Birkhoff and Sonya had had a couple of hours to sack out – not that Michael or Alex were happy about this, but as he explained to them, they weren't going to be any good if they fell asleep in the middle of trying to turn off a security system.
Besides, he'd already told them where the Unbroken Academy was, thanks to Ryan's flash of insight, and they'd promised not to do anything more than look around until he had a chance to do more research.
Ryan, in the meantime, apparently didn't need to sleep, because he'd spent the last couple of hours talking to undoubtedly grumpy contacts, many of whom were probably trying to figure out where the hell he was – while he was still theoretically in good standing with the administration, that didn't mean people didn't want him answering a whole lot of questions. The president's murder helped them there, by distracting a whole lot of people, though that was a hell of a thing to find the good side of. Birkhoff hadn't voted for the woman – he'd never actually voted – but there was a hell of a difference between "I don't like your politics" and "I want you dead."
Did you find out anything?" Sonya asked Ryan when the two of them went back to the "computer room."
"A lot of people pretending not to know me," Ryan said, "Although the fact that I'm calling them at 4 in the morning might have had something to do with that." He stood up. "What I did find out was strongly in the direction of 'don't mess with these people,' with the occasional undercurrent of 'they're the good guys.' The best info I got came from a contact I've got on the NYPD, who said that some people from the Unbroken Academy helped them bring down a mass murderer not too long ago, and that a lot of the people involved in it were young women – from maybe 16 to mid-20s at most – and that these women could kick ass."
"You think we're dealing with another agency, then?" Birkhoff asked.
"I'm sure of it, though it sounds like they have different goals. Division doesn't – didn't – deal with stopping mass murderers, as a general rule."
"Well, we certainly had some on the payroll," Birkhoff muttered. "Back when Percy and Amanda were in charge, I mean." And they made deals with them all the time. Not people like Ted Bundy, but closer to those on the order of Osama bin Laden.
"Yeah. I know."
Sonya handed him a Pepsi Max and said, "Ready?"
"As I'll ever be," he said.
X
It was 5:36 in the morning when Amanda awoke to the sound of her phone ringing. She had been dreaming of superheroes. "Yes?" she said.
Panos, of course. "They've been sitting outside this place near Cockeysville for about an hour. They're eating and talking and looking at it. They're not doing anything else. Place looks like the entrance of an old nursing home. The sign on the outside says "Unbroken Academy."
"Anything else?" Amanda asked.
"No trespassing."
Almost anyone else, Amanda would have assumed they were trying to make a joke. Panos didn't know how. "I mean, are they doing anything else?
"Nothing we can see."
"And are you certain they're observing this – Unbroken Academy? Could they possibly just be planning strategy? Or sleeping?" She didn't doubt Panos' powers of observation, but she preferred not to have mercenaries attack an actual private school. It would be extremely difficult to cover up. So she asked.
"They've been sitting there for an hour," Panos said. "And they're not asleep. There's too much movement for them to be asleep. And they're taking notes. So I'm sure. Sure enough to bet my pay."
That was sure, for Panos. "Very well, then," she said. "Scout out this Unbroken Academy and let me know if you see Nikita. Only then will we be completely certain."
"Michael and Alex watching it isn't enough?"
"That means that that's where they believe Nikita is," Amanda said. "They are more than competent at this sort of thing, but so is Nikita. It is possible they have been fooled."
"We checked on the vehicle. It's registered to a company called SWI. When Mickey tried to hack their website he got a warning. Thirty seconds later something wiped his hard drive."
"SWI?" Amanda didn't particularly care about Mickey's computer, except that it indicated that whoever was in charge of computer security at SWI was good at their job.
"Yeah. Mean anything to you?"
It didn't, but Amanda, while well-read, never pretended to know everything. "No. But I'll have some of the people here do some research and get back to you."
"Will do."
He disconnected. It was now 5:41 AM. Surely someone at the Shop would be up, able to answer some questions or do something to find out who or what this SWI was, and what connection they had to the Unbroken Academy.
But first, a shower.
FLASHBACK
Nikita thoroughly bound and gagged the driver, and then tossed him in the SUV's back seat. In the meantime, Xander drove the car to the back of the supermarket and parked it behind a dumpster, then wiped down the steering wheel and the door latches, at her direction. "I'd hoped we could torch it," he said, apparently joking.
"That would only bring more attention."
"Which is the last thing we need. Yeah. So. Where to now?"
"Back to where I was hiding." She didn't want them tracing this directly to the Unbroken Academy.
"Got it. After we get there, I'll make a few calls."
They drove the rest of the way in silence—to avoid giving any hints to their captive, in case he woke up and decided to try to fake it.
At some point, he had, because when they got there and Nikita opened the back door, he kicked the door as hard as he could, knocking her off balance – but not enough to do him any good. Nikita pulled out the pistol as she staggered back, and had it trained on him before he could even get his (still-bound) feet on the pavement.
The man stopped. Xander said, "I don't suppose you have any handy-dandy chloroform lying around?"
"Nope," Nikita said. "We'll just have to keep hitting him."
