Being cornered was not a new situation for Darien. Aside from that last time with the geriatric, Darien had never been caught mid-crime, but had always been pursued relentlessly afterward. He had been arrested more times than he'd been convicted, making the three strikes on his record a mere fraction of the number of times he'd been chased by the police. Darien had also escaped unscathed a number of times, but usually that meant the police had never chased him at all. Chase, in Darien's experience, led almost inevitably to capture. Once you were being chased, you had already lost.
Surrender was against his nature, as was the admission of wrongdoing, and those two combined to make him run every time, regardless of the odds against escaping. He just had to try. Ever a fan of the classics, Darien sided with Douglas Adams' famous character Zaphod Beeblebrox in thinking that as discretion was the better part of valor, cowardice was the better part of discretion, and he had valiantly hid himself in any number of closets as a result. But once found and cornered, Darien's first choice was not to resort to a violent last stand, but more a whining protest.
Acting courageously (or selflessly, for that matter) was new to him, and he wasn't very good at it.
Thus when Darien saw and accepted that he could not get away, he began to talk. Or to babble, really.
"Look, fellas, I'm sure we can work this out. If this is about all those times I stole my brother's Christmas presents and broke them, I'm really sorry about that. I was a kid, I was greedy, I didn't know any better," despite a sense of panic at the closing in of the strangers, Darien kept his wits and sense of humor about him, and the fact that they were dressed as Santas provoked a plethora of ridiculous comments and statements, which he unleashed in an unchecked flood, "And, and that time I told Susie Derkins that you weren't real, I was only trying to impress her. I didn't mean to make her cry!"
Two of the Santas briefly checked themselves. The name was clearly familiar to them, but the context made retrieving the reason for that somewhat difficult, since they obviously didn't have comic strips at the forefront of their minds. Darien didn't give them time to sort it out.
"And, you know, I haven't really been hiding from you, it's just that where I live doesn't have any chimneys," Darien carefully kept whether he lived in a house or an apartment to himself, just in case these people didn't know where he lived already and he was somehow able to go home after this, "And, you know, my penmanship is awful, all my teachers said so-"
This proved to be the end of Darien's speech for a time, as the four Santas all pounced on him. Though he made no real attempt to visit violence upon them (primarily because he was pathetically bad at it), he did thrash in a frantic final bid for freedom, but they bore him to the ground and one tossed a bag over his head. The one thing he gathered about this was that the bag had a powerful odor to it and he felt like he was choking. Then things began to get a bit dizzying and even nauseating, and he knew that smell had to be some kind of anesthetic. Alone in the suffocating dark, he collapsed rapidly and knew nothing more for awhile.
Something Darien had begun to grow used to since the Gland had become a loathsome aspect of his existence was awakening with some confusion as to where he was and how he'd got there. Even aside from the not infrequent bonks on the head that resulted in periods of unconsciousness that came as a part of his new line of work, often when he received counter-agent after being sunk in Madness, he would come back from it disoriented, not quite remembering what he'd been doing for some minutes after the shot took effect. It also wasn't uncommon for him to actually lose consciousness after the strain of losing his hold on sanity for seconds or even minutes.
And so it was with no great deal of panic that Darien awakened unsure of where he was or what was going on. In fact the main thing that bothered him was the bag over his head. Since his brief stint as a blind man a scant few months ago, Darien had hated not being able to see above almost all else.
His first act of conscious will was to try and extricate himself from the bag, at which point he realized his hands were tied behind his back. Tied, not cuffed. This distinction was, for someone who had been repeatedly arrested by the police, an important one. Policemen used cuffs, or possibly zip ties if they should happen to arrest too many people for the number of cuffs they were carrying. They did not, in Darien's experience, use anything else. This felt like... probably not rope. Maybe cord of some kind.
Not that Darien had expected to be kidnapped by policemen (he could think of no instance where he'd been drugged or literally bagged by any policeman), but government agents tended to also carry cuffs or zip ties with them, and Darien had definitely been picked up by agents. In fact, he had first come to The Agency with a bag over his head, for no reason that he was later able to accept as true.
Darien didn't get very far into his thought processes before he was again overcome by the drug saturated fabric of the bag over his head, and fell again into unknowing blackness.
The next time Darien regained consciousness, someone had had the courtesy to take the bag off his head and sit him in a chair. But his hands were still tied and, looking around, he still didn't have any idea as to where he was. He could tell of course that he was sitting in a chair, and that he was in a room, but he'd sat in lots of chairs and been in lots of rooms, so that really didn't narrow it down a great deal.
It did remind him a bit of The Official's office. Except without the windows. Or the class.
Gradually it came to him that he really didn't feel very good. It was more instinct that anything that made him twist around to try and see the inside of his wrist over his shoulder, fearing above all that the snake's head was about to go red. It was at this point that he realized that the tie at his wrist also bound him to the chair itself. But the snake wasn't even mostly red, and he could have figured that out and saved himself the strain if he'd taken another few breaths and sorted out what part of him felt bad and in what way. Mentally, he was as sound as he ever got.
No, the bad feeling was from a mismanaged dose of anesthetic, which left him feeling a little bit loopy and sick to his stomach. Once he realized that's all it was, he calmed down and got hold of himself.
He took another look around the office. Closed doors, cheap desk, shoddily constructed chairs. It wouldn't be hard to mistake this for The Official's office. But the lack of windows was a dead giveaway. The coldness of the room was another clue. The Agency was always looking to reduce costs, and one of the things to be attacked most frequently was the air conditioning. Darien had good reason to think this was the same day he'd been kidnapped, and it was much warmer outside than it was in this room, which meant someone was probably running the cooling system (the fact he could hear air blowing through the vent in the wall confirmed it). Another clue was that the walls were definitely a different shade of boring (specifically, they were gray instead of beige).
