Chapter Eight: Operation Whorehouse Central
Hello, world :D A couple of things brought to you from Asimo-san:
1. I apologize deeply for neglecting this story for months. I will take my rightful punishment, whatever it is.
2. I've decided to re-write the last two chapters of this story (starting with this one) by tweaking the plot and whatnot, as it was way too complicated and elusive before.
3. Thanks for your support and readership, as always
4. Sorry for the onslaught of run-on sentences from hell. Anyway, I'll be sure to add periods onto my grocery list next time.
It had been a week. Normally, L would have adjusted to a new environment within minutes, depending on the extremity of the situation. But for some reason, he just couldn't bring himself to accept the existence of his flamboyantly perky subordinate even after seven days.
Yes, the flamboyantly perky ball of godknowswhat doom which seemed to have fallen right through the sky and into his arms, just like a load of bird shit. This load of bird shit had insisted on calling itself Alexandra, despite owning a penis of probably hideous size. But that aside, L had to admit that he admired the transvestite a tad for his self-confidence. There were many people out there proud of cross-dressing, but no more than two who would blatantly show it off to the most conservative of people and shove something up the said people's behinds when, expectedly, the said people find his manners slightly disturbing.
Then again, Alexander was one of a kind.
A rare, rare kind.
"I get the slightest feeling that Ryuu doesn't love me very much." Alexander chattered on and off, quite amiably, in a completely one-sided conversation with his black-haired boss, who lobbed back with a barely intelligible "Really now—" before getting cut off.
"Could it be that I'm simply too sentimental for you? Of course, anyone with a pulse would be too sentimental for a zombie." After pushing an exasperated sigh from his lips, as if L was a rebellious teenage son and he was the detective's over-taxed mother, Alexander leaned forward with a small sparkle of curiosity in his eye, "Is there anyone that you really do like? Is there? No, huh? I knew it."
L stared flatly ahead until the blonde pulled away with all interests extinguished.
Alexander was much more than what L had bargained for. In fact, the detective didn't bargain for anything at all; the maniacally narcissistic cross-dresser before him wasn't too dissimilar from a spurt of pigeon shit which sailed, against all odds, onto his head, "I would rather Alexander refrain from abusing truth with conjectures and unfounded prejudice."
The blonde cheerfully ignored the man before him for his manicured fingernails, "Maybe I should have chosen a lighter shade of pink. This fuchsia really makes me feel needy. I'm not needy, am I, Ryuu? I'm not, right? I'm very popular with the boys..."
L's look had Alexander scrambling to rephrase, "You're just sexually repressed, Ryuu. Weird. Bizzare. Peculiar. You're just odd. That's why you aren't head over heels for me and begging for me to carry your child, on your knees right now. Isn't it? Isn't it?"
At this point L knew that it served his ear drums better to just go along with it. "One of the many reasons."
"I feel like we're hitting a wall, Ryuu. Where is that mysteriously handsome, albeit creepy, cross-dresser who wasn't able to take his eyes off from me? Where did all our energy go? All our love?" Cries of pain began slashing into the air like bad calligraphy; L couldn't help but flinch at the noise, "Please refrain from raising your voice, Alexander."
"Alexandra," Alexander corrected spontaneously, "So, Ryuu, I think it's better that we end this relationship before I hurt you any more."
L blinked, attempting to swallow his coffee and digest the words at once. Unsurprisingly enough, it turned out to be an utter failure as L rolled out of his chair, hacking very uncharacteristically of his monotonous self.
The power of a transvestite, indeed, was rather intimidating. L scrambled slowly as Alexander regarded him out of a pair of pitying eyes, "I'm sorry, Ryuu. It's been fun, but we ought to move on. Let's break up without tears."
L grazed Alexander's face with his calculating stare as he tried reading exactly what could have been passing through the unpredictable man's head.
At the unaffected expression drawing over the man's face, Alexander gave up his act in a cold explicit manner, "I know you already know who the hacker is, L."
