Uploaded two at once this weekend, be sure you catch the chapter before this one, it's definitely a continuation of the previous scene! I don't own Frozen. Oh, and this has some violence in it.
"Ah, hell!" one deep voice hollered, and the other released a sardonic baritone laugh.
"Pay up, Bruce."
"Hell no, two more innings yet."
"Rounds?"
Anna's eyes grew wider, the grifter not appreciating the feeling that she had but one escape route. When working a con, Anna could conjure up any number of lies to verbally milk should she be discovered stealing or trespassing. There was little she could say if captured tonight, clad all in black, a harness about her waist, USB drives on her person, that didn't include some form of, "I'm stealing information from your supervisor's office, pretty please let me go?" She could only hope to remain unnoticed, and wiggle back through this suddenly claustrophobic space Jane had dubbed the best means of infiltration. Out of sorts with the unfamiliar theft structure, Anna clenched her jaw and took deep, stabilizing breaths through her nose.
She despised this inkling of passivity. No control, especially in the vent. Quite literally backed into a corner.
"Nah, let's finish out the bottom of this inning," the baritone guard had to be leaning back in a chair, shrill squeaks sounding through the bottom of the door. "Been quiet for weeks, no reason it'd be any different tonight."
Jane waved and Anna made an effort to focus, the blonde pointing toward the corner alarms and then making a slicing motion across her neck.
I've killed them, she meant. She then indicated her watch, and gestured toward Anna, a gifted Swiss army abomination swallowing the better part of her forearm. Jane mashed a side button and Anna's own watch brightened, a countdown clock now already down to nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds. Anna grinned despite herself.
Would you like to synchronize watches?
Anna nodded, and then tried, with every ounce of finesse she'd managed to hone in her con roles, to slip through the rectangular space and onto the desk below. She narrowly avoided dislodging a telephone, and released a silent sigh of relief for the accomplishment.
Jane was already at the centermost computer, typing as quietly as she could. The soundless environment was not conducive to hacking: the faster Jane typed, the louder the clacks and taps of the keys resounded. She relinquished speed in lieu of measured covertness, which sacrificed that all-important time. Anna crowded over her shoulder, the men behind the lobby door cheering as the first out of their televised ballgame was thrown.
Jane hacked into the desktop home screen, the letters WGT emblazoned across a wavy aqua background and a single file visible in the top right corner of the display. Anna shoved a drive into a port on the computer, and Jane clicked on the file graphic.
No access.
Jane huffed, pulling up a text terminal window to bypass the security with instructions delivered via command-line interface. The seconds on Anna's wrist were trickling away like water through a sieve, inducing nervous fidgets. She didn't know what Jane had based her countdown clock on, having only been to one baseball game to Anna's knowledge.
Had she timed half innings and guessed an average from there?
Standing idly by while the other girl worked and the guards watched a dingy T.V. was certainly not what Anna had envisioned when she'd insisted on accompanying Jane. Just like sitting up in that vent; she had no control over the situation. She was putting all of her trust in this blonde girl, this girl whom she loved. Anna's palms were sweaty underneath her gloves, mouth dry, her muscles tightly wound. Because relinquishing job control— it didn't matter to whom— was harder than she could have ever imagined.
She trusted Jane, didn't she? Anna loved her, she was sure of it. Trust had to be some sort of emotional prerequisite.
She said she trusted me. I trust Jane, right?
Right?
Jane, still typing with her left hand, put her right on Anna's thigh to calm the pig-tailed girl, steel eyes boring into the screen with such intensity that it looked as if she were trying to deconstruct the electronic control board behind the plastic.
There was another shout from behind the frosted glass just as Jane cracked open the lone file on the desktop. It contained hundreds of projects subdivided into smaller files, of varying names, sizes, and types.
