*** The threader and the seam ripper ***
* Rummaging in the box we can find devices that we have no idea what they are used for, things that you don't usually use: a small threader with someone's face (Ariadne, the one from mythology, she seems to be), a very weird razor for unstitching... and more things that some will have seen and others won't. Getting philosophical (why not?) we can even find Ariadne's Thread and Occam's Razor. *
.
It was Monday, March 12th 2007.
Skipper thought that he had done something terrible during a previous lifetime.
If not... why two years later he had Manfredi and Johnson right opposite him on the concrete island... at his very home? What joke of destiny (or of the agency) was that? Behind him there were his usual teammates, expectant.
Kowalski talked in a low voice. "Aren't you going to ask them if they are spies, as always?"
"I wish they were, but they aren't. They were my teammates in... Mexico."
Manfredi was going to say something. Johnson nudged him and talked instead of him.
"Skipper... we need to talk to you and it'll be better if the others don't hear us."
Skipper supposed that it had something to do with Denmark and gave the others a break while they talked inside the HQ.
"What a HQ you have built!" Manfredi said. "I love it!"
"So this is where we're going to stay," Johnson said, looking around him.
"What? Stay?" Skipper asked.
Johnson looked at him surprised. "Did you think that we were visiting you? We've been sent by that jerk who is your boss. Now he's ours too and he has told us something about an enemy that nobody has seen."
"Aren't you with Shearer anymore?" Skipper asked, raising an eyebrow.
"No, but we preferred him. He was just rude, it was like having Johnson twice," Manfredi said, being slapped. "Hey, you! But this guy is sinister. I'd say he's one of the bad guys."
"He is, Manfredi... he is," Skipper said, turning around. "Well... do you want some coffee?"
Manfredi and Johnson nodded.
.
The three were sitting at the table with their coffees, bringing each other up-to-date.
"Yes," Skipper said. "Shearer was for a while watching us until something more urgent appeared and then they put Hal, the young colonel. He was nice, but he didn't grasp anything. Just imagine: we went to Madagascar and he doesn't know it. He never asked us for reports or anything... I think the colonel post is beyond him."
"Then let him give it to me," Manfredi said.
"At least you are nicer than the one we have now. He has been for half a year pestering us with an arch-enemy whose name is all we know, and frequently insisting that we should have already caught him. Coming from him, I sometimes think it's just an invention of his for making us fail because he wants to break our team."
"Then... why did he send two more?"
"What do you think, silly cousin?" Johnson answered him. "That hick has sent us here because he thinks that we break all what we touch."
"Well, it's hard to me believing that I'm saying this," Skipper said, "but... here you will do precisely the contrary thing. You don't know how I have in it for him... now he will have to separate six, not four. Let him try it."
Skipper, next, climbed up the ladder and leaned outside. He climbed down at once.
"I've told them to go and take pretzels for everyone, they'll be there for a while. Now we can talk about what happened two years ago."
"The Copenhagen Incident, the media called it," Johnson said. "It went all over the world."
"And we three are penguins non gratos... well, it's their loss!" Manfredi said.
"Skipper, I discovered things when they were going to change our boss. We both had to go to Seattle and -"
"Did you have to go?" Skipper asked. "I haven't been back. They told me that the protocol had changed, that when they chose Shearer they thought that it wasn't necessary anymore for us to go and meet our bosses personally."
"That was a lie," Johnson said.
"Well... what did you discover?"
"Shearer left us alone for a moment and I tapped his phone. We were there for some days and I devoted myself to hearing his conversations. I heard a lot of things that have nothing to do with this, of course. But things about us too. When he had commented our boss that we had accepted to come, I heard them call us gullible threesome, that he had told the Dane our secret mission, -"
"So he was with whom Hans was talking the day we left," Skipper concluded.
"I don't know what you're talking about, but possibly." Johnson was thoughtful for a moment. "He also said that at the beginning he was reluctant to collaborate, so he told him that we were a worldwide threat."
"And aren't they?" Manfredi asked.
"You are learning this business," Skipper said. "By the way," he wanted to know fearing the reply, "did Madeleine know anything about this?"
"I heard that, and she didn't. She didn't know anything and Flint didn't either, if you're asking. She sent us to get the intel for the sake of the Arctic fauna and flora. What I did hear was that they had convinced her that it was for that reason, but that the true plan was to get a date to give the United States an advantage if Greenland became independent, not to establish a plan for avoiding a possible purchase or annexation by other means."
Skipper processed all what Johnson was telling him. They had been used by some miserables who weren't even in charge of the mission when it started. If they hadn't taken Madeleine out of the mission, nothing would have happened, and that had been right after she had told him the news about the egg.