L brought his knees closer to his chest and stared at the man in interest, "And…?"
"And the fact that we've dawdled around doing nothing for a week means that you aren't willing to capture the hacker or share with me any information regarding him. I, being an agent with morals, will not betray my partner—so I can't submit you to the Pentagon. But I, being a human, won't let you drag me down—so I'll simply quit working with you."
"I must commend you regarding your wise decision." L took a sip of his coffee and stared into the air tentatively, "But I indeed do not know the identity of the hacker."
"Of course you don't."
For some reason, the tone of increasingly icy Alexander's voice made L slightly uncomfortable. There was a bit more to the transvestite than L had foreseen. He was letting on much less than he actually knew.
L felt his heart sailing slowly towards his stomach as he considered the possibility more deeply, trying to map events and motives and characters into a logical map. And when he did, he came to the realization that both he and Xiao had been entrapped in yet another delicate situation. Except this time, much more than their pride and a few lines of mockery were up for grabs.
If Xiao was here, she would've said something along the lines of, "Boy, we're in deep shit here, aren't we?"
And L would have full-heartedly agreed. The detective made a firm vow to himself never to walk near another transvestite ever again.
Xiaoxiao Liang narrowed her already undersized eyes when an unexpected '9' popped up amongst the pool of Sans Serif, bold grey code her in which her mouse swam.
"...the hell?"
She could only recall hacking into the high school reunion party of menopausal old men sporting donut bellies (better known as The Pentagon) seven times total. So why was it that the files insisted that she had visited nine times? It wasn't that she wasn't a fan of reaping undeserved credit, but adding another two counts of 'intentional disruption of confidential governmental operations' onto her five-foot thick stack of offenses wasn't exactly her favorite pastime.
It was only a side-note that she also had the world's best detective on her back.
Unless, of course, if she wasn't the only person who could come and go into the Pentagon's computer networks at will... then there would then be a very rightful owner of the extra two visits.
But if that wasn't the case, Xiao was left confronting the slightly revolting possibility that she had grown so needy of the Spartan geezers as to subconsciously visit them at night. On two different occasions.
Xiao traced the tip of her nose with an index finger, deep in thought, while Henry and Leila badmouthed her happily in the background (having finally found something in common).
"She's so uncouth, isn't she? For the love of god, it remains a fact that she beats Olympic sprint records when confronted with a bottle of shampoo!"
To the sound of Henry's voice Xiao flinched in disdain. The middle-aged geezer wasn't too different from a female fox entrapped in a penis-wielding stack of creme de la dipshit. Once he detected that Xiao was more afraid of Leila than he was of Xiao, he jumped ship to Leila. Nowadays he was inseparable from the English detective, even if Xiao threatened to eat all of his sugary antidote. "Of course," the she-male fox would sprout, "you'd give it to me if Leila told you to."
Sure, Xiao saw it coming. Henry, who hated her with his life, probably couldn't wait to take refuge within the lukewarm threats of her best friend. Leila, who would kill if that was what it took to make her Asian punching-bag even a single bit more miserable, probably adopted Henry without a qualm.
Xiao half-heartedly wanted to protest their accusations, but backed down because what they said was mostly true. Really true. Moreover, she could imagine any objection she tries to hurl Leila's way being shredded to pieces in a cookie-cutter fashion by the English detective's mechanical logic. The ostracized Chinese woman resigned to her laptop with a dull sigh, spreading her hands flat over the keyboard while gazing sheepishly into the screen. A few meters behind her, Leila shared excitedly all of Xiao's less-than-intelligent habits (singing in the shower, pretending her room was a Star Trek battleship, getting fired from McDonalds for-crying-out-loud).
Xiao again grew half a mind to prove the blonde wrong (by advertising how she had been hacking into the most secured place on earth), though she could also see Leila hanging her for the act before recognizing the genius it takes to do so... and therefore backed down.