A final, very definite clue, was that the place smelled like cigarette smoke. Really cheap cigarette smoke, trapped in a poorly ventilated building. The Official gave off this vibe like he ought to be smoking a big black cigar at all times, but if he smoked at all, Darien hadn't been clued in to it.
Darien had never let smoking bother him before, but just now the smell of cigarettes combined with the slightly sick feeling left by the overdose of anesthetic to make him feel nauseous. Naturally, he didn't enjoy this at all, and it added to his growing discomfort with his present circumstances.
Facing the front of the cheap desk, Darien noticed that there were two mantel ornaments sitting at it corners like colorful gargoyles. They were both Santas, but one had certain angelic characteristics and was holding a scroll list with the heading of 'Nice' whereas the other one had a distinct demonic aspect and a 'Naughty' list. Both looked thoroughly gleeful, but there was a slightly foolish cant to the angel Santa, and a sinister cunning cut to the devil Santa. If not for the disagreeable circumstances they might have been amusing. As it was, they just seemed creepy. Darien tried to ignore them.
He looked around again as best he could from his chair, wondering if there were any security cameras in here. The Agency was crawling with cameras, only some of which he'd managed to identify. If there were any in here, he wanted to be careful about what he did or said, even though there didn't seem to be any people around nearby. For instance, he didn't want to quicksilver only to find out they had someone watching security footage in the other room. Then not only wouldn't it help him escape, these people would know he could turn invisible. Assuming, of course, that they didn't already know that.
After looking around, Darien hadn't spotted any cameras. But he did still feel like he was being watched, and his gaze returned to the Santas on the desk. It occurred to him that those were about the right size to hide a camera in, though he didn't at the moment see any point the lens could conceivably be looking out from on either figure.
Still, almost no sooner had Darien decided that the devil Santa was the one that made him feel particularly like he was being watched than one of the doors to the room opened and a man walked in.
Tall, lanky and dangerous were the first three descriptive terms that came to Darien as the man crossed the room, went to the desk and sat in the chair behind it. That last term was not so much seen as sensed, though perhaps being kidnapped had made Darien prejudiced on this point.
"Have you ever thought about submitting an application to the Ministry of Silly Walks?" Darien asked, "If you go out and come in again, I'll tell you if they're likely to give you a grant to develop yours."
The man, hands folded neatly on the desk, looked at Darien in cold, humorless fashion, like a left-open freezer without any ice cream in it. Darien decided that he had one of those faces that would probably break into a thousand pieces if he so much as attempted a smile.
"You were seen," the man began, once he was satisfied that Darien didn't have any other smart remarks he'd like to make, "Questioning the Shepherd woman. But you're not police."
"I'm not?" Darien inquired in mock surprise, "Oh gee, then what am I?"
"That," the man replied in his irritatingly clipped way, "Is what you are going to tell us."
"Really?" Darien persisted lightly, "Well I'm glad you know what I'm going to do, because really I don't most of the time until after I do it. I'm thinking about seeing a shrink, but they're so-"
"Why did you go to see the Shepherd woman?" the man interrupted impatiently.
"Well, you see, I was in this van," Darien began, "And since it had stopped in front of the house, I figured I might as well go inside and meet the dog."
"The dog?" the man asked, "Is that supposed to be some kind of derogatory remark?"
"No, she actually has a dog. Little, friendly black mutt. We had a great time playing on the stairs."
The key to any good lie, of course, was to mix in an ample dose of truth, ideally in such a way that the truth was suspected while the lie was taken at face value. Darien was mixing good lying with bad lying, for no particular reason other than that he didn't want this man -or any of his goons, wherever they were- to know how much Darien knew, or how competent he was. Ideally, they would think he was a (probably clueless) idiot, and treat him accordingly. That would make it much easier to figure out what they wanted with him, and also to escape should the opportunity present itself.
"Come now, Agent Fawkes," the man said, "You don't seriously expect me to believe that, do you? Really. What does the..." he pulled Darien's ID card, lifted during Darien's period of unconsciousness, out of his pocket and read, "Department of Fish & Game want with the Shepherds?"
"Well..." Darien scrambled for a good line, and found one, "We got a tip they'd killed two game wardens, seven hunters and a cow on a hunting expedition, and of course we had to look into that because cows are out of season right now."
Apparently Darien had delivered this ludicrous speech with a degree of sincerity he hadn't managed earlier, because the man peered at him rather seriously, like a vulture looking for a way into a carcass.
"Are you on any medication at present, Agent Fawkes?" the man asked.
"That seems rather personal, don't you think?" Darien asked.
This provoked a satisfyingly annoyed sigh, and the man sat back in his chair.
"Agent Fawkes, it would be in your best interest to tell me what you found out from Mrs. Shepherd. I know you went to the agency her babysitter was hired from, and I know you talked to her housekeeper. I just need to know what you found out."
"I told you, I played with the dog, I didn't talk to Mrs. Shepherd. As to what I found out at the babysitting agency, did you know you need a warrant to get them to reveal information about their employees and clients? I didn't. So that's what I found out there."
"Agent Fawkes," the man said, speaking with patience that was clearly a bit threadbare, "You really don't want to be playing games with me."
"Why not?" Darien asked innocently, "Do you cheat at scrabble?"
"This could get very ugly, Agent Fawkes," the man warned.
"Really? 'cause I'd say things are already ugly in here. Maybe you should try a different shade of paint, because this bleak shade of gray just screams suicidal depression."
The man glared at him. Darien stared back with his best guileless expression.
"One way or another, Agent Fawkes," the man assured him in menacing tones, "You will tell me what I want to know."
Though he did his best not to show it overtly, looking in the man's eyes, Darien believed him.
And that scared the hell out of him.
