Author's Notes, Chapter 3:

EmberFalcon, Captein Ameila: I'm glad you're enjoying. Updates may be infrequent, it's mostly a function of when I have free time to work on it.

Please excuse the formatting (or lack thereof), most everything I've tried for clear divisions between scenes is stripped out.

And please, please read and review, comment and critique, alliterate and adore, and whatever other cute pairs of words you want to string together to mean 'feedback'.


Chapter 3

In the years since the first Chernobyl accident, the land had become a ghost town for miles around. The only signs of sentient life at all were at the atomic plant itself, and the facilities needed to run it. As such, avoiding authorities was not too difficult at all: a bonus for choosing the most infamous reactor of all to raid.

But now, the figure racing toward the edge of the dead zone found himself dwelling on other thoughts.

I wish there were authorities chasing me now. The lone panther thought, gazing into the darkness ahead. He had found his motorcycle right where he'd left it. A geiger counter showed that it was emitting levels of radiation in and of itself that would have been lethal in only a few minutes' exposure. But that did not concern him. He had a mission to complete, and this was the only way. The headlight lit the road ahead with a ghostly glow that seemed to only accentuate the sheer abandoment and solitude felt here. Even if one hadn't known that the entire place was contaminated with radioactivity, there was something deep in the psyche, an instinct of self preservation honed over millions of years, that simply said the place was wrong. It was too quiet, an unnatural quiet that raised the hackles on the back of his neck. The trees that lined the road were cast in deathly pale shadow, as if already mourning the losses, by the eerie moonlight. The crisp, blue light that normally shone down had now changed in hue to a sickly yellow from the intermittent toxic clouds now spreading across the sky. That was cause for concern, as one of the clouds could kill him far faster than the radiation dose he'd recieved. It could all be over in seconds if one of the corrosive ones caught up to him, as opposed to the hour or two more he had if he hurried.

He shivered, partly from the crisp night air, and partly from his extremities beginning to shut down. Suddenly he wondered if he really did have even an hour. He gripped the throttle tighter and made the engine revv even higher, the tachometer pushing into the red. He glanced behind him, warned by a primal instinct that he was in danger of being caught. A shaft of moonlight lit a patch of road he had just passed. Already, he could see streaks of yellow starting to waft across it while he sped away. A foul stench of sulfur and hideous chemicals made his nostrils twitch. It was only the barest whiff, but he shuddered both from the sensation and the accompanying fear of what it meant. He turned forward again just in time to see the concrete barrier across the road, laid by the military in the wake of the first disaster.

He swerved in an attempt to catch the gap in the barrier that he used to get through before, but it was too late. The motorcycle flipped three times in the space of a second, throwing him to the ground violently. Something snapped and pain seared up his arms, shoulders, and back. He looked down and saw his right arm hanging at an impossible angle, sending fire shooting through him. He gritted his teeth and tears brimmed in his eyes as he closed them tightly in pain. Using his good arm, he rose on unsteady legs. He dared not even stop long enough to make a sling, but rather let his broken arm hang and tried to ignore the pain. Limping to the motorcycle, he hunted about in the darkness for the case, which had been thrown. It took him nearly two minutes to locate it. Only the extremely rugged construction had saved it, as it had been thrown against a concrete freeway divider. It was scratched and dented, but the shielding had held.

Grabbing the case with his good arm, the panther forced himself into a jog. He had been in the peak of physical shape only hours earlier, but now he was panting for breath at only a mild jog. He could almost perceptibly feel himself slowing. The radioactive chemical soup of gasses he'd helped create with the exlposion now drifted in patches across the road, and he found himself navigating a minefield of the stuff, only visible when it chanced to materialize in a patch of moonlight. Several times he gasped for breath, only to find a lungfull of noxious gasses. Along the sides of the road he saw dead wildlife, and once he even glimpsed a bird seemingly freeze in midair and fall to the forest.

The road seemed to stretch forever into the black night, with houses long ago abandoned looming into view on either side occasionally, partly reclaimed by nature, doors shorn off to help prevent radioactive dust and gasses from accumulating. That would do nothing to stem the tide this time, however.

