Hello, Dear Readers. It is my unbounding pleasure to bring you the second-to-last chapter of Secret Agents Wanted (Finally!)
I would like to thank everyone who has stayed with me, still reading, up to this point. You people are incredible.
Disclaimer: I do not own Club Penguin, only Jezzie, Robinson, and Memory.
Memory rescanned the room, getting his breathing back to normal after his long sprint, and found nothing unusual, other than a couple making out at a middle table. Sneering at them to get a room in a low voice, he headed back out into the cold.
He was almost out of time.
Jezzie and Jetpack Guy parted when Rookie began coughing loudly, like he was trying to forcibly remove his lungs. Jezzie blushed when she realized that he was trying-and failing- to hide laughter behind the rough, guttural noise. Hiding her blush beneath a sheet of chopped blonde hair and not quite meeting Justin's eyes, she bent down to look under the table.
"What's so funny?" she hissed. Rookie chuckled and simply shook his head. Jezzie glared and straightened nervously to look at Jetpack.
Impassive. Stoic. He simply coughed modestly into his palm and straightened his sunglasses. "Um," He said.
"Um," Jezzie repeated.
Rookie snorted. Jezzie aimed a kick under the table.
"We should… go," Justin finally said. Jezzie rubbed her palm awkwardly across the back of her neck and nodded. They pushed their chairs back and stood up simultaneously, each burning a different shade of crimson. Rookie scrambled up also, a goofy smile on his smug little face; Jezzie summoned up one final warning glare and Jetpack just emanated a silent order to remain quiet, or die. They trooped in a line outside, and they all stopped short when they saw a large white sheet stretched between two poles. A large metal box projected light onto it, forming the shape of a large albino man, a darker silhouetted man behind him, arms crossed over a large barrel chest. Several other Islanders stopped to stare at the strange device, unsure of what was about to happen.
What happened stopped Jezzie's heart cold.
Robinson's rumpled suit-covered bulk filled the screen, his fedora drooping over his brow and hiding his eyes from view.
"He followed you, Jezzie. Old gramps here has it in his head that you needed help." Memory's smug voice blasted from unseen speakers, and he moved slowly into the shot, grinning. "Quite a table turn, isn't it?" he cooed. "You have a choice Jezzie. It's between the man who helped you into the PSA, who guided you into your new life, to whom you owe everything…" his smile burned from the projector. "Or between the PSA itself." A small timer appeared in the bottom right corner, counting down from 2 hours.
Memory sat back, and began rubbing his thumb across the brim of Robinson's hat, slowly, cautiously. For a moment he seemed engrossed with the movement, and then, with a start, remembered his purpose. He looked right at the camera. "There is a bomb, cleverly designed by myself, hidden inside the HQ—"
"We have to cut off that sound," Jetpack hissed urgently. "He'll blab the location to everyone here."
Rookie was already on it.
He was kneeling in the snow by the metal box, peeling the sheet metal off with his cell phone tools, and he looked at the radio location inside. "It says that the feed's coming from the…" his eyebrows drew together in confusion. "The fields outside of the mines? That can't be right…" he continued to poke and prod before looking up helplessly to his two partners. His eyes reflected what he knew was coming next, and what was probably the last thing in the world he wanted to hear.
"We need to split up," Jetpack said darkly, gripping his fists.
Jezzie nodded. "I'm going to go after Robinson—"
"No," Justin cut her off. "It's too dangerous."
Jezzie glared up at him. Didn't he think that she could handle it? "I'll be fine, Justin, I swear—"
"No," he said again. "I'm going with you."
"No," Jezzie threw back at him. "You're going to go diffuse the bomb in the HQ." He opened his mouth to disagree, again, only to have Jezzie hold up her hand for silence. "You like logic," she said evenly. "Well, here's some for you. You are the only one of us three who can diffuse bombs. I am the one that Memory and Herbert want back down in the mines. From there I can get to the corn field and shut down the transmitter. Conclusion: We split up, and I go after Robinson. Deal?"
He seethed for a moment before hanging his head, defeated.
Rookie stood up from the snow, looking small and frightened. "What about me?" he asked.
Jezzie thought for a moment. "Bring G up to speed, and try and get him to help Justin in the HQ. Alright?" she tried to sound encouraging, and Justin placed one hand on the younger agent's shoulder. Rookie nodded, looking grim, before diving into the overflowing PSA party, on route to G.
Justin looked one last time at Jezzie, his expression unreadable. "Be careful," he said in a low voice, and then took off at a run to the HQ.
Jezzie pressed her lips together and nodded, even though she knew that he could not see her. "You too," she said to the wind, and started off to the entrance to the mines.
Jezzie was in darkness.
After their escape, the torches had been all extinguished, and she had to use the dim light from her cell phone to guide her over unsteady rocks and through small, roughly-cared passageways. Her leg braces gleamed in the half-light, and squealed slightly whenever she bent her knees.
She had tracked down the precise location of Robinson from the information on the projector, and her GPS informed her that she was mere yards away. She decided to risk speaking.
"Robinson?" she whispered. The walls of the cavern threw her voice back at her, mockingly faint. "Robinson… Robinson…"
"Jezzie?" a rough voice coughed from somewhere to her left.
