Sing a Song of Four Men
The next morning dawned bright and quiet as it always did, though not many were around to see it. Including, unfortunately, a certain blond Briton in a certain hotel.
At ten o'clock, the sun shone through thick curtains to find Alex blearily squinting at the clock before racing into the bathroom to retrieve his drying clothes. He grabbed his laptop, the letter, his mobile – though who was going to call him he had no idea – and some cash before hurtling out the door, barely remembering to slam the button that would ensure a clean room when he got back. His date with Smithers or whoever was at ten o'clock; if he didn't move quickly he'd miss it.
A muzak version of Billy Joel's Uptown Girl played lightly while Alex bounced on the balls of his feet in the lift. He was out and on Tanjong Pagar Road before the voice finished its 'Doors opening!' routine.
Continuing down the road, Alex eventually turned right towards the MRT station. Upon reaching the brick building, he followed a pack of people down the escalators, past a whole row of eateries, round a corner and into the heart of the station.
Under the gaze of many cameras that made him feel a pang of sympathy for Winston Smith, he approached a ticket machine and entered the details of his trip. Thinking of the book, Alex felt his mood plummet like Nile's body had from the balloon back at the end of his first encounter with SCORPIA. What would he do if Smithers betrayed him and was sending him to his doom as Charrington had Winston?
But he did trust the man, if not the rest of MI6, and so he took the MRT to Orchard Road.
xxx
Golden Palace was an elegant place, with plum carpets, ebony wood and a golden ceiling. Chandeliers hung above the tables, scattering light and illuminating the wide expanse. Waiters smartly clad in black and white uniforms pushed trolleys and led hungry customers to empty tables.
The man at the front of house was elderly, the quintessential long-bearded Chinese sage with a red tang suit and black trousers. Smiling genially, he led Alex to a table in the middle of the room for eight, a number Alex had chosen just in case Smithers was bringing company. Alex thanked the man and sat, surveying the restaurant for a familiar face.
The food trolley arrived, and Alex accepted something called 'cha siu bao', a fluffy white bun with red meat in the centre. He nibbled at the hot treat, trying not to drool or get too burnt.
He finished the bun about five minutes later, but still couldn't see any familiar faces around him. Looking at his watch, he was put at ease. It was only ten-twenty. Smithers couldn't have left yet, surely. He sipped at his water, trying to resist the smells that surrounded him.
Smithers had to have a reason for contacting him, Alex thought. He would, no doubt, have a plan. Although Alex had already planned a plan without the gadget-master, and although Smithers probably realised that, he was the sort of man to eagerly inflict his ideas upon others just so they could admire his ingenuity.
But he wouldn't come all this way simply because he wanted to show off. No, there had to be another reason for this meeting – employees of MI6, no matter who they were, weren't supposed to meet up for social reasons. Perhaps there was some new information Alex needed that was too sensitive to send through the post, especially as MI6 was not supposed to be helping him. He poured himself half a cup of tea, watered it down with some more water and burnt his tongue testing its temperature.
What could Alex have overlooked that Smithers or MI6 hadn't? In his mind, he'd been rather good so far, finding out about fishhead and so forth. There was no way they could have found icy before him. He doubted MI6 even knew icy existed, if Alex had only just figured out that icy was next on the list of People Trying to Kill Alex Rider. Although, if he was right about Blunt's hint to go to Brazil, they had found out about fishhead before Alex had.
A waiter materialised on his right and pointed with raised eyebrows to an ovaloid plate covered with limp leaves and a dark brown sauce. Alex accepted the greens to keep him company. He poked at one with a chopstick. Despite it being a vegetable and therefore detestable, his mouth watered. Shrugging, he began to methodically devour the things.
Maybe it had nothing to do with extra information, and MI6 – through Smithers – merely wanted to give him backup of some sort. They had said that they were prepared to assist him, albeit indirectly. Maybe they'd found out about the fire and decided they could spare a magical phone that would send off a distress signal to Britain and some group of soldiers ready to jump on a helicopter to Singapore.
Unlikely. Singapore was too far away from Britain. Maybe they'd base them in the embassy, but Alex couldn't imagine that they would spend that amount of money, resources, effort and time on some ex-spy they couldn't even take proper responsibility for.
He wiped his mouth on a napkin and killed some time attempting to balance his chopsticks carefully on their holder so that neither end touched the table. His wristwatch said that Smithers was half an hour late. Or perhaps, when Alex hadn't arrived at 10 o'clock sharp, they'd decided to leave.
