Agent 47 vs Sam Fisher
History is written by the victors: a lie told to those unwilling to believe what lurks in the shadows. Truth is, it is those who hold the sword that decide who gets to hold the pen. The true victors are never seen, ghosts, happy to pass off the spoils of victory to those the public call decent people, because the man on stage has the least cover. They don't do it for the glory, not for the money, not even for their nation, but for the good of humanity, driven by their own twisted sense of moral justice. Shadows rule this world. Shadows that push us toward the light.
Smoke drifted in the low lit room, a small black box with Spartan accommodations, a metal table and a metal chair, a flickering fluorescent lamp hanging from the ceiling. A man sat in the chair, shoulders broad underneath a charcoal suit jacket and black button down, the top few buttons undone. He puffed on a cigarette, the filter fitting into a comfortable spot underneath the man's salt and pepper mustache. Two other figures stood just on the other side of the cone of light provided by the lamp, men-in-black types with faces obscured by darkness.
"I told you, I don't know where Sam is any more than you lot. A café in Malta, a sheep village in Scotland, a high rise in Tokyo, the man can blend and if he doesn't want to be found, he won't be," the seated man growled, tapping his cigarette ash into the tray on the table. Both agents looked agitated, one stepped forward and snatched the cigarette from the man, tossing it into the corner of the room.
"You've been singing the same canary cry for the past three hours, but we know you were a part of the mission where he went silent. We need to know why Mr. Coste." The suited man said, struggling to keep his composure behind his trained stone-face.
"Listen," Victor Coste said, more visibly annoyed than anything. "I was only listening in on comms for that op, Grimm was the one in his ear." He reached into his breast pocket, the handcuffs on his wrists stopping his hand just inches short. He rolled his eyes, leaned forward, and reached his hand in the pocket, fishing out another cigarette, lighting it and bending down to place it in his mouth before continuing.
"Fourth Echelon found intel on a covert bio-terrorist organization, held up in a 30-story skyscraper in Auckland, New Zealand, but it turned out we weren't the only ones who got the heads-up…"
[Auckland, New Zealand, Gene-Sync Headquarters]
The night was black over the city skyline, fireworks shooting off for the pleasure of crowds of masked people below. The crowd filed into the glass and metal monstrosity of a building, dressed in tuxedos and sparkling dresses, their flamboyant masquerade disguises visible even from the rooftop as Sam peered over the edge. He tucked his parachute tidily back into its pack and hid it behind the roof-access stairwell.
"I've touched down," Sam's grizzled voice was hushed as his head swiveled, looking for a stealthier entrance than the stairwell.
"Roger that," came the voice on the other end of the comms, the poignant feminine voice of Anna Grímsdóttir, affectionately referred to as "Grim." "Building schematics show an air vent on the roof leading down to the 27th floor, large enough for you to crawl through, then its two more floors down to the HVT."
"Understood," Sam radioed back, slinging his assault rifle across his back and pulling the grate off of a metal cylinder on the roof, an abyssal tunnel leading deep into the building. He pulled trifocal goggles down over his eyes, a quiet hum of electricity whirred as they booted up before going ghostly quiet, the roof illuminating with a bright shade of lime green. Sam snuck into the ventilation, his feet disappearing into the hole.
"Your target, Agent 47, is Garth Bishop," a British woman spoke into the bald man's earpiece. The man sat at a bus-stop bench, across the street from the skyscraper alight with music and champagne, people expertly moving past each other to socialize or take advantage of their host's generosity.
"As the CEO of Gene-Sync, Bishop faces many allegations of bioterrorism and as such has been so gracious to throw this gala to clear his name. The gala was not Bishop's idea of fun, it seems, as he has locked himself in his office on the 25th floor. You may wish to wait for his appearance at the party or silence him while he waits in isolation. Good luck 47."
As she finished, the bald man stood straight, adjusting his business suit and blood red tie, pulling a thin black domino mask from a bag left on the bench, affixing it to his face and casually strode toward the building. He wordlessly joined the crowds of shuffling people, making his way through the grassy courtyard and into through the open glass doors, the expansive entrance repurposed as a ballroom floor before him.
47 peered through the corners of his mask at all the opportunities that presented themselves. Two guards flanking an elevator, one constantly rubbing his eyes and yawning. A waiter pushing her cart of appetizers, her fingers twitching neurotically towards a pack of cigarettes under her apron. A solitary mechanic, taking a mere moment to peek out of a periphery room, staying out of sight of the masquerading guests.
Bingo.
