Agent Matt: Academy of Shadows

Chapter 2: Black Shadow

The worst time to feel alone is when you're in a crowd. Matt Ishida was walking across the tarmac of the playground, surrounded by hundreds of boys and girls his own age or older. They were heading in the same direction. All wearing the green jackets and grey trousers with the exception of the girls who wore an all green sailor uniform, with the short skirt and Black tie, but probably thinking much the same thoughts. The last lesson of the day had ended. Homework, tea, TV and bed would fill the remaining hours left in the day. Another school day. So why did matt feel so out of place, it was like he was watching the last weeks of term behind a glass screen. Matt jerked the bag over his shoulders as he walked over to the bike shed; he felt the weight of the homework in his bag… double Japanese and science. He had missed two weeks of school and he was having to work hard to catch up. Suddenly a voice called behind him, a sweet girl's voice. As he turned round he saw a girl rollerblading up to him, her soft green eyes looked at him and her brown hair shone in the sun. She was wearing pink roller blades on her feet but skated gracefully, her name was sakura Avalon. She was out of breath; she must of saw matt and rollerbladed straight on over to him.

"You doing anything tonight?" she asked. Matt jerked a thumb towards his back pack and said sadly.

"Yeah, double Japanese and science. Sorry sakura." As she looked at him, she brushed some stray hairs out of his eyes and looked at his worn out face, she knew school was a drag and tiring but he looked beyond that.

"Are you alright, matt? I've hardly seen you all week, and you seem-"

"I'm fine sakura!" he snapped. Sakura was startled by Matt's outburst. As matt sighed and learnt up against the wall he then said to sakura. "I'm sorry sakura, I didn't mean to snap, it's just…it's not being able to turn anyone of what I did, you know? Having all my friends thinking I was off for three weeks with the Flu, that I'm some pampered idiot. It's driving me absolutely bonkers." Sakura briefly giggled she learnt towards matts face and said with a smile.

"Bored more like." Matt was surprised to hear that from sakura. "You just can't wait for your secret agent beeper to go off, that's your trouble matt." As matt shrugged he said to sakura shaking his head.

"I told you, I'm not a spy…not anymore anyways. It would be more exciting than doing double homework, though." As sakura walked with matt, she knew he was having a rough time catching up. He had missed three weeks of school and was working hard to catch up. His teachers had not been sympathetic. Nobody had said as much, but when he had finally returned with a doctor's letter ("a bad dose of flu with complications") they had nodded and smiled and secretly thought him a little bit pampered and spoiled.

On the other hand, they had to make allowances. They all knew that Matt came from a broken family, that he had been living with his father who had died in some sort of car accident. But even so. Three weeks in bed! Even his friends had to admit that was a bit much. And he couldn't tell them the truth. He wasn't allowed to tell anyone what had really happened. Only she and Madison knew the truth. That was the hell of it. As sakura looked at him she saw that matt was looking around him, at the children streaming through the school gates, some dribbling soccer balls, some on their cell phones. He looked at the teachers, curling themselves into their second hand cars. Matt thought at first, the whole school had somehow changed while he was away. But deep down he knew now that what had happened was worse. Everything was the same. He was the one who had changed. Matt was fifteen years old, an ordinary schoolboy in an ordinary west Tomoeda school. Or he had been. Three weeks before, he had discovered that his father was a secret agent, working for JIN 7. The father-Mahon Ishida-had been murdered, and JIN 7 had forced Matt to take his place. They had given him a crash course in Special Assault Team survival techniques and sent him on a lunatic mission on the South Coast.

He had been chased, shot at, and almost killed. And at the end of it he had been packed off and sent back to school as if nothing had happened. But first they had made him sign the Official Secrets Act. Matt smiled at the memory of it. He didn't need to sign anything. Who would have believed him anyway? Besides those who had already sighed it. But it was the secrecy that was getting to him now. Whenever anyone asked him what he had been doing in the weeks he had been away, he had been forced to tell them that he had been in bed, reading, slouching around the house, whatever. Matt didn't want to boast about what he'd done, but he hated having to deceive his friends. It made him angry. JIN 7 hadn't just put him in danger. They'd locked his whole life in a filing cabinet and thrown away key. He approached the tarmac of the playground and reached up to brush away the single strand of fair hair that had fallen over his eye. Sometimes he wished that the whole business with JIN 7 had never happened. But at the same time-he had to admit it-part of him wanted it all to happen again. Sometimes he felt that he no longer belonged in the safe, comfortable world of Readington Comprehensive high school. Too much had changed. And at the end of the day, anything was better than double homework. As he smiled at her she said to him in a cold matter of fact tone.