The man realized what that meant and started flailing about, until Xander grabbed his thrashing feet and dragged him out of the car, letting his head bounce off the asphalt. This wasn't enough to knock him unconscious, but it took some of the fight out of him so that he was a lot easier to drag into the motel. There, they threw him onto the bed and Nikita said, "Okay, we're going to take off your gag. Yell and someone'll call the police – and I don't think you like them any more than we do." She gestured for Xander to do it, while she kept the pistol carefully trained.
He didn't scream, and he didn't try to attack Xander, but he clearly wasn't happy, and made sure they knew it in a stream of cuss words in at least three different languages, during the course of which he explained exactly what he would do to them and how painful it would be. The man had little or no imagination; she'd been threatened with far more inventive tortures in her time at Division, and that was just by Amanda.
While they waited for the man to run down, Xander left the room to make a phone call. Finally, the man ran out of things to say, and simply glared at her. "Are you done?" Nikita asked. The man spat. "Good. What's your name?" No answer. "Okay, then. The hard way it is."
When a minute later she hadn't moved, the man said, "This is the hard way? Unless you mean another kind of hard, and there you're already doing very well."
Nikita rolled her eyes but didn't say anything until Xander came back. "Okay, we got one coming," he said.
One what, Nikita wanted to, but didn't ask. "Okay. Good. I need you to help me. Our friend here isn't even telling us his name, so we need to get his wallet." The man backed up until his butt was up against the room's far wall.
"Maybe he's your friend," Xander said, moving forward. "I'm not friends with people who casually set up teenaged girls to be killed."
"I had nothing to do with that!" the man protested as Xander came forward, dragged him to the foot of the bed, flipped him over, and pulled the wallet out of his back pocket. He handed it to Nikita has he stepped backwards, not bothering to put the man back on his back.
"Vasily Abramov," Nikita read. There were also a couple of credit cards, a few hundred dollars in cash, and a blood donor card. "So, Vasily. You say you had 'nothing to do with that.'"
"I did not. I was at the Hustler Club."
"You obviously knew about it."
"Yes."
"So it's not that you wouldn't kill these women," Nikita said, "It's that you just weren't asked to."
"There's pretty much no way you can answer that that's going to make you look good," Xander said. "So don't even bother trying."
"Why would I? The girls were getting in the way of our business. They had to be taught a lesson." Nikita had seen this before. Vasily apparently thought he was dead anyway, so he wasn't going to bother lying – at least, not about things his captors already knew. And the way he said "Why would I" made it sound like he couldn't possibly see a reason anyone would object. Of course you killed those who got in your way; who wouldn't?
People like that ran Division. People like that were why she left Division, and was going to do her best to bring it down.
"And see how well that worked?" Nikita asked.
"We will simply try again," Vasily said, sneering.
"Yeah, one thing about us," Xander said. "We don't run scared from anyone."
"Then we will kill you all."
Xander laughed, though there was no humor in it. "Believe me when I say better than you have tried. People that make you guys look like Bugs Meany and the Tigers. We're still here. They're not."
Vasily was unimpressed, and said so.
"You don't need to be impressed," Nikita said. "You just need to tell me where your boss is."
"Whether I tell you or don't, you're going to kill me anyway. So I choose not to tell you." He said it with as much dignity as a man bound head to toe lying face down on a bed can have, which was very little.
"Doesn't matter anyway," Xander said. "We're not the interrogators." He opened the door and gestured. A blonde woman of medium height – maybe in her late 30s - came into the room. "She is. Vasily Abramov, lowlife Russian thug, meet Stephanie, like we're giving you her last name, witch. Steph? Go to it."
The woman smiled grimly as she stepped forward. "Just relax, Mr. Abramov," she said. "This won't hurt a bit."
END FLASHBACK
"What?" Amanda said. After her shower, she'd called in a request for someone in the Shop to tell her everything they could find about SWI and the Unbroken Academy. Ten minutes later, one of the board members, who sounded irritable at having been awakened at 6 in the morning, had called her back.
"I believe I was clear," the man said. "The Shop will have nothing to do with anything involving SWI. We will not prevent you from doing it, but we are beneath their radar and we would very much like to stay that way. Do not use any of our resources, either."
"This is to get Nikita," she said. "Which you all agreed to help me do."
"And we'll keep doing that, as soon as she's no longer connected to SWI. Their predecessor drove our predecessor out of business in a decidedly terminal fashion several years back and we have no interest in a repeat performance. We'll send you the information we have, internally, on SWI, but we won't research them any further."
"This is unacceptable."
"Maybe, but it's going to happen whether you accept it or not."
He hung up. She screamed in frustration, but didn't bother calling back; it wouldn't have done any good. Not thirty seconds later she got the signal that she was receiving an email. Attached was all the information they were willing to give her about SWI. She sat back on her bed and began to read it –
Wait.
That name. It couldn't be.
No, it was.
Well. This made things substantially more difficult.
X
Stephanie, whose last name is Samuels, is my creation. It couldn't be Willow; Nikita didn't meet her until the present.
