December First in Washington. Cold but sunny. The rest of the country's getting dumped with snow, but some of the people who make our country work are still walking around in jackets and short skirts. It could just be an unusually cool Fall day, if you didn't see all the !@#$ Christmas lights up.
Christmas. I'd almost forgotten it's less than a month away. I've been so busy dealing with the Legion that I've hardly had much time to think about it.
And now... Jesus !@#$ Christ. I think I'm going to be sending out more condolence cards than seasons greetings this year.
The battle against The Skull was the textbook definition of Pyrrhic !@#$ Victory. We won, mostly because we cheated. But the Flier took horrendous damage, and is more or less floating in the Mid-Atlantic, not even able to hover itself home.
They tell me they might be able to get her up and running by New Year's Eve. But that's more than can be said for the 309 Agents I lost that day, and the almost 500 seriously wounded. Between the fire, the explosions, and the dogfight, I counted just over half my crew as casualties.
It's a terrible thing to have to walk through hallways that have turned into makeshift sickbays and morgues because there is just no !@#$ room in the real ones, anymore. The eyes of the sick and the hurt look up at you for hope or for help. There are screams and moans, and the terrible sounds of those who are just about to go beyond it all.
And the eyes of the dead, staring and vacant, waiting for you to gently close them.
At least most of them got that final service. That's a lot more than I can say for the worst death of them all. Poor Agent Armatrading.
Poor Sue.
It is with some grim satisfaction that I can report that my Agents got to where they were holding her just before the Agency !@#$ got away, and actually captured one alive. He's not in good shape, though: the Company !@#$ had the buttons for each others' suicide charges, and my boys had to shoot into the death knot and hope they got lucky.
Lucky for us, it worked. Not so lucky for the dumb!@#$ with two punctured lungs and no stomach. But after hearing his story, I'm not so inclined to feel so sorry for him.
Of course, there's no physical proof. They sanitized the area with sludge gas and incendiary devices. Agent Armatrading's body is burned, pulverized bones buried under a few tons of what used to be a warehouse in Langley, VA.
But our "guest" tells me Sue got the better of them. She broke free of her restraints, overpowered one of the guards, and shot herself in the head. She must have known it was the only way to stop the freak, but did she know she'd be able to talk to me, after the fact?
I don't know. I might never know the answer.
But I believe that she knew. I believe that, after having Agent S root around in her brain for so long, and share her body, some rooting around the other way occurred. I believe she must have figured out a way to make a final report to me, postmortem, and fixed herself into doing just that.
Because if there was anyone who would have found a way to make that work, it would be her.
She was not afraid, at the end. I recognized the look on her face. It wasn't fear. It was pride.
I just wish there was some way I could give her a proper send-off. All I can do now is tell her family, friends, and coworkers what a great Agent she was as I officiate over an empty casket.
Somehow, that seems so hollow. So !@#$ paltry a reward.
So I've gone out of my way to honor her the best way I know how: !@#$ with the people who were willing to put her life in jeopardy just to get to me.
The President now has every piece of information that I was able to get about the connections between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Legion. He is aware that these could be just the tip of the iceberg, but that this could be it, and maybe we got off lucky, considering.
He is also aware that, if he chooses not to do anything about this matter, I reserve the right to slip a few choice nuggets to the press. I think he thinks I'm bluffing. He should know better by now.
There was also a rather frank discussion that took place between me and the Director, over at the Agency's headquarters. I saw to it that his personal, in-office washroom wasn't working, and joined him in the executive !@#$ for a little man-to-man, stall-to-stall talk about certain political realities while he was taking his daily, after-lunch !@#$.
There may have been some threats, made, mostly by me. There may have also been some horrendous noises and smells, also mostly by me.
You see, there's this wonderful barbecue place not far from their headquarters, but every time I eat there it flies through me like !@#$ through a goose. So I had an early lunch before going over to have that word with the Director. Too bad I barred his stall from the outside before occupying the one next to him.
(Does that make me a member of the occupy bowel movement? Because I got 99% of the gas on that one.)
Yeah, yeah. SPYGOD made a poop and fart joke. Whatever, son. You gotta find some !@#$ laughs when and where you can.
Especially since I don't know how many !@#$ laughs I'm likely to get in the days to come. I'll be too !@#$ busy wrapping up loose ends for even a chuckle.
Mostly, I have to take a good, long look at all the former villains I just had the Magician wake up or deprogram, and see which ones I can use for The COMPANY, and which ones go to jail, or into the ground. This is not going to be a fun
I also have to see to it that every one of The Big Man's "insurances" is deprogrammed and sent back to their normal lives as best as we can.
(And, yes, I lied to him about killing them. I needed him off-balance and talking while I played for time. I think it worked out just fine, seeing as how he's in the Heptagon basement in the mother of all medical comas.)
One thing that bothers me, though. I was so busy berating The Big Man for the utter waste of his life that I completely forgot to ask him why he'd targeted me so heavily, a couple months back. I was also going to ask him how he found out my secret, but maybe that's not such a horrible omission.
I mean, !@#$: he knew my real name. If he knew that, everything else is sort of secondary. I should be lucky he didn't know when I go take my after-lunch, on the clock dump at taxpayers' expense. Or where I got these fishbowl pumps.
Ah well. I suppose it doesn't matter, now. He's about as good as dead as a man who can't die's going to get, and his organization's rapidly becoming a bad memory. I don't like to turn my back on the old to focus on the new, given how this job tends to work, but I think we can call this chapter done.
ABWEHR is done. The Legion is done. So that just leaves HONEYCOMB and GORGON, both of whom will be difficult, to put it mildly.
But I've got a plan, son. It's a crazy !@#$ thing, and sometimes I wonder how !@#$ my brain had to be that day to come up with it. But I think it'll work, somehow. And at the end of it, I'll be standing over the bodies of two more dangerous organizations, more or less simultaneously.
And won't that be something for the President to take care of, come the last bit of the next election?
Cold and windy, today. Bad wind blowing. If I was superstitious, I might take it as a sign.
But I'm as much of a god as any of the people I'd be praying to. And I say it's a sign that big, bad changes are coming for the bad guys.
No more !@#$ around. No more monkeyshines. We did the Legion in about a month. Let's see if we can make HONEYCOMB happen in a week.
And on that note, I have to call Per Se and make a reservation for two, this weekend. It's probably booked so far in advance that time travelers have a hard time getting in, but something tells me I can make this happen.
As for what else happens...? We'll see.
Blow, blow, you cataracts and hurricanos...
(SPYGOD is listening to The Top (The Cure) and remembering the suspicious soda he had at the cue place)
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