The corner of Jane's lip twitched, and then the platinum blonde slumped back into the office chair, resigned to defeat. Narrowing their search would be difficult. They couldn't very well type 'Jane Doe' and hope for a match. Anna observed as speedy fingers typed 'Ice Queen', but nothing registered. She tried 'Jane Doe', and a handful of other search terms, all to no avail. The sheer amount of information stored would take ages to download to their drives, and Jane's network uploading system was already compromised. She couldn't send it to herself, and she couldn't physically remove it all. Not before the men resumed their rounds and discovered an active computer. If they were to find Jane's information, they needed time to sift through files. Time they did not have.
Anna shoved her out of the way and began clicking at random.
Better something than nothing.
Multiple options popped up as soon as Anna typed 'Westerguard, Hans' into the navigation bar. She scanned most of them, and did what she did best.
She built a story.
The leading man: Hans Westerguard.
Setting: New York City, eleventh floor office in Manhattan. Not just Manhattan. Files included New Jersey, plant operations, an unknown facility owned by WGT, whoever that was. Stints in Amsterdam, Scotland, Vegas, and… the Caribbean?
Anna clicked a file: Jamaica, St. John.
Anna's mind whizzed with conspiracy theories as she read.
The Carols? Did this stretch back as far as Seven Seas Trading?
Plot device: Tentative project titled B4. Women. Alcohol. Vegas gambling. Government loans for 'entrepreneurial projects undetermined'.
Wait…
Anna clicked on a folder titled 'Tortoise'.
What exactly do I have to lose at this point?
Within that file were thirteen others, arranged alphabetically. The first file was labeled B4. Anna opened it and began reading. Legitimate business infrastructure, employee payroll (which included Frollo and his girls), permits, alcohol licensures, beer and wine and Scotch inventories, a five-year plan... but nothing was active.
The most recently altered file was time stamped two days prior, just after the break-in at Anna's Hampton beach house. Seems Hans had moved the date of the Vegas meeting up a week, after finding out the girls had uncovered his initial plans.
But there was nothing present in the remainder of the file, merely an idea unsubstantiated, a theoretical project with zero likelihood of coming to fruition. The funding traces were there, but they were just that: traces of money, not tangible capital. The company was just for show, it was hollow, just like a…
Wait wait wait wait wait wait— Tortoise.
Shell companies.
A front, just like her contact said.
Shell companies: inactive until needed, until the parent company steered itself off a bankrupt ledge and called upon the wench of its shells to drag it out of the financial ravine. And there were at least thirteen of them in this file. Little money hoarding inactives, ready to bail out their owners should the conglomerate fall to ruin.
And looking at B4…
It connected in her brain, a wire completing the circuit. Jamaica. And St. John, a U.S. Virgin territory: offshore.
Tax haven.
Hans lacked scruples, economic or otherwise, so the need for shell companies as diversionary tax evasions didn't align with the illicit German's usual tactics. But he's followed legitimate business practices thus far, has taken careful steps to build something that looks right on the surface, even if it isn't. And the only people who take that kind of time and use people like Hans in their dealings…
Big money. Conglomerates, corporations, Fortune 500s, international money market and billionaire financiers.
Hans isn't in charge.
And that idea was more unsettling for Anna than the thought of plummeting toward the earth had the crank snapped her rappel line.
Hans, she could handle. As well as he knew Anna, Anna knew him. The quid pro quo was intrinsically mutual, and thusly mutually exploitive.
But an unknown puppet master?
A shout and the scraping of chairs on linoleum jarred Anna from her theories. Jane vaulted across the room to the electronic doorway and wrapped her hands about the keypad at the entrance. In her expression was a command, Abort, but Anna refused to leave before solving just a scrap of this mystery. She clicked furiously, windows materializing, words jumbling, bewilderment and anxiety bubbling at the edges of her mind like boiling oil. She dragged files at random into the USB folder. Scattered files, schematics, and graphics left faint impressions:
Traded oil futures… deep freeze ice machine coils…WGT… self-sustaining motors… computer chips… green energy plants…WGT… stem-cell research… ECT histories… genome mapping… WGT… investment purchases… refining plant sales… domestic and international pipe lines… WGT…
And then Anna stumbled upon it: a file titled 'Subject Beta'. Staring back from the screen was her own likeness, down to the freckled cluster on her right temple; a medical history she had never seen; her name, Anna Arrendale, emblazoned across the heading of the page; age, weight, and DOB in bold, Arial type.