An eternity of hell seemed to pass. He was shivering violently from the cold, his gasping breath puffing vapor into the chilly night. Coughs wracked his frame every few moments, and more than once he spat blood. His eyes were bloodshot and watering, making it more and more difficult to see. The road in front of him undulated and clouded like a horrid nightmare as his vision became worse and worse. Finally, he blurrily saw the lights of a van parked ahead.

The van was a makeshift containment vehicle. Once upon a time it had been a golden-flake chip truck. Now, it served a far more sinister purpose. The windows had been caulked shut, the doors had a very large lock on them that had been welded into them shoddily. The small rear windows had been painted flat black, and the windshield was a slight yellow tint that spoke of the strength of bullet-proof glass. The entire van had been painted a non-descript off-white. The vehicle idled impatiently, like a predator lurking in wait. Despite all of his training, the panther had a wild impulse to run as if caught, even though he knew this was his goal.

He limped toward the van with all the speed he could muster, his tongue lolling out in time to his gasping breaths. He was burned all over, his skin beneath the fur welting and blistering from the intense radiation he'd recieved. His fur was falling out in patches already, and he looked like some horrific creature come to steal children in the night. The van noticed his approach, and its tires squealed as it quickly backed up to him.

The doors burst open and three figures in white plastic suits jumped out. He could see their hard faces inside the helmets through the faceplates. There was a surreal air about the whole thing, like he couldn't quite believe it was all happening. The suits helped him stagger upright and a hand relieved him of the case he'd carried. The panther let the case go without questioning. He could already feel himself starting to slide. The world was swimming around his head. The suit that had taken the case quickly squirreled it out of sight into the interior of the van. He watched the figure disappear into the dark interior, then noticed one of the others pulling out a silenced pistol. The cold steel pressed against his forehead, almost as cold as the eyes of the one behind it.

He didn't know whether to feel betrayed or relieved when the trigger was pulled.


Carmelita's soft snores abruptly stopped with a snort. She blinked and blearily tried to focus on the paper in front of her. It was a losing battle. She reached for a cup of steaming mocha to try to combat the lack of sleep, only to find that it was mostly empty and what was left was cold. She downed it anyway, and immediately regretted it. Turning what little attention she could muster back to the paper, she tried to examine the record of a suspected Al-Qaeda terrorist last seen headed across the Chunnel. Authorities had failed to pick the trail back up on the other side, and his whereabouts were unknown. That had been three years ago, but Al-Qaeda had been known to use sleeper agents that stayed in one place for a very long time, sometimes decades.

The letters swam on the page before her eyes. She blinked forcefully and shook her head, but couldn't focus on the report. Finally she snarled and slammed the paper down in disgust. Then she noticed that the entire office was still buzzing with activity, not in the least lessened by the late hour. Deciding that she really needed a break, Carmelita opened the door and stepped out into the hall, headed for the elevator. The door closed with barely a sound behind her, and she dodged people in the hall who were running from one office to another with stacks and stacks of paper.

Two cups of mocha later, her eyes were wide open, but her mind was still half-asleep. She frequently caught herself reading over a sentence two or three times before realizing that it was the same thing. There was a knock on the door and she prayed it wasn't another stack of papers being delivered to her. Her prayers went unanswered as she opened the door to reveal a haggard looking jackal with a large stack of papers topped with a hand-written post-it note: 'Carmelita - 204A'. She sighed wearily and motioned for him to set it on the desk, not even able to fire up the famed Fox temper. He nodded and sat it in the only open space, turning to face Carmelita with a worried look. She caught the look, but ignored it and held the door open. Khalid walked out, leaving the vixen alone with a mountain of files.

Her decision took all of two seconds.

She leaned out the door and called after him. "Hey!" she stopped, embarassed as she suddenly realized she had no idea what his name was. Ghazi turned and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

"Ummm... I really need a break. How about I help you get some of these papers herded around?"

Ghazi smiled, though the fatigue showed, and spoke with a middle-eastern accent. "I would appreciate the help, Ms. Fox." Relieved to find any escape from the mounting tension, Carmelita followed him back to the records office.