She whirled around, flashing her weak excuse for light into the spot where the voice had emanated. She nearly sighed with relief, seeing the old timer sitting up against the cavern wall, the only thing keeping him down a thick twisting of rope that was easily severed by her phone-scissors.
"You know that this is a trap, right?" he asked, strangely blasé about the entire situation. Jezzie nodded and helped him to stand. "Then why did you come?" he asked, in confusion. "The PSA doesn't order rescue parties…"
"Remember?" Jezzie asked, eyes shining. "No sacrifices, when you work with me." He seemed rather taken aback by this statement, and a similar teen with bright green eyes was brought into his mind. They did make a good team, he thought. He gave Jezzie a smile that was quickly lost as he looked over her shoulder. "Look out!" he shouted, shoving her aside in time to give Herbert a fist to the face.
The albino man reeled back, dropping the bat that he had been about to smash into Jezzie's skull. Blood dripped down his ice-white nose and he scowled.
He rushed forward, ignoring Jezzie, nursing a heavily bruised elbow on the ground several feet away, and slammed his fist into Robinson's stomach. The elderly man bent over double, unable to breathe, and Herbert held up his fist, about to smash it into Robinson's exposed back.
Jezzie got there first.
She swung the discarded baseball back into Herbert's shoulders, making him pitch forward, into the wall, after which he didn't stir. Robinson dodged, breathing heavily, and grabbed Jezzie's by the arm. "Let's go!" he shouted, and she ran after him, into the dark depths of the caverns.
"Why. Are. We. Running?" she panted several identical passageways later.
"Herbert's too strong," Robinson replied. "And we need to find a safe exit." He turned sharply and headed down another corridor. The two fleeing agents stopped short once they slammed into a wall of bright firelight.
Blinking back tears, Jezzie and Robinson entered a large, cathedral-like cave, the roof of which was in shadow, far beyond the reaches of the thousands of torches strapped to the walls. Alone, in the center of the room, sat a plain white computer on a simplistic wooden desk.
Robinson circled it warily before powering up the monitor. "Maybe there's a map on here somewhere…" he muttered, and Jezzie watched his fingers typing quickly from behind him.
"What's that?" she asked, pointing to a file marked 'Moderator Takeover'. "I think that Memory said something about moderators when he had us captive," she explained. Robinson abandoned his search for a map and clicked on it, equally curious. He scrolled though the long chain of gibberish too quickly for Jezzie to read clearly.
"Oh my Mod," Robinson whispered in awe. "Jay, get your phone out."
"But why—"
"Now."
Jezzie flinched at the iron in old Robinson's voice and dutifully handed her cell phone over. He connected it to the computer with a thin wire, and began dragging around some of the documents in the Moderator file, storing them on her phone. "This explains everything," he said. "The missing agents have been corrupted by a mental stimulation, coming from a rouge computer program. Their minds were integrated into the machine and controlled…"
Jezzie placed a hand on the excited Robinson's arm. "English, please."
Robinson straightened and turned to face her, his steely gray eyes alight in fascination. "The agents of the PSA are the most highly trained operatives on the island," he said, "And so they were captured, one by one, and made to become an army of slaves, all controlled by a central control unit and used for their own sinister purposes."
Jezzie felt her jaw open in shock. Robinson was talking brainwashing and mind control. The missing agents had all been made to follow the orders of whatever madman had designed the computer program. And that meant…
"Justin's parents…" she said in a small voice, "Aren't here of their own free will?"
Robinson's silver eyebrows furrowed. "His parents are here?"
Jezzie nearly pushed him aside to look at the status bar on the download screen, searching in the Moderator files for any name to put to the actions that she had seen. It hadn't been Memory, Herbert wasn't smart enough… the files were long and intricate, and Jezzie's computer skills added up to about nothing, so it was slow going. Along the way, she filled Robinson on everything that had gone on in the caves. When she was done, he whistled softly.
"You kids have been busy, haven't you?" he asked in a quiet voice.
Jezzie flashed a triumphant smile over her shoulder at him.
He was about to return it when his eyes caught something in the shadows behind her. They grew wide for a fraction of a moment before he, for the second time that day, shoved her roughly to the ground.
There were three flashes of light from the shadowed hallway where Herbert was crouching, and the computer screen shattered, sending Jezzie's phone flying away, to be crushed on the rocky floor.
Robinson slowly fell backwards.
Jetpack Guy fell backwards.
As soon as he had put one foot inside the HQ's main briefing room, where his instruments informed him the bomb was hiding, he was punched in the face, and fell back against the wall, shocked.
Memory drew his fist back with a smug grin, showing off his gleaming teeth. "Been waiting for you, Jetty," he said in a light, mocking voice, and struck again, only for his eyes to widen in shock.
Jetpack held his fist in his hand, slowly crushing his fingers and blood dripping down his face from his nose. "Good," he said, and nearly threw Memory across the room, slamming him up against a flat screen TV, which shattered on the point of impact, raining down glass and a battered Memory onto the frayed carpet.
