Part three of End of the Road.
The assassin stepped over the prone body of an agent he'd found trailing him. She had been holding a GPS locator, likely instructed to tail him from a distance until the proper resources could be rummaged up to deal with him. Now, she wouldn't be an issue any longer. He thought about stepping on the small tracking device but decided against it. Her body would be found and serve as a warning to halt future attempts against him. Careful to make sure that none of his clothing trailed through the blood, he calmly strode from the confines of the dark, deserted alley to reemerge in broad daylight. The only question that remained in his mind was which way would be faster to get to the airport. He had a visitor to meet, after all, and lateness was considered quite rude by most.
Fox and K-Unit were at the location of the GPS signal within two minutes of Alex's departure from the same spot. Fox rushed over to the downed agent the second he saw the large puddle of blood beneath her head. "Dammit," he muttered, but still tested for her vitals as he colorfully swore under his breath. "Damn you Alex, you…" Fox frowned as he leaned back over the young agent to check for her pulse again, "you deceitful, brilliant spy." He turned back to a confused K-Unit with his own disbelieving expression. "She isn't dead. In fact, Agent Turner isn't even injured. She's sleeping."
Snake, the unit's medic, knelt down beside him and carefully went back through all the motions that Fox had just done twice. "What the…? Then where did all of this blood come from?" Both of them searched for traces of any wound on the agent's body but came up negative. "The bump on the back of her head means he intended to just knock her out, but why dump blood on her to trick us into thinking otherwise?" Snake put his medical kit away as he asked, sure there would be no need for it here.
"I don't think it was us he was trying to fool." Fox stood up, satisfied that the agent would have no lasting problems once she woke up. "I'd been confused when the coroner's report came back on the diplomat, because it said that he had been fatally poisoned before Alex ever slashed his throat. Which made no sense at the time the call came in. SCORPIA is known for the torturing of their victims before their deaths, so painlessly killing the diplomat before slicing his throat didn't exactly sound cold-blooded to me."
"What are you getting at?" Wolf asked, verbalizing what his entire unit was thinking.
"He never left MI6." Fox quickly pieced together everything he had, adding in his own guesses and assumptions. "Everything he's done has been to deceive SCORPIA. They must think they've turned him, or they're holding someone against him. I don't know. Whatever it is, he isn't doing this willingly but he can't get caught off-balance by either side."
Wolf crossed his arms. Solving logic problems and playing the spy game was not what he had signed up for. "Then we lay off?"
"No." Fox left the unconscious agent to one of her partners, who had been informed of the situation. "The plan doesn't change. Even if he is doing all he can, he's still SCORPIA's puppet and needs to be treated as such."
Eagle glared at his former teammate. "And risk his life because there's nothing else we can do?"
"He knew what he was getting into, and if our positions were switched, he would do the same for me. After all, better to die by the ally than live under the enemy."
K-Unit felt a collective shiver go through them that had nothing to do with the weather. Soldiers and spies had very different lives, but what Fox had said rang true for both jobs.
Fox had thought of something, and voiced it to the agent sitting with the one they had found. He nodded and told the unit the news. "Agent Smith is still on Alex's trail, albeit he's keeping quite the distance, and he's going to speak me through the directions. If this goes well, I think we can nab him. Falcon."
The sniper perked up. "Yeah?"
"Get in position in this building," he pointed to a spot on a map the other agent had handed over to him. "If I know him right, we can probably get him within reasonable range. Probably about here," another spot was indicated.
"Agent Mason." Turner's partner looked up at him, ready to move if he was ordered to. "I need you to get this area evacuated either out of the area or into nearby buildings. Call in a bomb threat, or something creative, but get the people off the streets for the next half hour." Agent Mason nodded, squatting back down by Agent Turner and calling back to headquarters for what Fox wanted.
"You have a plan for us?" Wolf, who had sat and listened to reports since his unit got stuck neck-deep in this mess Cub had made, wanted to get out and do something.
Fox gave him a wry smile. "I've got an idea."
The alert was being sent across a small area on the suburbs of London by television and radio, warning the citizens of the potential leak of a dangerous chemical agent: phenyldichloroarsine*. Supposedly, the blister agent had been in the process of being transported to the Royal and General bank, for the process of upgrading their security systems, when one of the wheels was flattened by a rock or other miscellaneous object in the road. The truck had skewed off the road, clipping half a dozen trees before it finally crashed to a stop. In the process, the multiple protective layers encasing the gas had been pierced. Five minutes after the initial gas leak, a couple was hospitalized with the earliest symptoms, namely severe vomiting and extensive damage to both the eyes and throat. At that point, the reports were saying, that the alarms began to sound. They all said the same thing with regards to what you should do if you lived/worked within a mile: evacuate the premises immediately.
