Chapter 5: Zim Versus Warehouse 13

"Whoa, whoa!" Sam said. He held up both hands and made a gesture with one of them. "Hey now. Hold up. What's the Secret Service doing here? Aren't you supposed to be protecting the president or something?"

"Ha-ha," the man said. "We've never heard that one before, have we Mykes?"

"Drop your weapons!" Mykes, the woman, said.

"You don't want me to do that," Sam said. "If I don't keep holding my gun like this." He demonstrated, showing his finger was off the trigger. "My buddy Mike's gonna have to take you down."

Mykes and her partner looked around, suddenly aware of being watched through a set of crosshairs. "Pete?" she said.

"I can't see anything," Pete said. He looked kind of familiar. Now that Zim saw his face at this angle, he knew who he was thinking of.

"Are you related to a vampire with a soul named Angel?" Zim asked.

"Uh . . . what?" Pete's confusion made him look even more like Angel than before.

"Never mind."

"You're after the Widowmaker, right?" Sam said.

"You've seen it?" Mykes asked.

"Shut up," Casey said to Sam. "Don't tell them anything."

"Take it easy, you big lug. I got buddies everywhere, even in the Secret Service." He looked back to the agents. "Names?"

"I'm Myka Bering, and this is my partner, Pete Lattimer."

Sam snapped his fingers. "I thought I might know you two! You're on Warehouse 13 duty, right?"

Pete and Mykes glanced at each other. "How could you know about that?" Pete asked.

"Relax. I recognized the Tesla." Sam gestured to the ray guy. "I go way back with Artie."

"You know Artie?" Mykes asked.

"You bet. I know just about everyone. I'd thought about setting up shop with the Warehouse, but I'm retired these days. Speaking of which, it's been at least ten minutes without me having a mojito. What say we go inside and work things out together?"

"Mykes, I don't think we have much of a choice," Pete said.

"Fine," she said. "Let's go in together. No sudden moves."

Casey growled, a sound that Zim was getting used to. He was just glad it wasn't directed at him for a change.

They stopped by the hotel bar so Sam could get a bunch of mojitos sent up to their room. Upstairs they settled into Walker's room, where she had hidden a package in the safe. She took it out, still wrapped in a chamois cloth, and brought it to the desk in the main room just as Sam collected the mojitos at the door and passed them out.

Finally Walker unveiled the object within. It looked like a common pipe that one would find in their utility room.

"That's it?" Sam asked.

Zim Flashed, and he saw a submarine in the Arctic. Russians commanded the vessel and shouted at one another. The schematics for the nuclear system on board. A man drowning while clutching a pipe. The pipe. Then a designation: K-19.

"K-19," Zim said. "The Widowmaker."

"The Harrison Ford movie?" Pete asked.

"Kind of," Sam said. "Back in 1961, the K-19 was a nuclear submarine that nearly went tits up and caused Chernobyl decades before Chernobyl."

"The pipe," Zim said. "If you touch it, it causes water to build up in your lungs, and it makes you drown."

"That's right," Mykes said. "That's what Artie told us. But no one is supposed to know that. How did you—?"

"That's our secret," Casey said. He glared at Zim, almost daring him to say anything about the Intersect.

Zim refrained from opening his mouth.

"How does it do that?" Sam asked.

"It's an artifact," Pete said. "Mykes and I, we work for Warehouse 13. Some things are just imbued with power because of the person who owned it or . . . something else. Sometimes we just don't know."

"Like Poe's feather pen," Mykes said. "It could kill people by writing a simple word."

"I've heard about black ops stuff like that," Sam said. "Very nasty shit. Hell of a gig you've got there."

A knock came at the door, and Sam went to check on it. Soon a very lean, well-built man with dark hair approached with a sniper rifle broken down in a case. "Michael Westen," Sam said with a gesture of his hand. "Mikey, this is . . . I don't even know where to begin."

"When you're a spy," Michael said, "I find it's best to just start at the beginning."

"We'd rather just start at the end," Mykes said. "Pete?"

"Sorry guys," Pete said. He produced a weird looking bag from his pocket and donned a pair of gloves. "We gotta snag it, bag it and tag it." He moved to grab the Widowmaker.

Casey drew down on him. "Not so fast."

Walker backed him up, and Mykes backed up her partner. Sam and Michael glanced at each other, unsure of where their loyalties should be. Only Zim seemed to know what was going on, and for him, that was very unusual. But more importantly, he didn't want either Walker or Mykes to get killed. He wanted to fuck them both so badly. Maybe a threeway could be arranged?

"Okay," Zim said. "So we've got the general."

"The insurance guy?" Pete asked.

"No! Goddammit! And these Warehouse guys have their . . . uh . . . Artie? And you two have the FBI guys who put you up to this. Why not just call them and get them to work together?"

Sam shrugged. "Kid makes sense."

"I'm not a kid!" Zim yelled.

"Just call him Zim," Casey said. Judging from the Satanic look in his eyes, Zim knew that Casey had done that deliberately. That motherfucker.

"Let's just hunker down and try to make sense of this," Sam said. "It'll be a lot better than just shooting the hell out of each other."

"I don't know," Casey said. "I'm usually a shoot-em-up kind of guy."

"We need to bag it," Pete said. "It's dangerous just having it out here."

Zim threw the chamois over the Widowmaker. It was almost as if a spell had been broken. Everyone slowly lowered their weapons until no one seemed to be in danger of getting shot.

"I'll get Beckman on," Walker said.

"Mykes, get on the Farnsworth," Pete said. She pulled out a giant blocky box that apparently worked as kind of a cell phone and worked at getting Artie on the line. While she did that, Zim Flashed and went back to 1929, to Philo Farnsworth putting this device together. They worked on a secure frequency that couldn't be cracked, hacked or tapped. Weird.

Another knock at the door. Michael nodded, placing the sniper case on the floor. "I already called in our FBI contacts." He went to answer the knock.

"Myka!" the Farnsworth shouted out. "Do you have it?"

Pete shoved his face next to Myka's. "Well, Artie . . . kinda."

"Kinda? Define kinda!"

Walker propped her cell phone up against the wall on the desk. The screen showed General Beckman, who didn't look quite so much like a general at the time. Her hair was messy, and she wore a nightgown. "Agent Walker, this had better be good."

"Who is that?" the Farnsworth squawked.

And then Michael brought the FBI agents in. One a man, the other a woman. Zim was starting to see a pattern here. He also felt the front of his pants go super-tight at this awkward moment as he looked at the female agent.

"These are our FBI contacts," Michael said.

The man whipped out his ID badge. "Fox Mulder, FBI. And this is my partner—"

"Dana Scully," she said. She showed her own badge.

Fuck, Zim thought. I need to bang her. Like, a lot.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .