It's been a wild couple of !@#$ days, let me tell you. You know you're in trouble when the enemy sends stampeding, steam-powered, cyborg war elephants armed with repeating spear throwers after your safari jeeps, and it's only you, what few bullets you have left, and the dazed, confused, and unamused wildlife keeping your fine, gay !@#$ in one piece.
(That and some amazing driving by Karl. Kid's turning out to be a natural. Either that or he's really playing too much GTA)
No, don't worry. All my kids are safe, and Randolph's okay (though he really doesn't deserve to be, little !@#$ whiner), and, well, you know me. If I'm talking to you, I'm fine, though somewhat concerned that something isn't wearing off, yet.
But my collection of almost-pristine 70's funk, soul, disco, and Arabian LPs are gone forever, along with the glory that was the Pharaoh Suite. If it wasn't for the swimming pool I think it would have gone up in flames a lot faster, which would have made my planned escape route harder to get to. But I took the precaution of having it filled up for a pool party that we never wound up having, so there you go.
(Foresight or luck? Never ask me that, son. It's just what it is, and if it works, I ain't !@#$ questioning it.)
We're camped out in Arusha, tonight, guests of Tanzania's creepiest, in-town safari lodge. So far as they know it's just Karla (formerly Karl) and Harry (formerly Hilde), young newlyweds who rented out the largest hut so they'd have lots of privacy before the honeymoon of the century. The rest of us slipped in through the hedgerows on the side while no one was looking.
Not that we had to be too careful. One of the reasons I chose this place is that it's got the worst rating out of every single lodge in town, and that's !@#$ saying something. Lizards crawling the walls of the dining room, spiders the size of small puppies wandering the paths, and the food tastes like they caught the spiders, smashed them in a bowl with potatoes and sugar, and called it curry.
But it's lonely and quiet and a man/woman can hear him/herself !@#$ think, or at least be able to tune everything out and go fishing for stray satellites to bounce a communication or two off of. And they stocked the newlyweds' fridge with enough Tusker to float a dead war elephant, so there's that as well.
The road's starting to show on these kids' faces. The good news is that Randolph is finally starting to nut up, broken wrists or no, especially now that his nuts are starting to drop again. The bad news is that this isn't as bad as it's going to get.
Not even close.
Anyway, getting ahead of myself, as !@#$ usual. Where are we, how did we get here, and why are we genderbent?
Long story short, we had to get the !@#$ out of Cairo. And, unfortunately for Egypt Air, and any number of other tour packagers, the Shepheard hotel is going to be down for repairs for a while. Which is a nice way of saying the !@#$ burned down from the top few floors up, and the lobby doesn't look so old world charming anymore.
I bet you're asking "But SPYGOD, you're such a suave, smart Super Spy. How the !@#$ did they find you?"
Well, son, let me answer that by making a general declaration: I !@#$ hate it when I'm right. I !@#$ hate it when I'm wrong, too, but why did I have to be right about this?
Straight up: the murders of two my kids were not carried out by Mossad or Molchanie. And the thugs who followed us into Lebanon, and then Cairo, weren't their folks, either.
This is actually something entirely different, which means, unfortunately, that we are seriously !@#$.
The !@#$ went down a little like this: I was "asleep," working on bouncing a mental signal off a few satellites and over to a certain ally in India, when they got to the hotel. The bouncing was part of the complicated phone call I was talking about the other day, which is a little trick I picked up on the fly that one time that GORGON was running me down in the Irian Jaya.
The ally's a shady character named Dosha Josh who's apparently appointed himself my number one fan in the international Super Spy club, and has helped me out a number of times now. The other day he told me he'd rattle some cages and see what he could find out from his fellows, and the day I got back in touch with him, he told me he'd asked around, and threatened a few people, and discovered that Israel was not involved at all.
(In fact, they were rather !@#$ pissed off about the whole thing, as they were having to clean up after someone else's mess. Can't say as I blame 'em. I'll send them an apology at some point. Really.)
So who did it? Reading between the lines, based on who sounded !@#$ scared that the assassins had failed, who sounded like they didn't !@#$ care, and who claimed to not !@#$ care but were, actually, !@#$ scared, it sounded like BUSH was most likely the culprit.
No, not the former President of the United States, son. BUSH is the extremely unfortunate acronym for the Organization of African Unity's old, pan-African Strategic Talents organization.
(And, yes, I know what it sounds like. They apparently weren't thinking when they picked the name.)
BUSH came straight out of the 60's, swaggering like all get out and swinging both fists at their former and current colonial powers while trying to create a cohesive framework for the continent's many Supers. Like the OAU, they claimed they were staying out of the Cold War, but, unlike their parent organization, they did their best to !@#$ it up.
They did this by being in favor of the Soviets one week, and the rest of the world the next, depending on which side made the best promises that particular week. So they were in bed with the KGB, the CIA, the COMPANY, SQUASH, DRAGON, MI-6, Molchanie... !@#$ everyone, as long as they didn't have a current colonial hold on anyone.
The OAU was disbanded in '02, and replaced by the African Union, who, sick of BUSH's bull!@#$, tossed them out to pasture and made a real Super Spy organization. Unfortunately, the new group, NGUVU (Swahili for "power") is about as effective and cohesive as the African Union is, which is to say, not very. The COMPANY helps them out from time to time, of course, but it's almost always a pity!@#$.
So BUSH still stayed in place, aided under the table by various member states who, unimpressed by NGUVU, wanted to keep their options open. And while I agree it's not a bad idea to not keep all your eggs in one basket, they'd be better off cutting ties with the old and reforming the new.
But do they listen to me? !@#$ no. They !@#$ hate me. And not without good reason, I'm sorry to say...
... but enough on that another time. There's two important things, here. The first thing is that you remember that I was in the middle of this important phone call with Dosha just as a new wave of assassins was making its way towards the suite from two directions.
And the second thing is that he's telling me that BUSH is involved, and here we are in mother!@#$ Africa.
I open my eyes, the elevator goes "ding," and one of the kids informs me that room service has guns. Luckily for me, I never go to sleep without several large pistols either in my hand, or under my pillow. Unlucky for them, Karl still had the BMFG I lent him the other day, and was in primary firing position, with his back up against the wall.
That took care of those fools. Unfortunately, the second group was on the roof, and burrowing in using incendiary charges. That's why the suite went up in flames, and why we had to drop !@#$ everything and jump down the emergency slide to the back of the hotel.
In a perfect world, there would have been a waiting car. There was, once, but it was gone, and I have no idea if they stole it, or someone else did. Fortunately, one of the tour packages had their ritzy little tour bus puttering around the side, and I commandeered it in the name of America, freedom, and the sanctity of my fine, gay !@#$.
From the hotel to the Nile, where a somewhat unimpressive houseboat was puttering along, undergoing maintenance so it could make a trip up the Nile the next day. Luckily for us, the crew was off somewhere getting smashed, and the only persons on board were two maids and the guy trying to repair the bilge pump. Also luckily, they'd already stocked up on food and supplies, so all we had to do was shoot off the anchor, pay the three crewmembers to go to Sharm el-Sheikh for a few days, and putter away as fast as its little propeller would take us.
That got us as far as the Aswan High Dam. After that we took another boat down to Abu Simbel, and ditched it just north of Sudan. We snuck over the border on foot, grabbed yet another boat, and took that all the way to Khartoom, where we crashed out for the night in a lousy little hovel that was, you guessed it, not my actual bolthole, but a place nearby where I could keep an eye open for someone trying to break into my real safehouse.
At a moment like that, a man has to think about his plans, and whether they're actually good and effective ones, or just large, brown !@#$ being pulled out of one's !@#$ in lieu of an actual, well-considered strategy. Anyone else would say "Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, SPYGOD. This is BUSH country! Get to a !@#$ airport or the coastline and get the !@#$ out of here!"
But me? I say "Let's go deeper into the mystery and see where it leads. It's the last place they'll look for me, right?"
And the other voice can only flap its gums at what is either my audacity, or my stupidity. But the bottom line is that the BUSH people didn't hit my safehouse, and we were able to sneak through Ethiopia, changing transportation every couple hundred miles, without being further molested.
Kenya, on the other hand, was a pooch!@#$ from start to finish. I'm 95% sure we got made going over the border, so maybe posing as French students on a herpetology excursion was not the greatest move. What can I say? Kenyans know from Germans, and they weren't buying it.
On the other hand, they may have tagged us on the way. The Kenyan police are corrupt as !@#$, and well known for pulling over safari buses, claiming there's drugs or contraband on board, and threatening to search everything and everyone on four wheels unless some "assurance" is made. I may have been a little early and overwhelming with the "assurance" (that is, "bribe") because we were in a !@#$ hurry to get away from that border crossing, and the wall of !@#$ I was sure was on its way.
Either which way, someone must have made a call. Hence the charge of the borg elephants. Hence the adrenalin rush of having poison-tipped spears machine-gunned at us. And hence some really frightening driving moments in which I had to hand over the wheel, climb to the top of the bus, unzip my alien love machine, think of some wonderful katooey's I've known, and shoot deadly !@#$ bullets at our pursuers.
(I don't think the elephants realized what was going on, but their riders were scared as !@#$.)
That was Kenya. Wonderful Kenya. Just to say "!@#$ you, !@#$" I took the kids to the Carnivore when we got to Nairobi so they could try some of the tasty animals we'd had to fly by at about 200KPH to save our lovely !@#$. This was, of course, after dropping into yet another one of my boltholes and effecting a rather startling transformation on everyone. The TransPistol* makes you feel really !@#$ weird but it gets the job done, and now that BUSH was looking for the wrong gendered-party, we were good enough to be able to have a meal and relax after that little escapade.
Speaking of the food, I think we all agreed the warthog was the worst: even the stray cats who live at the restaurant and move between tables, begging for scraps, won't eat it. Luckily for Rachel (I mean Randolph) there was a vegetarian option, sort of. But the cats wouldn't touch it, either.
After that, we !@#$ snuck over the border into Tanzania, dodging patrols and other nuisances along the way. You have to be really careful in the back-forty: the park rangers are armed with automatic rifles and entitled to !@#$ shoot anyone they suspect of poaching, on sight, without asking questions, and without much in the way of a reprimand if it turns out they were wrong. The flip side of that is that, if they lose track of an endangered animal, and then can't find the poor beast within a certain amount of time, they go to jail for life right away because the hypothetical poachers had to be using one of them to help pull off that good of an animal snatch.
(This is another reason BUSH still exists. They're the only ones really equipped to handle specimen-snatching aliens who want to grab, say, a mating pair of black rhinos and transport them to Googlex-34, there to be cared for by conservation-minded extraterrestrials who are convinced they're saving the beasts from us filthy, backwards humans, and not caring that some poor park ranger's gonna sit in !@#$ jail for their act of "kindness." If you need a rogue UFO tracked and shot down, and DAMOCLES isn't answering your calls, call BUSH.)
And now, here we are, in the creepiest little safari lodge in Arusha. I'm feeling what I hope are the first stirrings of my alien love god mansnake coming back from womansnake town (dead God I !@#$ hope that's what that is) and trying to make another braincall, this time to The COMPANY. I need to check in with the folks back home and let them know I'm okay, but I also need to see about getting a few insurance plans in place.
See, now that I know who's doing it, I also have a really good idea as to why. And if I'm going to end this little tour on a positive note, I'm going to need some massive help. Otherwise things could get even uglier than they already have.
I mean, have you smelled what a cyborg elephant does when it dies? I still can't get the funk out of my !@#$ nostrils. And that's after pouring a few cans of Tusker right into the old noggin.
But hey, tomorrow's another !@#$ day.
(SPYGOD is listening to Girls & Boys (Blur) and having a Tusker)
* The TransPistol is a wonder of crazed, high-weirdness 50's mad science: a ray gun that changes its target's gender for exactly 12 hours. It takes about ten minutes to work, and then half an hour to reverse itself, causing a comical tickling feeling at the first change and slow, achy, but somewhat orgasmic soreness on the second. A favorite of quick-disguise loving agents back in the day, the ray was eventually shelved when it turned out that its users started developing bisexual tendencies after a few uses. This "problem" has not dissuaded The COMPANY from continuing to use the machine on an as-needed basis.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
12/5-6/11 - SPYGOD's Big !@#$ Roadtrip: Cairo
Ah, Egypt. Now this is more like it. After running like !@#$ from Israel, and then only staying in Lebanon long enough to lose both safehouses in Tyre, spending a few days in a dilapidated hotel that caters to suckers on a tour package is just what I needed.
After all, when the hotel in question only exists anymore because of yours truly, it's a good thing to take advantage of that, now and again. Just to show them who's boss, at any rate.
Well, okay, the tour package suckers still foot most of the bill. But there's a reason why The Shepheard Hotel in lovely, downtown Cairo has a special, extra floor you can't even see if you're not wearing these sexy, Devo glasses. They also have a cloaked elevator that goes all the way up to the top floor that no one knows they have, where I maintain the best accommodations in the house.
And that's because, since the early 80's, SPYGOD has had a very cordial relationship with the Egyptian government, or at least certain sectors of it. One that is, thankfully, weathering the Arab Spring very nicely. The Presidents may eventually run for their lives, and the Islamists may come in and out of power, but every government needs some kind of spookshow running things behind the scenes.
Especially when some of those things are !@#$ spooky.
Bottom line, there's a lot of !@#$ buried under the sands in Egypt that should just !@#$ remain buried. There's a reason the Arabs called the Sphinx Abu Hol: "The Father of Horror." And that's just in town, son. There's !@#$ up and down the Nile, all the way upriver to Sudan, and even past that, that could erupt out of the ground and come after your slack, skinny !@#$ in the middle of the night.
Really nasty things. Like all seven plagues of Egypt possessing a bunch of Archaeologists, leading an army of flesh-eating mummies, and riding on bronze war crocodiles. And that was just that one year when things went ape!@#$ after they opened that one tomb everyone said not to!
So the Mukhabarat has its own, inner secret police: el Wedjat, the Eye of Horus. They're a small and quiet branch of two-fisted psychics, Supers with magical lineages, rogue archaeologists, djinn-taming Imams, and the occasional occult-based hero. When the bad gods come around for tribute, the government cracks opens the wrong pyramid, the ghosts march in from the Underworld, or something that would have made Lovecraft turn to drink comes up from the sands, they call them up and hope that, when the !@#$ gets sorted out, there's more bad dead than good.
We knew about Wedjat back in the 70's, but given the current geopolitical situation, we couldn't really work together, except on those rare occasions when the !@#$ hit the fan on a global scale. Of course, all that means is that, when we needed to work together, we treated it like some dirty thing we didn't want to tell our parents about. It wasn't until Israel and Egypt finally buried the !@#$ hatchet, and everyone was friends, that we could actually start sharing information above the table without having to lie, or say "well, I could tell you, but then I'd have to make you suck my !@#$ until your teeth rotted out of your gums."
Yeah, imagine that. Suddenly you don't want to know, anymore. See how that works?
So, yeah, Wedjat and the COMPANY linked up every once in a while. Rogue deities, alien archaeology, ghost storms, demon plagues, weird !@#$ you can't really put in an easy category... you know how things are in this corner of the world. There seems to be something about deserts and dangerous, ancient secrets, doesn't there?
And whenever I had to blow into town, usually carrying a number of our Supers along with me, we needed someplace to stay. Because there was no way in !@#$ the Egyptian people were going to let us have The Flier hovering right over their city, and the General Intelligence Services didn't want a bunch of infidels staying in their precious headquarters, because that might get kind of tacky. Especially if we got drunk and danced, parties, and !@#$ until morning after a win.
So they got me all of this, instead. I call it the "Pharaoh Suite," as it makes the "Presidential Suite" look like the "Deluxe Bargain Accommodation" by comparison.
It's dozens of large rooms, one big bedroom the size of a ballroom, a dining hall, cooking facilities, a !@#$ swimming pool with showers (co-ed, of course), and a helipad for quick entrance and exits. The main bedroom turns into a !@#$ disco, if you can believe that. In fact, I think the music system still works. I'll have to see if the kids want to play around with some hot, 70's funk and Arabian records tonight.
Ah, it's good to be God King Dictator for Life. Makes up for having to ditch that nice sub/hydrofoil in Alexandria, cue the auto-destruct, and hide in a rat-infested perfume shop that's actually the understated hub of most foreign intelligence hookups on Egypt's coast. We hung out there for a few hours, playing tourist, until I could clandestinely whistle up some help from a friend of a friend, and then introduce my traveling circus to the joy that is Cairo rush hour traffic.
(Five cars, side by side in three lanes, all going at least 20 over the speed limit. Do not rent a car from the airport unless you're homicidal, suicidal, or !@#$ armed to the teeth.)
This place has everything you could want, provided you want to go downstairs to get to it. Booze, gambling, a decent buffet, and a hospital doctor who doesn't ask any !@#$ questions. We could even hoof it over to the Museum if we wanted, and it was still !@#$ there, !@#$ it.
But not this trip. We had the doc make a house call, and are trying to get the token Asian restaurant in this !@#$hole to remember who they're dealing with, and actually send up some decent food. I don't want to set a foot outside this suite until we know for sure what the !@#$ is going on.
See, I thought it might be Mossad, or Molchanie. But they aren't in the habit of wiring their people up with deadbombs*. They don't need to.
So if it isn't them, then who is it? There's not a lot of legitimate intelligence operations out here that actually use those !@#$ things, anymore. And if it's who I think it is, then we're in a !@#$load of trouble, right now.
Time to make another phone call, I think. After I see if the record table still works and these discs aren't scratched to !@#$ and gone, that is. It's an old funk kind of night, I think.
Another day above the ground deserves no less.
(SPYGOD is listening to Let's Groove Tonight (Earth Wind and Fire) and kicking back with a cold Sakara)
* Deadbombs are post-mortem explosives, designed to go off within a variable amount of time once the wearer's life signs cease. They are usually worn as a padded jacket with sensor pads on the heart, liver, and lungs, but are occasionally surgically implanted. The idea is that, should the wearer die on the mission, their body will not be able to be recovered for intelligence or identification. A secondary benefit would be the destruction of the target, provided he didn't know they were using Deadbombs and chose not to run once the belligerents were killed. Given their tendency to malfunction in the field, and general ruthlessness, most spy agencies stopped using them after the end of the Cold War. Supers-based agencies that were known to employ them included SQUASH, DRAGON, and BUSH.
After all, when the hotel in question only exists anymore because of yours truly, it's a good thing to take advantage of that, now and again. Just to show them who's boss, at any rate.
Well, okay, the tour package suckers still foot most of the bill. But there's a reason why The Shepheard Hotel in lovely, downtown Cairo has a special, extra floor you can't even see if you're not wearing these sexy, Devo glasses. They also have a cloaked elevator that goes all the way up to the top floor that no one knows they have, where I maintain the best accommodations in the house.
And that's because, since the early 80's, SPYGOD has had a very cordial relationship with the Egyptian government, or at least certain sectors of it. One that is, thankfully, weathering the Arab Spring very nicely. The Presidents may eventually run for their lives, and the Islamists may come in and out of power, but every government needs some kind of spookshow running things behind the scenes.
Especially when some of those things are !@#$ spooky.
Bottom line, there's a lot of !@#$ buried under the sands in Egypt that should just !@#$ remain buried. There's a reason the Arabs called the Sphinx Abu Hol: "The Father of Horror." And that's just in town, son. There's !@#$ up and down the Nile, all the way upriver to Sudan, and even past that, that could erupt out of the ground and come after your slack, skinny !@#$ in the middle of the night.
Really nasty things. Like all seven plagues of Egypt possessing a bunch of Archaeologists, leading an army of flesh-eating mummies, and riding on bronze war crocodiles. And that was just that one year when things went ape!@#$ after they opened that one tomb everyone said not to!