Of course, all the necessary equipment would be set up within the next day. A delivery truck registered to a company that did work for the Royal and General would be at the crash site. A body belonging to one of their employees would be found dead in the driver's seat, killed on impact. Traces of the blister agent would have contaminated the entire inside of the truck and along the outside where the compartment had been breached. Two agents, actually engaged, would be in the emergency room with lungs damaged from previous exposure to the chemical. All tests would show that they had been exposed, because they had been. Just...not recently. It had been only two months ago that the couple had been caught in a high-security facility and set off alarms triggering its release. While they could no longer work in the field, they were happy to do the desk jobs and help out MI6 where the opportunities arose, as in this case.
But that would be later. For now, half an hour after the initial alarms were broadcast, Falcon was setting up his HK417 sniper rifle**, using binoculars to search for his target, and Eagle was readying the small metal smoke bombs in his hands, waiting for Fox's signal to be voiced over his handheld radio. Wolf and Snake sat in the back of Fox's car, watching as he flipped between the various cameras set around the area the agent was certain Alex would appear in. The small screen switched to a new street view every three seconds as he impatiently waited, ready to send the message to Eagle at a moment's notice.
In fact, he was watching so carefully for potential disguises that he almost missed it when Alex walked right past the third camera, completely stripped of all pretenses. Fox went back to the camera just as he came fully into view. It was undeniably Alex. "He's just about to pass you, Eagle."
"I've got a visual," he confirmed.
"Give it three minutes, Falcon, and he should be in range."
"Everything's ready over here. Which way should I be looking?" Fox's initial guess had been that he would be coming in from the eastern side, but that hadn't been confirmed yet.
"Still from the east, but moving further north as we speak."
Falcon shifted the aim on his rifle, pointing the sights further north by a couple degrees. "Got it. Just send him my way."
There was a pause for half a second before Fox said, "Eagle, it's your go."
The moment he entered the area, the assassin felt a subtle change in the area. It wasn't so late or early in the day that no one would be out on the streets, yet not a soul was in sight. Only the wind created sound, rustling leaves and dust, for there was a definite absence in traffic of either the pedestrian or mechanical sort. He narrowed his eyes as a rush of suspicion overwhelmed him, but decided he might as well walk through. The only other way to the second target without going by this route would take two hours longer. Inconvenient and entirely unnecessary, he reminded himself. While he could think of no good reason for an entire town being vacant, he also didn't feel the need to detour for purely instinctual reasons.
Ignoring his jangling nerves, he strode calmly into the town. Calmly, until he heard a sharp crack behind him. Whipping his head around, he received a face full of smoke.
He reacted immediately by dropping to the ground, leaving his bag by the sidewalk, and rolling out into the clean air. Another crack had him running blindly from the smoke grenades, eyes clamped shut to keep the smoke from burning them. The loud snaps of smoke released into the surrounding air had him twisting to avoid them as he tried to stay in the unclouded bubbles that were quickly disappearing. He closed his eyes and breathed slowly through the cotton of his jacket. The smoke was bad, but it could have been worse. They weren't trying to incapacitate him. The realization came to him quickly and he was instantly on high alert, stopping in his tracks. This was a cover for something else. But what?
"Alex?"
That voice…he recognized it from somewhere, from before his imprisonment. No one in SCORPIA had a voice that sounded as nice as this one. But that didn't matter. This was a cover for something else and he had to figure out what that something was. Getting to the second target was his highest priority.
The voice called his name again and he shut out the part of him that wanted to discover who it was. He squatted close to the ground, knowing that the smoke would be thinner down there, and cautiously opened his eyes. Nothing. The air was still too thick of the noxious smoke. But the smell it gave off to confuse the senses was strangely familiar. He almost thought that he remembered a room where it had been tested.
No, he had a mission to accomplish. Nothing would distract him.
Suddenly, the shifting footsteps stopped. Without the noise they provided, he couldn't locate where his three attackers were standing. Something was going to happen, and he wasn't going to be able to stop it. He stood to dash to another spot untainted by the smoke that seared at his lungs.
The silenced shot barely sliced his knee but he couldn't help the gasp that escaped him at the sudden flash of pain. It stung like a papercut—sharp and sudden—but quickly faded into the background as a tiny irksome throb. Glancing down at the line of blood it had left, he frowned at the odd way it had marked up his knee. A clear, slick substance marked the outside of his jeans just around the spot it had torn through. His eyes widened as he realized that the graze had been intentional. The bullet must have been coated in poison. He didn't have anything on him to remove it, and even if he had somehow been carrying the correct antidote, he was still caught in a precarious position.