47 made his way to trail the mechanic, slipping out of the crowd and into a small room with a piano in its center, an armoire for hanging coats standing along one wall. The mechanic in a blue jumpsuit sat in the corner, his head deep in a ventilation duct, a small red toolbox sitting behind him.
"Frank, that you?" the mechanic called out from his metal case. He held a hand blindly behind him, open-palmed. "Can you hand me that monkey wrench? This bolt is really stubborn in here."
47's eyes panned to the toolbox and he reached a gloved hand out to grab the monkey wrench from the toolbox.
"Of course, friend," 47's monotonous voice alerted the mechanic enough for him to poke his head out of the duct, only to be whacked in the head by the swinging wrench. Carrying the unconscious body into the nearby armoire, slumping him against the wooden back. He looked over his shoulder briefly, ensuring no one was watching, and unzipped the mechanic's jumpsuit, sliding his own feet into the blue suit.
He closed the door of the armoire, looking at the mirror in its door to see his new disguise. Satisfied, he slinked off for the elevator.
[Minutes later, 25th floor]
"Grim, we have a problem," Fisher called in over the radio, lifting the lid to a rolling clothes hamper, revealing two bodies, crumpled on top of each other. He found himself in a small laundry room, no sign of struggle barring the very faint drag-marks on the tile that led him to investigate. "I'm not alone up here."
"Be careful, Sam," Grim radioed back, keyboard clacks audible in the background of her call. "Looks like there's five heat signatures buzzing around Bishop's office, if any of them are our ghost you can't let them wipe any of the data in the room."
"Roger," Sam called back, flipping the cover back onto the hamper to cover the bodies.
"Incoming! South door!" Grim shouted, causing Sam to run to the closed door, his silenced pistol at the ready. The door creaked open as a guard entered, his rifle slung by his side. Sam slipped his arm underneath the guard's neck, his other slipping the rifle off the guard's shoulder and onto the ground.
"Give me a reason to keep you alive," Sam grunted into the man's ear, tightening his bicep on his throat and pulling his own pistol to aim at his head.
"I'll tell you whatever you want to know!" the guard choked, his arms instinctively shooting upward in a sign of surrender.
"Guards on Bishop," Sam whispered, "how many?"
"Three!" the guard said, Sam walking him over to the clothes hamper. "They've all got guns!"
"I'm shocked and amazed," Sam rolled his eyes. He flipped open the canvas top of the hamper, revealing the two unconscious bodies. "You know who did this?"
"I… I don't know… you?" the guard nervously squeaked, his eyes wide.
"No." Sam declared before slamming his pistol into the back of the guard's head, knocking him unconscious and letting him fall into the hamper. He flipped the canvas top back over the bodies and moved his hand to his earpiece.
"Grim, check the video surveillance, one of those heat signatures is definitely our ghost." Sam said, exiting the laundry room and heading toward the double doored office at the end of the hall.
"You're looking for a bald man, only discernable detail I can find is a tattoo on the back of his head, maybe pull off every guard's hat before you knock them out?" Grim radioed back sarcastically. Sam didn't dignify that remark with a response, edging closer to the office door. He pulled his multi-vision goggles down over his eyes once more, flipping the optic pattern to detect sonic vibrations.
He scanned through the door, seeing two guards just on the other side of the door face down and another slumped by a desk, all three only visible by their faint heartbeats. Another silhouette stood behind the desk, a pistol aimed at a man in the boss's chair.
"Grim! Cut the lights!" Sam shouted, taking a few steps back before ramming his shoulder into the seam between the doors.
A flurry of sounds echoed as Sam barged into the room. The cracking of the wooden doors, the audible depowering of lights on the entire floor, a silenced gunshot. The room lit up in Sam's visor in shades of blue and red as he switched the goggles to thermal vision. Red hot sprayed out of the man in the chair's forehead, the assassin's bullet escaping his head and slamming into the wooden table before Bishop faceplanted into his now bloodied desk.
Sam pulled up his pistol and fired a few shots into the darkness, only able to track his target's movements by his thermal radiation.
47 ducked and rolled to avoid the incoming fire, dodging behind a filing cabinet while firing back with his own silenced pistols, drawing an extra from within his uniform. Sam equally took cover, overturning a metal table that was against the wall before he drew his rifle. A few pings into the metal table dented the steel letting Sam know he wasn't going to go down easy.
"Sam! Thermals put him making his way out the window!" Grim called over comms.