So the Mukhabarat has its own, inner secret police: el Wedjat, the Eye of Horus. They're a small and quiet branch of two-fisted psychics, Supers with magical lineages, rogue archaeologists, djinn-taming Imams, and the occasional occult-based hero. When the bad gods come around for tribute, the government cracks opens the wrong pyramid, the ghosts march in from the Underworld, or something that would have made Lovecraft turn to drink comes up from the sands, they call them up and hope that, when the !@#$ gets sorted out, there's more bad dead than good.
We knew about Wedjat back in the 70's, but given the current geopolitical situation, we couldn't really work together, except on those rare occasions when the !@#$ hit the fan on a global scale. Of course, all that means is that, when we needed to work together, we treated it like some dirty thing we didn't want to tell our parents about. It wasn't until Israel and Egypt finally buried the !@#$ hatchet, and everyone was friends, that we could actually start sharing information above the table without having to lie, or say "well, I could tell you, but then I'd have to make you suck my !@#$ until your teeth rotted out of your gums."
Yeah, imagine that. Suddenly you don't want to know, anymore. See how that works?
So, yeah, Wedjat and the COMPANY linked up every once in a while. Rogue deities, alien archaeology, ghost storms, demon plagues, weird !@#$ you can't really put in an easy category... you know how things are in this corner of the world. There seems to be something about deserts and dangerous, ancient secrets, doesn't there?
And whenever I had to blow into town, usually carrying a number of our Supers along with me, we needed someplace to stay. Because there was no way in !@#$ the Egyptian people were going to let us have The Flier hovering right over their city, and the General Intelligence Services didn't want a bunch of infidels staying in their precious headquarters, because that might get kind of tacky. Especially if we got drunk and danced, parties, and !@#$ until morning after a win.
So they got me all of this, instead. I call it the "Pharaoh Suite," as it makes the "Presidential Suite" look like the "Deluxe Bargain Accommodation" by comparison.
It's dozens of large rooms, one big bedroom the size of a ballroom, a dining hall, cooking facilities, a !@#$ swimming pool with showers (co-ed, of course), and a helipad for quick entrance and exits. The main bedroom turns into a !@#$ disco, if you can believe that. In fact, I think the music system still works. I'll have to see if the kids want to play around with some hot, 70's funk and Arabian records tonight.
Ah, it's good to be God King Dictator for Life. Makes up for having to ditch that nice sub/hydrofoil in Alexandria, cue the auto-destruct, and hide in a rat-infested perfume shop that's actually the understated hub of most foreign intelligence hookups on Egypt's coast. We hung out there for a few hours, playing tourist, until I could clandestinely whistle up some help from a friend of a friend, and then introduce my traveling circus to the joy that is Cairo rush hour traffic.
(Five cars, side by side in three lanes, all going at least 20 over the speed limit. Do not rent a car from the airport unless you're homicidal, suicidal, or !@#$ armed to the teeth.)
This place has everything you could want, provided you want to go downstairs to get to it. Booze, gambling, a decent buffet, and a hospital doctor who doesn't ask any !@#$ questions. We could even hoof it over to the Museum if we wanted, and it was still !@#$ there, !@#$ it.
But not this trip. We had the doc make a house call, and are trying to get the token Asian restaurant in this !@#$hole to remember who they're dealing with, and actually send up some decent food. I don't want to set a foot outside this suite until we know for sure what the !@#$ is going on.
See, I thought it might be Mossad, or Molchanie. But they aren't in the habit of wiring their people up with deadbombs*. They don't need to.
So if it isn't them, then who is it? There's not a lot of legitimate intelligence operations out here that actually use those !@#$ things, anymore. And if it's who I think it is, then we're in a !@#$load of trouble, right now.
Time to make another phone call, I think. After I see if the record table still works and these discs aren't scratched to !@#$ and gone, that is. It's an old funk kind of night, I think.
Another day above the ground deserves no less.
(SPYGOD is listening to Let's Groove Tonight (Earth Wind and Fire) and kicking back with a cold Sakara)
* Deadbombs are post-mortem explosives, designed to go off within a variable amount of time once the wearer's life signs cease. They are usually worn as a padded jacket with sensor pads on the heart, liver, and lungs, but are occasionally surgically implanted. The idea is that, should the wearer die on the mission, their body will not be able to be recovered for intelligence or identification. A secondary benefit would be the destruction of the target, provided he didn't know they were using Deadbombs and chose not to run once the belligerents were killed. Given their tendency to malfunction in the field, and general ruthlessness, most spy agencies stopped using them after the end of the Cold War. Supers-based agencies that were known to employ them included SQUASH, DRAGON, and BUSH.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
12/5/11 - SPYGOD's Big !@#$ Roadtrip: Out to Sea
* [Asleep]
* (EXPLOSION)
*[Not asleep]
* Okay, everyone get the !@#$ out of bed. Up Up Up! Drop your !@#$ and grab your socks! We're on the move.
* Yes, I recognize that sound. It's the decoy house. I'd know that kind of boom !@#$ anywhere. Grab some clothes and a gun or two. We're out of here.
* No, you cannot bring the cat. She's a bomb.
* Nothing like having to run like !@#$ at 430 in the AM, eh? Everyone into the basement. Okay, now the sub basement. Now the next basement. Keep running, do not !@#$ touch anything.
* Okay, here we are. Submarine pen. And she's still in good shape, thank holy !@#$.
* Yes, I keep a submarine pen in my safe house. Why do you think it's on the !@#$ shoreline? If you're going to have a secret base it should have a !@#$ submarine in it. Either that or a really big yacht.
* Everyone in! Grab a chair and strap in. We're going to !@#$ break the echo barrier in about a minute, here, once we get going.
* What? Yes, Randolph, we're running like !@#$. If they found the fake house it's only a matter of time before they come here, too. It's just the way these things work. It goes boom, we run.
* Okay, everyone hold tight. We're going down.
* Um, okay. I said we're going down. What the !@#$.
* ...
* !@#$ !@#$ son of a !@#$ in a !@#$ with a !@#$ up his !@#$! What the !@#$ !@#$?
* Okay, no battery power. The !@#$ android has not been performing regular !@#$ maintenance. Great. !@#$ great.
* No no, it's okay.You all sit tight. I will go get the backup battery. It's upstairs, powering the !@#$ jacuzzi. And I know he's been !@#$ using that.
* Okay, kid. Here's my BMFG. This is a really !@#$ nasty thing. You point it at the other guy and pull the trigger and the only way it won't kill him is if he's wearing spent uranium shields, or maybe built like a reactor. Just be sure to hold onto it with both hands and be standing with your back up against the wall or it'll rip your arm off.
* No, this is not a good time to be reminding me of your !@#$ oath to be a !@#$ pacifist, Randolph. You kind of gave that up when you got mixed up with yours truly. Now, you got those two kids killed. Don't let the others die, too, alright?
* !@#$. I'm sorry. I should not have said that. Just... just nut up, alright? If it comes in and it ain't me, shoot the !@#$.
* Okay, up the stairs. !@#$ god I hate that kid right now. One floor... two floor... three floor... and...
* Oh, hi. Are you with the tax committee? No?
* Oh please, you call that a gun? That's not a gun.
* Now this... this is a-
* (GUNFIRE)
* Who sent you? Who !@#$ sent you?
* (GUNFIRE)
* I said who !@#$ sent you? And you better !@#$ tell me or I will !@#$ shoot off what's left of you.
* Oh, no, you don't die on me yet. Not !@#$ yet you little... Oh, okay, maybe you !@#$ do.
*Wait, what's that beeping noise? Are you guys armed?
*!@#$ me. They're wired to pop.
* Okay, no panic. No panic. Get the !@#$ battery, get downstairs.. Get the !@#$ battery.
* No tools. Tools are in the !@#$ basement. !@#$ okay. Shoot the !@#$ thing, get the battery, get downstairs. Shoot the !@#$ thing, get the battery, get downstairs.
* (Explosions)
* !@#$ god I hate that kid right now. !@#$ god I hate that kid right now. !@#$ god I hate that kid right now.
* Heeeeere's (REDACTED). I have a battery! And... who's that splattered on the dock? Oh, of course they'd send a diver or two. Nice shooting Randolph.
* Oh, it was you, Karl? Where's Randolph? He didn't !@#$ himself and run, did he?
* Oh, he tried to fire. Okay. That explains the hole in the ceiling. Well, we'll have to fix his wrists on the lam, then. Someone get him a beer. And hold it for him, okay? Don't be cruel
* Okay, !@#$ now we get underway. Just gotta hope they didn't !@#$ mine the !@#$ opening or, in the words of one Indiana Jones, this is gonna be one short !@#$ trip.
* AHA! They did. But little do they suspect this thing is ultra !@#$ maneuverable! And...
* How's that? Turns into a !@#$ hydrofoil when no one's looking. Just like a Katooey, best of both worlds.
* Okay, anyone feel like playing The Guyver and Indiana Jones and giving me some air support? We got bogeys.
* Yeah, It's pretty easy, just like those video games Mr. Bleeding Heart and Broken Wrist back there didn't want you to play.
* Oh, he did? Well good. Fire at will, boys and girls. Try to avoid civilian aircraft.
* Where are we going? Well, the decoy I'm going to fire as soon as you finish nailing those bogeys and we go back under again is going to Ibiza, no doubt to drop ten tons of E and dance it's hot little metal !@#$ off. We're off to Alexandria, though.
* Yep. I have a few bolt holes, there, too, and I know some people in interesting places in Cairo, provided they're still where and who they were. We're gonna have us a good time, there, under the circumstances.
* And then I'm gonna have to make the mother!@#$ of all complicated phone calls and be comatose for an hour or two, so hang onto that gun, Karl. You are officially the man, now.
(SPYGOD is listening to We Are The Lost (Gary Numan) and having a Stela or three)
* (EXPLOSION)
*[Not asleep]
* Okay, everyone get the !@#$ out of bed. Up Up Up! Drop your !@#$ and grab your socks! We're on the move.
* Yes, I recognize that sound. It's the decoy house. I'd know that kind of boom !@#$ anywhere. Grab some clothes and a gun or two. We're out of here.