Jetpack looked around, and saw that when Memory said the bomb was "cleverly disguised by myself" he really meant "lying on a table where everyone can see it". He started for the bomb, seeing the timer slowly click down, giving him five minutes. That was plenty of time.
Memory had picked himself up from the floor and held out his hands. "What?" he asked. "That's it? You have me at your mercy, and that's it?"
Jetpack looked over his shoulder at the bruised psychopath. "What more do you want?" he asked harshly, and hoped that Memory would reply, "A broken face."
"The question here," Memory rallied, "Is what you want, my old friend." He pointed at Jetpack's chest, right above his heart. "Anything you want, my associates and I can provide. Information, power, security…" a fire lit up in his eyes as he suddenly placed the dark hair of his friend to the dark-haired man he had seen at the Pizza Parlor. "…Jezzie?"
Jetpack gripped the front of Memory's shirt in his fist and used it as leverage to get a good punch into Memory's mouth. His front teeth split the skin of his knuckles, but he didn't mind. He welcomed the pain, so easily placed, over the other storm of emotions that were flooding through his body.
Memory, still in Justin's grasp, smiled. There was blood on his teeth. "Have I struck a nerve, Jetty?" he jeered. Then he pursed his lips and nodded. "I can understand it, though. Without Jezzie, you are alone. You are unloved. You are dust on the wind."
Jetpack tried to shut him out as he again slammed him into the ground and turned to the timer. Three minutes to go. Still doable. But, the words still echoed in his head, no matter how hard he tried to clear it.
No, he told himself, I am not alone. I am not alone.
"You know," Memory said from the floor, striking a pose with his head propped in his hand, "Right now, you are saving the very people who made you the way you are." The sentence was made to shock, and it did. Jetpack turned on his heels and silently asked for elaboration, which Memory gleefully provided.
"The PSA. They made you a perfect soldier. You followed orders. You kept all the rules. You were their lapdog, and how did they repay you? They let your parents come to us. Now, that doesn't seem very fair to me."
"They didn't let my parents get captured," Jetpack said, more to himself than to the smirking Memory. "They didn't."
"No search parties were sent out," Memory pointed out.
Jetpack growled in frustration and turned to the machine. Two minutes left. He could do this, if he could only get asterisking Memory out of his mind. It was all a distraction. He just needed to focus.
"They could have saved them, if they had believed that my boss was a threat," Memory intoned, still lying on the floor, fingering some shards of glass. "But, that isn't the PSA way, using violence to stop violence. Disappointing, right? It might even be worth punishing."
Jetpack began to open the bomb's covering, looking for the proper wires.
Memory continued. "And what is the result? A boy left without parents, without love, unable to feel." He chuckled coldly and stood. "On that note, Justin, I guess that you and I aren't that different."
Justin turned, a sharp negative on his tongue and was struck on the face with a shard of glass. It wasn't a stabbing blow, leaving only a heavy scrape across his left cheek.
As Justin felt the warm blood trickle down his face, everything seemed to stop.
The bomb was still, and air was solid around him, and all that Jetpack Guy could see was Memory's face. Memory was right. They were not that different.
He had been pushing everything aside in his quest to become the best agent in the PSA, feeling like it was his duty to serve them, in hope that he could please them, to thank them for taking him in after his parents were gone. But, it was their fault. They drove his parents to the side of evil. They had made him the way he was.
Eighteen years of emotion was welling up inside of him, and he could not stop it. All of his ignored frustrations. All of his forgotten dreams. All of his missing experiences. He felt them come, and took a hold of them.
They were in his fist as he drove Memory back. The ex-agent's surprise at such a vicious onslaught was clear on his face, punch after punch. Justin was not driving back at him alone, he was beating into everything that had stood in his way, all of this time. Memory was just a representation of the enemy. He was Herbert, keeping his parents hostage and twisting them to evil, he was the PSA, unable to go against code and save them, he was G and his fatherly attempts to keep Justin in society, he was Robinson and his conformist agent rules that begged to be broken, he was the Director, keeping the truth away from him in an attempt to keep a perfect agent.
Jezzie's face flashed into Jetpack's mind, and he slowed. She had no ulterior motive. She was not inhibiting him. She had been the light at the end of the tunnel, and he had to admit that kissing her was now the only thing in his life that he did not regret.
Finally, Justin was empty.
Memory was in a battered, bleeding heap on the ground, shuddering and wincing, and Justin stood over him, knuckles bleeding and scraped, chest heaving in an attempt to catch his breath.
"I am not like you," Justin growled. "I still hope that things can get better. I can still work to help others. Get one thing straight: Just because I hate the PSA does not mean that I'm ever one of yours."
Memory looked up, through swollen black eyes. "Jolly for you," he said, spat out what looked like a tooth, and then jumped up with speed that Justin had though impossible for an injured man, and fled out the door. It shut behind him with a click, indicating that Justin was now locked inside.
He removed his sunglasses and heard them hit the floor. He made sure to step on them as he walked up to the bomb.
Ten seconds left.
Jetpack closed his eyes and looked away.
Across the island, all clocks struck six.
Boom.
Now, to cancel all worries, I will update after this. The last chapter is already written, just waiting for some reviews before I post it.
So... please review?