"It's not just you who can't talk about it, remember?" she said as she gently tapped him on the head with her fist. "Me and Madison had to sign…" suddenly something caught sakura's eye and her face was twisted in silent anger. Matt noticed this and asked.

"What is it, sakura?"

"It's him." Her voice was nearly rasping with venom. Matt looked where sakura's eyes were and that's was when he saw the beaten-up white car. Back outside the school gates for the second time that week. Everyone knew about the man in the white car. He was in his twenties, bald-headed with two broken stumps where his front teeth should have been and five metal studs in his ear and two in his nose. He didn't advertise his name. When people talked about him, they called him Suzuki, after the make of his car. But some said that his name was John and that he had once been to Readington. If so, he had come back like an unwelcome ghost; here one minute, vanishing the next ... somehow always a few seconds ahead of any passing police car or overly inquisitive teacher. Suzuki sold drugs. He sold soft drugs, like pot and cigarettes, to the younger kids at the elementary school, and harder stuff to any of the older ones stupid enough to buy it. It seemed incredible to Matt that Suzuki could get away with it so easily, dealing his little packets in broad daylight. But of course, there was a code of honour in the school. No one turned anyone in to the police, not even a rat like Suzuki. And there was always the fear that if Suzuki went down, some of the people he supplied-friends, classmates-might go with him. Drugs had never been a huge problem at Readington, but recently that had begun to change. A clutch of seventeen year-olds had started buying Suzuki's goods, and like a stone dropped into a pool, the ripples had rapidly spread. There had been a spate of thefts, as well as one or two nasty bullying incidents-younger children being forced to bring in money for older ones. The stuff Suzuki was selling seemed to get more expensive the more you bought of it, and it hadn't been cheap at the start.

"You know Rita Sasaki was beaten up the other day, and it went straight to Suzuki. Somebody should do something about him."

"yeah." Mat replied "Things have been stolen too, he's poisoning the schools."

Suddenly Suzuki looked up and saw sakura looking his way. He smiled his two front stumps and winked at her, sakura shuddered at the mere thought of him flirting with her. On an impulse she turned round and pretended to kiss Matts cheek. He then rolled his eyes and went back to sorting out the drugs on the front seat. Matts face was blushing sakura's lips were only half a centimetre away yet he could still feel them pressing up against his face.

"Anyways matt, I got to go, I'll see you tomorrow in class, okay?"

"S…Sure sakura!" matt slowly replied. Sakura then started to walk home with Madison who was waiting by the fence for her. As matt watched sakura walked off with Madison he didn't notice someone was coming close to him. Matt didn't realize someone was coming close to him until he bumped into him, not even an apology, just a grunt. Matt turned to watch as a heavy- shouldered boy with dark eyes and serious acne problem across his face lumbered over to the car, paused by the open window, and then continued on his way. He felt a sudden spurt of pure loathing. The boy's name was ZacharyYamazaki. When matt was a student at the Tomoeda elementary, he was nervous, scared and just suffered going through his parents' divorce. Zachary, sakura and Madison were the first to make him feel welcome. Whenever matt was alone, scared or upset Zachary would cheer matt up by telling sakura one of his fabricated stories. The look on her face made matt laugh, he was a good friend, a best friend, a true friend. This year he had been hardworking and popular. Everyone wanted to be with him, but he always chose to be with matt and his other friends. These days, everyone just avoided him. Matt had never thought much about drugs, apart from knowing that he would never take them himself. But he could see that the man in the white car wasn't poisoning just a handful of dumb kids. He was poisoning the whole school and poisoning the very heart of Matt's life. A policeman on foot patrol appeared, walking toward the gate. A moment later, the white car was gone, black smut bubbling from a faulty exhaust. Matt was on his bike before he knew what he was doing, pedalling fast out of the yard and swerving around the school secretary, who also was on her way home.

"Not too fast, Matt!" she called out, sighing when he ignored her. Miss bridle had always had a soft spot for Matt without knowing quite why. And she alone in the school had wondered if there hadn't been more to his absence than the doctor's note had suggested. The white Suzuki accelerated down the road, turning left and then right and Matt thought he was going to lose it. But then it twisted through the maze of back streets that led up to the Shonoko Street and hit the inevitable four o'clock traffic jam, coming to a halt about two hundred yards ahead.

