duct-taped mouth were little more than mumbles, they still sounded like swearing.
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Yates said, “be grateful that you’re not an American citizen, or you’d be facing execution for treason right now! Can you believe Unstable Mabel thought I would actually hand over a fugitive from justice, just because she said she was a goddess? I mean, I can see that she has magick powers, but my pastor would call anything more than that blasphemy,” she looked up as one of her agents strode through the door, an unsettling smile on his face. He was a tall, shaven-headed man in his mid-thirties. A Beretta fitted with a silencer dangling from his right hand by his side.
“Hernandez, there you are, where’s Rosenberg?” she said.
“Tied up nice and safely,” Hernandez said, pointing the gun at her.
“What are you talking about?” she said, outraged.
“He wouldn’t see reason, I told him that I’m not going out guarding your car, like Saxon and Buckley did. We’re all just expendable pawns to you, aren’t we?”
“That’s nonsense, I’ve always treated you like family!”
“Really? Okay, ‘Mom’, what’s my first name?”
“Well, more like big sister, surely,” she said, looking offended by the accuracy of the statement as she searched her memory, but the best she could come up with was that it began with a ‘J’, “look, Juan…”
“Nope.”
“I meant José….”
“Wrong again, this could take all night, so I’ll just tell you, it’s David.”
“You don’t look like a David.”
“And you don’t look like a corpse… yet.”
“I’m ordering you to drop your weapon. Now!”
“I’m not taking orders from you any more, I’ve had enough of risking my life for a government paycheque, Jackson Smith has made me a better offer.”
“You’re delusional,” she sneered, “Smith’s dead.”
“I’d have shot you by now, but I wanted to see the look on your face when you realised that you’ve been chasing the wrong crook all along, he set Cooper up as a scapegoat, only his surviving is messing that up. A conman who got conned, isn’t that funny?” he pointed the pistol at her with a two-handed grip. “Now, I’m taking him to Smith so I can get my reward and retire somewhere sunny where the agency will never find me,” he said as he put two bullets in her chest. She gasped and slumped forward onto the desk.
Cassie fought to stop herself vomiting into her taped-shut mouth as a dispassionate part of her brain decided that silencers weren’t as quiet as they sounded in the movies.
“Lie face down and don’t do anything stupid,” Hernandez said as he pulled a Ka-Bar fighting knife from his belt and cut the tape off of Cooper’s legs. He stepped well back as he drew the gun from his shoulder holster again before putting the knife away, “Stand up; move too slowly, move too fast or don’t move at all and I’ll blow your knees off and carry you to the car.”
As Cooper got up, he trapped the heel of one of his slip-on shoes with the toe of the other, pulling it partly off and then did the same with the other one, hiding it by exaggerating how hard it was to get up with his hands cuffed behind his back, which wasn’t easy to start with. Once he was on his feet, he looked longingly at his staff, which rattled and fell over, the runes glowing faintly.
Hernandez jumped in fright, looked at Cooper suspiciously, then waved him towards the door with the barrel of his gun. He limped awkwardly stamping each foot in turn hoping it would be mistaken for the circulation in his feet returning as he flattened the backs of his shoes down.
“Stop playing for time,” Hernandez said, when Cooper, who’d been shuffling slowly down the corridor for a few feet, doubled over convulsing with a hacking cough, “whatever you’re up to it won’t work,” he said stepping back cautiously out of range of being rushed.
“Keep that up and I’ll clear your throat with a 9 mil to the back of your neck,” he said as Cooper turned towards him, still bent over coughing violently. He stopped immediately, straightened up, shrugged and kicked. One of his shoes flew off, hitting the gun. A bullet ripping into the ceiling at an angle, showering plaster down over them. He kicked the other shoe in Hernandez’s face, then spun around and bolted, zigzagging down the corridor into the garage where they serviced and valeted the vehicles.
His hopes for a fast way out were dashed when he saw that the big, red roller-door at the far end was shut, and Hernandez would kneecap him before he could open the pedestrian exit to the side with his hands secured behind his back, even if it weren’t locked.
He swerved to the wall and knocked a toolbox off a workbench with his hip as a bullet exploded into the floor behind him. Diving behind a car, he kicked a can of WD-40 in the same direction, gasping in pain when he hit the ground hard on his side without being able to use his hands to break his fall.
Wedging the bottom of the can against a tyre with his shoulder, he pushed the button on top of the nozzle in with his chin. Lubricating oil sprayed out over his mouth and up his nose. He could feel it trickling down the back of his throat as he fought the desire to gag as long as he could before rolling over onto his stomach, throwing-up against the duct tape.
He finished vomiting and turned onto his back to see Hernandez standing over him, gun in hand, with a bemused expression on his face, “Look at you,” he said with contempt as Cooper worked his jaw up and down and sideways as fast as he could, “I wish the people who hide like cowards every time you walk past could see you now. What a joke you are!”
Cooper shouted, “Fusada!” as the tape slid part way off of his mouth. A loud bang shook the walls, making Hernandez jump in fright. He watched wide-eyed as the staff flew through one window of a car at the far side of the garage and out the other, leaving holes surrounded by spider web patterns. It hit a van, punching through both sides, and when it shot through the doors of the car Cooper was lying against, landing on his hands, Hernandez started to run, firing back wildly.
Even though it was only lukewarm to his touch, it melted the cable-ties off of his wrist without leaving a mark in his skin. He stood up, aimed his staff and yelled, “Scort!”