Another voice was speaking from a hundred or so feet away, but he couldn't hear him clearly. Grabbing for the one thing he still had on him, he closed his eyes again and held the gun out in front of him, waiting for one of them to say something again. This time, he wouldn't be caught off-guard.
They had planned for everything.
At the soft clatter of a piece of gravel, he spun to his left and instinctively shot twice. Aiming for the first thing he heard, he hadn't realized that it was a decoy for them to locate him. A sharp whistling sound and the Beretta flew from his hand seemingly by magic. He heard the sound a second time and ducked out of the way, only for his wrist to get caught in the invisible lines. "No," he gasped, eyes wide as he tried to get free and grabbing for the kukri that he had tucked back into his bag, only to remember that he had dropped it somewhere along the way here. Another whistle, and his arm was further entwined.
A third voice called out loudly, "I've got him!" and he heard the footsteps resume.
Feeling his heart thud loudly in his chest as the poison flooded his nerves, he cautiously felt around his arm. There, he thought, feeling the set of strings that twisted around his wrist. With a quick breath to steady himself, he flipped his wrist over and used his second arm to counterbalance the weight on the other side of the linking strings. He heard a sharp shout as he quickly jumped up to loosen the grip of the strings, flipping backwards as he landed gracefully on his feet to rid himself of their grasp entirely.
But the maneuver had cost him more than he intended and he found himself unable to breathe as he fell down to his knees. The smoke slowly dissipated, letting him see more clearly the face of his partner standing above him. "Ben," he gasped as the face triggered dormant memories, a small smile on his face. "It's been awhile."
"Yeah, we'll have you fixed up in a second," Ben was reassuring him, but the teen was quickly shaking his head and still desperately trying to get back up.
"No, I need to get back out there. The diplomat, he isn't who you think. He needs to be stop—" He was cut off as he passed out, falling forward into his partner's open arms and laid gently on his back. Before the poison could hit his heart, Ben stabbed the antidote quickly into his chest. He pulled a second, smaller needle from his pouch and pricked it into Alex's neck. The first was to neutralize the toxin before it could cause lasting harm and the second to steady his vital signs, essentially putting him in an enforced sleep while the antidote worked.
While this was happening, Wolf was tending to Snake's arm, which had likely been fractured near the wrist when Alex had freed himself of the stringed shurikens. "It'll be fine," the medic was saying, waving him off as the splint was secured to keep the bones in place. "Nothing a week in a sling won't fix. Now let me get up to check on Alex. Falcon hit him over three minutes ago and I don't trust a couple milligrams of antidote to magically fix everything."
Eagle ran up, the plastic bag clutched in his right hand significantly emptied of the majority of its metal spheres. "How'd we do?"
Fox hoisted Alex up into a bridal carry, dismayed by how light his partner had gotten during his seven month absence. "We did well, but get the engine going. Do you know how to get to St. Dominics from here?"
A/N: That took a little longer than expected to finish, but admittedly, that's what happens when you type up multiple stories at once. My twin, Sekai, and I finally got around to posting stories on our shared account, Takanami. Basically, we threw out ideas about what would happen if you stuck these two 'verses together, or if two random characters met, and the hell that would follow for all the innocent bystanders. Heh. Fun times. Anyhow, posting might get a little strange (not that it was already…) added to the fact that I'm a temporary secretary tomorrow and the day after that.
So…yeah. Hope you liked the chapter. I actually divided this one in two parts and worked on the two viewpoints simultaneously. However, considering it is two in the morning as I'm finishing this, please help by pointing out the mistakes I've undoubtedly made. Time for bed. *yawn*
*PD, as NATO abbreviates it, is an organic arsenical vesicant and vomiting/incapacitating agent; therefore, one of six blister agents classified by NATO. Developed by Germany for use in chemical warfare during World War I, it has been decidedly less effective than other blister agents and relegated to use in security for banks and other high-security areas that can afford it. In most cases of exposure to PD, it damages the eyes, lungs, throat and nose, induces nausea and vomiting, and can cause both blindness and bone marrow damage with long-term, high dosage contact. Death can occur if treatment is not fast enough, but it is very rare. Basically, you don't screw around with this stuff lightly.
**Heckler and Koch medium range sniper rifle. Apparently, SAS has taken a liking to this new technology, along with Delta Force (American Special Ops), RENEA (Albanian counter-terrorism), ADF (Australian Defense Force) and others. It is only available to government and military organizations as of right now.
