Disclaimer: These characters are used and abused without permission. But they enjoy it. =^_~=
~~~~~~~~~~Episode Eighty-Seven: Support Structure
"Do not needlessly endanger your lives until I give you the signal." ~Dwight D. EisenhowerJuly 16th, 1903
Not all agents were necessarily evil. Those still associated with Cinq were bound by the morals and values adopted by their less-than-honourable employers, certainly, but Cinq wasn't what it used to be. It was short one member who chose never to have anything to do with the organization again, and that member had once commanded his own fighting force, just like any other. But he dealt with them differently.
These agents were respected with the truth, and in turn, they respected their leader for his honesty, and vowed to carry out his orders even after he was no longer able to give them. They wore simple navy blue clothes based on designs of civil war uniforms worn by troops of the northern United States, with matching caps, and ran around portions of the world in secret, peering out from under the brims of those little blue caps in silent contemplation. Some weeks after the grand assembly that was held to start the process of replacing their leader, they became aware of a plot, a command coming from Camp Jeffrhyss and going out to all the other factions regarding an agent who had recently gone astray. The Blue Caps, as they called themselves, didn't like the sound of what they were hearing, and felt they needed to do something about it.
However, all they had to work with were rumours. They needed to get their hands on official documentation carried by an agent, one of Jeffrhyss' men, if possible. With this in mind, they took up positions throughout London, looking for an agent to nab and squeeze for information, but staying close to a specific radius around one individual. Among other people, the Blue Caps saw an agent in a gray suit and bowler hat, with tawny hair and a decidedly nasty sneer. They discussed him amongst themselves, but decided that he was too far down on the food chain to be interested in. The agent was left to carry out his business, and the Blue Caps went elsewhere, certain that a better opportunity would present itself in time.
**********It was slightly out of character, but Duo and Heero were walking down a busy route of commerce that was teeming with life and packed with shops, hanging around a young, pretty, well-dressed lady and helping her carry her shopping, which consisted of two hat boxes stacked on top of four dress boxes, plus half a dozen paper bags from some very posh establishments. Even more surprising was that the well-dressed young lady was Hilde. The boys had taken her on a shopping spree to get her spruced up a little, partly to say thanks for being so supportive of them, but mostly so that Heero could have a pretty decoy at his disposal.
The finest of her new gowns was sealed away in the boxes, but the plainer dress she wore was just as splendid, made up of a cheery red check in cotton voile, and a straw sun hat painted white with a matching red ribbon. Hilde looked and felt like a real lady now, and while most poor flower girls brought up in the slums would have had a hard time carrying off the change, she lifted her head proudly and made it all believable, from the way she walked with dainty confidence to the way she commanded her bearers to carry more and more loot as they bounced from shop to shop. Within an hour, she had easily gone through all the money they had scraped together for the outing.
"Now this is living!" Hilde crowed as yet another gentleman tipped his hat to her as she passed.
Heero and Duo, following behind with an armload of stuff each, rolled their eyes at each other. "A little too convincing, don't you think?" Heero suggested.
"Hey, shows she was paying attention all that time Dot an' Lena were around," Duo replied with a shrug that nearly unbalanced his burden.
"Less chatter back there!" the Queen Bee ordered with a flick of her white-gloved hand. Almost immediately afterwards, she stopped and stared googly-eyed at the contents of a jewellery store window. "Oooooh..."
"Oh, no you don't," Heero snapped.
Hilde patted him on the head. "Don't panic, I just want a teensy look, okay?" She twisted around, flung open the door to the shop and slipped inside, unobstructed.
Duo looked at Heero and snickered, then crinkled his eyes sympathetically. "This is really nice of you, and I'm taking careful note of it."
In time, Heero relaxed his glare and smirked, setting his boxes down on the ground and leaning against the building with his arms folded. "I can't fault her for having a dream, not if I don't want to make another powerful enemy."
"She wouldn't tell anyone about us, I know she wouldn't," said Duo.
"...just making sure, that's all." In Heero's opinion, there was currently no such thing as 'too cautious', which explained why keeping Hilde happy was so important, and also why he was still examining every inch of his environment for threats of a different nature. His eyes fixed on something in the distance, and he elbowed Duo. "Over there."
Immediately alert, Duo looked in the same direction, but only saw an average-looking mob of people tracking up and down the streets carrying shopping of their own. "Which one?"
"Gray suit, bowler hat two sizes too big, sandy hair, mud stains on the trouser cuffs."
With that description, Duo easily picked him out, aparently an agent on a mission. He made a scoffing noise through a smile and shook his head. "What number's that, now?"
"Since the park? ...nineteen," Heero calculated.
Duo whistled. "Damn...I don't know if I wanna be around to witness whatever's going down."
Heero thought quickly back to the beginnings of his first and only mission. Often an agent didn't know where he was going until the day he had to leave, and didn't know why until he arrived. In the interim, it was always possible that there were some minute facts on paper, hidden on one's person. "Go get Hilde," he instructed quietly, eyes still on the young man in the gray suit. "I've got an idea."
