Downtown Berlint's commercial district was just as vibrant as any other functioning city's. The theaters and fancy restaurants and the high-end boutiques were what landed on the front page of the Style section of the local newspaper, of course, but the sign of a healthy economy was that the variety extended down to a lower level. There were the gift shops, the record stores, specialty shops that covered niches from art supplies to military surplus to taxidermy. It was hard to think of anything you couldn't buy in the city if you only knew the right store.
But at the moment, no shop seemed to fascinate Nightfall more than this ordinary corner-shop grocery.
"We really shouldn't be staring. We have other things to do," Twilight said.
"You're right. Perfectly right. It's none of our business," Nightfall said distantly, staring straight forward in front of her.
Twilight tried to step away, but Nightfall just kept on staring forward rigidly. From inside the shop, the unbroken, nearly shouted monologue continued unabated:
"Ah, but what purpose could these items serve, you must be asking? After all, what could a mild-mannered citizen like me be doing with a selection like this? Heh. I couldn't possibly tell you, of course. It's surely nothing, I assure you. There's obviously nothing here that could be of interest to a dark secret society that gnaws at the tree-trunks of the modern world like some sort of dragon-beaver. After all, I'm just a humble, normal, non-spy citizen of this beautiful world, not some sort of famous super-cool superspy. I can understand your confusion, though. After all, it is awfully strange that I look so similar to that famous agent of deceit, the light shining within the shadows, the great Daybreak!"
"Will you be needing a bag, sir?"
"Spies don't need bags! Uh. So I do need a bag, because I'm obviously not a spy, like that famous Daybreak."
The man bounced jovially from one heel to the other as the cashier rang up his purchase, his boater hat wobbling with every step. He barely stopped talking while the ingredients were bagged, mostly about himself, briefly about how he had to get home before his cinnamon bread came out of the oven, plus a brief mention of an upcoming ping-pong tournament that struck Twilight as slightly familiar. Then with his business completed, he picked up his loaf of bread, gallon of milk, and bottle of women's shampoo, and happily traipsed out of the store and out of the lives of everyone there.
Twilight and Nightfall stood staring down the street for a few moments, while normal traffic drifted past them without incident. Eventually, like some spell had been lifted, they both continued back down the sidewalk without prompting.
"Loid," Nightfall said after they had passed a block in silence together. "About the other day. At the academy."
"Yes?"
"It's so much worse up close."
"I know."
They thankfully reached their destination without interruption from any further natural disasters. It was a trendy new cafe, "Pierre's", founded and run by a man named Hans. Pierre's was the sort of tiny restaurant that got glowing reviews from tinier newspapers, and had tables spilling off the patio and all over the sidewalk outside like an open wound. It was a perfect place for Loid and Fiona Forger to visit because it was exactly the sort of hip place a younger married couple might go for an afternoon date. It was a perfect place for Twilight and Nightfall to visit because to a man who understood Berlint's alleyways it was mere minutes away from the auto shop that serviced Desmond's car.
Right. The mission was officially on; time to focus.
The greeter sat them at a table outside, and the waiter took their drink orders. That left them alone at their table, with nothing to do but fill the air with the sort of normal conversation that Loid and Fiona Forger would be expected to have in public. Basic cover material. Twilight had done it a million times before.
"Oh, we should try the salmon, darling. I hear it's surprisingly good," Nightfall said, giving the menu the thoughtful look of a woman who definitely hadn't memorized it the night before.
Twilight cleared his throat. "Sounds good," he said, just a bit stiffly.
"Is it too early for wine? Fish goes with white wine, right honey?"
"Mmhmm."
Nightfall looked up over her menu at him. "Is something wrong, honey? You're awfully quiet."
Twilight blinked. He clenched his toes, an old trick to focus himself without seeming suspicious. He tore his eyes away from the floral border on the menu that in fact occupied most of the menu, and instead forced himself to meet Nightfall's deadpan expression across the table.
"Nothing's wrong, honey. Just wondering if this food can live up to these prices," he said, with mock-mock-nervousness.
"Oh, don't worry about it. We deserve to treat ourselves every now and then, sweetie," Nightfall said. Twilight just frowned to himself.
Honey. Darling. Sweetie. The little glances. The way she stared at him from across the room. The way she talked to Fiona's coworkers about how wonderful her husband was. The notes she packed in his lunches. Sleeping in the same bed. Sharing a home. Raising a daughter.
Nightfall had possibly the greatest poker face in the entire agency, but even so, after months of constant exposure he had noticed dozens of little strange things about her behavior. He had chalked them up to stress, or affectations to remain in character for her cover. But now they were coming so constantly and so clearly that even an outsider like Watkins could notice them. There was only one plausible explanation:
Nightfall was testing him.