Sam gritted his teeth, pulling himself over the cover just to see the man's foot as he leapt. He ran to the window, now seeing a rappelling cable lodged into the wall and the assassin hooked in, running down the side of the building. He took a few shots at the fleeing agent, one clipping the back of the man's calf before he dipped into another open window, escaping.
"Show me surveillance on the floor that man entered, Grim," Sam said, rushing to the nearest stairwell.
"13th floor, he just… shit! My connection to the surveillance system has been cut." Grim cursed, furiously typing in the background.
"My lucky day…" Fisher mumbled under his breath, making his way downstairs keeping his weapon drawn.
47 stepped away from the large wall of servers, having fully sabotaged the surveillance system from this room. He slipped out of the guard uniform he had commandeered, fitting himself into his comfortable suit that he had lugged up to the server room.
"Congratulations 47, the money has been wired to your account, objective complete and no without trace," the British voice of his handler came over the radio.
"Not exactly," Agent 47 took out a dark length of fabric, stretching it around the wound in his leg to staunch the bleeding and fit his pant leg over it. "There was another agent in there I was unable to stop, he saw my face."
"No matter," Diana said, "your only objective is to exfil back to the ICA."
"Understood," 47 clicked his radio off, straightening his blood red tie and holstering his pistol. He moved to the stairwell, ready to go down the multiple flights of stairs to the exit, when the door flung open hitting him in the face.
Fisher exploded out of the doorway, his pistol knocking out of his hand because of the surprise impact. Not to be slowed, however, he pulled a clawed karambit knife from its holster, slashing at the falling bald assassin. The blade tore across his chest, only barely finding flesh, but slicing his tie in two.
47 hit the ground hard, feeling his twin pistols fall out of their shoulder mounted holsters as Sam's karambit sliced their straps. He spun on the ground, throwing a foot directly into Sam's chest to gain some distance. He rose to his feet, his hand reaching behind himself as he locked eyes with his opponent.
The lights flickered briefly as the two men stared each other down, blood dripping from 47's chest and Sam's knife.
"I'm guessing I can't persuade you to walk away," Sam growled, inching closer to the suited agent, his foot brushing his pistol on the ground.
"You'd be right," 47 retorted, stationary and stoic.
Sam took another step and 47 snapped to motion, his open hand slamming into Sam's collarbone. Sam winced in pain, but retorted with an upward slice with his knife, aiming for the assassin's shoulder. 47 moved his shoulder out of the way, reaching into his back pocket to draw a syringe and poking Fisher with it under the ribs in one swift motion. Fisher felt the small stab, but threw his elbow into 47's nose, breaking it with a sickening crack.
The two separated once more, 47 dropped the syringe and reached his gloved hand up to his nose to crack it back into place. Sam squinted his eyes, feeling the quick effects of the poison as it coursed through his swaying body.
"You…" Sam slurred, his vision already fading. His eyes were good enough to spot his pistol, still at his feet, and he dropped to grab it. Thinking quickly, 47 grabbed a small marble bust atop a square table, lunging for the poisoned spy with the stone face raised high.
A gunshot and the sound of cracking marble.
"And that's the last Grim heard from Fisher, no radio, no feed from his goggles, nothing." Coste puffed away on his cigarette, already half in the ashtray. The suited man in front rubbed the bridge of his nose, letting out an exasperated sigh.
"So a bald ghost took out Gene-Sync's CEO, erased any trace of him ever being there, incapacitated or killed Fourth Echelon's best agent, and disap…" he was cut off as the second suited man wrapped a strand of fiber wire around his neck. He struggled, arms reaching back to grab at his attacker, pulling off the brown wig he had atop his head to reveal a shiny bald head. His assailant's eyes stared with rage as the original suited man ran out of air, dropping to the ground.
"Shit… shit!" Coste struggled against the cuffs holding himself to the table, the cigarette dropping from his mouth and into his lap.
"You may not realize it, but you already know too much," 47 said, reaching beneath his suit jacket, retrieving a pistol and aiming it at the seated Coste. Victor ducked and weaved as far as the cuffs would let him, but the assassin's gun stayed trained on his head.
He closed his eyes as a gun fired, but he slowly realized he wasn't dead. He blinked his eyes open to see both suited men on the ground, his would-be-assassin with a bleeding hole in the middle of his forehead. Behind him, in an open door that now flooded the interrogation room with light, stood his old pal Fisher, a rough, seemingly self-applied bandage to his head, blood dripping down to mat his beard.
"He should've finished the job," Sam coughed, limping to free Victor from his cuffs.
Winner: Sam Fisher
Stay tuned for Rayquaza (Pokemon) vs Alduin (Skyrim)
