3
When Cobb opened his eyes the first thing he saw was Marx pacing anxiously in front of him.
"Well?" asked Marx. "Did you find out?"
Cobb shook his head as he unhooked himself, then glanced at the other dreamers. Mal was stirring. Eames was blinking away the last traces of sleep. Arthur still appeared to be in a deep sleep. That was not good.
"Julius," said Cobb. He struggled to keep his voice level after what he'd just found out about the man who'd been a family friend for so long. "I'm sorry. He's a red herring."
"What?"
"He doesn't know anything. He's just a college kid who needed money. A shady looking woman paid him to put on that suit, carry that flashdrive, and go where she told him to. He doesn't know her name, only that she paid him fifty bucks and paid for all his expenses every time she sent him somewhere."
"Damn it!" Marx kicked over a chair.
Immediately there was a knock on the door, then one of Marx' guards opened it. "Everything alright, Mr. Marx?"
"As alright as it can be," muttered Marx. He motioned to Arthur who's head was still lolling in deep slumber. "We're going to have to take care of him."
"You're letting him go?" asked Cobb and continued without waiting for an answer. "Good. He's just a kid and he's pretty confused and scared. Buying his silence should be pretty easy."
"Yes, of course," said Marx, but he continued to study Arthur. "My men will make the arrangements." He looked thoughtful for a couple moments, then a lewd smile crossed his face that Cobb doubted he would have noticed an hour ago. "Untie him and take him to Harold. This one's right up his alley."
Seeing that smile and knowing the context behind it made Cobb feel sick. What was worse, Arthur still showed no signs of waking, even though the time on the clock had run out. Had he slipped back into natural sleep or passed out? Or had Marx sedated him again?
Cobb didn't dare look at Mal or Eames. If they started looking at each other nervously then Marx would know something was up. Instead he watched as Marx's guards began untying Arthur, and tried to appear casual. All the while he willed the boy to wake up.
And the moment that the last of the ropes were unknotted from around Arthur's wrists he did wake up. Or more likely, he'd already been awake, but was pretending to be unconscious. He leapt into action, landing a punch to the first guard's face that completely smashed his nose, then kicked him in the knee hard enough to knock him down.
"Hey!"
The other guard only had time to say that one word before Arthur grabbed two handfuls of the older man's hair and jerked his head downward. His knee was waiting to meet the guard's face.
"Stop!" ordered Marx. "Somebody stop him!"
Cobb made a move as though to intervene but met Arthur's eyes, willing the boy to understand. Comprehension flitted across his opaque eyes and he grabbed Cobb by the arm and threw him with some sort of judo throw. Cobb landed on his back, winded, but without the broken nose that the two men who'd really tried to stop him were suffering from. By the time he actually hit the ground Arthur was already out the door.
Arthur turned right as soon as he reached the hallway and began sprinting as though his life depended on it, which it did. There was a set of French doors at the end of the hallway, just like Cobb said there'd be. He flung one open and didn't bother shutting it behind him or barricading it, because before him was the picture window, just as Cobb had described.
He didn't slow down, not even a little, just kept rushing toward it, knowing he'd need his speed. At the very last second he flung his arms up to cover his face and dived right through the glass.
Then he was falling.
Falling.
Falling.
Falling.
He hit the water with a splash.
I'm awake. And I've got a chance to escape. Arthur began swimming north, against the current, which kept trying to drag him south. South was where they'd look for him, so north was the way to go. He stayed under water as much as he could, but the second time he surfaced, he looked back at the villa on the cliff and saw several people standing at the picture window he'd just dived out of. Thank you, Cobb.
He swam for the better part of the day before finally dragging himself ashore, exhausted and waterlogged, but alive and free. His suit was completely ruined, but all in all, things could have gone much worse.
He'd kicked off his right shoe and disgarded it, almost as soon as he entered the water, but he'd left the left one on. Now he took it off and pulled up the padding inside of it to retrieve the emergency cash that he always kept stashed there. Five one-hundred dollar bills and three quarters. The quarters were so that he could make a call from a payphone, though payphones were getting harder and harder to find these days.
He came ashore on a small but touristy town, with a boardwalk, which was his good luck. People stared at him, but they were vacationers and easy to convince that nothing was wrong, since they didn't want anything shady spoiling their vacation. "My girlfriend's dog," he said whenever he noticed people staring, and he'd flash them a big fake smile that actually almost felt genuine because he was so happy to be alive and out of the hands of the human traffickers. "I shouldn't have hung on to the leash."
They smiled back and went on their way, and promptly forgot they'd ever seen the drenched man in the three piece suit, and Arthur stopped at the first tourist attire shop he came to and purchased sandals, a pair of shorts, and a t-shirt, and was suddenly indistinguishable from any other college student in town on summer break.
He found some food next and ate slowly so that he wouldn't make himself sick. Then he found a payphone, deposited his quarters, and dialed one of the many numbers he had memorized. "It's me," he told the man who answered.