What if Smithers wasn't coming? Alex was counting on someone to arrive, not only because he didn't want to pay for the meal but also because he would feel, well, let down. It was one thing to be unable to track Smithers down when the gadget-maestro didn't know he was coming, and quite another to be stood up in a reasonably expensive restaurant after dedicatedly decoding a secret letter, simply because he'd been a few seconds – well, alright, minutes – late.
Alex picked up his neatly folded napkin dramatically and threw it across the table messily. He looked around to see if anyone had seen his childish fit, but they all seemed unaware. Either that or they were very good at staring intently at their own tables in the milliseconds before his accusing gaze landed on them.
There was a small commotion at the front of the restaurant. A group of tourists were emphatically demanding that they be let into the restaurant, despite being unable to say whether or not they had a table booked – probably not, Alex thought drily – or how many seats they wanted at their table.
He rolled his eyes and accepted another dish, this time something that sounded like 'hum soy gow', whatever that meant. After replacing the lid, he stood up to reach over and place it in the middle of the table so he wouldn't be tempted to eat it as quickly as he had the other food. It wouldn't do to be completely bloated once Smithers turned up. If he turned up. He'd wait until eleven o'clock.
A shout erupted from the group at the entrance as he sat back down and folded his arms. Glancing over, he saw one of the group break past the wall of uniformed staff to grab a white napkin from the nearest table.
In front of the man, a short waiter waved his arms ineffectively. The man's friend had also made it through the line, but he seemed to be on the waiter's side as he leapt and pranced about the agile other man, trying in vain to grab the napkin off him.
Distracted by these lunatics, the other staff members soon joined the dance of the napkin, leaving the other two tourists hovering awkwardly like two flies above a plastic roast beef. With half-hearted movements they swiped at the napkin as it came flying round. Upon meeting with failure, one of them rolled his eyes and slumped, as though they had suffered this routine many times before.
The other called out plaintively, "Guys, you're acting like children."
Just as the restaurant staff called in reinforcement from a nearby shop, the napkin-wielding maniac broke free of the crowd with a shout of triumph, leaving behind what resembled a tuxedoed rugby scrum. He began to leap over chairs and tables in a mad scramble towards the middle of the room. Incidentally, towards Alex.
Alex was ready to flee by the time the man was two tables away. From a distance, he'd thought the man's face looked remarkably familiar, but hadn't been able to place it and was sure he would recognise someone so weird. But the memory he had of the face was more serious and frightening, and definitely not as humorous as the one before him, and so he dismissed it as a mere similarity from afar.
Now that the man was about five tables closer, Alex couldn't dismiss it, because now it looked even more familiar than before.
And he was heading straight towards Alex, of all people, even though there were no empty tables around him. It was clear that the group of tourists was there for him. They were the allies sent by Smithers.
The group… Alex felt the food he'd only just consumed rise in his stomach.
It was K-Unit.
In the space of this horrifying realisation, Eagle had made the final two leaps over to Alex's table, where he presented himself to the boy and cachinnated, "Fancy meeting you here, Cub!" He gave a little conspiratorial scowl in the direction of the waiters who had finished their tussle. "They wouldn't believe we had a reservation."
His face cocked towards Alex, with wide eyes and a pouting mouth that did not suit the grown man and made him look almost like a slightly too-realistic doll. It was just as frightening, if not more so, than the expressions Alex had known him by previously. "Why didn't you come and help us?"
Alex was shocked. Stupefied. Where were the cold-hearted soldiers from Brecon Beacons? Where had the sharp-eyed sniper who had never even talked to him gone? Why was Eagle being so weird, so… childish? Alex, polite as ever, smiled weakly and flopped his hand at an empty seat as the rest of K-Unit made their way to Alex's table.
Without any greetings save for a small wave from a grinning Ben, the men plonked themselves down at the table, leaving empty seats either side of Alex who was left feeling like the head of the meeting.
Smithers was nowhere in sight. He'd abandoned Alex, who was only made more uncomfortable by Snake, who was staring at him as though he were some amazing euglena under a microscope.
"You…" the Scottish man exhaled.
Eagle grabbed one of the things from the steamer basket and chomped on it happily while Ben offered Wolf some tea. Wolf scowled.
Alex scowled too, at Snake. "I what?" It would have been nice of Smithers to have given him some warning. As it was, he felt isolated and awkward and found himself wondering inanely whether Smithers or MI6 had picked these men especially or whether it was just another coincidence like Point Blanc had been (or so he told himself). Blunt didn't believe in coincidences.