The records office was one floor below Carmelita's, run by an old raccoon who could have easily posed as Sly Cooper's grandmother. She had the haggard look of one who did not suffer fools gladly, and everyone knew she ran an extremely tight bearuacracy in her little domain. Tonight was no different, even if the apocalypse did seem to threaten to rain down (literally) upon them. Her dress was perfectly proper and spotless, completely out of place for a catacomb so rundown and musty as the lower archives. But then, few people, herself included, ever had to go down as far as Carmelita planned to do.

Ghazi spoke to the recordkeeper in his middle-eastern tounge. Despite all of her interpol training, Carmelita couldn't place the dialect. It sounded somewhat flowing, despite being quickly punctuated here and there with sharp syllables. The fox nearly did a double-take, as the old crone didn't even bat an eye, but replied in flawless Arabic, to the obvious delight of the new recruit.

Ghazi turned to her with a grin pasted across his otherwise tired face. He was exhausted, as were they all, but the excitement of the job had yet to wear off on him yet, and he had the enthusiasm of youth.

When did I lose that? thought Carmelita with a start. And it bothered her immensely all of a sudden, to realize that she did not, in fact, enjoy what she was doing. She stayed up late nights, but it had been years since she could honestly say she liked what she was doing. How did I stop loving this?

Ghazi's expression turned confused as Carmelita's face descended into a sour look. She blinked a few times, pulled back to the conscious world, and forced a smile. The Jackal regarded her with a raised eyebrow, and Carmelita upbraided herself mentally for the lapse in attention. I'll have to do better than that if I'm going to catch the ones behind all of this...

The raccoon flipped a switch, and the entire floor lit up shudderingly. Ghazi led her back into the recesses of the archives room, which was feeling more and more like a crypt with every passing step. All it needed was for Ghazi to have a whip and torch, and he'd have been a passable imitation of the Harrison Ford movie. That brought a smile that really did touch her eyes. I'll have to watch that again soon. I loved that movie. The Jackal led her onward, taking note of the signs posted at the corners of the shelves. They passed rack after rack, filled with years and years of history. Some of these records would go back as far as the very beginnings of interpol... and further. This had been a police building long before the word 'Interpol' had even been coined.

And it showed. At first, they'd passed large stacks of microfilms, neatly tucked in boxes. The boxes quickly changed to boxes with yellowed labels in the tell-tale monotype of a few decades prior. Further still back in the room, the volumes turned into notebooks, tied shut with string. Manilla folders lined the shelves, but not the cut-rate paper-thin folders they bought now. These folders were thick and heavy, from an era when things weren't made to be thrown away five minutes later. There was a layer of dust covering everything, and an air of disuse. The sterile lighting from a few decrepit flourecent tubes gave the entire scene a surreal atmosphere, as if it were of another time and place -- disturbingly close to the truth. Then, the folders gave way to books. Old books. Some of them were written on the back with languages she recognized, and others were practically unintelligble.

Carmelita chanced to look back. Though lit, the floor lamp from the front desk stood out like a beacon of warmth. It seemed further away than the building itself was big, impossibly distant. She turned back, and it was at that exact moment she caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. Her hand edged toward her shock pistol and she cautiously moved away from Khalid toward the source.

Aisle K was the political crimes section. It was filled every bit as full as the other sections, positively overrun with files chronicaling the life and times of more enemies of the state than one would imagine possible -- if one didn't work for Interopol or intelligence. Carmelita moved in through one of the regularly-spaced cross-rows that interspersed the aisles, connecting them. She looked back toward the desk, and felt a chill run down her spine. She had good eyesight, but as far as she could see, all of the folders had red writing on them, unmistakably Russian. Each and every one had the cold emblem of the Soviet Union stamped neatly in red ink. Each one represented some life that had been torn apart by the two superpowers as they'd taken their ridiculous war to preposterous heights. That the United States had eventually won was cold comfort to the ones who had lost everything in the deal. It felt like a memorial. No, it was less than a memorial. It was like a headstone in an abandoned graveyard: a mute testament to the passing of people whom no one remembered or cared about.

Carmelita shivered and pulled her jacket closer.

"Carmelita?" Khalid called. "I've found the section we need to search. Would you mind helping me?"

Unable to completely repress the shuddering sensations she felt, Carmelita followed him to a file cabinet that could have easily predated World War II. Perhaps it did. The Raccoon at the front would have likely known, but the fox was in no mood to ask. For several minutes, they patiently leafed through the folders, one by one. Even though they were sorted alphabetically, it took a few minutes to find the right one when several files have the same name.