"Arthur?" his contact sounded relieved. "We've been waiting to hear from you for days! Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," Arthur told him, forcing his voice to remain cool and calm, even though the genuine concern that his contact felt for him made him feel like choking up. People caring about his wellbeing. People helping him. People saving his life. He wasn't used to it. He didn't want to get used to it. "Break the story," he told his contact. "Bring those bastards down."
"On it." On the other end of the line he heard his contact typing rapidly. "You're sure you're okay man? We've been worried."
"I couldn't be calling if I wasn't fine. I apologize for causing concern."
"Don't be sorry. I'm just glad you're okay. Everyone will be glad. Why don't you come back here and celebrate with us?"
"Because I'm on the other side of the country."
"It doesn't matter. We'll send a jet to pick you up."
"I have some other business to attend."
"Come on, man," cajoled his contact. "I've got your check cut and right here in my hand."
"You know the address to mail it to."
"Arthur," said his contact, "You're a hero. Come celebrate like one. Please. Everyone is going to want to see that you're okay with their own eyes. Come join us. You'll have a front row seat as we watch these bastards come toppling down."
"I can't," Arthur told him. "I have a debt to pay."
"We'll cover it. Give me the guy's name and address and I'll have the check in the mail within the hour."
Arthur hesitated. It seemed that he was really, really wanted in New York, and a front row seat to watching his enemies crumble was very tempting . . . but this was something he had to do himself. "He saved my life," Arthur said, letting his voice soften just a bit.
"Oh. Oh, I see. Alright then, I'll stop pressuring you. You do what you have to do, man. But give us a call next time you're in the Big Apple. I want to buy you a drink, man."
"We'll see," said Arthur. It was the best he could do.
Twenty minutes later he had disappeared into the masses of society.
Cobb, Mal, and Eames were at a bar when the story broke. It was so big that half the sporting events on for the night were postponed for those special news reports. Cobb was glad to see that the television stations had their priorities straight.
They watched in silence as prominent businessmen, celebrities, even politicians were arrested and led out of their homes in handcuffs because of their involvement. Cobb felt sick as he realized how big this thing actually was, and how close they'd come to helping destroy the man who'd made it possible to put a stop to it. He wondered if Arthur was okay, or if he'd drowned trying to escape, and he was glad that he didn't dream anymore because he was sure he'd only have nightmares about the kid's corpse washing up on some surf tormented shore, looking like crab food, his face a grotesque, scavengerized version of how June's had looked. Or if not that, then the nightmares would have probably been the ones that Arthur would have been having all week if he was still capable of dreaming. Nightmares of the kid being drugged into a stupor and handed off to some sadistic pervert.
"I'm sure he's alright," said Mal, watching her husband's troubled expression, knowing what caused it. "He was skinny, but he looked strong. And he knew how to swim."
"The little darling's much too obstinate to go down so easily," Eames agreed. "There's no way he drowned."
"We'll probably never know," muttered Cobb, staring at his beer. "He doesn't really seem like the type who'd even call home and let his parents know he was okay, let alone a couple strangers who just hacked into his mind."
"Trust me, dear, he's fine," said Eames. "Next time word of a Pendragon extraction trickles down through the grapevine, I'll give you a call."
"If he really was Pendragon," Cobb pointed out. "Pendragon's been an active extractor for eight years. The kid was only twenty-four or twenty-five."
"That old?" Eames asked with a smirk. "I wouldn't have put him at a day over seventeen."
"He had the tattoo," Mal reminded him. "I think he was the real deal."
Honestly, Cobb did too. And that bothered him even more. Just what the hell had happened to a kid like that to turn him into a professional dream thief at the ripe age of sixteen? How had he gotten all of those scars? It looked like someone deliberately tried to shred him. And how could someone who'd been through all of that still have a moral compass at all? Granted, Arthur had become a thief, but he'd invaded the dreams of human traffickers on this last job, to find out where he could get hard, indisputable evidence of their activities.
"He's strong," said Mal, as though she could read her husband's thoughts. "He's a good boy."
"Pity you can't adopt him," said Eames, finishing off beer and motioning to the bar tender to bring him a second. "I bet Philippa would love a big brother."
Cobb ignored that comment and threw back the rest of his own beer. "I just wish that I knew for certain that he was okay."
By evening Arthur was dressed once more in one of his trademark three piece suits, with his hair slicked back as per usual, a gun concealed inside of his suit jacket (couldn't be too careful since he was still in his enemies' backyard and not all of them were in handcuffs just yet), a check for half a million dollars made out to one Dominic Cobb in one hand, and the keys to a rental car in the other.