Her quickly fleeing attention was yanked back into place when her computer screen began flashing red. Xiao stared at the chunk of metal and plastic for minutes, wondering why the hell it flashing red, of all things. She faintly recalled having programmed a function to drive her computer screen red if it had ever been intruded upon—
At the time that she pieced together the function, she had believed that she would be very pleasantly surprised when the time came for it run. She had considered herself a lonely genius, and had looked forward to finally being challenged by someone worthy. The belief was mostly due to her naivety and pure thoughts about the lack of evil people in the world, which was completely ruined and trampled down within minutes of having met L.
At the current moment, however, Xiao was really beginning to wish that she hadn't gotten herself fired from McDonald's. After all, there were only so many possibilities as to who would have both the motive and the devices to trespass her turf... none of which were good.
L and Watari wouldn't do—their self-righteous, dogmatic ways would never allow them to savor the irony of sneaking into the property of a bona fide hacker. Plus, if L had wanted to contact her, he usually would conceitedly pull a one-way video call with a narcissistic, oversized rendition of his name. And if L didn't, neither would his three little groupies, who would probably bitch fight a few millenniums over a piece of chocolate-stained pajamas before paying Xiao any mind.
After eliminating five people, the rest of the world was divided neatly up into two categories: they were either with the Pentagon (and out to ruin her), or they weren't (and still out to ruin her). But Xiao realized that the Pentagon would never possess anyone of such talents—otherwise, why would they so grudgingly hire L, who was practically a bank-robber in disguise when it came to charging for his services?
Xiao stared at her computer screen with disdain and barked, "Liang the Second, I see. Just wait 'till I get my hands on you, poser. Betcha didn't know I was a sadistic pimp."
As if on cue, files begin popping onto her computer screen from the middle of nowhere. Windows closed and opened on their own rapidly, one after another and completely out of control. She had seen the exact scene so many times and knew the exact codes which manipulated it, down to the very letter.
Yet despite the eerie familiarity, it was the first time that she was seeing it on her own computer. She felt slightly like a surgeon having an open-heart surgery at full consciousness.
And to tell the truth, it was only slightly horrifying.
Still, she feigned to be in-control, mainly by popping jelly-beans at life-threatening rates. The candy robbing, as expected, caught the eyes of the two new-found-friends behind her.
"Oh, it looks like your computer caught a virus!" Henry observed as he peered into her computer screen, "Do you download a lot of games and movies or something? My cousin did, and jeez, his computer went crazy."
Leila's follow up couldn't have been faster. "She must have. Xiao, what did I tell you about—"
Xiaoxiao groaned. Here she was, a master of technology dying of a panic attack due to a slightly humongous possibility that the very invader wiggling into her personal space was the exact same one sneaking around the Pentagon…and two computer-illiterate commoners were trying to lecture her about the workings of a computer virus?
She felt like a human being instructed by two prehistoric apes on how to crack open a walnut.
Jesus fucking Christ, the lecherously ridiculous scene!
And, needless to say, in a crisis like this one, the first thing that came to mind was L: she needed him.
It was only an afterthought that asking for help from a detective who couldn't be happier with her mashed and cremated might have been a somewhat silly idea.
"Oh, you don't have to look afraid! I'm sure it's just a normal virus… here, let me see, I'm pretty good at this stuff." Henry lent a chubby hand.
"Shoo, shoo." Xiao swapped it away dismissively as she marched off onto the porch, laptop in one hand. She needed to first deal with the hacker.
Who he was, what he wanted, how he wanted it—she would deal with those after thoroughly stripping him naked of his firewall and puncturing every internal organ of his laptop with her codes.
The hacker needed at least three more minutes to break her firewall. She could walk to the porch in a minute, and then crush the life out of his codes in thirty seconds—which left ninety seconds to spare… which meant she had fifty percent of the allotted time for errors. And honestly, Xiao couldn't imagine how a genius like her could make an error worthy of ninety-seconds.
That was before, of course, she slid open the porch door to a bent silhouette.