Duo went and fetched Hilde out of the jewellery store, and the trio packed up their parcels and began tailing the man, at a distance. Here was an ideal opportunity, Heero explained, to test out some of their less-used abilities in a manner that might also curb his curiosity about where all these excess agents were coming from and why. They followed the young man down the same road for a long time, and Hilde soon pointed out that they were headed for a train station. There was very little time to act before the gray suit and bowler hat would disappear for good, so they formulated a lightning-fast plan.
Ducking down a side street, they ran parallel to the main road about halfway across the remaining distance to the station. Heero took up a neutral position on a park bench with a little less than half the packages, while Hilde took the rest and headed back to the road, and Duo tucked his braid down the back of his tweed jacket and headed along a diagonal to the station itself. Finally having earned the position of power he had always deserved, Heero sat back and watched his well-oiled machine in action at last.
Hilde piled hat boxes on top of dress boxes, hung bags off her arms, and arranged it all so that she could just barely see where she was going. Walking away from the station, she aimed carefully for the bowler hat, dodging everyone else with feigned wobbliness, and crashing deliberately into the agent. She squealed and went down in an avalanche of packages that took the agent out as well. His hat came off and he hit the ground with a terrible 'Oof!'
The sight of a pretty girl in distress brought a whole flock of gentlemen to help her to her feet, and the swarm made a particular point of helping her pick up every one of her parcels. The agent in the bowler hat wanted to scowl as he clambered to his feet, but suppressed it well. He found that he had one of the lady's paper shopping bags and grudgingly handed it back to her as he put his hat back on, not wanting to look suspicious to the swarm.
Then, as the young man turned to exit the scene, anxious to get where he was going, he slammed face-first into another youth, obviously another rubbernecker. "Oh, sorry, mate!" the youth offered in a ramshackle Cockney, but the agent took no notice, shoving him out of the way as he carried on toward the train station.
Hilde went one way, securely balancing her cargo, and Duo went another way, snickering and playing with the agent's wallet. Heero smiled to himself as he watched, pleased with their efficiency.
They regrouped and hopped a cab across town, just in case the bowler hat wised up to their tricks and went looking for them. While they stopped for a mid-morning snack at a little café, Heero emptied the wallet out onto the table so they could all have a look at the contents. "Sloppy...just plain sloppy," Heero remarked at the large number of library cards and official miscellany he carried, all with different names on them. "You're only supposed to carry one set of credentials with you at any given time."
"Maybe they're not for agent-type use, y'know...maybe he's just running from his ex-girlfriend?" Duo joked, holding up a small photograph of a curly-haired, 200 lb. Can-Can dancer.
While Heero winced and shuddered, Hilde gathered up the money and drooled over it. "Hmmm...nearly forty pounds...enough to go back to that jewellery store!"
"I've created a monster," Heero deadpanned, sifting through some business cards with grungy, bent edges. "Four tobacconists and a liquor store. Here's to his good health."
"Seven toothpicks...ewww, he's used three of them already!"
"Hah! Listen to this horoscope he clipped out of the paper: 'You will lose a substantial sum of money'!"
"Lady Tiger Lily in the fourth race, twenty to one odds...I'll have to keep both eyes on that one...if he'd lost, he would have ripped up the slip and thrown it away."
"...'Yvette LaBouche, go straight up to the top floor and ring bell three times after ten o'clock'...oh, that's just wrong."
Duo paused before joining in the next round. He had unfolded a scrap of paper and seemed to find something of interest that brought a sombre shadow to his face. "Hey...I think I found something..."
Heero and Hilde both scooted their chairs closer to look over his shoulder on either side. It was a typewritten note on new paper, with four columns of data spaced out evenly on separate lines. The note read:
Atenabu Luxor arson June 28 Dreschler & Co. New York sink ocean liner August 7 Mileski Malta (?) demolition July 22 Peacecraft (anon.) Leeds (Ibrox) July 16 Yan, Sun Gee & Bros. TBA (Korea) flooding August 3
The cryptic message was instantly sobering. Slowly, Heero slid the pieces into place and attempted to interpret it. "The other four names...I recognize them. They were all delegates at Cinq's grand assembly. According to the rulebook, they each have to 'audition' for the vacant role by mimicking the sort of behaviour that made Cinq what it is. This must be the most recent batch of attempts to impress them."
"I'm not liking today's date right next to Relena's name," Duo said shakily, leaning forward over the note and clamping his hair to the base of his neck with one hand. "What does this mean, that...that she's going to do something stupid and pointless and mindbogglingly destructive today?"
"I think I know where Leeds is," Hilde mused, "but who or what is 'Ibrox'?"
Heero squinted at the peculiar word, but that didn't make it either more or less comprehensible. He shook his head. "Back to base. Maybe by now, the others are back from their supply mission, and we can ask them."
