The next morning, the group congregated in the van. Percy and Annabeth were the first two to arrive and when they opened the back doors, both Jay and Jeff were still asleep. Percy seemed to find that funny, but Annabeth didn't. She also didn't think there would be enough space for the rest of them if the beds remained where they were.
"Well, do you want to bury them in the floor of the van?" Percy asked when Annabeth spoke her thoughts.
"No. Can't we wake them up so the rest of us can get into the van?" Annabeth asked, slightly irritated.
"Go ahead."
Annabeth gave him an incredulous look. "What?" He asked a little defensively. It didn't seem like he thought he did anything wrong.
Annabeth just shook her head and said, "Nothing. I'll wait until Leo and Frank get here before I wake them up."
Percy nodded and checked his watch. Leo came strolling out to them with Frank lumbering along behind him looking very bleary eyed and irritated.
"Hey! Why are we all standing outside? Shouldn't we be in the van instead of loitering outside?" Leo asked loudly.
Frank winced when Leo started shouting, while the rest of the men just looked at him. If any of them were in a good mood earlier, it seemed to have evaporated with Leo's exceptionally loud greeting.
"We have to get Jeff and Jay off the cots before we can get rid of them and gain access to the van." Connor said.
Leo craned his neck slightly to see around the others and shrugged when he caught sight of both Jeff and Jay still asleep. He walked into the van and wedged himself between the two cots. There was still space towards the front of the van, but the cots that were raised were right at the back directly blocking the back doors. Leo was barely able to squeeze between them and he was probably still the most lean out of the group.
Percy raised an eyebrow when Leo was able to slowly make his way to the front area where the beds weren't occupying space. Leo went to the foot of Jeff's bed and started whacking Jeff's feet and calves repeatedly. When Jeff had woken up and gotten off his cot, Leo hit a switch in one of the panels and the cot sunk into the floor. Frank was able to wake Jay up by shaking his shoulder roughly a few times. It was a much nicer alarm than Leo's in any case.
"What's goin' on?" Jay asked sleepily.
"We have work to do. Like finding a place to eat breakfast that isn't at this hotel." Percy announced.
The men chuckled and Connor was the one to climb into the driver seat. Leo hit the switch that made Jay's cot sink into the floor. Percy was at a different panel hitting multiple switches in a certain pattern. With each one something else happened.
The first was that the walls of the small bathroom rose up. Jay immediately ducked in.
"Well, someone needed to do his business and do it quick!" Travis exclaimed. They all chuckled.
Percy hit another switch and all the swivel chairs seemed to unfold from below the keypads in the walls and mold onto the ground with floor panels sliding to adjust and lock the chairs into position. It was very impressive. Annabeth raised her eyebrows at Percy but he raised his eyebrows and tilted his head in Leo's direction like all his idea.
With the final switch, extra lights turned on that Annabeth hadn't realized were off. She then wondered how much fuel it took to run the van with all the different devices inside. She also came to the realization that they had never stopped for fuel in the van or plane. The plane she could understand, but the van had been going just as nonstop, and she never remembered stopping at a single gas station.
"Percy?" Annabeth called as she lowered herself into her chair at her normal station.
"Hm?"
"What kind of fuel does this van use?"
Percy froze as he was typing his identification into his monitor. "I don't really know. It's quite a complicated device. That's a question for Leo to answer."
Annabeth nodded and turned to her own monitor. She typed in her identification and lines of code came up. "What the heck?"
"What's up?" Percy asked.
"What is all this?"
"It looks like a couple lines of code." Percy stated.
"What's it for?"
"Why would I know? It's on your screen."
"Shouldn't you know? Aren't you in charge of the A2?" Annabeth asked irritably.
"Exactly. I'm in charge of the whole business. You're technically in the strategy department." Percy replied shrugging.
"Well aren't you a whole lot of help." Annabeth grumbled.
"That's why I'm here." Percy grinned cheekily.
Annabeth grumbled some more before turning to look at the other stations that were on the opposite wall. She called, "Hey, Leo!"