Tears prickled and she touched the screen, staring at her birthday. Anna had been wrong, according to this file. Only off by a few months, but she had gotten the numerical day right. She had turned nineteen about two months ago, when the girls first arrived in Louisiana.
My birthday. My… I have a birthday. A real birthday—
"A!"
If one could whisper-shout, Jane had succeeded, motioning violently with her head toward the air vent with the swinging hatch above her. Anna could barely see for the tears, dragging and dropping the 'Subject Beta' file into the removable USB folder, selfishly stealing her own history when their objective was Jane's.
A blue and white progress bar appeared on the desktop: 10% transferred.
Anna heard the body contact with the door.
"Bruce, something's up with the sensor."
"What's wrong?"
"It's not letting me in. Come do the retina scan and see if it works for you."
Jane was spread eagled against the door, one hand on the electronic keypad, another plastered to the doorframe. Her eyes were shut, and it seemed that the frame was shimmering, like hot asphalt on a day upwards of ninety degrees, energy waves undulating over her body.
"Fuck, something's wrong, check the remote cam."
Jane's eyes popped open and she started moving, racing across the floor to grab Anna by the hand. Anna shrugged her off, stubbornly fixated on the downloading file.
"We've got a breach!"
"Grab the gun!"
"A, we have to go," Jane said.
"No, not yet, we can't leave yet. I have to—"
"It's not worth it, whatever it is, we don't have time—"
"Just let me have this!" Anna shouted.
"A—"
"No, not 'A', you don't even know! They know it, how come you don't even know my—"
The cracking of the door frame cut her off, light from the frosted glass blocked by a massive man pointing a revolver at Anna's chest.
"Now let's not do anything hasty guys, you don't want to regret your next move," the stocky guard said.
"Bruce, the computer," the other gestured toward the working monitor just as the status bar reached 100% on the download.
"Charlie, go frisk 'em," the stocky one nodded to the taller.
"My pleasure. Looks like girly bits under all that black."
The guard known as Charlie took a step towards them, and Anna didn't see an out. She had her weapon stowed in her pocket, but if frisked, she would be even more defenseless. She'd talked a gun out of her face twice before, but during those instances, she had had the backstory to make a convincing case. Right now, she was helpless. She had never been helpless before.
And it scared the ever-living shit out of her.
"Hey, what do you think you're doing?" Charlie asked.
"Don't touch her," Jane warned.
"You're in no position to be giving orders. Step back before I make you," Bruce said, motioning with his gun.
Anna's arms were raised submissively, eyes trained on the barrel of the firearm. But there was movement out of the corner of her eye.
"I'll warn you once, because I don't want to do this. Turn around, walk away, and no one will be hurt," Jane said.
No, Jane, you'll hate yourself, please, this is all my fault—
"Oh ho!" Charlie laughed. "Someone's got some spunk in her," he said, stomping toward them. His beefy hand darted out to Anna but Jane grabbed his wrist, the man crumpling to the floor and spasming at her hold.
"What the— don't you fuckin' move!" Bruce shouted.
Several things happened at once. First off, the girls did move, for Anna had pushed Jane out of Bruce's line of fire and behind a desk while she lunged for the computer, yanking the USB from its port. Bruce fired three bullets, the metal at the corner of a filing cabinet pinging with every brutal puncture from the shots. Jane sat hunched behind that filing cabinet, Anna situated across the walkway and curled up behind a desk.
They heard Bruce moving about, checking on Charlie or taking cover, Anna didn't know. She surveyed Jane who stared back with an anguished confusion, because nothing was worth putting their lives into this jeopardy. No inconsequential file was worth forcing Jane to be a weapon, forcing her to harm when escape was easily accessible. They had other days, they could've tried again.