**********'Base camp' was the meeting room at the pub, and as predicted, Trowa and Quatre were back from wherever they had been. Within a remarkably short time, Hilde had permanently etched the workings of Morse code into her mind, and while she was still not up to the skill level where she could actually read the messages she deciphered, through six hours of drills she translated each letter or number given to her in dots and dashes with 98% accuracy. At that point, any missed characters could probably be logically gleaned by whomever read the transmission. Now all they needed was a means of intercepting telegraphs, hence the supply mission.
Quatre was overly anxious to show off what he and Trowa had found, so Heero graciously let them make their presentation first. Out of a large cardboard box, they hefted a hideous contraption made of wires, lights, vacuum bulbs and, the one recognizable piece of technology, a common electromagnetic telegraph key, for transmitting and receiving. They set it down on the table and let everyone get a good look; 'everyone' excluded Sally, who had a patient to see, and Wufei, who was just generally miserable lately.
"It's a telegraph absconsion machine," Quatre explained excitedly. "Here's how it works...you take this long wire, see? With the little clamp on the end? And you just climb up a telegraph pole and hook it up to the wire. Then when a message is transmitted, the signal goes from one office to another as usual, but it also shoots down this little wire and activates this telegraph key right here, see? The government ministry that regulates the system will swear up and down that no technology exists that can pirate a telegraph signal, but this thing really works, and the inventor proved it to us!"
On cue, Trowa reached into the back pocket of his bone white slacks and pulled out some handwritten pages with memos about relatives arriving on specific trains and long-distance medical diagnoses by the inafmous 'old wives', regular everyday traffic. "He says the trick is hooking up outside a telegraph office that does as little business as possible. Then they're not in as much of a hurry and an untrained operator has a better chance of successfully intercepting a message." He gave the samples to the other three for consideration.
Heero tried not to look too enthused until they could be sure it wasn't just a parlour trick. "Black market, I suppose?"
"Only place these sort of people operate," Trowa confirmed.
"...I'm terrified to ask how much it cost."
"Good, then I don't have to tell you," Quatre laughed guiltily. "You don't want your blood pressure spiking, and I don't want to die young."
Duo was fascinated by the electric beast and leaned right over it for a closer look. "How soon can we test it out for ourselves?"
"Depends on what you want to listen in on," Trowa continued. "If you want to hijack a signal being sent to Lord Jeffrhyss, for example, you'd hook up to the office closest to the Isle of Wight."
"I'll reserve judgement until I see it in action," said Heero, reaching into the pocket of his jet black executive jacket, "but it will have to wait awhile. Take a look at what we found."
The typed note with the cryptic information was passed across the table, and both Trowa and Quatre studied it with a mix of concern and befuddlement. "We thought there might be an outside chance you'd know what 'Ibrox' meant," Duo added, once it appeared clear that both boys had figured out the general gist of the document themselves.
Quatre sat back and shrugged with a helpless look on his face, but Trowa kept squinting at the paper, and then began tapping it with the back of one hand. "...I feel like I should know this..."
"Think hard," Heero prodded forcefully. "Something involving the Peacecrafts is going to happen in Leeds today, but without that missing element..."
"Hold on, hold on..." Trowa waved faintly at the others, struggling to dredge something up from the depths of his memory. Then he looked up at Heero with very faint fear. "If you don't mind...I'd like to ask Arthur."
"...why Arthur?"
"I don't know, I just...we talk now and then, and when I look at this word, his face pops into my head. I can't explain it."
A half-forgotten fragment of a conversation wasn't a whole lot of backing for a major breach in security, but then, Arthur had always known more than he let on, and was excellent at keeping secrets. They didn't have time to be too choosy. Heero sighed. "Alright. Let's go."
**********They cut the meeting short and went back to Bridlewood, all five sneaking over the brick wall next to Arthur's cottage so as not to sound any alarm bells in the main house. Despite all their effort at staying quiet, the old carpenter heard them scaling the wall and met them as they came over, bringing a barrel for Hilde to step down onto and then lifting her the rest of the way down in quite the gentlemanly way. He would have done so even without the fancy red check dress.
They all went into his cottage and got straight to the point, showing Arthur the typed note and delivering an abbreviated version of what they already knew. Still quite sharp for his age, Arthur caught on quickly. "Ye've no' got much time, ah reckon," he said, sinking into his easy chair while the others took various seats all around. Slowly, he nodded at the paper. "Nevertheless...come to th' right place, ye have."
"What can you tell us?" Quatre begged hastily.
Arthur set the note down on the end table next to his pipe, reached behind him to the bookshelf where a dusty album sat, and looked at Trowa the entire time. "Ye will remember our wee talk aboot football, laddie." While the youngsters glanced amongst themselves in anticipation, Arthur began flipping through the old album, narrating as he went. "Ibrox is a stadium in Glasgow. Ah s'pose ye could say mah 'home team' plays there. Usually its th' team that makes the news, but last year th' stadium itself got a bit o' publicity."
Arthur found the page he was looking for in the album, and handed the opened book to Trowa, while the others bundled around. There were some newspaper clippings spread over two whole pages. The headlines all read about the same: 'Disaster at Ibrox.'