Carmelita whirled around, whipping her shock pistol out and pointing it at the dim recesses of the records room behind them. Ghazi jumped reflexively and turned to stare where she was pointing. There was nothing, but Carmelita's eyes were wide and paniced.

"What is it? Did you see something?" he asked in a whisper. The fox gulped quietly and forced herself to holster the pistol.

"Ghazi, I'm going to check something out." she replied, trying to keep her voice even. The Jackal drew his own weapon, feeling the weight of it reassuringly real and anchoring in this eerie scenario. Their footsteps echoed disturbingly loudly, each footfall sounding like a desecration of a grave.

What IS it with you and the graveyard imagery, Carm? the inspector thought to herself. She approached aisle K, not the least bit reassured for having realized that she was in part overdramatizing. She looked once again up the aisle, filled with towering shelves and volumes upon volumes of old misdeeds. This entire area felt wrong, like a grudge held beyond all reason.

Clockwerk. she realized. That's why this is feeling so eerie. It reminds me most of all of him. And why not? Clockwerk had undoubtely had ties with the Soviet Union at some point, he'd hidden himself in Russia, and he carried profound hatred to the point of insanity. She relaxed visibly, and the unreal air of the entire scene evaporated like so much smoke.

...until she turned around. This time she did visibly shudder. Looking away from the front desk, she saw that the shelves went further back still. The lighting was broken back beyond this point, and the entire aisle was lit with what amounted to artificial twilight, punctuated by the occasional half-hearted flicker of the tube. But what had grabbed her attention so forcefully was what now appeared before her in the middle of the floor. A section of the carpet had been pulled up, revealing a trap door. It had been crafted to fall flush against the floor, though not concealed. The carpet had been sliced raggedly, and the door was now open, laying opposite the hole.

"Ghazi..." Carmelita felt her heart racing. "Go tell chief Rob that we need his attention down here right now." she said flatly with barely-contained panic. She forced herself to take another step forward, and then another, until she stood on the brink of the hole. A dank, sour air rose from it, the stench of things best left forgotten. But now she could see quite plainly that someone had no intention of letting it be forgotten: a flashlight's tell-tale conical beam whipped left and right about the place, randomly illuminating locked file cabinets.

Suddenly, a thought occurred to her.

"Hello? Is there someone else working in this section?" Why not? It's probably one of our own people down their busting their butt looking for records...

She heard a curse muttered in Arabic and frantic footfalls. Her eyes shot wide as she realized what she had just stumbled across. She drew her shock pistol so quickly that it seemed to appear in her hand, like a genie summoned from a bottle. Before she'd even made the conscious decision, she landed on her feet in a wooden plank-floored room filled with filing cabinets of a decisively military dull-olive. Two of the metal containers closest to her had been brute-forced open, rusting locks smashed beyond recognition and cases dented.

Her eyes were still adjusting, but she was keyed up and her ears were as keen as ever. She heard scrambling footsteps in the back corner, and she began dashing blindly through the dark toward their source. A foot appeared in front of her, and she went head over heels, smacking into a wall of file-folders. Compacted as the were by the years of neglect, they mercifully stuck rigidly to their shelves, rather than burying her in papers as the attacker had intended. She bounced up and pointed her pistol at the dark, which had suddenly become as still as death -- too still. She hadn't heard anything at the trap door, and not even Sly Cooper was that silent. The intruder was still somewhere in the room, and trying to keep silent so she wouldn't find him.

She started trying to filter out sounds. Her own breathing and heartbeat, she slowly focused and then ignored. And there was something else... a very low breathing sound. But it was almost impossible to tell where it was coming from. It was everywhere and nowhere, echoing off of the metal cabinets. Suddenly, there was a metallic slam, and light poured in. An old door had been sheared off of its hinges, and an old lightbulb feebly lit a maintenance crawlspace. She just caught the sillhouette of a lithe form slipping up into the duct...