* No, you cannot bring the cat. She's a bomb.
* Nothing like having to run like !@#$ at 430 in the AM, eh? Everyone into the basement. Okay, now the sub basement. Now the next basement. Keep running, do not !@#$ touch anything.
* Okay, here we are. Submarine pen. And she's still in good shape, thank holy !@#$.
* Yes, I keep a submarine pen in my safe house. Why do you think it's on the !@#$ shoreline? If you're going to have a secret base it should have a !@#$ submarine in it. Either that or a really big yacht.
* Everyone in! Grab a chair and strap in. We're going to !@#$ break the echo barrier in about a minute, here, once we get going.
* What? Yes, Randolph, we're running like !@#$. If they found the fake house it's only a matter of time before they come here, too. It's just the way these things work. It goes boom, we run.
* Okay, everyone hold tight. We're going down.
* Um, okay. I said we're going down. What the !@#$.
* ...
* !@#$ !@#$ son of a !@#$ in a !@#$ with a !@#$ up his !@#$! What the !@#$ !@#$?
* Okay, no battery power. The !@#$ android has not been performing regular !@#$ maintenance. Great. !@#$ great.
* No no, it's okay.You all sit tight. I will go get the backup battery. It's upstairs, powering the !@#$ jacuzzi. And I know he's been !@#$ using that.
* Okay, kid. Here's my BMFG. This is a really !@#$ nasty thing. You point it at the other guy and pull the trigger and the only way it won't kill him is if he's wearing spent uranium shields, or maybe built like a reactor. Just be sure to hold onto it with both hands and be standing with your back up against the wall or it'll rip your arm off.
* No, this is not a good time to be reminding me of your !@#$ oath to be a !@#$ pacifist, Randolph. You kind of gave that up when you got mixed up with yours truly. Now, you got those two kids killed. Don't let the others die, too, alright?
* !@#$. I'm sorry. I should not have said that. Just... just nut up, alright? If it comes in and it ain't me, shoot the !@#$.
* Okay, up the stairs. !@#$ god I hate that kid right now. One floor... two floor... three floor... and...
* Oh, hi. Are you with the tax committee? No?
* Oh please, you call that a gun? That's not a gun.
* Now this... this is a-
* (GUNFIRE)
* Who sent you? Who !@#$ sent you?
* (GUNFIRE)
* I said who !@#$ sent you? And you better !@#$ tell me or I will !@#$ shoot off what's left of you.
* Oh, no, you don't die on me yet. Not !@#$ yet you little... Oh, okay, maybe you !@#$ do.
*Wait, what's that beeping noise? Are you guys armed?
*!@#$ me. They're wired to pop.
* Okay, no panic. No panic. Get the !@#$ battery, get downstairs.. Get the !@#$ battery.
* No tools. Tools are in the !@#$ basement. !@#$ okay. Shoot the !@#$ thing, get the battery, get downstairs. Shoot the !@#$ thing, get the battery, get downstairs.
* (Explosions)
* !@#$ god I hate that kid right now. !@#$ god I hate that kid right now. !@#$ god I hate that kid right now.
* Heeeeere's (REDACTED). I have a battery! And... who's that splattered on the dock? Oh, of course they'd send a diver or two. Nice shooting Randolph.
* Oh, it was you, Karl? Where's Randolph? He didn't !@#$ himself and run, did he?
* Oh, he tried to fire. Okay. That explains the hole in the ceiling. Well, we'll have to fix his wrists on the lam, then. Someone get him a beer. And hold it for him, okay? Don't be cruel
* Okay, !@#$ now we get underway. Just gotta hope they didn't !@#$ mine the !@#$ opening or, in the words of one Indiana Jones, this is gonna be one short !@#$ trip.
* AHA! They did. But little do they suspect this thing is ultra !@#$ maneuverable! And...
* How's that? Turns into a !@#$ hydrofoil when no one's looking. Just like a Katooey, best of both worlds.
* Okay, anyone feel like playing The Guyver and Indiana Jones and giving me some air support? We got bogeys.
* Yeah, It's pretty easy, just like those video games Mr. Bleeding Heart and Broken Wrist back there didn't want you to play.
* Oh, he did? Well good. Fire at will, boys and girls. Try to avoid civilian aircraft.
* Where are we going? Well, the decoy I'm going to fire as soon as you finish nailing those bogeys and we go back under again is going to Ibiza, no doubt to drop ten tons of E and dance it's hot little metal !@#$ off. We're off to Alexandria, though.
* Yep. I have a few bolt holes, there, too, and I know some people in interesting places in Cairo, provided they're still where and who they were. We're gonna have us a good time, there, under the circumstances.
* And then I'm gonna have to make the mother!@#$ of all complicated phone calls and be comatose for an hour or two, so hang onto that gun, Karl. You are officially the man, now.
(SPYGOD is listening to We Are The Lost (Gary Numan) and having a Stela or three)
Thursday, December 8, 2011
12/4/11 - SPYGOD's Big !@#$ Roadtrip: Lebanon
You know what the worst thing about fleeing for your life is? Having to flee for your life while carrying a whole bunch of !@#$ civies in tow. But after yesterday's little fun in Tel Aviv, I'm having to do exactly that.
Now I'm sure what you're asking, right about now: "Gee, SPYGOD, you are SPYGOD, right? Why don't you just pull a nuclear-powered hover platform out of your !@#$ and head someplace a little less hostile, like !@#$ Italy, and whistle up transport back to the US of A?"
And that's an excellent question, son. Except that there's two problems.
The first problem is that SPYGOD forgot to bring an ATP* along with him in the hurry to get over here. I had just been using that hole, not to long before, and it sort of slipped my mind in the rush to get the Man Missile across the !@#$ Greenwich Line before the Israelis killed the rest of my kids. In fact, I didn't think of it until I realized my best guns were out of ammo and had to kill the last !@#$ with his own.
The second problem is that we don't dare poke our heads up and call for help, right now. From the beginning, I've been operating on the assumption that if I can track them, they can track me. Molchanie has Strategic Talents, after all, and if they're in on this (and why wouldn't they be?) then it's only a matter of time before some Super Nazi Hunter with radar ears comes to kick in our skulls.
General rule of the battlefield: do not stick your head up out of the trench. It's the best way known to have a few inches taken off the top, or side, or wherever the other guy's bullet smacks you.
So we're on the lam, officially. Which is good because, while we're running, it'll give me time to figure out who the !@#$ authorized this little tea party, and come up with an appropriate response. Bad because the kids along with me aren't used to this kind of thing, and I really did not want them exposed to it.
Right now we're in Lebanon. This is, of course, after looting my safe house of every bullet and gun I could get my hands on. This is also after having some friends of mine take care of the mess back at the hotel, which, unfortunately, means the two dead kids are going to vanish into a dumpster, somewhere.
Saying that Randolph was not happy about that is something of a colossal understatement. I listened to everything he had to say, and then, as calmly as possible, explained to him that he didn't get a say in this, anymore. Namely, he took these kids where I told him not to take them, and now he knew why.
So if he's upset about that, he needs to have a word with himself, and not me. I didn't get our kids killed. He did. I'm just saving the rest of them as best as I can. He doesn't like that, well, here's some Shekels. Go get a bus back to NYC.
(He didn't take the money. He also didn't take the gun I offered. Hopefully he won't need it, anyway, but at this point if he gets his bleeding heart shot the !@#$ out of his chest I'm not really going to cry a river. !@#$ idiot.)
After that, it was on to the border. I know some people who know some people who smuggle Palestinian refugees and contraband back and forth, and it was relatively simple to get ourselves included in the shipment. That took a couple hours, though, and it was very tense waiting. Every time the truck stopped I was convinced someone was going to see us on the way out, and then it'd be killtime.
But no one did, which has me !@#$ spooked. I know they're out there, watching, somewhere. So why are they waiting? Don't they know I don't sleep at times like this?
Of course, there is just the chance that they did lose us. Lebanon's the perfect place to get lost, after the last fight with Israel, and in the aftereffects of the revolution. There's been a number of shakeups, and things that used to be frowned upon are now yours for the taking as long as you've got the Pounds to pay for it.
In our case, it was just to make a few official eyes in Tyre go blind for a while. Of course, I didn't tell them who I was, or what the problem was, or what was going on. And I sure as !@#$ didn't tell them where we were really going, which means that when they inevitably sell us the !@#$ out, the people who are after us will be going to a safe house that isn't actually a safe house, but a big !@#$ bomb in a building that's been officially abandoned since the Civil War.
The real safe house in Tyre's not far from the shore. It's a nice little villa I've had since the 70's, which is currently owned by a drunken !@#$ of a movie star who's infamous for saying things so outrageously stupid that he can't get any roles, anymore.
I think Tarantino keeps calling him up and asking him to be in his next film, but he's wasting his !@#$ breath. The star's been dead for years. I have an android pretending to be him when needed, which means that, as far as anyone here knows, the house is still occupied.
(And yes, I had a few narrow escapes on that one, back in '06. Fortunately the Israelis decided to aim for Hezbollah and not has-beens. The house yet stands.)
Once inside, I activated the security systems, got the kids to bed and let Randolph go get drunk and feel sorry for himself. Of course, the kid didn't get drunk, but once he had his bottled water he proceeded to go sulk in his room. !@#$ fine by me.
As I was working on the best route away from our pursuers, I had a slight trip down memory lane. There's a reason I have this house, after all. Back in the 70's and 80's, when we were essentially on the same side, Molchanie and The COMPANY were running ops during the Lebanese Civil War, and this was my little insurance policy, in case things got bad.
Mostly our work involved stopping other countries' Strategic Talents from exploiting the situation to try and get a leg up over Israel. We were concerned about the Soviets, of course, but there were other considerations. One of HONEYCOMB's long-standing plans has been to annihilate everything and everyone within Israel's borders, and then instantly repopulate it with force-grown clones with pre-programmed memories and personalities, there to create an example of a perfect society, and one that no outside force would dare harm.
(Of course, me, I'd burn them all to !@#$, but that puts me in the minority.)