"A friend o' mine was at the match, he wrote to me th' next day," Arthur continued. "Scotland were playin' England at home, April 5th o' last year. Thousands, just thousands in the stands all chantin', an' jeerin', and bein' raucous all at once. The stewards were doin' their job, makin' sure the fans dinnit get too rowdy, but...well...us Scots, we've got the reputation for bein' the biggest, meanest hooligans in the league." He spoke with a certain amount of joking pride just then, but his tone quickly changed.
"Somehow, the terraces got overloaded, and they was all jumpin' up an' down on 'em at once, thousands o' people. The planks underneath 'em gave way...and a great, wallopin' section of terrace collapsed wi' ev'rybody on it. Twenty-five dead, five or six hundred wounded. The papers still dispute th' figures to this day."
While the others grew drawn and pale at the unfortunate retelling, Heero leaned back in his chair, taking up a pensive position. "Is it possible...not especially likely, but possible that someone could duplicate this sort of accident in Leeds today?"
Arthur squinted. "Today? Hardly possible at all!"
"Are you sure?"
"As sure as ah can be," the carpenter replied, shrugging. "Leeds 'aven't got a team, an' Hunslet's disbanded...ah dunno if they've even got a ground t'play on, an' besides that, football's out o' season."
It didn't add up. Heero leaned away from the group, pressing a thumb to his lower lip as he calculated potential losses related to doing something as opposed to doing nothing. "We can't take the chance," he concluded quietly. "We've got to go."
**********Leaving Hilde behind to sit with Arthur awhile, the boys skipped lunch and fled for Euston Station, all accepting the risk that the whole idea of a Peacecraft-orchestrated mini-disaster was the proverbial wild goose chase. It was far into the afternoon when their train hit the outskirts of the city nestled in the far north of England. From King's Cross to Leeds, the trip took more than three hours, and if not for an old woman selling apples at their destination, the boys would have been starving hungry at the outset of their mission.
Once inside the city, they were blind. They knew nothing about the area, or the layout, or the people. Reduced to stopping passers-by on the street, they practically begged for information, but the general consensus was the same; football just wasn't on the slate for that time of year, and the region had already lost the closest thing it had to a team of its own when the Hunslet Football Club lost the lease on its ground. If Milliardo and Relena were honestly planning to pull a spectacular stunt akin to what happened at Ibrox, they couldn't imagine how or where.
With the sun beating down on them, Heero, Trowa, and Quatre clumped together in the street outside the station, daubing at their brows with their sleeves and frowning at each other while Duo wandered off somewhere. "Anything?" the troupe leader asked.
Quatre looked sheepishly at the ground. "Everyone's either too busy, or they don't know what we're talking about." Frustrated, he turned to his left and whacked Trowa in the arm. "You're the sport expert, you ought to know all about this sort of thing! If Relena could find a non-team playing a non-game in a non-stadium out of season, why couldn't you!?"
"Don't get snippy with me," Trowa chomped back. "All I get to do lately is read the scores in the paper the next day! I never get to see a match first-hand anymore, and the numbers all start to blur together after awhile...wish I could get back on the field myself one of these days..."
Heero checked his pocket watch. "Quarter to four. If we don't figure out what we're doing soon, we'll--" When he looked up and realized Duo was missing, he started looking around. The chef was across the street at a kind of gift shop, picking some thin, flat objects off a divided wall rack. Walking over to the counter, Duo handed one or two coins to the saleswoman, and then headed back to the group, flipping through his small purchases.
"Who wants to play tourist?" Duo asked cheerily, and he held up a series of postcards to the boys, one after the other, making a lively presentation of each little photo on stiff paper. "Look, we can see Kirkstall Abbey, nice lookin' place there...and Temple Newsam House, home of...some guy who married the queen of Scotland or...something...and look! The Corn Exchange! Yum yum, everybody loves corn..."
With pleasant exasperation, Heero folded his arms and sighed. "Does this have anything to do with anything?"
"Of course it does!" Duo sang, holding up postcard after postcard. "See this? Skipton Castle...only about a thousand years old, so it should still be standing by the time we get there, can't be bad...and..." Suddenly, his face changed, and he danced the next card in front of Heero with teasing slowness. "Ooooh...what's this? Can we go see this!? Can we can we can we, pleeeease!?"
Heero frowned at the postcard at first, then looked closer and reached out to grab it, bringing it right up to his eyes with both hands. Trowa and Quatre got up on either side of him, and they all gazed at a photograph of a broad field with grandstand seating behind it. Neatly arranged in rows on the field, some standing and some kneeling, were many young men with moustaches and striped shirts with numbers on, undoubtedly some kind of sports team. Heero flipped the postcard over and read the caption on the back. "...'Elland Road Sporting Facility, developed from the Old Peacock Ground, 1896 through 1897, to serve the communities surrounding our fair Leeds'."
Duo grinned and bowed with a Shakespearean flourish of one hand. "Thank you, thank you, no applause..."
"Look, there's even a little map to it!" Trowa added excitedly, pointing it out on the card. "We can just hand this to a cab driver and go right now!"