Snake was oblivious. "You!" he repeated, stabbing a finger towards Alex. Eagle gulped, paused, looked at Snake, looked at Alex, then stuffed another thing from the steamer basket into his drooling mouth. Snake elaborated. "On the landing! The pot plant!"
Alex's heart dropped to his stomach to say an unwelcome hello to the food he'd just eaten. There was only one way Snake could have known about the landing incident. Why had he pretended to be a pot plant, of all things? "…You live in number 4, don't you?"
Snake nodded mutely, still staring. "And you in thirteen, it seems."
Eagle's face, previously clouded in confusion, lit up with glee. He swallowed hurriedly before blurting, "So it was little Cubbie you saw that day? The one you called me about?" Without waiting for a reply, turned his attention towards Alex. "Why were you hiding behind a pot plant?"
Wolf and Fox turned to look at Alex with incredulous – and, he imagined, slightly disapproving – faces. He tightened his crossed his arms defensively. "I was trying to escape the snipers! You know how it is!"
Snake gave him a look of apology before patiently herding Eagle's hands away from the last piece of food.
"Yeah, about that," Ben commented, offering Eagle some tea to replace the food, "Smithers sent me to get your stuff from there when he realised you'd gone." His face contorted into a wicked grin. "You have some very interesting underwear."
Alex's face heated up and he directed his gaze away from his fellow agent only for his eyes to fall on Wolf, whose wrist was in a brace and who seemed to have gotten into a violent fight recently.
Eagle noticed his curious expression and gave off a bark of laughter that didn't quite match with his name, and caused several other diners to turn their heads, frowning. "Wolfie isn't very happy with you," he sang, and withdrew a yo-yo from his pocket. It was the yo-yo from Smithers, with the nylon string, and he wrapped it around his finger and started to bounce it up and down merrily.
"Why?" Alex asked cautiously.
None of the men seemed willing to give him the reason, but eventually Snake took pity on the awkward silence after Ben offered the table in general a cup of tea. "Wolf was trying to be your back-up when his motorbike got caught on a fence."
Blood rushed to fill the small spaces of Alex's face that weren't red already. He turned back to Wolf. "Sorry, I didn't know you were trying to help, I thought you were one of the…" He trailed off at Wolf's glower.
But to his immense surprise, the man muttered quietly, "S'not your fault. You weren't to know."
Luckily, the food trolley arrived once more, and the group took chiu-chao fan guo, wu gok and dao sa bao. The names meant nothing to Alex and the others, but they accepted them anyway. Their ordering consisted of nodding at whatever the waiter suggested. Wolf began shovelling food into his mouth with commendable efficiency.
For a few minutes they ate in silence, punctuated by sniggers from Eagle, who seemed inordinately amused at everything. Ben offered Alex some tea, which he refused.
The food trolley came around again just as Wolf and Eagle began to fight over the last piece of dao sa bao. Their chopsticks and glares clashed as if they were in some kung-fu film. Eagle took the opportunity to make several sword-fighting sounds, to which Wolf rolled his eyes and suddenly flicked the food at Eagle's shocked face. It rebounded and fell with a light thud into his bowl.
Snake, ignoring the rest of the table, politely asked the waiter the name of a startling orange dish gleaming with oil. The waiter cleared his throat and glanced around before answering.
"It is Gwai Lo food from province of Mei Gwok, Sir."
Somehow, Alex didn't believe him, but Eagle piped up, with a grin and half-chewed food visible in his large mouth. "Why's your nametag Susan?"
The tables around Alex's turned silent, but the waiter merely laughed and rubbed the back of his neck. "Ah, I lost mine and so I borrow my sister. She over there."
The soldiers' eyes followed the man's gesture to a woman with long bleached-white hair sitting with a few friends at a table, and Alex noticed Wolf grow pale.
As the waiter walked away, Ben turned to Wolf, having also noticed the man's changing complexion. "Are you okay? Is it the food? Would you like some tea?"
Wolf glared darkly at him, but even Alex, who had not seen the four for quite some time, could see that his heart wasn't in it. He lacked that certain je ne sais quoi in his current glare that usually made him suitable for Unit Leader and possible Sergeant material. The man muttered something unintelligible under his breath.
"What was that?" Ben's face was positively thrilled, at the promise of gossip material from his former teammate.
"I said," Wolf growled, "she's my ex-girlfriend. She mentioned she had family here."