But no, I had to go and—
Another bullet whistled overhead, Jane now standing and throwing wild charges with an ungloved hand.
"Jane!" Anna called.
She needed to move, needed to act, needed to regain some semblance of control. She hated, loathed this feeling of uselessness, resented it, her powerful, admittedly dangerous partner shouldering a load of responsibility not just for the break-in, but for Anna's own negligence. Anna army-crawled over the carpet, reaching deep into her pocket while Jane unwittingly provided the cover she needed. Rolling across a walkway she went unspotted by Bruce, who was still shooting wildly about the office with little regard to computers or windows or neighboring buildings.
I guess seeing your partner incapacitated with a touch turns a seasoned marksman rather manic.
Anna inched forward along the carpet and then thrust the hand-held stun gun at Bruce's ankle, connecting with a meaty calf and triggering violent muscle contractions. Bruce dropped to his knees and Anna kicked the gun from his hand; she threw his head against her leg and brought her knee against his face. There was a grotesque crunch, and a crimson waterfall poured from his nose. She stabbed the stunner into his torso once more and watching as a man twice her size convulsed before her.
"A…"
Anna held the trigger down and dug the probes into the sensitive area below his ribcage, an eerie calm returning as she regained the control she had lost. The tears weren't a visual blockade but a stinging rinse, clarity tracked down her cheeks. The carpet below the man darkened, and some far-off portion of the conwoman knew the guard had wet himself, lost control from the pain. But Anna felt safe, now. Self-possessed, tranquil almost. She was disarming a guard and she was unflappable. She had done this before, but something was different…
Silent tears kept rolling.
"A, you need to stop now," Jane took her wrist from the unconscious man, and Anna heard moaning from across the room. Charlie was coming to, but Bruce, on the ground and no longer spasming, was down for the count. Or longer.
"We've got to move, now," Jane said.
They abandoned the vents and sprinted into the front lobby area, the security screen still recording from a hidden camera nestled in the doorway Jane had missed when she initially disarmed the room. She placed a hand on the computers behind the front desk and her arms shook, breaking monitor glass and causing the hard drive to smoke.
"A— A, let's go."
They were on top of the elevator riding down to the first floor, intent on hot wiring the nearest sedan and booking it back to Jane's place. Anna hugged her knees to her body on the roof of the elevator car, blinking furiously.
"What the hell happened to you back there?" Jane asked, tone sharp as barbed wire.
"I didn't… I needed to get—"
"We said upfront we would come back if they were doing rounds." The blonde paced frantically atop the descending car. "We had the time, A, that was reckless and stupid. I'm not letting you come with me again if you pull something like—"
"If we had done it my way, we wouldn't have had this problem!"
"Your way? Your way?! We went through this! Hans knows your face. Unless you expected to infiltrate whatever security company he hired, there was no way you were getting within one hundred feet of that office, never mind his computer!"
"I didn't feel comfortable from the beginning with that whole thing," Anna spat.
"Then why didn't you say something!"
"I couldn't… I didn't… that's a lie, I… I d-don't know what's wrong with me. I was just up in that vent, and then everything went to hell in my head, Jane. I was just sitting there, fuckin' useless, I was so out of my depth, and I knew I couldn't talk us out of this one, if we were caught, I wasn't going to be able to contribute anything—"
"It was agreed upon that I would run point on this," Jane said. "These buildings, that data, this city is very much my element, why didn't you just do as I said? We could've come back for it."
"I don't know," Anna whispered.
"Don't you trust me?"
"I… it's not that I don't trust you, Jane, I just… I don't like not being in control."
"Don't give me that, you've partnered before."
"Yes, but I was always in my element. Using my tools. Our first job together, I built my character at the Moore house. St. John, I was with Ursula. I was in charge with Frollo, in Scotland— I can beat anything with a con, Jane. But this was different."
"You should've let me handle it, then," Jane said, sliding out of the side vent at the second floor. They then climbed down a fire escape, regrets and doubts banging between Anna's ears like residual gunshots.