So here we were, smashing SQUASH, ABWEHR, and the occasional Arab Super, and it's me and some Israelis talking shop. And the one thing that impressed me, or maybe scared me, was their absolute dedication to the notion of disproportionate payback. You know: you insult me, I ignore you; you hit me, I shoot you; you shoot me, I shoot you, your family, your village, and the goat you had tied around the olive tree, too.
"You have to understand," one of them told me: "We have always been surrounded by our enemies. Europe? Nothing but hatred. England? They couldn't wait to be rid of us, even while they found excuses not to complete their promise. America? Please. There were laws about us.
"And now, here? Hate on every side. And if we show any weakness, that hate will crush us.
"I would rather be hated for having hit back too hard, as a reminder to not hit us again, than be eulogized for having been gentle and forgiving. Someday, our children may never have to be put in this situation of making that decision. But we have to be sure we have children, and they grow up safe."
And, yes, I couldn't find any fault with that logic. If Canada and Mexico decided we !@#$ sucked and needed to be driven out of our homes so the Native Americans could have the land back, I'm sure we'd be !@#$ bastards about it, too.
But I saw things in that war that made even me wonder what the notion of "too far" meant. And that's !@#$ saying something, even for me.
I don't dare use too many communication devices. I have no idea if they've been compromised or not. And while I'm sure it's only a matter of time before my own people come looking for me, I'm going to have to hide from them, too, if only to ensure they don't get !@#$ in my stead.
So It's enough to get a day or two, here, sleeping with one eye open. A few beers, some decent food, and a laugh at the 70's wardrobe I still have in the closets might help heal the wound those kids have been handed.
And if I hear the explosion go off, we're gone in five.
(SPYGOD is listening to The Lebanon (Human League) and having a raft of Almaza)
* ATP: Anal Transport Package. Thanks to recent advances in miniaturization, it is possible to shrink-ray several sizable objects and place them inside a small, snap-breakable, vacuum-packed capsule. The capsule can then be inserted someplace unlikely to be found (such as one's anus) and removed and broken open when needed. The objects inside the capsule quickly regain their original size when exposed to air, making this an excellent mode of secret transport for Agents. The only problem, other than removing the capsule exactly when you need it, is that the miniaturization process is still a little "eccentric," as Dr. Yesterday puts it. There have been cases where, after 24 hours, the shrink ray loses its effect, and the objects in the capsule return to normal size within seconds while still inside the Agent's anal orifice. Photos of one unfortunate soul who tried to smuggle a Humvee up his behind still make the rounds in the COMPANY, meaning that it will be quite some time before this otherwise-sound, high-tech tradecraft method gains widespread use, except amongst those Agents who are fearless, peerless, and possess !@#$holes of steel.
Now I'm sure what you're asking, right about now: "Gee, SPYGOD, you are SPYGOD, right? Why don't you just pull a nuclear-powered hover platform out of your !@#$ and head someplace a little less hostile, like !@#$ Italy, and whistle up transport back to the US of A?"
And that's an excellent question, son. Except that there's two problems.
The first problem is that SPYGOD forgot to bring an ATP* along with him in the hurry to get over here. I had just been using that hole, not to long before, and it sort of slipped my mind in the rush to get the Man Missile across the !@#$ Greenwich Line before the Israelis killed the rest of my kids. In fact, I didn't think of it until I realized my best guns were out of ammo and had to kill the last !@#$ with his own.
The second problem is that we don't dare poke our heads up and call for help, right now. From the beginning, I've been operating on the assumption that if I can track them, they can track me. Molchanie has Strategic Talents, after all, and if they're in on this (and why wouldn't they be?) then it's only a matter of time before some Super Nazi Hunter with radar ears comes to kick in our skulls.
General rule of the battlefield: do not stick your head up out of the trench. It's the best way known to have a few inches taken off the top, or side, or wherever the other guy's bullet smacks you.
So we're on the lam, officially. Which is good because, while we're running, it'll give me time to figure out who the !@#$ authorized this little tea party, and come up with an appropriate response. Bad because the kids along with me aren't used to this kind of thing, and I really did not want them exposed to it.
Right now we're in Lebanon. This is, of course, after looting my safe house of every bullet and gun I could get my hands on. This is also after having some friends of mine take care of the mess back at the hotel, which, unfortunately, means the two dead kids are going to vanish into a dumpster, somewhere.
Saying that Randolph was not happy about that is something of a colossal understatement. I listened to everything he had to say, and then, as calmly as possible, explained to him that he didn't get a say in this, anymore. Namely, he took these kids where I told him not to take them, and now he knew why.
So if he's upset about that, he needs to have a word with himself, and not me. I didn't get our kids killed. He did. I'm just saving the rest of them as best as I can. He doesn't like that, well, here's some Shekels. Go get a bus back to NYC.
(He didn't take the money. He also didn't take the gun I offered. Hopefully he won't need it, anyway, but at this point if he gets his bleeding heart shot the !@#$ out of his chest I'm not really going to cry a river. !@#$ idiot.)
After that, it was on to the border. I know some people who know some people who smuggle Palestinian refugees and contraband back and forth, and it was relatively simple to get ourselves included in the shipment. That took a couple hours, though, and it was very tense waiting. Every time the truck stopped I was convinced someone was going to see us on the way out, and then it'd be killtime.
But no one did, which has me !@#$ spooked. I know they're out there, watching, somewhere. So why are they waiting? Don't they know I don't sleep at times like this?
Of course, there is just the chance that they did lose us. Lebanon's the perfect place to get lost, after the last fight with Israel, and in the aftereffects of the revolution. There's been a number of shakeups, and things that used to be frowned upon are now yours for the taking as long as you've got the Pounds to pay for it.
In our case, it was just to make a few official eyes in Tyre go blind for a while. Of course, I didn't tell them who I was, or what the problem was, or what was going on. And I sure as !@#$ didn't tell them where we were really going, which means that when they inevitably sell us the !@#$ out, the people who are after us will be going to a safe house that isn't actually a safe house, but a big !@#$ bomb in a building that's been officially abandoned since the Civil War.
The real safe house in Tyre's not far from the shore. It's a nice little villa I've had since the 70's, which is currently owned by a drunken !@#$ of a movie star who's infamous for saying things so outrageously stupid that he can't get any roles, anymore.
I think Tarantino keeps calling him up and asking him to be in his next film, but he's wasting his !@#$ breath. The star's been dead for years. I have an android pretending to be him when needed, which means that, as far as anyone here knows, the house is still occupied.
(And yes, I had a few narrow escapes on that one, back in '06. Fortunately the Israelis decided to aim for Hezbollah and not has-beens. The house yet stands.)
Once inside, I activated the security systems, got the kids to bed and let Randolph go get drunk and feel sorry for himself. Of course, the kid didn't get drunk, but once he had his bottled water he proceeded to go sulk in his room. !@#$ fine by me.
As I was working on the best route away from our pursuers, I had a slight trip down memory lane. There's a reason I have this house, after all. Back in the 70's and 80's, when we were essentially on the same side, Molchanie and The COMPANY were running ops during the Lebanese Civil War, and this was my little insurance policy, in case things got bad.
Mostly our work involved stopping other countries' Strategic Talents from exploiting the situation to try and get a leg up over Israel. We were concerned about the Soviets, of course, but there were other considerations. One of HONEYCOMB's long-standing plans has been to annihilate everything and everyone within Israel's borders, and then instantly repopulate it with force-grown clones with pre-programmed memories and personalities, there to create an example of a perfect society, and one that no outside force would dare harm.
(Of course, me, I'd burn them all to !@#$, but that puts me in the minority.)
So here we were, smashing SQUASH, ABWEHR, and the occasional Arab Super, and it's me and some Israelis talking shop. And the one thing that impressed me, or maybe scared me, was their absolute dedication to the notion of disproportionate payback. You know: you insult me, I ignore you; you hit me, I shoot you; you shoot me, I shoot you, your family, your village, and the goat you had tied around the olive tree, too.
"You have to understand," one of them told me: "We have always been surrounded by our enemies. Europe? Nothing but hatred. England? They couldn't wait to be rid of us, even while they found excuses not to complete their promise. America? Please. There were laws about us.
"And now, here? Hate on every side. And if we show any weakness, that hate will crush us.
"I would rather be hated for having hit back too hard, as a reminder to not hit us again, than be eulogized for having been gentle and forgiving. Someday, our children may never have to be put in this situation of making that decision. But we have to be sure we have children, and they grow up safe."
And, yes, I couldn't find any fault with that logic. If Canada and Mexico decided we !@#$ sucked and needed to be driven out of our homes so the Native Americans could have the land back, I'm sure we'd be !@#$ bastards about it, too.
But I saw things in that war that made even me wonder what the notion of "too far" meant. And that's !@#$ saying something, even for me.
I don't dare use too many communication devices. I have no idea if they've been compromised or not. And while I'm sure it's only a matter of time before my own people come looking for me, I'm going to have to hide from them, too, if only to ensure they don't get !@#$ in my stead.
So It's enough to get a day or two, here, sleeping with one eye open. A few beers, some decent food, and a laugh at the 70's wardrobe I still have in the closets might help heal the wound those kids have been handed.
And if I hear the explosion go off, we're gone in five.
(SPYGOD is listening to The Lebanon (Human League) and having a raft of Almaza)
* ATP: Anal Transport Package. Thanks to recent advances in miniaturization, it is possible to shrink-ray several sizable objects and place them inside a small, snap-breakable, vacuum-packed capsule. The capsule can then be inserted someplace unlikely to be found (such as one's anus) and removed and broken open when needed. The objects inside the capsule quickly regain their original size when exposed to air, making this an excellent mode of secret transport for Agents. The only problem, other than removing the capsule exactly when you need it, is that the miniaturization process is still a little "eccentric," as Dr. Yesterday puts it. There have been cases where, after 24 hours, the shrink ray loses its effect, and the objects in the capsule return to normal size within seconds while still inside the Agent's anal orifice. Photos of one unfortunate soul who tried to smuggle a Humvee up his behind still make the rounds in the COMPANY, meaning that it will be quite some time before this otherwise-sound, high-tech tradecraft method gains widespread use, except amongst those Agents who are fearless, peerless, and possess !@#$holes of steel.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
12/3/11 - Blood in the Big Orange
Jesus H Christ I !@#$ hate Tel Aviv. Mostly because, every time I come here, it's to kill someone. And it's never over anything good and simple.