Normally he would never have sought out someone he'd met on one of his jobs, but normally those people didn't save him from a fate worse than death. He owed Cobb, and he hated owing anyone anything. He had made a million dollars off this last job. He figured that splitting it fifty-fifty with Cobb was fair and would make them even. Finding out the full name of the man he was signing the check for was pathetically easy with his resources. So was finding his home address.
When Arthur pulled into the driveway of the modest house that the Cobbs lived in, there was a stretch limo in their driveway. The Cobbs didn't own a limo. They owned a Volvo and a Saturn. But someone else Arthur had researched recently owned a limo. More than that, they owned this particular stretch limo.
One other car was in the driveway, a nondescript sedan that the research didn't show as belonging to either of the Cobbs, but Arthur knew they had a young daughter. Logic dictated that it must be their babysitter's car.
They have a daughter. Marx is here. They're not.
"Fuck," swore Arthur, as he shifted his car into park. He left the engine running as he sprinted up the front porch, drawing his gun as he went. The front door had been left open. That was never a good sign.
He crept inside stealthily and wished that he'd bothered to get the blue prints for the house so that he'd know their layout. This was supposed to be simple. He was supposed to have just dropped off the check, told Cobb that now he didn't owe him, anything, and disappeared again. He wasn't supposed to be infiltrating the man's house with only nine shots and no backup, trying to save the guy's four-year-old daughter from the very man who'd employed Cobb to hack into his mind in the first place!
He found his first bit of trouble in the living room. Two of Marx's guards were tying up the babysitter and leering. It didn't take someone with an IQ as high as Arthur's to know what they were planning, and it didn't even take Arthur a full second to decide what he was going to do about this. He picked up a pillow off the couch, pressed the muzzle of his gun against it, then raised them both and aimed then pulled the trigger twice. The pillow muffled the sound of the two headshots. The babysitter screamed against her gag as one of the corpses fell across her.
Arthur hurried forward and pulled the body off her.
"Shhh," he said, pressing one finger against his lips, even though it wasn't strickly necessary for her to be quiet. Whoever else was there was probably expecting to hear her screams, but Arthur couldn't afford for her to go hysterical on him right now. "It's okay, I'm here to help you."
He began untying her. The girl didn't struggle against him. In fact, as soon as he was finished she threw herself at him and hugged him.
"Thank you," she sobbed, pressing her face against his shoulder. "You saved me. Thank you . . ."
"Uh . . . um, you're welcome." Arthur tried to pull away, but his damsel in distress was having none of that. She grabbed his face between her hands and pulled his face toward hers to give him a very long, very grateful kiss. Arthur was shocked enough by her actions that he didn't immediately pull away. He remained paralyzed for a good four seconds before renewing his efforts to disentangle himself from her. "Where's the baby?" he asked, even as he fended the babysitter off from trying to plant another kiss on him. Then he wondered if it was right to call a four-year-old a baby, but now wasn't the time to worry about things like terminology. "Where's Philippa?"
"They took her upstairs," said the babysitter.
"How many?"
"Three men," said the girl. "Two guys who looked like gorillas in suits, and a skinny older man with gray hair."
"Alright," Arthur said. "Only three of them." He stood and helped the babysitter to her feet. "I'm going to go kill them. I need you to get yourself out of here. Run to the neighbor's house and call the police. Then call the Cobbs and let them know what happened. Let them know that Marx is the one whose men attacked you two."
"Are you going to be okay?" asked the girl, clinging to his arms so needily, that if they were in any other situation, Arthur would have been positive she was trying to steal his watch, wallet, and cellphone.
"Yes. Now go –"
The girl grabbed his face again and pressed her lips against his as though she planned on trying to eat his face off. Again, Arthur was too surprised to react immediately, but his senses returned sooner this time and he managed to pry her off of him in under five seconds.
"Go," he ordered and the ran toward the staircase.
AN: Thank you for all the nice reviews! I was kind of worried I might not be able to write a story like this one, dealing with these subjects, and have it be very well received, since they're the kind of things we're not even allowed to talk about in school.
Some of my inspiration for this fic came from the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy, which my school's library doesn't have, and which my parents forbid me from reading, but which I read anyway. (down with censorship!) I wondered if anyone would notice the similarities. My mind just started connecting the dots when I was looking for a cool last name for Arthur, as well as a name for his mentor. And though I didn't intend for this fic to spawn enough ideas for a string of fics, that's what's kind of happened. (GD resilient parasites . . . ) So just to give a little information that will be revealed in future stories, but isn't a secret or a spoiler, my version of Arthur's character got that tattoo after he was apprenticed to Penrose (his mentor who saved him from a pretty bad home-life.) He chose his alias because it was similar to his mentor's, and because his real father used to read him stories about King Arthur Pendragon, and he aspired to have that sort of strength. Also, I needed to have a way for Cobb and co to be able to identify him. So there are actually reasons for that beyond paying homage to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
Next time: Arthur ruins his new suit and kills people (not necessarily in that order), and the Cobbs get a call from their babysitter.