It was the only thing that made sense. Nightfall was a stickler for professionalism, not just the right actions but the right attitude to go with them. She would never compromise herself by developing feelings for him. She must have thought that he was getting soft after months in deep cover on the same mission, so she was trying to bait him into a trap to prove it to him. So when she put a note into his lunch saying "Have a good day at work, honeybun", he knew what reaction she was hoping to get. And he wasn't going to give it to her.
"Oh, you will."
"What?" Twilight said, distracted.
Nightfall held up the wine list. "Ewell? Ewell Brothers chardonnay. It would pair wonderfully with the salmon."
"Oh," said Twilight. "Yes. That sounds like a good idea."
Nightfall slid the wine list back into the menu. Good choice of wine. Commercial, slightly obscure, but surprisingly popular among the crowd this place attracted. With any luck they would be running low and it would buy them a few extra minutes. It was a weird coincidence, because she also had a bottle of the same kind back at home. Maybe this was part of the test.
What was Nightfall's endgame here? Was she just doing this to teach him a lesson? Or was she planning on reporting him to WISE as a liability? It was hard to consider either possibility. The first seemed petty for someone as professional as Nightfall, and the second just seemed cruel. He liked to think that Nightfall wouldn't pull tricks like that on him at all, given how long they had known each other. But it had to be one of them, because the alternative was...
Twilight scowled at a list of chicken courses. It was a ridiculous idea. Even in the unlikely event that his theory was wrong and Nightfall did in fact harbor some manner of feelings for him, and even if Twilight did reciprocate those feelings, there was no way they could have acted on them. It was obviously couldn't...
Twilight's brain hit a skid as it failed to make a connection. It ramped back up, resumed the train of thought, and spun out at the exact same point. It occurred to him, rather belatedly, that there was nothing actually stopping him from being in a relationship with Nightfall right now.
It was a bad idea, for lots of obvious reasons. And impractical. And it would annoy the hell out of Sylvia. But they were living together, on a deep cover mission that would last for months if not years. And they were, legally, married. Some would say that actual romantic involvement would be much more straightforward than the alternative at this point. Even WISE could hardly say anything about them making their cover more realistic.
But it was a bad idea. Nightfall knew that, surely. Best to just stick to that for now.
Nightfall lounged back in her seat, watching the restaurant interior through the window. "This place reminds me of where we first met," she said.
"Does it?" Twilight said absentmindedly.
Nightfall gave him a wary look. He realized that she had hauled the bulk of the cover conversation up until this point, while he had been doing the verbal equivalent of putting a hand on top of a couch being moved to make it look like he was helping in some way. "You remember, Loid," she said casually. "The little restaurant on fourth street, remember?"
"Oh yeah. Yeah, it is a lot like that place. I bet the chef is just as surly too," Twilight said. Amateurish, on his part. That was one of the first bits they had decided on for Fiona's background. She and Loid had been regulars at the same restaurant who gradually got to know each other better. It was a good way of explaining any familiarity that seemed to go beyond a single year of marriage.
Twilight remembered that day, years ago, when the agency had brought him a young woman doing her best to conceal the terror on her face, and told him he was a mentor now. It was hard to forget a day like that. One of the most difficult disguises he'd ever had to pull off was pretending to be somebody who didn't still feel like a scared green recruit himself.
The waiter came by with their drinks. They patiently ordered, two dishes each, each dish customized in some small but idiosyncratic way. The waiter took their orders back to the kitchen, and before the door had stopped flapping Twilight was out of his seat.
"Excuse me for a minute, Fiona. I have to use the bathroom," he said.
Twilight walked through the restaurant and into the bathroom, locked it behind him, and started a mental countdown in his head.
Right then, he thought as he adjusted his jacket. The dishes would normally take about twenty minutes to cook, based on the restaurant's normal production rate at this time of day. The customization to their orders would hopefully add a couple minutes to that. Nightfall will reject the first delivery of their food, based on some nitpicky interpretation of their order, so add on ten minutes minimum to correct the mistake. She could keep doing that over and over, but Twilight didn't like the idea of Fiona Forger getting thrown out of a restaurant for belligerence. So he figured he had about half an hour to work with, before anybody noticed Fiona was eating alone while Loid was stuck in the bathroom for mysterious reasons.
Twilight removed his vest, undid his jacket, changed the soles of his shoes, and put on a different hat. Not a full disguise, but different enough that a disinterested passerby wouldn't make the connection. Thus prepared, he slid out the bathroom window and walked out of the back alley at a casual but extremely fast stroll.
The auto shop was right where it was supposed to be. Twilight checked his watch, noting that he probably didn't have more than half an hour left before Desmond's guards came back anyway. Plenty of time, though, and Nightfall's vigil right on a street they would have to drive down gave him an advance warning system. The gate to the lot was shut and locked, the fence topped by barbed wire, and for once there was no hole in the back for the benefit of delinquent employees and curious teenagers.