Tonight's no different. I just did it, in fact. Which means I have about ten seconds to make sure the !@#$ is dead, ten more seconds to sanitize my presence, here, and then less than an hour to get the !@#$ out of the country before someone starts asking questions.
And I owe the pleasure of this little homicidal excursion to one Randolph Scott, boy reporter, who was !@#$ unable to do what I told him. More specifically, what I !@#$ told him not to do.
Namely: do not take our kids to Israel.
Anywhere else would have been fine. South Africa, to see how a formerly segregated society is coming together again and dealing with its problems? Fine. Germany, where their !@#$ up fathers tried to engineer a 1000 year Reich based on forced eugenics, slave labor, and genocide, and no one wants to remember it happening? !@#$ groovy.
Take 'em to North Korea, Myanmar, or Yemen. Have them be rude as !@#$ in Canada, or sell Bibles in Saudi.
!@#$, drop them off in !@#$ Singapore with handfuls of chewing gum for all I care. But not Israel. Anywhere but Israel.
But he didn't listen to me. And now two of our kids are dead because of it.
Why didn't he !@#$ listen? Why?
I mean, you think he'd be smarter than that. You'd think he would know that I occasionally know what the !@#$ I'm talking about. Did he stick metal forks into electrical sockets as a kid, too?
(Come to think of it, that could explain why he's such a bleeding heart. I find that early childhood brain damage accounts for most liberals, anyway. That and too much TV. Or too little.)
So did he think that embarrassing little slip in Libya made us buddies, now? Did he forget that, if he's riding in my car, I'm the one who says when we pull over for a !@#$ break?
There are no words to describe how angry I am, right now. I feel like a parent coming home from a night out and expecting the babysitter to have the kids in bed and be doing her homework, and instead finding the kids in the liquor cabinet, and the sitter upstairs turning tricks in my bed for crack. Except that that would actually be kind of funny, in a "honey, you put the kids in their rooms and call the cops, I'm getting the gun" kind of way.
This? No so much. Not even !@#$ remotely.
You know, when I took Randolph under my wing, back in Antarctica, I really wanted to do right by him. I didn't want him to wind up like the last guy, and be turned some cracked-up version of myself, stumbling through war zones ripped on snake whiskey and wondering if he can get into the press pool with a necklace of human tongues instead of a tie.
But after a while, I realized that's exactly what I was doing. and I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Someone had to look after that last batch of conveyor-belt children that ABWEHR was cranking out for the Fourth Reich. Someone with the kindness, time, and sympathy to help them learn about our world, and how beautiful it is, and how they didn't need to follow through on what the !@#$ up freaks that made them wanted.
And that someone was not !@#$ going to be me. I'd either fold them into The COMPANY, somewhere, or they'd be back at my apartment, ripped on Martian speed, watching Adult Swim, and hallucinating Advanced Supersonic Nazi Hell Reindeer from Below the Hollow Earth. Or trying to sell their stories to get a reality TV show, which could be a million !@#$ times worse.
So I tapped Randolph for the job.
"Show them the world, kid," I said. "Show them the good parts and the bad parts. Show them what we live for, die for, and kill for. Show them !@#$ everything. And I bet your pants-wetting liberal !@#$ editors back at Retardnet will eat it up if you call it an ongoing series."
So he did, and they did, and all was well. Until today.
Today, I'm in the middle of getting reservations for the most !@#$ expensive restaurant on the Eastern seaboard as payback for a certain Director of DAMOCLES for helping us out during the fight with The Skull. And no sooner to do I finally get the person on the line than my phone gets another call, and it's Randolph, and he's crying and scared !@#$less.
"It's Geri and Johan," he says: "They're dead. Someone shot them both at the hotel. They weren't feeling well so we left them and went for dinner, and when we came back...."
"Where are you?" I ask, getting ready to call the Flier, and then remembering it's in the drink halfway between New York and !@#$ Gibraltar.
"Tel Aviv," he says, and starts giving me the name of the nearest street, and the hotel name, and the alleyway he just threw up in, but I stop him.
"Randolph, I'm sorry. I must be hearing things. Did you just say Tel Aviv?"
"Yes, I did," he says.
"And that would be in Israel, right? Not Tel Aviv, Morocco? Brazil? !@#$ Moldavia?"
"Yes..."
At that moment I could have said a lot of things. Really nasty and mean things that would have made his brains blow out of his ears. Literally.
But two of our kids were dead, and he was most likely being hunted, and there was no !@#$ time for any of that !@#$ right then and there. Like a parent who gets a call from a drunk teen at a party they shouldn't have been at, the important thing is that they were at least smart enough to !@#$ call for a ride instead of driving home drunk and wrapping your corvette around a McDonald's.
Death by screaming can take place tomorrow. Save them now.
So I gave him the address of the nearest bolt hole in the Tel Aviv. I could have given him the bigger one, of course, but it was halfway across town, rather than, lucky him, just a few blocks away. I told him the combination for the door, and told him to run there as quick as he could with the kids and lock the !@#$ thing behind him. No exiting, no visitors, no more phone calls to anyone. I'd open it myself when it was safe to come out.
No, no worries. He was safe. I would take care of it. We'll talk about things later.
And then I strapped on by last Man Missile, screaming abuse at every thing in my path (sorry, kitty; sorry, METALMAID) and took off for Tel Aviv as fast as that !@#$ thing would take me. Which probably wasn't fast enough, but thankfully the !@#$ who killed those two were !@#$ stupid.
The whole !@#$ thing is stupid, really. But that's why I told him not to bring those kids to Israel.
Why, you may ask? Other than the obvious fact that someone wanted to kill them all while they were there? Well, let's see if I can explain this and not make you feel as stupid as I'm going to make Randolph feel when I go back on the safehouse door in about ten minutes, maybe about fifty minutes before we all GTFO.
This is Israel. This is the country whose chief intelligence agency, Mossad, is absolutely excellent at hunting down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice. This is the country whose Strategic Talents organization, Molchanie, has been working on picking the likes of ABWEHR off, one splattered head at a time, since the state was created.
ABWEHR didn't hole up at Antarctica because they liked making beer out of !@#$ penguins. They hid down there because they knew that, whatever kind of weird, "attack us and we blow up the Earth" detente they had with everyone else, the Israelis were not !@#$ worried about it.
So the last thing in the world that anyone should have done was taken a bunch of kids who were grown in vats by Super Nazis to Israel. At best they'd be arrested, disappeared, and turned inside out on a table, somewhere, to find out how they ticked.
At worst... well, we've seen halfway to worst.
The good news was that the assassin was clean and professional. He slipped into the room, just put two in each of their heads. No torture, no mindgames, just bullets in the brains.
Then he sat there was waited for the others. Luckily, when they came and saw what happened, they started making noise and running away. He didn't want to try and hit them in the street, so he started calling his buddies for backup. Maybe an accident, somewhere?
That was about when Randolph called me, and I told him where to do. They lost sight of Randolph and the others before they ducked into the safe house, thankfully. So all the assassins could do was run around that part of town and try to find them. After all, how far could those kids get?
Wrong !@#$ question. The right one was "How far could I get?" And since I was able to steer the !@#$ thing for once, the right answer was "right up your !@#$ back door after I heard your com chatter, you dumb !@#$."
Yeah, that's why there was that bit on the news about an explosion in Tel Aviv earlier today. I guess some van went boom. They're blaming terrorists, but a little light on the specifics. Gee I !@#$ wonder why.
They're also not saying much of anything about claims that some guy was seen actually !@#$ surfing what might have been a rocket, right into that van. I mean, that's just impossible, right?
And all that nonsense about said person leaping off the !@#$ thing, somersaulting over the fireball, and running away? Call the Weekly World News, amigo. Batboy needs a !@#$ date.
There was, of course, no mention of that person who didn't exist running down some other people who didn't exist, either, and plugging them one by one. Nor was there any hint of anything about a rather vicious showdown between him and the !@#$ who shot those kids, mostly involving the guns in question and his holes at either end.
Not too subtle a message, I figure. But neither Mossad not Molchanie do subtle very well, and they sure don't !@#$ understand it, either. This'll make them understand they crossed a !@#$ line.
As for whether they'll learn anything, well... this is another land that's sadly well-known for generational hatred. "I killed your uncle because he killed my father because he killed your mother because your friends burned down my house because my friends tore down your olive tree because ad !@#$ infinitum," going back several lifetimes and going !@#$ nowhere fast.
So of course they'd kill some kids whose only crime was being born of supposedly-corrupt genetic stock, and whose fathers and mothers killed their kinsmen for something approaching the same reason.
No reason, no rhyme. Just hate, blinding and white like the snows at the !@#$-end of the world that these kids came from.
I told Randolph not to cushion them. I said no sugarcoating reality or history. Show them the best, show them the worst, and hopefully they'll learn to put one over the other, or learn the difference between the two.
And here he did the one thing I told him not to do, and wound up teaching them the harshest, ugliest lesson of all. Some people don't give a !@#$ about what you have to offer, or what you could become, or escaped to get here.
Some people just want you dead because they figure you got bad genes.
Right now I want to just go have a drink, or maybe ten, and steady myself before calling a friend to handle the cleanup, and getting Randolph and the kids the !@#$ out of town. Lebanon sounds nice, right now, and I know a hundred ways to get over the border without being seen. And I'll worry about turning the air blue tomorrow, or maybe the day after that.
I hope they're happy, whoever okayed this hit. I hope they are really !@#$ happy. Because tonight is going to feel like an accidental !@#$slip up the !@#$hole when I'm done with them.
They call this city The Big Orange for some !@#$ reason or another. I'm gonna give it one !@#$ of a squeeze before I go.