Leo turned around with a slightly questioning slightly frightened look. Annabeth allowed herself a small satisfactory smile for Leo still fearing her after so many years in the military and A2 business.
"Yeah?" He answered.
"Come over here for a second."
He stood up and walked over. He sat down in the vacant chair next to her. Jeff was in the one on the opposite end of Percy and Jay was in the same chair as Percy except at the other wall. From what Annabeth could tell, she and Percy were the only ones who always sat in the same seats every time they worked in the van.
"What can I do for you?" Leo asked in a salesman-like voice.
Annabeth raised her eyebrows then pointed to the code saying, "Why do I have this on my screen?"
"That's a monitor, first of all. Second of all, what do you mean?" Leo said.
"What do you mean, 'what do you mean?'" Annabeth asked.
"I mean, what are you asking?" Leo said.
"I am asking why I have this code on my monitor."
"I don't know. I'm not the one that gives you things to analyze and base things off of. That would be the head of your department."
"Okay. Who is the head of my department?" Annabeth asked. She was not liking this complicated game of tag.
"You would be in strategizing, right?"
"I think so. I am on this mission to be the field strategist, right?"
Leo looked like a deer in headlights for a second, then the look was gone and Annabeth put it to the back of her mind for the moment.
"Alright. I think as you're just working with us for this mission, Nico would be the person to talk to."
"Where is he?"
"He's got a special assignment he's taking care of. We'll meet back up on the way to Guilin."
"Guilin?"
"Yeah. It's another city in China."
"Why do we have to go there?" Annabeth asked.
"That's where the hand off needs to be."
"Hand off?"
"Not my position to say. I think the code is either wrong or processing."
"Why does Nico expect me to know what to do with a processing or incorrect code? This isn't my area of expertise."
"You're here as a field strategist. That means that anything that requires strategic thinking and analyzing goes to you. That's what your job is on this mission."
"But I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it!" Annabeth said frustrated.
Percy turned his chair and placed a calming hand on her shoulder. "Hey. You'll be okay, Annabeth. Calm down."
Leo took a good look at the code and said, "Jeez! There's an error!"
"What?" Percy asked sharply.
"There's an error in the code. At least I think there is. It can't move on without the error being corrected, right?" Leo explained quickly.
Percy too studied the monitor. The lines of code passed so quickly that Annabeth had trouble seeing a pattern of any sorts. It just looked like random letters and numbers to her. What made it worse was her dyslexia. She knew both Percy and Leo had dyslexia and struggled to figure out why they were so easily able to comprehend letters and numbers going up and down on a screen in a certain order when the order they might be processing in their brains could be wrong.
Percy nodded. He said, "I don't know why. I'm not sure what it wants though. I'm no code expert."
Annabeth tried to figure the code out again. She caught where the error was. She watched the code repeat over and over and over and over until the answer came to her.
"Does code always have to move on to another code?" Annabeth asked quickly.
Percy and Leo both shook their heads. Percy said, "Code can be for different things. I'm not sure what this one is for. I know that code can be used to disguise something or protect it in which case you would have to crack the code. In other cases you might have to just watch it. This kind of code would be one used to give commands. This kind definitely has an error in it, but why it does I don't know. If you solve the error, it will either go on with whatever commands it is issuing or it will unlock something."
Annabeth blinked a few times trying to process the quick definitions of codes. It was impressive. She seemed to be saying that a lot about the A2 intel. That didn't strike her as a good thing, but not necessarily a bad one either.
Annabeth watched the code and decided to at least attempt to crack it. She was a daughter of Athena and she didn't like not being able to do something or not knowing something. It frustrated her to no end when all the men knew everything that was happening and she was lost in the dark.
"You got it?" Percy exclaimed.
Annabeth focused her attention on her screen again. She hadn't even noticed herself correcting the error in the code. It flashed green and she was able to see XIAN on the screen before it changed into multiple files. Annabeth glanced over her shoulder and saw the rest of the men watching her screen. When she turned back to it, a good fifteen more files had already opened up.