The average speed of traffic in Tomoeda is-at the start of the twenty-first century-slower than it was in Victorian times. During normal working hours, any bicycle will beat any car on just about any journey at all. And Matt wasn't riding just any bike. He still had his falcon XC road racer, hand built for him in the workshop that had been open for business on the same street in shundori for more than fifty years. He'd recently had it upgraded with an integrated brake and gear lever system fitted to the handlebar, and he only had to flick his thumb to feel the bike click up a gear, the lightweight titanium sprockets spinning smoothly beneath him.

He caught up with the car just as it turned the corner and joined the rest of the traffic on the Shonoko Street. He would just have to hope that Suzuki was going to stay in the city, but somehow Matt didn't think it was likely that he would travel too far. The drug dealer hadn't chosen Readington Comprehensive as a target simply because he'd been there. It had to be somewhere in his general neighbourhood-not too close to home but not too far either.

The lights changed and the white car jerked forward, heading west. Matt pedalled slowly, keeping a few cars behind, just in case Suzuki happened to glance in his mirror. They reached the corner known as Dead mans road, and suddenly the road was clear and Matt had to switch gears again and pedal hard to keep up. The car drove on, through Pedreons Green and down toward Kanoria. Matt twisted from one lane to another, cutting in front of a taxi and receiving the blast of a horn as his reward. It was a warm day, and he could feel his Japanese and Science homework dragging down his back. How much further were they going? And what would he do when they got there? Matt was beginning to wonder whether this had been a good idea when the car turned off and he realized they had arrived. Suzuki had pulled into a rough tarmac area, a temporary parking lot next to the River Shimari, not far from Kanoria Bridge. Matt stayed on the bridge, allowing the traffic to roll past, and watched as the dealer got out of his car and began to walk. The area was being redeveloped, another block of prestigious apartments rising up to bruise the Tomoeda skyline. Right now the building was no more than an ugly skeleton of steel girders and prefabricated concrete slabs. It was surrounded by a swarm of men in hard hats. There were bulldozers, cement mixers, and, towering above them all, a huge, canary yellow crane. A sign read: SHIMARI RIVER VIEW HOUSE. And below it: ALL VISITORS REPORT TO THE SITE OFFICE. Matt wondered if Suzuki had some sort of business on the site. He seemed to be heading for the entrance. But then he turned off. Matt watched him, increasingly puzzled. The building site was wedged in between the bridge and a cluster of modern buildings. There was a pub, then what looked like a brand-new conference centre, and finally a police station with a parking lot half filled with official cars. But right next to the building site, sticking out into the river, was a wooden jetty with two cabin cruisers and an old iron barge quietly rusting in the murky water.

Matt hadn't noticed the jetty at first, but Suzuki walked straight onto it, and then climbed onto the barge. He found a door, opened it, and disappeared inside. Was this where he lived? It was already growing dark, and somehow Matt doubted he was about to set off on a pleasure cruise down the River Shimari. He got back on his bike and cycled slowly to the end of the bridge, and then down toward the parking lot. He left the bike and his backpack out of sight and continued on foot, moving more slowly as he approached the jetty. He wasn't afraid of being caught. This was a public place, and even if Suzuki did reappear, there would be nothing he could do. But he was curious just what was the dealer doing on board a barge? It seemed a bizarre place to have stopped. Matt still wasn't sure what he was going to do, but he wanted to have a look inside. Then he would decide. The wooden jetty creaked under his feet as he stepped onto it. The barge was called Black Shadow; the boat was flaking and the Black was made up with rusty ironwork, and the dirty, oil-covered decks. The barge was about thirty yards long and very square with a single cabin in the centre. It was lying low in the water, and Matt guessed that most of the living quarters would be underneath. He knelt down on the jetty and pretended to tie his shoelaces, hoping to look through the narrow, slanting windows. But all the curtains were drawn. What now?