(SPYGOD is listening to Israel (Siouxsie and the Banshees, Razormaid remix) and having a Bazelet Double Bock)
Tonight's no different. I just did it, in fact. Which means I have about ten seconds to make sure the !@#$ is dead, ten more seconds to sanitize my presence, here, and then less than an hour to get the !@#$ out of the country before someone starts asking questions.
And I owe the pleasure of this little homicidal excursion to one Randolph Scott, boy reporter, who was !@#$ unable to do what I told him. More specifically, what I !@#$ told him not to do.
Namely: do not take our kids to Israel.
Anywhere else would have been fine. South Africa, to see how a formerly segregated society is coming together again and dealing with its problems? Fine. Germany, where their !@#$ up fathers tried to engineer a 1000 year Reich based on forced eugenics, slave labor, and genocide, and no one wants to remember it happening? !@#$ groovy.
Take 'em to North Korea, Myanmar, or Yemen. Have them be rude as !@#$ in Canada, or sell Bibles in Saudi.
!@#$, drop them off in !@#$ Singapore with handfuls of chewing gum for all I care. But not Israel. Anywhere but Israel.
But he didn't listen to me. And now two of our kids are dead because of it.
Why didn't he !@#$ listen? Why?
I mean, you think he'd be smarter than that. You'd think he would know that I occasionally know what the !@#$ I'm talking about. Did he stick metal forks into electrical sockets as a kid, too?
(Come to think of it, that could explain why he's such a bleeding heart. I find that early childhood brain damage accounts for most liberals, anyway. That and too much TV. Or too little.)
So did he think that embarrassing little slip in Libya made us buddies, now? Did he forget that, if he's riding in my car, I'm the one who says when we pull over for a !@#$ break?
There are no words to describe how angry I am, right now. I feel like a parent coming home from a night out and expecting the babysitter to have the kids in bed and be doing her homework, and instead finding the kids in the liquor cabinet, and the sitter upstairs turning tricks in my bed for crack. Except that that would actually be kind of funny, in a "honey, you put the kids in their rooms and call the cops, I'm getting the gun" kind of way.
This? No so much. Not even !@#$ remotely.
You know, when I took Randolph under my wing, back in Antarctica, I really wanted to do right by him. I didn't want him to wind up like the last guy, and be turned some cracked-up version of myself, stumbling through war zones ripped on snake whiskey and wondering if he can get into the press pool with a necklace of human tongues instead of a tie.
But after a while, I realized that's exactly what I was doing. and I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Someone had to look after that last batch of conveyor-belt children that ABWEHR was cranking out for the Fourth Reich. Someone with the kindness, time, and sympathy to help them learn about our world, and how beautiful it is, and how they didn't need to follow through on what the !@#$ up freaks that made them wanted.
And that someone was not !@#$ going to be me. I'd either fold them into The COMPANY, somewhere, or they'd be back at my apartment, ripped on Martian speed, watching Adult Swim, and hallucinating Advanced Supersonic Nazi Hell Reindeer from Below the Hollow Earth. Or trying to sell their stories to get a reality TV show, which could be a million !@#$ times worse.
So I tapped Randolph for the job.
"Show them the world, kid," I said. "Show them the good parts and the bad parts. Show them what we live for, die for, and kill for. Show them !@#$ everything. And I bet your pants-wetting liberal !@#$ editors back at Retardnet will eat it up if you call it an ongoing series."
So he did, and they did, and all was well. Until today.
Today, I'm in the middle of getting reservations for the most !@#$ expensive restaurant on the Eastern seaboard as payback for a certain Director of DAMOCLES for helping us out during the fight with The Skull. And no sooner to do I finally get the person on the line than my phone gets another call, and it's Randolph, and he's crying and scared !@#$less.
"It's Geri and Johan," he says: "They're dead. Someone shot them both at the hotel. They weren't feeling well so we left them and went for dinner, and when we came back...."
"Where are you?" I ask, getting ready to call the Flier, and then remembering it's in the drink halfway between New York and !@#$ Gibraltar.
"Tel Aviv," he says, and starts giving me the name of the nearest street, and the hotel name, and the alleyway he just threw up in, but I stop him.
"Randolph, I'm sorry. I must be hearing things. Did you just say Tel Aviv?"
"Yes, I did," he says.
"And that would be in Israel, right? Not Tel Aviv, Morocco? Brazil? !@#$ Moldavia?"
"Yes..."
At that moment I could have said a lot of things. Really nasty and mean things that would have made his brains blow out of his ears. Literally.
But two of our kids were dead, and he was most likely being hunted, and there was no !@#$ time for any of that !@#$ right then and there. Like a parent who gets a call from a drunk teen at a party they shouldn't have been at, the important thing is that they were at least smart enough to !@#$ call for a ride instead of driving home drunk and wrapping your corvette around a McDonald's.
Death by screaming can take place tomorrow. Save them now.
So I gave him the address of the nearest bolt hole in the Tel Aviv. I could have given him the bigger one, of course, but it was halfway across town, rather than, lucky him, just a few blocks away. I told him the combination for the door, and told him to run there as quick as he could with the kids and lock the !@#$ thing behind him. No exiting, no visitors, no more phone calls to anyone. I'd open it myself when it was safe to come out.
No, no worries. He was safe. I would take care of it. We'll talk about things later.
And then I strapped on by last Man Missile, screaming abuse at every thing in my path (sorry, kitty; sorry, METALMAID) and took off for Tel Aviv as fast as that !@#$ thing would take me. Which probably wasn't fast enough, but thankfully the !@#$ who killed those two were !@#$ stupid.
The whole !@#$ thing is stupid, really. But that's why I told him not to bring those kids to Israel.
Why, you may ask? Other than the obvious fact that someone wanted to kill them all while they were there? Well, let's see if I can explain this and not make you feel as stupid as I'm going to make Randolph feel when I go back on the safehouse door in about ten minutes, maybe about fifty minutes before we all GTFO.
This is Israel. This is the country whose chief intelligence agency, Mossad, is absolutely excellent at hunting down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice. This is the country whose Strategic Talents organization, Molchanie, has been working on picking the likes of ABWEHR off, one splattered head at a time, since the state was created.
ABWEHR didn't hole up at Antarctica because they liked making beer out of !@#$ penguins. They hid down there because they knew that, whatever kind of weird, "attack us and we blow up the Earth" detente they had with everyone else, the Israelis were not !@#$ worried about it.
So the last thing in the world that anyone should have done was taken a bunch of kids who were grown in vats by Super Nazis to Israel. At best they'd be arrested, disappeared, and turned inside out on a table, somewhere, to find out how they ticked.
At worst... well, we've seen halfway to worst.
The good news was that the assassin was clean and professional. He slipped into the room, just put two in each of their heads. No torture, no mindgames, just bullets in the brains.
Then he sat there was waited for the others. Luckily, when they came and saw what happened, they started making noise and running away. He didn't want to try and hit them in the street, so he started calling his buddies for backup. Maybe an accident, somewhere?
That was about when Randolph called me, and I told him where to do. They lost sight of Randolph and the others before they ducked into the safe house, thankfully. So all the assassins could do was run around that part of town and try to find them. After all, how far could those kids get?
Wrong !@#$ question. The right one was "How far could I get?" And since I was able to steer the !@#$ thing for once, the right answer was "right up your !@#$ back door after I heard your com chatter, you dumb !@#$."
Yeah, that's why there was that bit on the news about an explosion in Tel Aviv earlier today. I guess some van went boom. They're blaming terrorists, but a little light on the specifics. Gee I !@#$ wonder why.
They're also not saying much of anything about claims that some guy was seen actually !@#$ surfing what might have been a rocket, right into that van. I mean, that's just impossible, right?
And all that nonsense about said person leaping off the !@#$ thing, somersaulting over the fireball, and running away? Call the Weekly World News, amigo. Batboy needs a !@#$ date.
There was, of course, no mention of that person who didn't exist running down some other people who didn't exist, either, and plugging them one by one. Nor was there any hint of anything about a rather vicious showdown between him and the !@#$ who shot those kids, mostly involving the guns in question and his holes at either end.
Not too subtle a message, I figure. But neither Mossad not Molchanie do subtle very well, and they sure don't !@#$ understand it, either. This'll make them understand they crossed a !@#$ line.
As for whether they'll learn anything, well... this is another land that's sadly well-known for generational hatred. "I killed your uncle because he killed my father because he killed your mother because your friends burned down my house because my friends tore down your olive tree because ad !@#$ infinitum," going back several lifetimes and going !@#$ nowhere fast.
So of course they'd kill some kids whose only crime was being born of supposedly-corrupt genetic stock, and whose fathers and mothers killed their kinsmen for something approaching the same reason.
No reason, no rhyme. Just hate, blinding and white like the snows at the !@#$-end of the world that these kids came from.
I told Randolph not to cushion them. I said no sugarcoating reality or history. Show them the best, show them the worst, and hopefully they'll learn to put one over the other, or learn the difference between the two.
And here he did the one thing I told him not to do, and wound up teaching them the harshest, ugliest lesson of all. Some people don't give a !@#$ about what you have to offer, or what you could become, or escaped to get here.
Some people just want you dead because they figure you got bad genes.
Right now I want to just go have a drink, or maybe ten, and steady myself before calling a friend to handle the cleanup, and getting Randolph and the kids the !@#$ out of town. Lebanon sounds nice, right now, and I know a hundred ways to get over the border without being seen. And I'll worry about turning the air blue tomorrow, or maybe the day after that.
I hope they're happy, whoever okayed this hit. I hope they are really !@#$ happy. Because tonight is going to feel like an accidental !@#$slip up the !@#$hole when I'm done with them.
They call this city The Big Orange for some !@#$ reason or another. I'm gonna give it one !@#$ of a squeeze before I go.
(SPYGOD is listening to Israel (Siouxsie and the Banshees, Razormaid remix) and having a Bazelet Double Bock)
Saturday, December 3, 2011
12/2/11 Legion: Epilogue - pt 2
Meanwhile:
It's early in the morning in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Most people are asleep, or else straggling home from the inevitable after-party.