Heero tapped the card against his other hand, giving Duo a secret smile as a reward. "Quite right, and so we should."
Trowa and Quatre took it upon themselves to find a carriage for hire that could accomodate all four of them, while Duo slunk up to Heero, nabbed the end of his braid and swiped it down the length of Heero's nose, playfully, like it was a paintbrush. "Do I get a bonus for finding it?" he asked in his bedroom voice.
Eyeing him lasciviously, Heero stepped just close enough so that they could breathe the same air, but not so close that anyone would start staring, and one hand drifted up to the satiny lapel of his jacket. "We'll see," he purred.
The other boys called them over to the side of the road where some hired transport was waiting, and as the quartet embarked the vehicle, Heero handed the postcard to the driver, and no further instruction was needed.
**********When the carriage rolled up to its destination, four heads poked out the windows on the left hand side, marvelling at how long and involved a journey they had gotten out of one measely shopping trip for Hilde. Upon seeing Elland Road for the first time, however, they were hardly impressed. The inn across the street was a far more interesting edifice than the single grandstand that squatted at the side of a scraggly greenish field. There wasn't much else to look at, as far as structures went, so it was a stroke of luck that there was at least something going on atop and around the structures to catch their eyes and keep them.
There was a football match being played. Out of season. Without official teams. And somehow, the grandstand was practically bursting with spectators watching it. Two batches of young men, one in blue jerseys and one in white, were dashing up and down the pitch between painted white lines, chasing a firm leather sphere around and passing it between them with precisely-aimed kicks. Watching the mock game were many hundreds of people on a mid-summer outing, and at ground level around the field were the usual types one expected to find on the sidelines, like coaches and food vendors and boys with dwindling handfuls of programmes.
The team of four slowly approached the small-potatoes excuse for a stadium, and one of the programme boys walked right up to them, brandishing his papers. "Support football in Leeds! Buy a ticket for today's fundraising match!" he called out tiredly, having delivered the same short sales pitch to dozens of others that day.
"Looks to me like it's almost over," Trowa observed astutely, keeping one of his eagle eyes on the scoreboard.
The boy in the cap sighed, rolled his eyes and scuffed his shoes into the dirt. "Awright, I can let you in 'alf price..."
"No no, that's not necessary," Heero said slyly, having taken one of the lad's leaflets and studied it swiftly. He fished some coins out of his pocket and handed them over. "So, it's a fundraiser, is it?"
"That's right, sir, so we can 'ave our own football club on our own field," the boy answered gladly. "We're gonna 'ave a team for Leeds, an' we're gonna buy this pitch, an' we're gonna build it up into summat grand, an' I'm gonna work 'ere all me life!"
Heero found himself smiling whimsically at the dream, but as the quartet offered the lad their best wishes and walked toward the stand, his face fell slightly. "If something terrible does happen today, that may never come about."
"Think positive," Quatre reminded them all.
They stopped at the foot of the stand, looking up at the throng of people absorbed in the match. Men, women, and children of all ages and descriptions sat in tiers of wooden benches held up on an intricate support system of metal bars and beams. The tiers sloped up away from the playing field to a height of about fifty feet, and the sides were covered with upright sheets of grayish-green corrugated metal to hide the ugly inner workings of the stand. Stickers and posters clung to the siding, advertising the varieties of food and drink for sale there, but it was so late in the match that everyone was more or less done eating. The predominately-male crowd cheered attentively as the blue-jerseyed goal tender made a fantastic one-handed save on a critical penalty shot, and so it went on.
"How many?" Heero asked.
Trowa used his sharp vision and rapid math skills to estimate the size of the crowd. "About three thousand."
"If you were going to bring that stand down...how would you do it?" It was an ugly question, but a necessary one if they were to stop a potential catastrophe. Unfortunately, they didn't have many ideas between them, so they stood in a little pocket of silence surrounded on all sides by happy cheers. They tossed around ideas about ramming the stand with a heavy cart, overloading it with hidden weights, and even the use of explosives until Trowa wandered away from them to inspect the structure more closely.
The glut of people just about filled the stand, leaving little of the bench space visible. Even so, when Trowa looked very carefully between the spectators, he saw dim shadows of the metal latticework holding the benches, and the people, effortlessly off the ground. He stared and stared at just one spot, and just when he thought he couldn't stare for one second more, something under the benches moved.
Trowa's eyes grew slightly. He beckoned to the others and led them down the side of the stand, inspecting and running a hand along the corrugated metal. Heero and Duo whispered to him anxiously, and they discussed the possibility of someone trying to sabotage the stand from the inside out, but Quatre held back a little. All of a sudden, he felt something...odd, but familiar. His sixth sense began screaming at him, but the words were garbled, incomprehensible. Quatre touched a hand to his temple, frowning at the ground in confusion, but eventually he pulled himself together and rejoined the others.
