Something Solved

  “Have you made your peace?” Ian asked as he drove himself and Ed to the Scorpions HQ.

  “I’m not the one that’s gonna be in the firing line. You know he’s going to use the sky-nail against you?”

  “I’m counting on it,”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,”

  “She proposed,” Ian said flatly and Ed nearly fell out of the car.

  “What? When?”

  “Last night,”

  “What did you say? Surely you said yes,”

  “Not in so many words,”

  “But you said yes?”

  “Technically, no,”

  “What? Dude, she’s about the hottest girl you’ve dated, she’s a doctor, she likes me and JR, and she’s got two different coloured eyes! Why the hell didn’t you say yes?”

  “Because,”

  “You’re not having second thoughts, are you?”

  “Hell no, it’s just, if today goes bad I didn’t want her to live with the knowledge that we might have been married,”

  “So you said no?”

  “No,”

  “But you didn’t say yes either?”

  “Yes,”

  “You really are the dumbest smart person I know,”

  “Yet you still love me,” said Ian with a smile, and Ed couldn’t do anything but smile in return.

 

  “Okay, listen up, Erasmus will be on point for this operation so he’ll do the briefing,” announced the Colonel to the briefing room at large. “You have the floor, Erasmus,”

  “Thanks, Colonel,” he said. “Okay, Thor sent me coordinates this morning. Satellite imaging reveals that the meet will take place in this abandoned factory,” Ian explained as a number of aerial photos of an abandoned factory flipped past on the screen.

  “Thor will be expecting me to screw him over, so if he sees anyone else coming it’ll become a bloodbath real quick. For that reason, I will go in alone with only Ed as backup, he’ll be concealed in the back of a pickup. Ed this is the part that you won’t like, I’ll need to refrigerate the back of the tuck to mask your heat signature,”

  “No problem,” Ed said sarcastically.

  “Good. The rest of you will follow with a twenty five minute delay. Thor will be using the satellites to monitor the parameter, but all satellites have got special codes that mask military installations. I’ll make sure the area around the factory is masked so he won’t see you coming,”

  “Wait a minute,” someone called from the back, “why should we listen to a civilian consultant?”

  “Because he is a Special Agent, and thus outranks almost everyone in this room,” said the Colonel, “Please, continue,”

  “Thanks. I’m only brining you in as backup, should my plan fail and Ed fail as primary backup. This ends today, Thor will not kill anyone else. Everyone know what they should do? Good, let’s suit up and ship out,”

            Ian had forgotten the rush of adrenalin that came with briefing a bunch of agents on a strategy that was so fool proof it might just fail anyway. After the briefing, Ian and Ed headed down to the garage where they found the unmarked bakkie with the refrigerated loading bay.

  “Have you made your peace?” Ed echoed the question.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Ian said. “Just promise me something,”

  “Oh, no, please don’t do this, neither one of us is dying today, you hear me? And if you die, I’ll bring you back and kill you myself,”

  “I don’t doubt that for a minute, but if that happens, just take care of Danny, would ya?”

  “Only if you promise that you’ll take care of Aaliyah,”

  “Done,”

  “Done,” Ed repeated and they shook on it.

 

            It had taken a good hour to get to the factory out in the middle of nowhere. It was a sizable building but Ian had seen bigger in his lifetime, and his career as an agent working for the Agency. He parked the bakkie in the parking lot, or what was left of it, and made his way inside.

            He immediately noticed painted arrows on the ground, no doubt Thor’s work.

  Good, Ian thought, he’s leading me into his trap.

            Ian followed the arrows deep into the centre of the factory and up to a control room on the second floor. All the consoles in the room were dead and at the far end was a single chair with its back turned to him. A step of two from where he stood now, was a cross painted on the floor like a mark for an actor in a stage play.

  “You weren’t followed,” said Robert and he turned the chair around. It wasn’t a question.

  “I never thought to see you again,”

  “Yes, well, I wasn’t really planning on being caught, but you just had to go and throw a spanner in the works, didn’t you?”

  “Always,”

  “Step onto the mark,”

  “No,”

  “Step onto the mark, please,” Robert said with a little agitation in his voice and rose from the chair.

  “No,”

  “Do it,” he said and pulled a gun on Ian.

            Instinctively Ian put his hands in the air, and reluctantly he stepped onto the mark.

  “I must admit, you’ve given me quite a bit of trouble,” Robert said, gun still pointed at Ian.

  “I can say the same about you. Though I’d much rather hear why you’ve been killing off Others agents?”

  “Have you grown attached to them hunting you? Would you rather let them find you and kill you? Or worse, find that doctor of yours, Danny is it? She is pretty, and you know very well what they do to pretty women, especially the ones that resist,”

  “So you’ve been killing them to protect me?”

  “No you idiot. They took everything from me. My job, my life, the man I loved,” the last bit surprised Ian a bit, he never knew Robert to swing that way. “And a dead man has nothing to lose,”

  “How many were you planning to kill? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? Or were you going to keep killing until someone managed to stop you and back trace you?”

  “No one can back trace me, I’m the best cracker there is,”

  “That’s your opinion,”

  “Ha, that’s the truth. Sure, your little stunt with the VI was impressive, but I managed to get past that as well,”

  “True, but there’s always someone better, Robert, someone younger, someone smarter,”

  “Not this time. Betsy is mine, she quivers at my touch and puts out at my word,”

  “So you mean to kill me with the sky-nail?”