When it stopped overflowing with data, Annabeth clicked on each one individually. She found supply lists, maps, strange programs, and a few lists of names. None of them were familiar to her, but Percy's face darkened the first time she pulled up a list of names. She thought that meant that the names were people that meant something to him.
When she had opened up every file that had popped up, Percy nodded and turned back to his own monitor once again. The other men did likewise leaving Annabeth more confused and irritated than she had been that entire day which said something as she had practically spent the entire day irritated, confused and frustrated. Not a good combination for her especially away from home.
"This is bad." Annabeth heard Percy mutter as he feverishly typed away at his keypad.
The men all were muttering out loud as they ran strange programs on their own monitors.
"Yeah, I figured that out." Percy muttered irritably. Annabeth glanced around the back of the van. The other men didn't say anything, but they all seemed to be listening very intently. None of them were working other than Percy though.
"We can't do that though." Annabeth heard Travis say.
"I got that much." Percy said.
"We don't have a choice. We're way too short on time." Frank said, none too quietly either.
"Calm down and quiet down. We're gonna figure it out. Status, Angel."
Angel? Who the hell was Angel, Annabeth thought. She wasn't jealous per say. She just wasn't a fan of a strange woman talking to Percy about something she didn't even know about.
"Come on!" Connor exclaimed. " We can't work with that! Not even you Percy - "
"Shut it!" Percy said sharply. "Thoughts like that aren't going to help."
"But we can't get around this!"
"I said shut it." Percy said calmly. His face didn't exactly match his calm tone. It was angry, panicked and scared. That was enough to scare Annabeth, even if she didn't know what was going on.
There was silence in the van again. Percy continued working at his station while the other men just leaned on the keypad that was still popped out from the wall.
Jeff and Jay both looked just as clueless. Not that it was a great comfort to Annabeth, but she wasn't alone.
"We've got to get the hand off done." Leo said.
"Well seeing as there are about three more steps we have to do before we can, we aren't leaving Xi'an for a while." Percy said. His eyebrows were furrowed as he navigated through whatever program he was on.
"What if we go down to Guangzhou sooner than later?" Frank asked.
"They won't have their part finished yet if we do. Hey, aren't we supposed to be having breakfast by now?" Percy asked.
Everyone turned to look at Frank who had driven straight past a good ten breakfast restaurants. His face flushed and he turned his attention back to the road. He pulled into a small looking place and stopped the van. It was open, but Annabeth wasn't sure she liked the smell that was emanating from its doors.
Percy didn't seem to be a fan of it either. "What do they make in here?"
"No clue. I don't even think it's a restaurant open to anyone." Leo said. He was plugging his nose when Annabeth looked at him.
"I've smelled worse things." Jay said. as he was an MMS field agent, Annabeth wasn't surprised by his comment. A bit disgusted, though.
"That's not something the rest of us need to know, Jay." Leo said, his voice nasally from him plugging up his nose.
"Come on! You all seem to have plenty field experience. This shouldn't seem that bad!" Jay said.
The other men looked at him. Annabeth could see his logic, but neither of them really knew what the A2 did. It just seemed like any field agent should be used to bad smells from places they would probably be sent.
They sent Frank back up to drive and he pulled out of the lot. As the van was pulling out, Annabeth thought she caught sight of a figure perched on top of the building. It looked like it was watching the van and had binoculars at its eyes. It also seemed to be talking into a radio on its wrist.
Annabeth thought about telling Percy, but she wasn't 100% sure of what she had seen. She regretted not telling him when Frank gave a cry of alarm and the van got hit by something from behind sending everyone sprawling.
A/N: Well it's been awhile. Updates have definitely slowed like I've been saying, I'm very busy now that school has started as well as all the other activities that come with it. I am still updating, just slower. I'm still trying to update once a week, but... sometimes close enough is all I can get.
I am far from done with the story. Thanks for reviews/PMs