Security was low at the unofficial event, so they could wander where they willed, and felt safe from reprisal. Sure enough, Trowa found a hole in the corrugated metal, in the very middle and the very bottom of the back side of the stand. A squarish panel of metal had been unfastened and removed, and in fact it was just big enough for a person of average size to wriggle through, and there were scuff marks in the half-dead grass, indicating that someone had grabbed that opportunity very recently. They looked around and saw no one, then stood in a semi-circle around the hole and stared at it. "Okay...who wants to go first?" said Duo.
One by one, they got down on all fours and crawled through the hole, Trowa first and Heero last, making sure that nobody saw their strange behaviour. Inside the grandstand, it was even darker than they expected. The 'roof' was made up of benches and sporting fans, so very little light was getting through, but as the boys straightened up and let their eyes adjust, they began to see the same movement Trowa detected. As they scanned the iron jungle above them from left to right, they discerned one...two...three...four different figures in black, climbing around on the bars. Up to no good, most certainly, but none of them had long fair hair like the Peacecraft siblings, so the mystery deepened.
The figures in black hadn't noticed the intruders. "Fan out," Heero whispered, and the boys each targeted one of the saboteurs and moved toward them. They started climbing, and their clankings on the metal monkeybars were muffled easily by the crowd, but soon, one of the figures felt the vibrations as Duo made his vertical advance, looked down, saw him, and squealed in a girl's voice.
Duo froze and locked eyes with a very familiar dark-haired lass. She had a dark braid half the length of his own, and a green paisley scarf wrapped around her head like a bandana. In one of her hands was a wrench, and with it she appeared to be undoing one of the thousands of bolts that held the stand together, but worse than that was Duo's realization, after searching his memory banks, that the saboteur was Kamal, one of Quatre's beloved siblings. He scowled angrily, and while there was a multitude of things he could have yelled at the woman, all he got out was "Hey!!"
The other six players looked around in panic at the noise, and there were further exclamations of shock. Heero was now creeping up on Adeela, not a faceless black blob, while Trowa was catching up to the twins, Nashida and Asalah. The others were as high as thirty feet off the ground, but Quatre was lagging far back, his breath trapped in his throat as he stared up in shock, shaking his head faintly.
Duo reached across the three-foot span between the trellis he was on and the next trellis over, so he could climb higher and confront Kamal properly. "What do you think you're doing!?" he hissed, leaning over as far as he dared.
"Nothing you'll have to worry about if you get out now!" Kamal snapped back.
Six trellises to Duo's left, the twins were backing quickly away from Trowa, leaping from bar to bar in an attempt to escape. He could hardly watch, holding his breath and covering his eyes every time they jumped. Four trellises to the right, Heero was balancing between two supports and levering himself up to the youngest one, who froze wide-eyed as he approached. Quatre's head was still spinning, but gradually he came to his senses, targeted the nearest of his sisters, and attempted to exercise his authority in a clear, strong voice. "Nashida, I order you to come down here this instant!" he demanded, pointing at the ground in front of him.
Wrapped in an identical black head scarf to that of her twin, Nashida bit her lip and conceded, slowly climbing down, but Asalah got back to work. Wordlessly, Trowa watched as she unscrewed a bolt, dropped it to the ground where it hit one of many other bolts with a clink, and quickly replaced it with a short metal rod the same diameter as the missing bolt. There was a hole drilled into one end of the rod, and Asalah threaded a long piece of string through the hole and tied it tight. Trowa looked around frantically and saw hundreds of other little rods with strings attached, and it became clear to him just how they were planning to bring the stand down.
Duo was making some poorly-aimed grabs for Kamal's wrench but couldn't catch it. "Gimmie that!" he snarled.
"Get off!" Kamal shot back, and she actually tried to hit Duo with the wrench, also missing her target. It took the lion's share of their effort to stay aloft, and it was a long way down to the ground.
Meanwhile, Heero had Adeela completely immobilized by a red hot stare. He swung himself over to her trellis, snaking an arm around her waist and leaning in close to bewitch her with his talents. "Adeela," he cooed warmly, "give those to me..." She stared helplessly into the deep blue ocean of his eyes, so mesmerized that she barely noticed the wrench and pliers slipping out of her hands and into his. Adeela had resisted Heero's charms before, but this time he caught her off-guard.
By now, Nashida was stepping down off the trellis and met Quatre's angry gaze with confusion. "Brother?"
The gardener was so hurt and furious that he didn't know where to begin. "What are you doing!? Who put you up to this!? Answer me!!"
Nashida was understandably bewildered by his attitude, especially since they were all under the impression that their brother approved. She blinked at him, wide-eyed, and spread her hands out in supplication. "We're not here by force, we're doing what we have to do. We thought you understood that."
Quatre got hit in the head with a piece of rhetoric that did not compute. He shut his eyes, shook his head, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Wait a minute...understood what?"
While the plot thickened on the ground, Trowa was still studying the girls' handiwork. The strings attached to the rods holding the places of the missing bolts were tied together in bunches, and the bunches were tied together in clumps, the end result being that a small handful of ropes, when pulled at once, could yank hundreds of rods out of the support structure of the stand, potentially triggering a complete collapse. While the other lads were bent on dragging the girls down off the iron lattice and having it out with them, Trowa was trying to calculate how long it would take to cut all the strings and prevent a disaster.