  “I know a rhetorical question when I hear one, but yes. And when your backup arrives an hour from now, all they’ll find is a dead man impaled in the floor,”

            Ian smiled devilishly.

  “They say the sky-nail is accurate up to one-one hundredth of a millimetre,” Ian said.

  “Thanks to your VI it went up a bit, now one-one thousandth,”

  “With that little room for error, you don’t really have to be too sure of your calculations. Even if I stand a little of centre,” Ian said and shifted his weight to the right, “it would still kill me,”

  “Yes, it would,”

  “Which begs the question, though, are you sure of your calculations?”

  “What?”

  “Just a thought,” Ian said, smiling all the while.

            There was a sound of thunder and the world seemed to enter a temporal laps. Everything that followed in the next few seconds seemed to last a lifetime.

            Ian bent his ring finger on his right hand in towards his palm. Robert stood fixed, arm outstretched and pistol pointed at Ian’s chest. There was a screech of metal and a thundering crash as the sky-nail came through the roof and embedded itself in the floor…in the midst of the two men.

            Robert recoiled and half of his arm fell in front of Ian’s feet. Ian reached down and picked up the gun while Robert recovered and ran out the door to his left. Ian followed with lightning speed. He called to Robert, commanding him to stop, but he wouldn’t. Ian aimed and fired, taking off Robert’s right kneecap. The man fell to the floor and time seemed to return to normal.

  “Do it,” Robert spat as Ian stood over him, “kill me now, avenge your partner,”

  “No,” said Ian, lowering the pistol, “that’s be too easy. And there’d be no justice in it,”

  “You know as well as I do that I’ll never make it to trail, the Others will get me long before then,”

  “That I’d call justice,”

            Ian didn’t have to wait long before Ed joined him, he could see he was relieved that Ian was alive, and he himself was relieved that his plan had worked.

            Ten minutes later the rest of the Cyber Crime Unit arrived and took Robert away.

  “How did you know he was going to pull a gun on you?” she asked.

  “I didn’t,” was Ian’s reply.

 

            That night, they were all celebrating on the roof of their house. Devon and Marko joined them. They braaied, drank, Ed and Ian entertained them with a few tunes to which they all sang along. JR reminded them of a few things the men would rather have forgotten, but the two women enjoyed it thoroughly.

 

            Meanwhile, in a holding cell within the Scorpion HQ, Robert sat staring at the ceiling as he lay on his back. He heard the buzzer go, saw the door open but heard no one enter.

            He looked around, but saw no one. He tentatively walked out of his cell and stared up and down the hallway. Empty. Carefully he turned around and headed back inside.

  “What took you so long,” he said.

            He felt a sharp pain at the base of his skull and a cloaked figure held a hand over his mouth.

  “Not who you were expecting,” said a voice so sinister, so terrible, Robert thought it was Satan himself. And that was the last thing he thought.

 

            Sometime later, during the festivities, Ian led Danny to the edge of the roof.

  “Look,” he said pointing out towards the town below them.

  “At what?”

  “You’ll see,” he said and typed something on his phone.

            The whole town went dark, and then lights started to return, but not all at once and not all in the same place. Slowly a pattern formed and finally they could all see that the lights spelt a question formed from two simple words. ‘Mary me?’ they read.

            Danny turned to Ian and found him kneeling beside her, holding out a box with a silver ring inside it, encrusted with small diamonds and other precious stones. Danny was speechless, holding her hands over her mouth.

  “You might want to hurry up with your answer, before the people start to complain,” he said jokingly.

  “Yes,” she said, “yes,”

            Ian took the ring from the box and placed it on her finger, then stood up and embraced her. They shared a long kiss while the others cheered. Afterwards they congratulated them both and as Ian was fixing the power grid a call came through. He headed inside the house to answer it.

  “Hello?”

  “Good work today,”

  “Who is this?”

  “You need not worry yourself. You stopped Thor, so for that we are grateful and we will respond in kind. You will not be harmed, for now. But you do have something that belongs to us,”

  “Melisa,”

  “Yes, we want her back,”

  “Why? She turned on you?”

  “Yes, and we have our own way of dealing with traitors,”

  “That I know all too well,”

  “We will be expecting her release soon,”

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” said Ian and ended the call.

  “Everything alright?” asked Ed as he came down the stairs.

  “Yeah,” Ian said, “Everything’s great,”

 

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Melisa, “you have a mean right cross on you,”

  “I know,” said Devon.

            They were in a dark room, alone, with only a thick layer of glass between them. There was a light on each side, and a door, but no chairs. Melisa was pacing up and down.

  “I have a few questions for you,” said Devon.

  “And why would I answer them?”

  “Because I’m going to ask nicely,”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes. Why did you help us?”

  “You call that asking nicely?”

  “Compared to torture, yes,”

  “Because I got attached,”

  “I’m meant to believe that?”

  “I did help you, didn’t I?”

  “Why are the Others after us?”

  “That’s a long story,”

  “I’ve got a lot of time, so start telling,”

            Devon left the high security wing of the Scorpions HQ two hours later with a wealth of information.