"COOPER!" she yelled, diving for the opening and stuffing her way inside, despite being a touch larger than the one ahead of her. It was a narrow fit, and she swore silently to herself, as she did in every chase, that she would not touch another Mocha until she'd lost some weight. She could almost see the person ahead of her as her own body blocked out what little light there was. She tried futilely to bring her shock pistol to bear, but couldn't get it in front of her. The feet rounded a sharp corner in the ducting, and she saw her chance to bring her pistol out. She pulled it out in the corner space, which just marginally allowed her a little more room, and she fired dead ahead. Impossibly, the one in front of her seemed to sense it coming and crunched to the side. He was six feet in front of her, completely unmissable. She stared dumbfounded as the bolt slipped by him and tore open a section of the duct ahead. Bricks went flying, and she saw stars and neon lights beyond.

This is insane! she thought to herself, trying to ready her pistol again while crawling: no easy task. Suddenly, he slipped down and out of sight, through the brand-new exit she'd created for him. She followed as fast as she could, tearing her leather jacket on the jagged metal edge. She winced at the pain, but held it in check as she braced for the landing some two stories below.

She landed on her feet and wasted no time breaking into a run. The figure hadn't dropped out of sight yet, but was making his way across rooftops. As he jumped between her and the Eifel tower, she saw him framed by the lights.

That's not Cooper! she thought. but who...? She didn't finish the thought, but rather jumped to the next rooftop in hot persuit. The one in front of her was nimble, but she was faster, and she put it to good use. He didn't seem to know where he was going, either, as he sped toward the shady districts. Undeterred, she slowly closed the gap. Several minutes later, she began firing her shock pistol in a wide arc, intended to make him falter. To her utter surprise, this time the bolt flew true, stopping the would-be spy in his tracks. He thudded to the tin roof of a factory with a groan, and she caught up to him in seconds, skidding to a halt.

The man was a jackal, like Ghazi, but from a much rougher upbringing. His face, though paralyzed silent now, spoke volumes about a life that hadn't been easy. Scars criss-crossed his face and arms, and she wondered briefly if any of them had been self-inflicted. He was dressed in second-hand military fatigues that were worn and ragged. Clutched limply in his left hand were the files he'd striven so hard to obtain for the benefit of person or persons unknown.

She picked them up, suddenly extremely curious about what could possibly have been so valuable that Interpol had buried it for a half century and terrorists were seeking it with ferocity. Whatever expectations she'd had, there were dashed. The papers contained nothing but line after line of seemingly scattered numbers and symbols, some of them Russian and some English. They were in a two-column format, with something that looked vaugely like serial numbers on one side, and long strings of random numbers in the other. She stared at it for several moments, willing something to appear out of it, but it was just yellowed pages of paper with dot-matrix printing. Finally, she sighed and handcuffed the man to a convenient pipe. She took a quick note of the location on her personal GPS and headed, files in hand, back toward the Interpol station.


Ghazi had decided to go home. It had been hours of exhausting work, and interrogations from his own comrades. He knew they meant well, but they were all keyed up now that someone had broken into HQ, and after being tired to start with, to say that they were edgy was putting it mildly. Carmelita had come in some hours earlier, but could offer no explanation for what had happened other than the bare facts. The man had run when she spotted him, but there was no apparent motive other than the handfull of worthless files he'd snatched. Carmeltia speculated he'd grabbed the wrong batch in haste, and Rob had turned this particular case over to her to manage. It was a big entrustment for Carmelita, and no small show of faith. It was, perhaps, a message that Rob was beginning to trust her once more. It had been difficult, following the perpetual failures in the Cooper case, but it seemed she was finally starting to overcome the burden that had dogged her steps. He found himself suddenly growling at the very thought of the ringtail. How dare he! He'd made Carmelita's life a living hell for years, and then deigned to come on to her? Ghazi was outraged on Carmelita's behalf, although somewhat belatedly.

He sank deeply into a patched leather armchair, the most luxurious piece of furniture in his admittedly run-down apartment. Sadly, it was all he could really afford on a beginner's salary. Not daring to turn on the television, he stretched out and yawned, clad only in his boxers, trying to unwind a bit before bed. A glass of water rested on the end table to his left, and he sipped the cool liquid to calm him down. He closed his eyes and reached for the phone. Nothing cheered him up at the end of the day like a talk with his mother and father...