It was still just a fence with wire, though, Twilight thought as he climbed right over it. He had no respect for a security system that could be thwarted by a thick blanket.
He landed in the back of the lot, the building hiding him from anyone that might have been able to see him from the road. This wasn't all going to be easy. Desmond's guards might be gone, but the auto shop employees would still be here, and they probably wouldn't react well to someone messing with such a lucrative contract.
Twilight crept around the side of the building. Desmond's car was kept in its own separate garage, with its own separate tools. The only outside entrance was the garage door, which was supposed to stay closed and locked at all times, even when the mechanics were working on the car. Twilight supposed that made Desmond really popular with them. Nobody was allowed to work on the car without the supervision of the guards, however, so at the moment Twilight had unrestricted access if he could just get past the door. But, he decided as he examined the lock, that wasn't a viable option. The outside lock wasn't trivial to open, and the door would make too much noise.
Lucky that he had prepared for this, he thought, as he unbuttoned his shirt to reveal the greasy coveralls underneath.
He unfurled the mask and miniature makeup kit from an inside pocket, and it was a matter of seconds before he was an exact duplicate of Gary, second most recent hire to the auto shop and owner of the most magnificent set of ear hair Twilight had ever seen outside of an illustration of a goblin in a fairy-tale book. It wasn't a perfect disguise because Gary's shift had ended hours ago, and there hadn't been any inconspicuous way to restrain him before this mission. He just had to hope that nobody in the shop noticed that Gary was in two places at once.
He put his hand on the doorknob to the employee entrance, took a deep breath, and stepped into the nest of vipers.
"Hey Gary."
"Didn't expect you to see you working so late, Gary."
"What's up, G-man?"
Menaces, each and every one of them.
Twilight walked down the back hallway of the shop casually and without saying anything to anyone beyond perfunctory greetings. The inside door to the garage where Desmond's car was held was near the back. Twilight rattled the handle. He might have hoped that they would be careless enough to leave this door unlocked, but no luck.
He turned back. He could probably have picked that lock in a minute, but any of the other coworkers would have had awkward questions for Gary, which would unfurl backwards and eventually roll down Desmond's paranoia pit. Best to go for the simpler plan: where there was a lock, there was a key.
Twilight walked towards the front office, where hopefully that key would be stored, either on a hanger somewhere or in somebody's pocket. He lurked around the edge of the doorframe, trying to look and see if there was anyone-
"Gary! Get in here."
Twilight froze. Then, steeling himself, he walked into an office decorated in shag carpet, plush furniture, and the smell of oil and old rubber. Desmond was clearly paying these people a lot, though perhaps not enough for an air freshener.
"You helped Herbert on the converter job for that specialty van last month, right?" said the person at the desk, a mustachioed man wearing a tie and a white shirt sporting a dalmatian impression of black stains.
Twilight paused. What voice would Gary have? He went with the safest option: medium pitch, mild Central Berlint accent, slightly louder than typical to compensate for the ear hair.
"Yes I did, sir," Twilight said.
"Great. We got a customer on the phone who wants something like that done. Help him out, will you?"
Twilight ran through a million scenarios in his head. He couldn't help the customer; the clock was ticking and he had less than twenty minutes left. He couldn't run, because Gary wouldn't run. Would attacking work here? If he put the manager in a sleeper hold, he might think that he had just dreamed all of this. But would the other coworkers hear? Even if they didn't, what if the manager was confident enough in his memory to know that it wasn't a dream? There were a million things that could go wrong.
After amusing itself by watching this deluge flow past for a moment, part of Twilight's brain finally coughed up the proper solution.
"Sorry, sir, but my shift actually ended a couple hours ago," Twilight said.
"Oh, okay, no problem," the manager said. "I'll get Jack to do it, he's good with that sort of thing."
"I actually just came back because I left something in the garage with the Desmond car. Mind if I borrow the key?"
"Knock yourself out," the manager said, tossing it underhand to Twilight.
Twilight walked out of the office, back to the garage, and opened the door. It was always the simple solution. Why did he never think of the simple solution first?
The garage was simple, like any other auto garage in Berlint, except for the two chairs on either end for the guards to sit and watch while the mechanics worked on it. That bit of security was perhaps not as airtight as Desmond believed, if the manager was so liberal with giving access to his workers. Policy often ran aground when confronted with the basic effects of personal relationships. Something to keep in mind.
The car was a black sedan, very plain and deliberately so, but with every security feature it was practical to fit on a car this size and some that were not exactly practical. With so much wiring and armor and double-locks crammed into the paneling, it wouldn't be hard to find somewhere to hide the tracer, even if the car was going to be inspected.