Eagle decided to join in after accepting one of Ben's cups of tea. "Why, Wolf, I never thought you had it in you to have a relationship with anyone!"
"That's the problem. She didn't either, after a week."
"What's the problem?" Snake asked, setting down his chopsticks and affecting concern.
"She said it was my fault. She hates me." Wolf looked around somewhat desperately for another food trolley to help him change the subject. To his dismay, they all seemed to have migrated to the other side of the restaurant.
"Hates?" Intrigued, Ben leaned forwards, forgetting the dripping teapot in his hand. "Really?"
"Last time she saw me…" He cleared his throat. "She left England."
Alex, who had been keeping half an eye on the woman in question, noticed her turn towards the table. She made as if to excuse herself and half-rose from her seat, throwing down her napkin. Alex called to Ben with an urgent whisper.
"Ben! She's coming over here."
The Liverpudlian, along with the rest of the soldiers, whipped their heads to look over at the woman stalking towards them in her eggplant-coloured dress with an expression that mirrored the quiet before a storm.
Wolf lost his characteristic saturnine appearance and instead had taken on the guise of a man faced with flogging by scented bootlaces. "We have to get out of here," he announced gravely.
Alex, with all the ingenuity that had helped him many times before, spotted an incoming train of food trolleys and alerted the men to his plan in hushed tones. As soon as they were blocked from the woman's sight, they each clambered onto the lower shelf of a cart, pushing the extra cutlery and trays that were on them under neighbouring tables as quietly as possible. FFSAS training was useful for some things, at least.
The trolleys brought them round to the entrance of the restaurant, where they departed mostly unharmed. They peeked a look back at the woman standing in consternation at the vacated table, then straightened and gave a collective sigh of relief.
Snake muttered a few soothing words to the pale Wolf but Eagle grinned widely, flourishing a bundle of cloth napkins from their table. At closer look, Alex saw a multitude of desserts that had previously been on the trolley on which Eagle had hidden. At their incredulous looks, the man widened his eyes and grasped the food protectively. "What? I wasn't finished!"
xxx
K-Unit, somehow, managed to wrangle a room right across the hall from Alex's. He wasn't unhappy with this arrangement, but nor was he really that happy either. Eagle still had possession of the yo-yo, and teased him with it as he followed them into their shared room.
"Could you stop that, Eagle?" Alex asked after he had been hit with the thing for the tenth time.
Eagle only grinned, and hit him again.
Sighing in resignation and wondering how on earth he had ever thought that these men were in any way terrifying, he entered the room and stopped short. Eagle crashed into his back and swore. Alex smiled.
On the single bed similar to the one in Alex's room, all the soldiers' bags had been piled haphazardly. Four army cots surrounded the floor around the bed in various states of disarray. Alex amused himself by trying to guess which one was whose.
The one that had been made neatly and precisely with crisp edges was surely Snake's; he practically exuded OCD with his neatly trimmed nails and pernickety twitches. Next to it was probably Eagle's cot, if only for the amazingly rumpled sheets it suffered.
Under the window, a Sherlock Holmes book lay face down on the pillow. It seemed to Alex the sort of cot left by Ben, who struck him as a bookish sort of man. Only one cot remained, one that was neither messy nor neat and with no personal artefacts. By elimination, it had to be Wolf's.
Alex stepped aside to let the men tramp past, eagerly anticipating the reveal.
Snake didn't go to any cot. Instead, he walked over to the bed, and hoisted several bags; bags which, now Alex looked a bit closer, looked exactly like the ones he had left in his flat back in Chelsea.
"Here." The man tossed the bags at a surprised Alex, who grunted under the impact. Yes, they were definitely the bags he'd left back in Chelsea. But why did it feel so anti-climatic when he'd been longing for them the whole trip?
"Thanks," he muttered. Snake lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.
Meanwhile, Ben entered the bathroom, and started brushing his teeth with a pink, glittery toothbrush. The rest of K-Unit didn't seem surprised, so Alex figured this was a normal occurrence.
Eagle was, unwittingly, the first to reveal to Alex his cot. Finally abandoning the yo-yo, he collapsed onto the cot under the window that Alex had predicted to be Ben's, and started reading the book avidly, while Wolf stood by him and looked moodily out the window at the street below.
Alex tried not to gape at his misjudgement, but consoled himself with the fact that his other guesses were probably correct. Snake the neat, Wolf the messy and Ben the ambiguous? Ben worked for MI6, he remembered, which would account for being overly ambiguous, if there was such a term.