"Did they say anything else about Madeleine?" Skipper saw Johnson shaking his head. "About an egg, a hatchling...?"
"Nothing. Haven't you talked with her since then?"
"Very little." Skipper remembered that call. "And she told me that it couldn't be."
The three remained silent until they heard the fishbowl sliding. The others had arrived. Private was the first to climb down.
"We have them!" Private noticed the serious demeanors, even sad he'd say. "Is something wrong?"
"No, don't worry..." Skipper said not to frighten him. "We've been talking about geopolitical issues. And you know that they are serious and boring."
When he saw the smile again on Private's beak, Skipper thought that he had succeeded. But now he wasn't calm: he knew that it was him, and no-one else, who had ruined the mission in Denmark. He wished he could go back as if there was a thread that he could follow to undo all the waddled path and change things at that first night he had spent in Seattle two years before. Kowalski could make a time machine for him, but he could never tell him what he wanted it for. None of the three should know anything about that issue. Never.
The most simple explanation was that: all had been his fault. He could complain about his team, his superiors... but he was the one who had caused everything.
At that moment Kowalski and Rico went in. Skipper had to molt his thoughts and present Manfredi and Johnson as the new recruits. They had to lodge them in the HQ, get them used to the team routine, introduce them to the other zoosters... with that he would be busy for some days.
.
Some days later, Manfredi and Johnson already knew Skipper's schedule and they wanted to talk with him. They got up at five o'clock in the morning and made him go to the concrete island. The sky was cloudless, the dawn was cold.
"What are you doing awake before time?" Skipper asked.
Manfredi showed him a box. "As you showed your face for us and you didn't tell anyone that of Christiania... I have one of my imaginative plans to return the favor."
"With a box?" Skipper took it and opened it. "I would have liked to see your imaginative plans then, but if you explain this to me..."
"Johnson and I have been talking about when Flint retires."
"True. One of the things that I heard when I tapped the colonel's phone," Johnson said showing disgust, "who, if it was up to me, he could burst... was that, as soon as Flint will be out of the way, he wants to interrogate you to ruin your career."
"So we'll give you ideas for you to tell him and so he will think that you are mad and he will give it up for you," Manfredi explained taking out a pocket watch. "We're going to hypnotize you."
"Really?" Skipper said, laughing.
"Stare at it and concentrate... Open the box and trust the power of my imagination. And some advice: elephant. Remember that in interrogations there's always an elephant."
"Manfredi," Johnson whispered to him. "The elephant is a different thing."
"The same as an elephant getting into a china shop... let the thoughts go inside you. Throw the dice, Skipper," Manfredi said.
Skipper threw the nine dice from the box. Manfredi interpreted the nine images he had in front of him just any old way.
"You'll tell him that you woke up... so far away... in Japan! In... Kyoto? Yeah... You were on a bed, but look... it wasn't normal, it was made with money. Lots of rolls of bills. Fake, don't get your hopes up. And they're not legal tender anymore."
"Deutschemarks," Johnson said. "For example."
"Counterfeit deutschemarks," Manfredi repeated. "And from there you went to see a terrible talent show because we were acting, okay? We got burnt juggling with kerosene bottles and you put our ashes in a manila envelope with a teaspoon, which was what you had near. Throw the dice again."
Skipper threw the dice again.
"Look... we're alive again! It was your birthday and we went to Nairobi, we didn't tell you what for, but we were preparing a surprise party for you. But we needed flying piranhas and we had to go to Ecuador to look for them, so we two went in a whale because it was cheaper than the ship and the plane. The bad thing is that the piranhas attacked us and ate the ends of our flippers. So we left them inside the whale's belly and they learnt to feed on krill. We went back to Nairobi and carried an elephant for the surprise... but it had an explosive leg, which 1% of elephants have, and the party was ruined. And this is why you're always grumpy, because you didn't have a birthday party. We're sorry, namaste, okay? And now wake up."
Skipper opened his eyes.
"How are you?" Manfredi asked him.
"Very relaxed, but I don't understand why you have told me so much nonsense."
"Do you remember it?" Manfredi didn't expect that.
"How can't he remember the lot of nonsense that you have told him?" Johnson blurted out. "I will have nightmares tonight. What he has to do when he sees that jerk is to give him a beating!"
"What you have to do is not to think about the elephant," Manfredi insisted.
Skipper took the watch from his flipper. "Six o'clock. Time to get up."
And he went down to the HQ trying not to think about the droning he had already in his head.