The bullet-sized ball of red light hit Hernandez in the side as he turned to shoot. He screamed as he caught fire, the flames, as unnaturally red as the runes, consuming him until he disappeared from sight. After a few seconds the blaze burrowed down into the concrete, but when he walked over to it, there wasn’t as much as a smudge left on the floor.
As he was pulling the last of the oil-soaked tape off of his face he noticed a middle-aged man with black, curly hair sitting, bound and gagged, against the opposite wall. He searched his memory for his name for a moment, “Mr Rosenberg, isn’t it?” he said. Rosenberg nodded whilst shaking visibly,
“Did you see what I did to your ex-colleague?” Rosenberg nodded again, trembling with fear.
“I did that because he was trying to take me somewhere I didn’t want to go. Are you going to do that, Mr Rosenberg?”
Rosenberg shook his head so vigorously that he nearly fell over. Cooper took a step back, held his staff out and whispered, “Tuainich,” the duct tape and cable ties dropped off and he jumped up, trying to run away so fast that he slipped and fell flat on his face. Cooper stepped back, runes along the length of his staff glowing faintly, as he watched out for any tricks, waiting until the smaller man got back up and held a hankie to his bleeding nose.
“Take it easy. As the patient who grabbed the dentist’s testicles put it, ‘we’re not going to hurt each other, now, are we?’ Let’s take a nice stroll back to reception; you in front, me following,” he said gesturing with his staff to the way he’d come in, picking up and putting on his shoes on the way back. As they got closer to the door, he heard voices through the wall and gestured for the agent to go first. He shook his head vehemently, to which Cooper shook his staff even more vigorously.
As he turned the corner, with Cooper hanging back, they saw Yates and Cassie sitting side by side on the red plastic seats, chatting friendlily.
“Cooper! Did you really have to punch that poor man in the face?” Cassie said, as the agent dabbed his bloody nose.
“Nice to see you were worried about me.”
“When your staff flew through the wall, I thought that was probably a good sign,” she said, pointing at a three inches in diameter hole near the door.
He turned his attention to Yates, “I see you’re still standing, Kevlar?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, tapping her chest and wincing as she touched the bruises under her bulletproof vest.
“Well, I hope that you realise that I’m not going back with you for a kangaroo court,” he said, the runes glowing faintly on his staff.
“There’s no need to worry, Mr Cooper,” she said, handing him back his guns grips first, “I was tasked with recovering the money and bringing the man who stole it to justice, and while I have absolutely no doubt that your grubby fingerprints are all over it, your involvement is outside my current remit.”
“I love it when you talk dirty,” he said, taking the weapons and holstering them, one on his belt and one on his ankle after checking they were both still loaded.
“You poor woman,” she said turning sympathetically to Cassie, “having to suffer him all day.”
“You’ve no idea.”
“I need to get back to the States and get more men, as Smith has us outnumbered,” she said nodding to Rosenberg as she walked to the door.
“Yates,” Cooper said, she stopped and turned back to face him, “if you try to leave now Morrigan will catch you, make no mistake about that. Take my advice and got to the main building, tell them you hate my guts and they’ll welcome you with open arms. If everything goes according to plan, you can leave in peace in a day or two.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then there’ll be nowhere to hide, anyway.”
“Have you forgotten about the might of the American military?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but weren’t most of the cowboys and railroad labourers in the old west the Scots and Irish? If your government waits for a Pearl Harbor type event to get involved, then tens of millions of their descendants will become her thralls and the rest of your citizens will face an army of close to a billion, by that time, with soldiers it takes a bazooka to kill and a goddess who won’t allow the use of the nuclear option. And, yes, Cassie, I did actually read another one of your reports.”
“Madeleine,” Cassie said standing up and facing Yates with her back to him, blocking his view, “setting aside the fact that he’s got a face you’d never tire of slapping, for a moment, I have to say that he’s still right. The last time she was here it took nearly five hundred years to beat her, and that was with all the supernatural beings fighting against her. Now it seems that they’re all on her side. If you stay here and things go badly, then you can at least supply your government with intel that might lead them to entering the war early and give America a better chance, not a good chance, but certainly a better one.”
Yates thought about that for a moment, then sighed and shrugged her shoulders, “I don’t suppose another couple of days will make any difference either way.”
“I can’t imagine that we’ll ever meet again, so good luck and no hard feelings,” he said, smiling, holding a hand out to Yates as Cassie stepped aside.
“This better not be a joy buzzer,” she said before shaking it.
They watched Yates and Rosenberg walk back to the main building, “One thing,” he said when they were alone, “next time you step in front of me and block my view can you at least wear tighter jeans?”
“Pervert!” she said before following him out onto the forecourt muttering about how she’d like to tighten a pair of jeans around his neck, “Should it be so dark out here?” she said after taking another drink of potion, to be on the safe side, “Maybe we should wait for it to get a bit lighter before we make our move.”
He studied the strange pattern on his staff as the runes blinked on and off in turn, giving the impression that a single light was running its length, pointing upwards. He held it above his head and whispered, “Solas-siridh.”
The beam shot straight up like a searchlight as every rune blazed in unison, spreading out as it lit the undersides of the ever growing number of gigantic dragons that were circling tirelessly above them, filling the sky as far as the eye could see and blocking out the setting sun, “I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon,” he said.