But he was wrong again.
Ben finished brushing his teeth and strolled back into the room, eyes flicking disinterestedly over the intensely reading Eagle, the intensely brooding Wolf and the intensely … sleeping Snake, who opened his eyes in time to see a pillow flying towards his face. He sneezed and glared at Ben before escaping to brush his teeth as well.
Having rid the bed of its occupant, Ben began dumping the messy cot's entire load onto it. Alex was gobsmacked once more. Ben was the messy one, not Wolf? He had thought Ben was the most known to him out of the four soldiers, but if he couldn't even guess his bed, what chance did he have of getting the others?
Quickly he reviewed his choices: there was only the neat cot and the ambiguous bed left. The neat one had to be Snake's; there was no way he could see Wolf ever being as anal as the Scotsman. That made Wolf ambiguous. Well, that wasn't so bad, he reflected, the only two surprises would have been the messy Ben and the scholarly Eagle.
Alas, logic was not on his side as Wolf tired of his enigmatic staring and wandered over to the neat cot, meticulously adjusting the covers so that the slight rumples caused by his sitting down were corrected.
So Snake was the ambiguous one. Alex had got every single one of his guesses wrong. How could that be? Usually he was so intuitive!
"What are you looking at?" Wolf interrupted his bemoaning. "You've been standing there for centuries!"
Alex's eyes narrowed. "Like you can speak, channelling your menace out the window for so long, Wolf."
Ben looked up from his nest on the bed and sighed. "You two are fighting already? Wolfie, remember the promise we made to old Q-boy."
Wolf switched his glare to Ben. "'Old Q-boy'? What an oxymoron. And anyway, Smithers didn't say we had to get along."
"Do you even remember what he said?" Eagle broke in, not bothering to look up from his book.
Silence. Then—
"Of course I do!" exclaimed Wolf. He cleared his throat. "He said 'honour and protect Agent Rider until you find out what in the blazes is going on.'"
Snake exited the bathroom and collapsed onto his ambiguous bed. "It wasn't really a promise, you know. Otherwise he would have worded it better. I mean, honour? What has that got to do with anything? Holmesie?"
Blinking, Eagle looked up. "Don't call me that, Wormy," he snapped, snapping the book shut. "He was probably going for dramatic."
"It fell apart at the end, then," Ben observed. "Alex, stop standing there like a loon. Here, sit on the bed." He shuffled over marginally to give Alex some perching space.
Witheringly, Wolf cuffed Ben's leg. "He won't want to sit in that dog's breakfast. Grab a chair from somewhere."
"There are only two chairs between our two rooms," Snake admonished. "One of them is in his room and it won't fit through the door, and the other is bolted to the floor."
Alex looked at the men. The men looked at Alex.
Eagle shattered the silence. "Oh, for Heaven's sakes, sit on the windowsill. Call yourselves resourceful; honestly."
Alex sat on the windowsill.
"So," Wolf began, "anyone have any idea how we're to 'honour and protect' baby-Cub here?"
Ben aimed a kick at Wolf's shoulder. "Why don't you explain to us the situation, Alex?"
"We know everything up until you disappeared into Brazil," advised Snake.
"Er," Alex said. "Well, basically, there's a guy who goes by the name 'icy', and he's here in Singapore, and I think he's behind all the attacks."
"Concise," Eagle remarked. "Anything else? Have you found where he lives? What happened in Brazil?"
"Er," repeated Alex. "No, I haven't found out where he lives. And… In Brazil I, er, talked with one of icy's minions."
"Well, that was informative," Wolf scowled. "Nothing at all?"
"No," Alex reiterated.
Ben smiled at him reassuringly. "Well, that's why we're here!"
"Anyone have any ideas?" Snake asked. "Holm— er, Eagle?"
Eagle sniffed. "Actually, I do," he replied, "have an idea, that is. We should find out where he lives, then plant a bomb under his house."
Nodding, Fox muttered, "Transmissions, that's how you knew his pseudonym, yes? We can do a trace on that. Give me your laptop. It's the one from the safehouse in Greenland, yes? What on earth made you go there? Didn't Blunt tell you to go straight to Brazil?"
Alex left the men to fetch his laptop. When he arrived back, Wolf was scribbling out a plan to confirm that the house would, indeed, be icy's. He didn't want any civilian to get hurt – not because civilians' lives were important to him, but because there was 'a lot of nonsense if one of them got themselves killed'. Alex handed the laptop to Ben, who accepted it eagerly and began his typing.