Twilight rolled under the car, beneath the main drive shaft. There was a spot here on the frame that was too small to contain a bomb, too concealed to be seen directly from anywhere, too obscure to directly show up on the schematics. In other words, it was the perfect place to hide something from someone already looking for dangers.
Twilight reached up to place his tracer in its hiding spot. He paused when he felt his fingers brush up against something, and even more surprised when he pulled out a tracer that was already concealed there.
A perfect hiding spot indeed.
Twilight committed every detail about the other tracer to memory, taking special care to note the frequency it was broadcasting to, then returned it to its hiding spot before finding somewhere else to put his own. He left, locked the garage, and returned the key to the manager's office before hurrying out the way he had come in, making sure to fluff the barbed wire back up on his way out. Mission accomplished, technically.
Obviously the assassin had gotten to Desmond's car first. They hadn't gone for the obvious plan of using a car bomb, presumably because they knew that any bomb big enough to kill Desmond was big enough to be noticed in one of his regular inspections. But if they were tracking his car, that probably meant that all of their hunches were correct and the assassination attempt would take place while he was traveling. It didn't always feel good to be right.
But now Twilight knew for a fact that they were targeting the car. That was the only advantage he had right now.
Twilight slipped back into the bathroom at the restaurant, ten minutes ahead of schedule. He changed his outfit back, washed his hands, and made it back to the table on the patio to see Nightfall talking with the waiter, next to some woman in an office uniform who had pulled up another chair at the table.
"No, I said we wanted moderately freshly ground pepper on the salmon, not freshly ground. You need to grind it into a bowl and let it breathe for a minute," Nightfall said to the waiter, who was taking her statement with dignified resignation. She spotted Twilight coming out of the bathroom. "But on second thought we'll take it anyway. Don't want you to go to any more trouble."
Twilight sat down in his chair and nodded a greeting to the strange woman. "Hello. Did I miss anything?"
"Nothing important," Nightfall said. "Loid, this is Yor. We met at Eden the other day, she just passed by on her way home from work."
"Nice to meet you, Yor," Twilight said. Nice looking woman, he thought. Strange earrings. Nightfall had met her at the school? He could barely remember anything from their most recent visit to Eden besides-
"We also met her husband at Eden, if you remember," Nightfall said.
Oh.
Twilight painted a smile onto his space with the broad brushstrokes of a distracted mind. He knew that his vocabulary here had to be restrained with leather straps and chains. "He's a bit of an eccentric fellow, isn't he?"
"Oh, yes. He wears that hat wherever he goes!" Yor said cheerfully.
"We actually saw him out shopping while we were walking here. In the grocery shop a couple blocks down," Nightfall said.
"Oh good. Do you know if he remembered to buy my shampoo?" Yor said.
"He did, yes," Twilight said, who knew it would be years before he forgot anything that happened in that grocery store. "He was actually acting kind of strange. If you could believe that."
"Did he mention anything about a secret society?"
"Yes, actually," Twilight said. "So you know about his... hobby?"
"Of course. He's not exactly good about hiding it. That secret society thing is my fault, actually," Yor said.
Yor opened up her handbag, and pulled out a couple sheets of stationary. She flapped them onto the table, into between the cooling plates of food. Twilight leaned over, noting the spiky black borders on the margins, and the ornate header that ferociously declared "FROM THE DESK OF THE BLACK ROSE".
"I had the print shop make up a couple hundred of these," Yor said brightly. "Whenever I have some chore that needs doing around the house, I write it on one of these saying it's his new mission and stick it under his pillow, and he gets it done right away. I've never seen him happier since I started doing it."
"He doesn't get suspicious that he doesn't get paid?' Nightfall said, creasing one of the stationary sheets experimentally.
"It hasn't come up," Yor said.
Yor looked thoughtful for a moment, and stood up. "Right then. If you saw him shopping on your way here, that probably means he's back home cooking dinner by now. I should get going. Nice meeting you, Loid!"
Yor left them alone. Twilight's attention turned back to their meal. What with everything he had gone through today, he had actually worked up quite an appetite. Nightfall, in turn, began her usual pre-meal routine of cutting every item of food into identically-sized pieces.
"How's your chicken, Loid?" Nightfall said. He noted the unusual inflection, and the strange movement of her lips. Mission status report?
"Delicious. Tender, too. We should come here more often," Twilight said. Completed, with complications. We'll debrief at home.
The "complications" actually made the mission seem a lot more straightforward. At least they knew they weren't barking up the wrong tree. They could operate knowing at least part of what the enemy knew, and on the day of the Imperial Scholar mixer they would be in a prime position to intercept. It was just a matter of waiting and planning, and tying up a few more loose ends.
He caught Nightfall's eye from across the table, with her fork in her mouth. He didn't know if he was just imagining it, or if he actually saw the edges of her mouth curl up in a smile as their eyes met.
He preferred it when things were simple.
