AN: Being the intelligent person you all know me to be, I have decided to start a very long, very complicated fanfiction...the day before my first GCSE. Hopefully, I should be more regular with updating this one. The Professor Layton elements promised in the summary will mount later on, but I would really appreciate people giving me ideas for puzzles in reviews and the like. Speaking of reviews, I welcome constructive criticism and ego boosters alike.
Depending on the popularity of this story, I may or may not create a comic as well.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick…went the watch.
Anxious for it to settle, I lightly tapped the glass panel separating the clock face from the rest of the world. It was a pretty little watch, indeed. My service had obviously stained and weathered the leather strap, and beige sores pock-marked the brown animal hide. And I must commend my service's detail on the metal functions of the wrist watch, with the dull brass buckle starting to pick with rust.
Yet the clock face; the glass panel was ever so slightly scratched, misting around the edges. Underneath it was a gorgeous circle of untouched, pale cream- not even off-white. And the black numbers were uniform and immaculate! Waiting daintily like ladies and gentlemen at a train station for the dark, decorated forms of the hands to crawl past.
The mundane details are always special to me, and with no other means of keeping myself occupied whilst squatting around a corner, waiting my next…patient, I may as well have taken note of them.
Five minutes before, I had nearly been caught off-guard. Regardless of what physical training I had to undergo for my career, nobody could spend an hour on bent knees, poised for action with their back against a wall simply crawling with speckles of dust and slightly crumbling brickwork. I had been seated for no less than ten minutes, when quick footsteps trotted near to my position. And then it was back onto my weary feet and worn, trembling legs.
It was just some lady, by the looks of things tittering about being late to her sewing circle.
I almost snort with disdain for the common stereotypes of my job. I had been a 'war hero' (with minimal credit given, albeit), crawling into the nasty ratholes our enemy called bases, only disguised as an innocent little boy from the homeland, sent by higher-ups to help his Daddy (my disgruntled superior, who had been stationed there for several months by then) after the English had bombed our home.
An eleven year old playing a stricken sweeper boy. My weapons were simply what martial artists had taught me to do with cleaning supplies to get out of a pinch, and I could have laughed with joy if I'd been able to use even those skills- famous tales of war spies spoke of stealthy, hardened men sneaking around corners with a constantly loaded handgun.
It had been weeks until their bosses had trusted their colleague's child enough to 'clean the intel room', unaware that his Daddy's next pile of neatly folded uniform would come with top-secret military Intel.
But when I did become a grown man, slipping into their bases with all the stealth of a predator? It had actually been more of a case of a one-and-a-half day trek through sewage pipes, peaking in terms of excitement when I messily throttled a security guard as he was mid-sneeze. By the end of it, I had finished not only my mission, but also any of my colleague's attempts at conversation with me for at least a fortnight.
My more favourable missions were the classy ones that people do associate with spies. Raised in boarding school, I knew of etiquette and always made sure not to take my evenings of caviar, sex and wine for granted.
Pity that on our next mission rotation (to keep suspicion in the various social circles at bay), somebody had hastily thrown me into a three-week course about first aid, before being shipped off to pose as some peasant town's new doctor with a cocky intern on her second mission, and a far too experienced near-pensioner whinging about how nosey cleaning staff were going to stop us (him) from doing our (his) mission.
I was not enjoying myself.
And now, I thought, my ears pricking as they hear more pattering footsteps on the pavement, I'm going to have to kidnap a man with sore legs and an aching back.
The footsteps slowly became louder. I had trained myself to recognising them during my half-year of dreading the sound of them trotting down the halls towards my room, breathily insisting that my previous diagnosis that his constant headache was 'nothing to be concerned about' was wrong the very second he burst through the door.
It was annoying, yes, but given that the extent of my medical knowledge was limited to 'how to kill and torture efficiently' as well as the fruits of a sloppy first aid course, he was probably right.
The town treasurer, Graham Murphy, rounded the corner. Unsurprisingly, his fat hand was pressed to his forehead in an attempt to relieve the pain that he had been complaining to me about. My dark grey clothes blended neatly with the bin bags that I had inevitably been placed by, and I was no more than a shadow to him.
A very athletic, vicious shadow.