She was surprised her laptop was still in hand (and not in broken pieces on the floor) as her jaw dropped nearly to the ground, "Ohmifriggingaw—"
Her eyes widened to disproportionate sizes when the tip of L's germaphobic finger brushed against her lower lip tentatively. For a second she wondered if he was asking for a virtual blow-job; thankfully she realized that he had only meant to shush her.
"Hello." He peered into her face with his pair of dead-owl eyes and shut the door behind the two of them, "I propose going to the café to continue our conversation. It is a place with a commendable repertoire of pastries."
Xiao groaned at the mention of "pastries", about to cross her arms and take the sugar-fiend on, when she realized that she had a greater problem at hand: there was someone molesting her baby. Without another thought she pointed at the lawn three floors below, "Get down there first and we'll discuss whatever later."
He didn't look at all fazed, which, though expected, was slightly disorienting nonetheless: "Unfortunately my offer must only hold now."
"Can't you see I'm busy?" Xiao snapped, gesturing to her half-open computer.
L scrubbed one foot with the other. "To the contrary…"
"L, just shut the fuck up and jump." Xiao jabbed a finger to the lawn below irritably, "It's only two floors. Knowing your agility, the most you'll get is a severed spine."
A victorious smile surfaced on one end of L's lips: "For your reference, Xiao, I am recording every word you say. And that command which you had just issued may be severe enough to earn you quite some years in jail."
"If you don't leave me alone right now, I'll…" Xiao narrowed her eyes, realizing that she had, in fact, ran out of threats, "I'll do something very nasty to your testicles."
"I would very much like to witness your concept of 'very nasty'."
Xiao groaned glanced at her watch. She had less than twenty seconds left. Without another thought she flipped open her laptop cover and began typing frantically.
The Asian didn't even realize that L had began scooting the chair, on which she perched, with complete ease. She was beginning to feel overwhelmed as commands and windows overlapped and amplified one another. Xiao stared, horrified, into her computer screen as her guts shouted up to her brain; her brain issued billions of contradicting commands down to her fingers at once; in response her fingers drove holes into her keys. Her entire body, soon enough, began was under a debate fierce enough to have any English parliament giggle with glee.
But it wasn't her only problem, for L had actually taken advantage of her dilemma to push her—rather naturally—down a trolley connecting the porch and the lawn.
"GOD!" Xiao snapped, shooting to her feet, eyes brazen with anger. Before her, the fragile, over-worked computer finally shut down on its own, succumbed to the hands of conquer and defeat.
She had just lost.
Xiaoxiao Liang, at the ripe age of twenty-one, had just been hacked.
It was the only sentence her brain couldn't register correctly. It just made no sense. She, the self-proclaimed world's best hacker, had just been hacked?
She stood up from her chair, about to jam her fingers in one of his orifices—she wasn't too fussy, at this point in time, regarding which one—when she realized that she was stepping on grass.
It took her a few more seconds to register the fact that, while she was busy dueling a hacker, L had taken the chance to carry her off onto the lawn below the porch.
She twisted her head up to face L, the bastard who had just driven her into her first defeat. However, in his place she saw the face of a woman…
Who, upon closer examination, was a— No.
"That was really something!" The man, with face caked in makeup, beamed cheerfully, "But, I have to say, if Ryuu-dear hadn't distracted you, I wouldn't have been able to trash you like that. Really. Well, at least not so easily. "
Xiao considered the possibility that she had died from shock and was now in heaven, which was currently trending cross-dressing angels: "Who the hell are you?"
L cut to the chase, "This is Alexander—
("Alexandra," the man corrected.)
"—Stewart, my assistant in the Pentagon Hacker case." L explained, turning to Stewart slowly, as if it was more difficult spooning out his eyes than taking one glance at the transvestite, "Alexander, this is Xiaoxiao Liang, an anti-virus developer."
Xiaoxiao narrowed her eyes slowly at L. This couldn't have been heaven. No heaven could allow something as strange-looking as L an entrance, anyway.
"Is something out of place?" L inquired when he noticed the confusion in Xiao's eyes.