"You can't waltz in like that," Snake was explaining patiently. "It's much too dangerous. You'll get yourselves injured and then who'll have to drag your sorry arses home?"
"But I have to get that close to hook it up; you know that," whined Eagle. "Wo-olf!"
"He's right," Wolf agreed reluctantly. "But perhaps we could con him into letting us in?"
Snake nodded thoughtfully. "We can't go in as police or anything, though. Maybe council people?"
"People talking about the water mains, maybe?" asked Eagle. "Then you ask him to watch the water in the bathroom while Wolf and I do our business?"
The Scotsman hummed his agreement. "But I can't keep him there by myself, and Fox can't help. He should be doing the computers. Wolf, you could organise Fox and Eagle and give the signal to go."
"Cub could go with you," Wolf suggested. "Well – how old are you, Cub?"
Alex thought quickly. On the one hand, the a younger age would impress them more with his results back in training, which was very, very tempting, but they would also be horrified to think that MI6 would go so far as to recruit a teenager. On the other hand, being older would make them think of him more as part of the team in this mission, but it would insult to the soldiers, his being sent to the FFSAS a few years before anyone else was allowed.
"I'm seventeen," he lied, watching their reactions.
Wolf only nodded, while Eagle seemed not to have heard. An undefinable expression flickered over Ben's face, but he seemed to accept Alex's answer, and Snake frowned a little, but that could have been thinking about the mission. All in all, it seemed he was safe. Phew.
"You'd have to grow some stubble," Eagle commented matter-of-fact. "Maybe you could be an apprentice or something."
"Alright, that's it!" Ben looked up from the laptop and stretched.
Alex leaned to peer at the screen. "You have his address?"
"No," Ben confessed, "but there's nothing we can do for at least another eight hours. It's searching through your databan—"
"I'm sure no one really cares," drawled Eagle. "I'm tired. Can we watch a movie?"
The other soldiers sighed in tandem. "There's a channel called HBO that only does movies," Snake acquiesced. "Why don't you go and get some sleep, Alex? We won't be able to do anything else tonight."
Eagle gasped in horror. "No!" he wailed. "Alex, Cubby, you have to stay with me! Watch a movie! They might have Arnie on! Come o-on!"
"Get a room, you two," Wolf growled. "Some of us want to watch more important things."
Alex left. Eagle traipsed after him.
xxx
Watching movies with Eagle was like watching movies with Jack. The man tolerated nothing but silence, and stared at the screen with such a look of intense concentration that it appeared as if he were attempting to spot the switch in a magic trick.
He sat, cross-legged on the bed, arms in his lap, back hunched over. By the time the first movie ended, Alex wondered how on Earth the man could keep that position without feeling uncomfortable or getting pins and needles.
The movie finished, and the ads came on. Eagle scowled at the timer on the bottom right of the screen, counting down to the start of the next movie, and muted the TV.
The worst of being around K-Unit, Alex had learnt, were the awkward silences when the men remembered he was there. It was better when they bantered with each other and completely forgot his presence. Sitting next to Eagle with no one else in the room, Alex couldn't hope to disappear, so he decided to make the man forget his young age by distracting him with meaningless small-talk.
"I didn't know you liked books," he began.
Wow. That was the best he, an ex-spy, could come up with? Alex could only hope he hadn't sounded to accusative. Didn't want to alienate himself even more, did he?
Eagle dragged his eyes reluctantly away from the timer to look at Alex. "You don't know a lot about me," he intoned ominously, then went back to staring at the timer.
Alex was debating with himself whether Eagle had been joking when the soldier spoke again, the words forcing themselves slowly through his mouth as his concentration on the timer waned a little. "I like mystery novels, spy novels. The others think I'm putting on airs."
"Huh," grunted Alex, not sure how to respond without insulting either Eagle or the rest of K-Unit.
"They ribbed me for ages when Fox became MI6 and I stayed FFSAS." Eagle's eyes slid to Alex's again. "Sorry. I don't think you're supposed to know he's MI6. Are agents supposed to know each other? Are you an agent?"
Alex shrugged. Technically, he wasn't. Not anymore. "No."
With a strange, slightly confused look, Eagle returned his attention to the timer. "Sorry. If you don't want to watch another movie," he offered, "you can go do other stuff if you want. I'll take back the TV in the other room."
Alex shrugged again, but a smile, unbidden, grew across his face. "S'okay."
AN: So... K-Unit. :D Are you happy with them? Wish they were different?