"Relinquishing control gets you killed, if you hadn't noticed," Anna said petulantly. "I've seen it too many times not to be completely on guard in situations like that."
"I don't understand. I thought you were okay with me leading, okay with me, that you trusted me to—" Jane's pale face cracked, an egg against an iron skillet. "—I thought you weren't afraid of me."
"I'm not afraid of you!" Anna protested. "I love you!"
"But you don't trust me," Jane said soberly.
"I trust you not to shock me. I trust you to make love to me."
"But you don't trust me to run a job, to keep you safe from outside threats? Sure, you trust me not to hurt you. You trust me when it's just us two, but throw in the world, unforeseeable factors, and you think I'm incompetent?"
"You know that is not the case!"
"Still, you don't trust me to let me take care of you, to let me protect you."
"I-I-I've always taken care of myself," Anna said sadly.
Not a good reason, but maybe slightly more justifiable.
"I'm not trying to be overly sentimental, but you know that doesn't have to be the case anymore," Jane said, back to her blank expression. Her hands were across her torso, and Anna could feel the distress rolling off of the blonde's body. Her own was mingling with it in the New York night.
"I just… I've never had to trust anyone else. Not for a job. I've had to trust marks to do things out of their own interests. Another rule of the con, you can't con someone who's honest. I trust people to be self-serving."
"Not selfless," Jane finished. "It's true that trust is a nicer way of saying vulnerability," the blonde said, stopping at the driver's side of a blue car parked at a meter. "You don't trust me to put your well-being above my own."
"You have to understand, I never had to, to…trust. Trust is… is having confidence, absolute faith in someone else."
"How convenient you know every confidence trick in the book. Use them on yourself," Jane said, sliding into the driver's seat.
Anna followed, head hanging low, lightly panting from their exhilarating flight to the car. She pulled the USB from her pocket, pouting at it.
"I'm sorry."
"We can't let anything like that ever happen again. It was too close."
"No, I'm sorry I made you do that," Anna clarified. "The zapping thing—"
"It… was necessary."
Jane drove the car to the impound lot two blocks away from her apartment building. The snoozing night guard didn't rouse even as Jane waved the electronic blockade up and pulled through. They hopped the fence and were at the ground floor of Jane's building before Anna could speak again, shame and ignominy weighing heavily on her conscience.
"They knew everything about me," Anna said.
"What?"
"The company with Hans… WGT, or whatever. They knew everything, even stuff I didn't know," Anna said, holding up the USB. "I was in a file. They had my medical history, my fingerprints, my birthday… Jane, I've been celebrating my b-birthday on the wrong d-d-day for nineteen years," she mumbled, choking over her words. "They knew which hospital I was born in, allergic reactions to medicine… I didn't even know I had allergies."
Jane came closer, one bare hand finding Anna's waist and the other caressing her cheek. Anna knew her tears were soaking Jane's fingers, and this was the first time she wished Jane wouldn't touch her. She felt ignorant, defiled, and hopelessly violated.
"They knew my name, Jane, my real name," Anna said.
"It's alright, it's only…" but Jane couldn't finish.
"It's not just a name, you know it," Anna said. "I've been meaning to tell you, for a few weeks now. You really do know everything I know about me, except that little detail," Anna chuckled humorlessly. "But they even knew my last name. Something I never did."
"I don't know what to say to comfort you… I'm so bad at this."
"It's not…" her breaths came in pitching, wracking patterns. Anna couldn't look Jane in the face. "I really know now, what it must feel like to be you, and it's awful," she finished.
"But not the good kind?"
"Jane!"
"I'm sorry, but I don't want your pity," the blonde said, soft embrace betraying her unkind tone. "I imagine if I knew more people, I'd have pity in spades. I expected more than that from you."
"I don't want it! To pity you, I— knowing how it feels, it's not even pity at this point. I can't pretend to know what you've been through, but this, knowing that someone else knows all the details about your life, all the secrets and stories that should be yours… they belong to you, don't you think that's… completely unfair?" Anna sniffled.