"We're helping Miss Relena and her brother," Nashida explained innocently. "It's the only way we can practice in case we ever have to fight to free the rest of our family, you know that! Nadia's out there somewhere, and maybe she needs our help!"
Quatre was still incredulous. "How do you expect to help Nadia by harming hundreds of innocent people!? And where did you get the idea that following Relena would get you there!?"
"But...you agreed that it was best...didn't you?"
High above, Duo and Kamal were still locked in a fiesty struggle for control of her destructive tools. Amazingly, they managed to keep their grunts of effort in check, for being discovered by the people in the seats would do none of them any good, but when Duo stepped across to the trellis Kamal was perching on, things turned ugly. He finally got a commanding grip of the wrench, but stepped on Kamal's foot at the same time, and she had to let go of the instrument and jam her hand into her mouth to keep from yelping out loud. Jerking his arm back with unneccessary force, Duo unbalanced himself, and slipped.
At thirty feet in the air, there were no enemies, and as Duo's foot flew off the lattice, Kamal leaned over and snatched one of his arms with both of hers. All eyes flew to the scene and Heero, who had persuaded Adeela to give it up and start climbing down, inhaled sharply and nearly fell himself. Everyone cringed, and Kamal was the worst off with a bar jutting into her gut as she grappled painfully with Duo's arm. To complicate matters, Duo looked up frantically at the bolt Kamal had been working on, and it had wriggled out on its own without being replaced. The metal bars creaked, as if they were about to buckle. Without a thought for himself, Duo reached up and peeled Kamal's hands off his arm, letting himself fall. A collective gasp went up as he flailed on his way to the ground. Normally he could have handled a leap from that height, but he landed awkwardly, crumpling and slamming his left shoulder into the ground, hard.
The proceedings ground to a halt as everyone scrambled to his side, everyone except Asalah, who used the distraction to continue with the next phase of her operation. Duo was suddenly surrounded by hands trying to help him up, but something was wrong with the shoulder he landed on, and he yelped in pain at being touched. Heero raced to his side but had to stop a few feet short, painfully watching his mouse from a discreet distance, and was pushed aside by Kamal as she blasted past him to get to the injured party. "Are you all right!?" she exclaimed, cradling his scruffy head and close to tears.
Duo was still seeing tweeting birdies flying around in little circles. "...nngh...I think I am...maybe..."
Suddenly overjoyed that she hadn't caused him mortal harm, Kamal squeezed him all over, whimpering thankful cries of 'Alhandullellah!'. Then, all cuddled out, she sat up on her knees and whacked him in the back of the head. "Ja-hosh! You could have killed us both!"
Duo looked up at Quatre blankly for a translation. "It means 'idiot'," Quatre grumbled, though he had to clean it up a bit.
The chef winced as he pushed himself upright with his good arm. "Gosh, I've been called an idiot in three different languages. I'm honoured." Then he looked past the concerned crowd and saw one of the twins scurrying around, just before she disappeared through the hole in the metal siding. "Where's she going?"
Everyone turned. Asalah had gathered up a large portion of string bundles and taken them through the hole with her. Knowing that their time was up, the other girls ran to the hole and clambered through, and were quickly followed by Trowa and Quatre. Duo tried to get out as well, but the shooting pain returned to his shoulder, and the opposite ankle as well. Heero naturally tried to pick him up, but Duo cried out in agony at being moved. There was no possibility of getting him out the same way he came in. Some shouting occurred outside, and Heero fell into a crouch, running a hand through his hair in indecision until Duo tugged on his sleeve, panting with the effort. "Get your butt out there..."
Heero looked at the bundle of strings, put them together with the rods and the missing bolts, and shook his head. "I can't do that. If someone pulls that rope--"
"Then go make sure they don't!" Duo hollered back, but the outcome was already becoming questionable. The girls were pleading with someone outside, yelling 'Not yet! Not yet!'
The rope began to go taut, and Heero made a flying leap, landing on his belly in the dirt as he grabbed the rope and pulled back twice as hard. He crawled back through the hole, keeping a tight grip on the homemade lanyard, and unexpectedly looked directly up into the face of Milliardo Peacecraft. The young men each took a moment to register the other's presence, and then immediately went for their weapons. They both had one hand on the rope and one hand levelling a revolver at the other's head. The other boys and girls were huddled off to the side, praying that nobody got shot.
"Get up and step away," Milliardo ordered calmly, ready to take over once his minions were finished the grunt work.
Heero slowly got up, but he didn't step away. "You know I can't let you do this."
"Why must you insist on interfering with my family's affairs?" the young heir asked.
"I'm not here for a debate," said Heero. "The agent assigned to watch this feat take place and report back to his superiors on how well it went? He's not coming. We made sure of that." To his satisfaction, Milliardo deflated a tiny bit. "So that means if you go through with this now, nobody will be around to watch, except us...and there is no way in hell I'm going to prop up your ego in front of Lord Jeffrhyss or anyone else. He'll read about it in the papers tomorrow, but that's all he's going to get. Even your new flunkies aren't obligated to vouch for your success...and Jeffrhyss won't take their word for it anyway. Give this up and go home."