The second I saw the back of that drab brown suit, I slipped through the small open crack between his back and the corner he had walked past. His pale blonde hair was darkened under the moody rainclouds that were ever-present in Seattle, as I had learned. It gave me a good guideline as to where his neck was, and that was where I aimed my hands.
Though I could not see his face, I imagine that he was gawping, and indeed there was a muffled squeak when I the cloth to his mouth. He writhed in indignation, and then tensed seemingly every muscle in his waifish body. Then trembled. Then relaxed.
I glanced in every which direction for witnesses, the weight of the gun strapped to my leg all the more present. No intake of breath or terrified shriek- I was still invisible to the rest of the world.
I stumbled into the alley with his body firmly clutched to my front under the armpits. Being behind a dumpster would give me some cover, and if there was someone there, then they had not given any indication of troubling me while I was bored out of my mind waiting.
Mr Murphy flopped hopelessly onto the ground. I snatched my pouch of supplies from under the tankish bin, and made short work of restraining his wrists and ankles with duct tape, twisting another piece into a makeshift gag, and securing it with one long strip that turned his pouty mouth into a shiny silver box.
Then the sweetest moment arrived; pressing the hidden button on my oh-so pedestrian watch. It was a lovely feeling to know that radio waves that half the world's scientists were ignorant to the existence of were blasting through the air, summoning my employers.
Two seconds passed, but my eyes remained firmly glued to the dainty clock face. Starting at the bold European-style twelve, a little red line pierced a line down the middle from the centre, slowly rotating towards the one and spreading a small red segment over the cream paint. It stopped there; five minutes until they arrived to pick up the unconscious banker.
I sat back and fiddled with the end of the tape, footing his skinny arm out of the public's sight. He was an oddly proportioned man, seemingly all skin and bones with a finely made suit hanging off his little form. His hands and feet were massive, however, and his nose and cleft chin jutted out without a care of grace. I picked at the tape end again and split its width by half, giving me two thin strips to secure around two fat knuckles.
I smiled and remembered a little puzzle that I had heard a while ago:
'You have twelve sticks and a roll of tape. You decline to add tape to the first stick, but then add one to the second and third. On the fourth stick, you add two, and three on the fifth. How many pieces of tape are on the twelve stick?"
The answer is quite simple, if you have some degree of knowledge in maths and logic. I would quite like to trouble somebody with it one day.
I smiled as I worked over the tape. Mr Murphy's fingers weren't exactly 'sticks', but then again, I wasn't exactly using such exorbitant amounts of tape on them, either.
This method of restraint was good at passing time. Furthermore, you could string two or three fingers together at once. Duct tape was an unpleasant thing to be bound with as it stood, and binding individual fingers restricted their movement.
Luckily, most were unaware of this and no spy that I know of has been caught and restrained in such a way- even if we were, the service that had taught us this method had been just as diligent in teaching us how to get out of it.
I played with the method somewhat happily. Adding too much tape caused it to fall off, I knew. But the thumb needed to be bound at the top, because it was the most likely to scratch off bonds. I flipped Mr Murphy over and attempted to manoeuvre his hands behind his back. My hands had cramped up and fallen asleep in their disuse before, which put a damper on my typically excellent skills.
I bound the thumbs back to back, and content, listened to the tear of the tape as I pulled it around the bottoms of the fingers- where they meet the palm.
His hands now completely useless, I glumly checked my watch. The slowly disappearing red slice indicated that I had two minutes left to myself.
More childish than I am usually willing to admit, this became my opportunity to go a little overboard. Quick, tightly pulled circles under the armpits to restrict some blood flow to the hands and slow him down if he ever got out, and behind the knees too. Around the foot, because nobody in their right mind would run with a ring of tape around their foot.
I couldn't bring myself to ruin his clothes, as I would insist when my employers' staff arrived and, mortified, ask me why I had his shirt pulled past his navel and was in the process of wrapping a second ring around his stomach.
I grouchily argued that if he escaped (given the thorough job that I had done, that was a laugh), then he would have a hard time running because of some trivial excuse I gave about exhaling. Wonderful. Now my employers thought that I was a lunatic with a bondage fetish.
That, I can't deny in private, but it does not look good on a resume.