"Let me clue you in on something, little one," Jane said. "Life is completely unfair. Look at your own victims."
Anna shook her head.
"I thought I knew who I was. Or, I was at least satisfied with what I did know," Anna said.
"Well, now you've got an entire file to go through. You can discover new things about yourself."
"But we didn't get yours… we messed up, we won't be able to go back to that office again," Anna said.
"We've got to get to Vegas first. I saw where they moved up the game."
"But I don't think that's the major project anymore. It's a front, like I said before."
"But will Hans be there?" Jane asked.
"I don't know. The incident tonight might only spook him further," Anna said, swiping at her nose with a shirt sleeve.
"Then maybe he'll reveal something to the players there that we don't know. If anything, it can shed some light on this theory of yours. Give us a lead into who or what his backer is. I can research WGT while we're there."
"Then we'll go. We'll find the information you want Jane, we will," Anna promised.
"What? So I can have a breakdown when we do?"
"Yeah," Anna laughed, genuinely this time. "You'll get to know yourself through the eyes of… whoever the hell these people are."
"So do you. See how other people see you, and use that to your advantage."
"I already do that," Anna said. "It's kinda my job. The off-putting thing about this is, it's really me. There's no manipulation of this person in here," Anna said, gesturing toward the USB. "It is very much me, bare bones, no wild tales. And I'm afraid I've been so many people that I don't know her. A girl with a last name? That's… I've been wondering what my surname was since I can remember."
"Then go get reacquainted with her. I'd love to meet her when you're ready."
Anna furrowed her brows at the thumb drive. "Jane, I—"
"There's no pressure here, in the same way you put none on me," Jane cut her off. "It's good to know that you were going to tell me anyway, your name. I mean, I didn't even bother asking. But I want you to trust me, really trust me, before you do."
"I do trust you."
"Part of you does," Jane raised a finger. "The carefree part, the part of you that's… whatever your name is. And I'm elated that I possess a fraction of your trust. I have your love, true, but I think you've conflated love and trust. I said in Louisiana that you feel things acutely, keenly. You love in the same way, so blindly, so fully. I'm oddly… proud of the fact that it takes time to acquire your complete trust. You, the real you, trusts me, but A doesn't. The conwoman, after all she's seen? I wouldn't expect her to."
Anna knew Jane was right. She was right about so many things. But that didn't change the fact that Anna didn't want her to be right. She couldn't bring herself to meet Jane's eyes, so settled for contemplating the pale chin at her eye level.
"But think about it, please, before you reveal anything you're not truly ready for," Jane continued. "You're about to learn a lot of new information about yourself, and no matter how open you claim to be, there's something special about having some of that just for you."
"How do you know that?" Anna asked.
"Because it's what I've wanted for as long as I can remember. To know details about myself, with something close to certainty. A birthday. A name. A hometown. The reason you pity me is the reason I understand you. More sympathy than pity, really. We're too alike, you and I."
"Not in all things."
"But enough similarities for it to be… I'm unsure how to phrase it," Jane dropped her hands from Anna's body. "Uncanny, that we fell…" the blonde bit her lip and let the sentence hang unfinished. "We'll really get to know each other, then trust each other, and then… love each other."
"I already love you," Anna whispered, rising to touch Jane's forehead to her own. She placed her arms around the blonde's shoulders and clung for life. "I do, I swear I do."
"There is no order for us, remember? You told me that. You don't live together before a first kiss. And I guess for you, love comes before full trust. And that's enough for now."
"I don't think it is."
"We'll work on it," Jane said.
"I'll work on it," Anna protested.
"Just so you know, I trust you."
"And I love you."
And at that moment, it was enough.
A/N: Dare I ask for theories at this point? Treatises on the misidentification of love for trust, and vice versa? A scathing review of a cobbled-together action sequence? Hope you guys liked this latest installment, and a Happy Memorial Day to you all. I myself will be stuffing my face with BBQ ribs.