She had been practicing retorts to whatever would come out of L's mouth if he had seen her again since the lost bet. If he asked about her wellbeing, she would crack an immature sex joke. If he read a warrant, she would crack an immature sex joke. If he hollered to her from a megaphone off a jet while she was surrounded by police cars, she would find a megaphone and holler back an immature sex-joke, mainly about his being a transvestite.
But now that there was already a real transvestite there…
Xiao arched an eyebrow, turning to Alexander, "Do you like immature sex jokes about Ryuuzaki?"
L cut in to his own rescue, "We are here to discuss the possibility of erasing his position as my subordinate, in terms of changing computer records. Since he is the only partner the Pentagon assigned to me, it should not be too much a problematic task, as you have no witnesses to take into account. The task requires merely hacking into the Pentagon and changing a few records."
"And why should I?" Xiao turned to Alexander, "You, sir, just molested my baby. What makes you think I'll stop you from being sucked dry of all your sanity and bodily juices by this creep here? I wanna tell you a perverted joke about Ryuuzaki first, though."
L cut in again, "That, Xiao, we have already planned. Alexander—
("Alexandra!")
"—had made several copies of evidence documenting your illegally pirating things from your computer while you were within the borders of the United States of America. As the crimes had been committed there, the British government is not liable to protect you, and you will be at the mercy of the FBI. It seems that the most current fine for pirating is fifty thousand dollars."
"How the hell-" Xiao started, and was cut off by Alexandra's happy chuckle, "You got hacked, remember?"
Xiao pretended not to have heard the humiliating words, "Well, since I'm currently kidnapped, did you know that the charge for kidna—"
"Actually," Alexander smiled gleefully. Xiaoxiao really couldn't tell whose side the man was on, "Actually, you see, as we're both governmental agents, this is not a kidnapping."
Xiao stared into the pair of flashy green orbs threateningly and looked away as soon as she realized that his eyes were much harder than she anticipated. He was a formidable opponent. And he wasn't on her side.
She knocked her ankles together, wryly considering all that had gone on. It made no sense. Were the two even working together?
First of all, if Alexander was working with L, surely he would have seen through L's lie about her being an anti-virus developer. Therefore, either he wasn't working with L, or he was—but with some complications. After all, if L had already told him all there was to be known about Xiao, surely he didn't need to introduce Xiao (and Xiao would have understood from the implications what position she was in) again.
But L did introduce her, and purposefully under the wrong title. It must have meant that the two were not corroborating at all. If Alexander was working with L, he must have had ulterior rewards to reap from helping L retrieve her dead body—which wasn't to her benefit. And he must have known that L didn't trust him, having ignored that lie before so easily, and was confident enough to proceed without L's help. That must have meant that he had a gloat-worthy plan already in progress. If Alexander wasn't working with L, he probably wasn't working for Xiao's well-being either.
In both cases, Xiao decided, Alexander wasn't on her side.
Moreover, L wouldn't suddenly just pick up an assistant. His three groupies were enough to keep all of the civilized world's police agencies busy. Plus, if the Pentagon had genuinely wanted help, they would usually provide teams—not solo agents. The fact that L had fabricated such an obvious lie (anyone keeping up with the news would realize that Xiaoxiao Liang had a face twin to the one broadcasted for having Ebola) before her meant that he wanted her to notice that Alexander wasn't working with him.
Could it really be an indirect call for help?
Well, it was either that or the two of them were together to eliminate her to start with—and all of this was an act. In fact, this new alternative was much more logical. After all, the two of them had teamed up to blackmail her: L distracted her while Alexander hacked into her laptop, an act preformed with fluidity of pros. To boot, L had motive: Xiao lost the last bet to him and owed him quite a bit, after all.
Xiao believed much more easily that L had simply came to trick her than came to ask for help. But the man looked genuine enough. Then again, he just looked the same as he always did, with the expressionless face and marble eyes. Still, there were only three possible options: L wanted her dead, L wanted her half-dead and in jail, or L wanted her alive enough to help him out of a jiffy, and then dead.