The barge was moored on one side of the jetty. The two cabin cruisers were side by side on the other. Suzuki wanted privacy-but he must also need light, and there would be no need to draw the curtains on the far side, with nothing there but the river. The only trouble was that to look in the other windows, Matt would have to climb onto the barge itself. He considered briefly. It had to be worth the risk. He was near enough to the building site. Nobody was going to try to hurt him in broad daylight. He placed one foot on the deck, and then slowly transferred his weight onto it. He was afraid that moving the barge would give him away. Sure enough, the barge dipped under his weight, but Matt had chosen his moment well. A police, launch was sailing past, heading up the river and back into town. The barge bobbed naturally in its wake, and by the time it settled, Matt was on board, crouching next to the cabin door.

Now he could hear music coming from inside. The heavy beat of a rock band. He didn't want to do it, but he knew there was only one way to look in. He tried to find an area of the deck that wasn't too covered in oil, and then lay flat on his stomach. Clinging on to the handrail, he lowered his head and shoulders over the side of the barge and shifted himself forward so that he was hanging almost upside down over the water. He was right. The curtains on this side of the barge were open. Looking through the dirty glass of the window, he could see two men. Suzuki was sitting on a bunk, smoking a cigarette. There was a second man, blond-haired and ugly, with twisted lips and three days' stubble, wearing a torn sweatshirt and jeans, making a cup of coffee at a small stove. The music was coming from a boom box perched on a shelf. Matt looked around the cabin. Besides two bunks and the miniature kitchen, the barge offered no living accommodations at all. Instead, it had been converted for another purpose. Suzuki and his friend had turned it into a floating laboratory. There were two metal work surfaces, a sink, and a pair of electric scales. Everywhere there were test tubes and Bunsen burners, flasks, glass pipes, and measuring spoons. The whole place was filthy obviously neither of the two men cared about hygiene-but Matt knew that he was looking into the heart of their operation. This was where they prepared the drugs they sold: cut them down, weighed them, and packaged them for delivery to local schools. It was an insane idea to put a drug factory on a boat, almost in the middle of Tomoeda, and only a stone's throw away from a police station. But at the same time, it was a clever one. Who would have looked for it here?

The blond-haired man suddenly turned around, and Matt hooked his body up and slithered backward onto the deck. For a moment he was dizzy. Hanging upside down had made the blood drain into his head. He took a couple of breaths, trying to collect his thoughts. It would be easy enough to walk over to the police station and tell the officer in charge what he had seen. The police could take over from there. But something inside Matt rejected the idea. Maybe he would have done that a few months before: let someone else take care of it. But he hadn't cycled all this way just to call the police. He thought back to his first sighting of the white car outside the school gates. He remembered his friend Zachary shuffling over to it and felt once again a brief blaze of anger. This was something he wanted to do himself. The words of sakura helped encouraged him to do so.

"Someone should do something about him." But what could he do. If the barge had been equipped with a plug, Matt would have pulled it out and sunk the entire thing. But of course it wasn't as easy as that, not like the cartoons. The barge was tied to the jetty by two thick ropes. He could untie them, but that wouldn't help either. The barge would drift away, but this was Kanoria. There were no whirlpools or waterfalls. Suzuki could simply turn on the engine and cruise back again. Matt looked around him. On the building site, the day's work was coming to an end. Some of the men were already leaving, and as he watched, he saw a trapdoor open about a hundred and fifty yards above him and a stocky man begin the long climb down from the top of the crane. Matt closed his eyes. A whole series of images suddenly flashed into his mind, like different sections of a jigsaw puzzle. The barge. The building site. The police station. The crane with its big hook, dangling underneath the jib. And the downtown Tomoeda arcade. He'd gone there once with his housekeeper, Julie landers, and had watched as she won a teddy bear, hooking it out of a glass case and carrying it over to a chute. Could it be done?

Matt looked again, working out the angles. Yes. It probably could. He stood up and crept back across the deck to the door that Suzuki had entered. A length of wire was lying to one side, and he picked it up, and then wound it several times around the handle of the door. He looped the wire over a hook in the wall and pulled it tight. The door was effectively locked. There was a second door at the back of the boat. Matt secured this one with his own bicycle padlock. As far as he could see, the windows were too narrow to crawl through. There was no other way in or out. He crept off the barge and back onto the jetty. Then he untied it, leaving the thick rope loosely curled up beside the metal pegs-the stanchions-that had secured it. The river was still. It would be a while before the barge drifted away.

He straightened up. Satisfied with his work so far, he began to run. As he ran he said to himself in anger.

"Those dam drug dealers got one of my best friends hooked," he then looked up at the crane and smiled "and I'm going to return the favour."