Narrowing his eyes, Milliardo looked over at the pack to his far right, and the girls seemed to shrink under his gaze as if they already felt the sting of failure on top of their master's disapproval. Still, he wasn't about to quit just because this sneaky upstart of a butler told him to. He tightened his grip on the rope, wrapping it around his hand three times, and took a step forward, aiming his pistol in a more threatening way. "Step...aside."
Inside the grandstand, Duo had been dragging himself to the exit a little bit at a time, and was easily blocked from Milliardo's view, giving him a unique position of suprise attack. He grabbed handfuls of the rope and very carefully wrapped it around both hands, ignoring the throbbing ache in his left shoulder. Then he put one foot on either side of the hole and whispered just loud enough for Heero to detect, "Let go!"
Heero let go. Duo pulled with all his strength and dragged Milliardo forward, creating a moment of shock just long enough for Heero to switch his gun to the other hand and let fly with a savage right hook that sent the man staggering backwards. The girls squeaked with fright as their leader fell, and when he next looked up, he was staring down the barrel of Heero's revolver, well and truly beaten. "...now, go home," Heero stated with a tone of finality.
Millardo touched a hand to his lip, and brought it back down with a trickle of blood. He glared venomously as he crawled to his feet, slowly picked up and holstered his own revolver, and began to back away. The girls swarmed around him, pulling on different parts of his red army jacket and pleading with him to let the matter drop. Perhaps he realized that the day's work really was a waste, but the boys would never know. He gathered up his troops and led them away silently, not looking back once. There would be other opportunities, he decided, and next time he would be ready for Heero's meddling.
The girls kept looking back at Quatre, but didn't dare stop to discuss things with him. He stared helplessly after them, full of unanswerable questions. He wanted to know who had manipulated his sisters into this hideous assignment, but deep down he knew. Nashida gave him the answer without even knowing it. Relena. She was to blame. And she would have to answer for this crime against his family. Quatre stood there and fumed until Trowa came up and put a hand on his shoulder. "You alright?"
".......no." And I won't be until I sort out the person responsible for the subversion of my sisters.
Behind them both, Heero was helping Duo out of the metal cave just as the crowd tossed up another tremendous cheer for a goal scored by the white jerseyed team, totally ignorant of how close they had come to grievous personal injury. He helped Duo limp aside and leaned him against the wall of the grandstand, then wandered over to the others, taking Adeela's wrench and pliers out of his pocket and looking at them almost guiltily. "We've, um...got some overtime ahead of us...can't really leave the place in this condition..." Even though it was technically a victory, it didn't feel like one. Duo was hurt, Quatre was in crisis, and they had about five hundred bolts to screw back in before the crowd cleared out and made the stand transparent again, and right at that moment the whistle sounded, ending the match. Brimming with applause, people began filing down off the stand and milling about wherever they wished, and the boys had to scramble to get the loose square of corrugated metal into place to avoid suspicion. Then they looked around in dismay, and Heero shrugged. "...we might as well take our time with dinner."
The other three made tired grunts to the affirmative, and they left. Later that night, they would have to go back with tools and torches, and repair every last bit of the damage the girls caused. Victory never tasted so bitter.
**********Much later in the day, the Blue Caps struck gold. An agent was creeping up on an eating establishment, a pub by the name of Catherine's, and was attempting to establish a surveillance post across the street. The Blue Caps knew what the person was there for, by virtue of his location, so he was a prime target.
They waited until he ducked down an alley to investigate all the entrances and exits to the area, and then they jumped him. The agent, while older and more experienced than the bowler hat whom they rejected earlier, could not cope with a half-dozen-man ambush, and didn't even have time to reach for his sidearm. The Blue Caps dragged him into an abandoned shop by the back door and ransacked his person, where they found a single sheet of paper, the official document they were looking for.
It was a berserker order, and it was aimed squarely at Heero Yuy. The Blue Caps' leader spoke highly of this young man, and whether he was currently giving them instructions or not, they knew their master would have wanted them to look out for the lad. At least now they knew what they were dealing with, but all they had done was snatch one agent off the street. Now they knew they were facing four entire legions of enemy agents, all after one man. And that man didn't even know it.
~~~~~~~~~~
Next, in Episode Eighty-Eight: Dorothy reveals a terrible secret to Relena, at the same time as Quatre decides to tell her exactly what he thinks of her. Meanwhile, Heero discovers a previously unknown affinity for music.
There's some fact and some fiction in this episode, and most of the facts were generously supplied by the very helpful lads (and lasses?) at www.leedschat.com. There *might* have been an exhibition match for fundraising purposes, but we really don't know...which has never stopped me from making stuff up before. =^_^= Barring another long series of mishaps like the one we had this week, Episode 88 will be out on July 31st, which had to be pushed back because of the other delays, yuck. =P