Grudgingly Xiaoxiao swung towards Alexander, "Forget it, I don't want..."
To her surprise, Alexander drew a pistol from his side and (here she took two quick steps backwards and stared with alarm at L-) dropped it on the ground, falling on his knees in the process. Xiao stared in surprise as he looked up at her with near-watering eyes, "I'd like to be your computer. To be raped by your majestic hands."
The smile on Xiao's face dropped in a beat, "Who the hell are you kidding?"
"You only have three choices, Xiao." L spoke slowly, as if he had been rehearsing the speech, "One—you do as we say. Two—you physically and mentally overwhelm the two of us within thirty-seven seconds."
"And three?"
"Three—you physically and mentally overwhelm the two of us within thirty-seven seconds, and then do as we say."
Before Xiao knew it Alexander had somehow slipped behind her and, in a flash, had her hands cuffed behind her back. L continued rather comfortably, as if things were going just as planned. "Let's now take a trip to the café, to discuss our plans."
"I don't see how this is a discussion." Xiao pouted dramatically, sticking her lips out in the most immature and downright disgusting fashion as Alexander dragged her towards Watari's limousine, "Ow, Alexander, do you have to man-handle me? Can't you see that I'm as delicate as glass here?"
She could have sworn she caught an offhandedly evil smirk on Alexander's face for no reason. The smirk had her heart exploding jittery sparks of fear. There really was something wrong with the present situation. Everything was odd and out of place. There were too many questions and not a single answer.
Why did L lie? Why didn't Alexander react to the lie? Was L trying to insinuate something? Was he trying to say that he was going to arrest her for real, or was he saying that he needed her help? Or was it all a plot before the moment she first met him in Leila's apartment?
And who, really, was this Alexander? Why did he agree to work with L? What was his connection to the Pentagon? What did he want from her? What could he want from her?
And, most importantly, why were the two of them making her hack into the Pentagon on their behalf? It couldn't have been a coincidence; especially not so for L, who knew that Xiao was the Pentagon Hacker. Was this just another way to arrest her? But why was L, who had so many times insinuated that he didn't want her to be arrested and could have arrested her long ago, going along with it? Plus, the action was an offense even for governmental agents—they would be arrested as her accomplices, if she were to be caught.
Why were they taking that risk? But L didn't take risks. So was there no risk at all?
Xiao chewed her lower lip slowly as she attempted sorting out all the millions of questions mushrooming inside her quickly liquefying brain. Was her relationship with L—the hide and seek, the semi-lunatic bets—a trap set by the detective to capture her trust…? Was he with her at all, during all those previous weeks?
Who was L?
"What are you looking so abstract for?" Alexander stabbed her side with a finger, and before she was able to say much, quickly posed another question, "What should we call this secret mission of ours?"
Xiao stared into Alexander's eyes pensively. It could have been that L had been working with a much bigger team, of which Alexander was a member, since the beginning. Then the game might have just begun. Or was it that a game had just ended, and had now brought her into the next level?
Yes, a new level wouldn't be too much of a surprise. She had just uncovered another hacker into the Pentagon, and coincidentally just minutes before getting 'kidnapped' by L and a stranger. And now she had been forced into taking up a job that, for some reason, made no sense.
"… whore…"
Xiao jerked up at the word, "Eh?"
"I am sadly disappointed at confirming that the word would actually catch your attention." L's voice chained Xiao down the reality. The madwoman blinked rapidly, prying at the half-repressed grin on Alexander's face in confusion. The transvestite held up a flat palm before L's nose, "C'mon, pitch it over. Two bucks." and L grudgingly placed a small lollipop there.
Xiao blinked, still confused over exactly what the two had bet over, "What?"
"We're going to call it 'Operation Whorehouse Central!' Sexy, no?" Alexander smirked, obviously pleased.
Somehow, just hearing the name made Xiao quite a bit happier. And the fact made her slightly worried for her own well-being, "Only if I'm the pimp."