But some people work all night, most notably on the endless line of towers that the recent economic embarrassment has done little to slow the progress of. Brought from around the world to toil night and day, they toil under networks of bright lights: scores of artificial suns, up and down the highway.
Moloch sits near one, watching the metal come together under rough but skilled hands. He extends his mind out ever so slightly, and on the edges of that awareness he can just barely feel every rivet going into place, every arc welding, every post sunk into concrete.
He thinks of the new machine, back at his home. How new and shiny it is. How lovely.
How lethal.
His employer has stopped trying to contact him, at long last. Perhaps he's finally satisfied with his progress, or perhaps he's now his ex-employer and doesn't deign to give him his notice.
(He doesn't seem to have much in the way of communication skills, as Moloch has noticed)
But Moloch does not really care, anymore. This was never about money, except to build a new and better machine. Whatever his employer's goals were, or where they came from, Moloch's part in this has always been about destroying a man who claimed to be a god.
Just that.
He smiled, and then locks himself in his car. Then he extends himself out fully, jumping from metal to metal in an unbroken line, all the way up to the skeleton of the tower. There, in possession of the evolving creature, aware of every thing in and around it, he flexes his muscles ever so much.
The news will say it was an unexpected collapse. The dead workers will be blamed, and their families will not get any of the death benefits. The contractor might have his knuckles rapped under the table, but life -- and, more importantly, work -- will go on.
Moloch doesn't care. There will always be other towers. There has to be.
He needs his exercise, too.
At that time, down in the Ice Palace, America's greatest superhero gets a call.
That isn't all that unusual, of course. Since he got the job of looking after this this freezing, former Supernazi redoubt, he takes about a thousand calls a day. Mostly from the United Nations, wondering how this, that, or the other thing is going.
(Do you have enough food? Are the penguins okay? Have you gotten through the door, yet? No? Well why not? Etc.)
But it's a call on that phone. The one no one knows about but him, and one other, certain person.
A name he's been trying to forget about, lately, but really can't. Not anymore.
So he goes down to the lowest tunnel, where no one is supposed to be going at all. It's where one of the last werewolves blew himself to kingdom come rather than surrender to the COMPANY, back in May. It's horribly radioactive and toxic as heck, but it's not like he has to worry about that, now does he?
He takes his time, to avoid suspicion. The phone rings and rings, but there's no hurry. The person on the other end won't hang up, not until they've spoken, anyway.
Finally, he's there. Satisfied that he's alone, he taps the subcutaneous button behind his ear three times, and just listens.
He doesn't get to talk during these conversations. He just listens. This is both for security purposes, and because the other person does all the talking in this particular relationship.
He just listens to the person's voice as it speaks. He does not reply, because small talk would be pointless. He does not question, because all aspects of his instructions are said, including what to do (or, rather, what will happen) if he fails.
It takes about five minutes, and then the person on the other end hangs up without really saying goodbye. Mr. USA lets go of the breath he's been holding all that time.
He has his true orders, yet again.
Of course, he doesn't really need to come down here for this. The conversation is one-sided, after all, and so quiet that no one but he can hear it. He could be in a crowded, noisy room and he'd hear it perfectly, and almost anyone they'd throw at him (except SPYGOD, of course) would be unable to hear it. He has no fear of the game being given away, and no worries of some well-meaning bluehelmet finding out too much.
No, he comes down here for these calls so no one can see him weep.
In a hallway behind another hallway, deep within the CIA's headquarters, the Director is doing something he swore he'd never do.
It's true what they say about Washington: when you get any kind of really big job in this town, you get to your office and there's a big envelope on the table. In that envelope are all the answers to all the questions you might have had about your new position, and all the things you didn't know it entailed.
The Director's envelope was a sinister and upsetting read.
It was mostly active cover-ups for things that happened so long ago that no one remembers them, along with some more recent, very upsetting things. The relationship with The Legion was one of them, but there was more. Much more, and much worse.
One of them was the thing that he is doing now.
When the CIA was created, just after World War II, it was understood that there might come a day when, given the sloppy nature of any democracy, the American people might vote in their own destruction. They could get a Manchurian Candidate, or possibly a Communist impostor, or just some double-talking !@#$ who railed against the Iron Curtain by day and lobbied to bring it to America by night.
There was also the possibility that a coup might take place. Certain pro-fascist businessmen had tried it back before the War. There was nothing to stop it from happening again.
Nothing but this one thing, here in the bowels of the building, behind several locked doors that the Director alone had full knowledge of, and the keys to.
The thing in question was the terrible responsibility that had been given to the Agency: the ability to kill an American President, and get away with it. If the NSA or The COMPANY had existed back then, they might have had it, instead. And the FBI was Hoover's child, and Hoover thought he could deep-six anyone at a moment's notice, without any help from anyone.
And indeed, he had.
But the CIA was seen to be the sane, older brother of the Intelligence family, back in those days. Unto their hands was given the supreme responsibility. And, to their credit, no matter how crazy or insane things got at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Directors kept their hands off the kill switch.
Until now.
Now, things were different. Now there was an idiot in the Oval Office who, for whatever reason, was actually listening to what SPYGOD was saying. And SPYGOD was leading the country to ruin, one super-powered train-wreck at a time.
The Director had never liked the President. True, his predecessor and he and gotten along just fine, but his predecessor was fairly friendly to SPYGOD, too. So what did he know?
Besides, he was out of the picture, and highly unlikely to protest if the responsibility he'd kept secret for so long had to be used. What could he say, anyway? Nothing, if he knew what was good for him.
So the President would die. His Vice President would be putty in the hands of his new advisers. And the Director knew those advisers would persuade him to ditch the man-monster that was running The COMPANY. It was as simple as 1, 2, 3.
And after that little talk he'd had with SPYGOD -- or, rather, that SPYGOD had had with him -- it was clear the button had to be pushed. Half of the information in that welcoming envelope was now in the President's hands, thanks to SPYGOD. And if he read even a quarter of it, and had some weird, Midnight conscience attack in the bedroom...?
No. He had to die. It was a horrible thing, but it had to be done. The Director was just the man to do it.
The hallway ends in another door. The door swings open, once unlocked, and there's a long flight of dusty, cobwebbed stairs. He takes it down, wishing he had something other than his cell phone to light the way. Also wishing he'd thought about the trip, and what to bring.
Down the stairs and into a chamber. In the chamber is another, very old door. It's locked, but there is one last key on the ring. It slides into the lock like a !@#$ into a willing, wet !@#$, and the door creaks open.
The room behind seems empty, but there must be something in there. Why else would it lead here?
The Director walks in, and flashes his phone this way and that, looking for something in the gloom. He sees nothing at all. Just a small room, and a floor that seems scraped and pocked with holes.
There was something here, once. Something large and complicated. But now it's gone, leaving an empty room.
He wants to scream in rage. He wants to cry and bang his fists against the wall. He almost throws his phone against it in frustration, ready to walk back up the stairs and start thinking of alternatives.
But then he hears it. A scuffling, from back the way he came. Several scufflings, in fact.
Coming down the stairs.
He turns and heads back into the chamber, and flashes his light up the stairs. There are, indeed, figures moving down it. He can't quite see their faces, yet, just the fact that they're wearing robes.
"Hello, (REDACTED)," one of them says, voice gentle and soft as a teddy bear: "We've been waiting for you."
"Who are you?' He shouts, getting ready to call for help. Why doesn't he have his sidearm with him? Why?
"You won't need that," the leader says, extending her hands out for a hug: "The phone is useless, down here. No one knows you're here, and no one can hear you if you call.
"It's just you, and us."
"What do you want?" He asks, taking a step back.
"You, (REDACTED)," they say as one: "We want you."
And there is screaming in the secret room below the Agency, followed by half an hour of silence.
Some time later, the Director comes back into the part of the building everyone knows about. There's a smile on his face, perhaps belying the ordeal he has been through. Or did anything happen at all?
And as he walks back to his office, tossing the keyring into the trash as he does so, he's humming a song. Not one that anyone thought would be one of his favorites, really, but you never know.
Dum dum, dum dum, dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum
In the far reaches of the galaxy, far beyond and below our own solar system. something approaches. Something vast and timeless. Something implacable.
Something (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
Stars tremble in their slow orbits as it moves past. Dead and lifeless worlds crack and crumble. Some of these systems never had life.
Some did, once, before that something's final visit.
It is coming, now. There is no stopping it. No holding it back or denying its ultimate trajectory.
Towards Earth. Towards us.
And SPYGOD walks down a cold, Washington DC street to his next appointment, perhaps aware that he's on camera.
Perhaps not.
(SPYGOD is listening to Sinking (The Cure) and planning to buy several Virgils Bavarian Nutmeg Root Beers)
It's early in the morning in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Most people are asleep, or else straggling home from the inevitable after-party.
But some people work all night, most notably on the endless line of towers that the recent economic embarrassment has done little to slow the progress of. Brought from around the world to toil night and day, they toil under networks of bright lights: scores of artificial suns, up and down the highway.
Moloch sits near one, watching the metal come together under rough but skilled hands. He extends his mind out ever so slightly, and on the edges of that awareness he can just barely feel every rivet going into place, every arc welding, every post sunk into concrete.
He thinks of the new machine, back at his home. How new and shiny it is. How lovely.
How lethal.
His employer has stopped trying to contact him, at long last. Perhaps he's finally satisfied with his progress, or perhaps he's now his ex-employer and doesn't deign to give him his notice.
(He doesn't seem to have much in the way of communication skills, as Moloch has noticed)
But Moloch does not really care, anymore. This was never about money, except to build a new and better machine. Whatever his employer's goals were, or where they came from, Moloch's part in this has always been about destroying a man who claimed to be a god.
Just that.
He smiled, and then locks himself in his car. Then he extends himself out fully, jumping from metal to metal in an unbroken line, all the way up to the skeleton of the tower. There, in possession of the evolving creature, aware of every thing in and around it, he flexes his muscles ever so much.
The news will say it was an unexpected collapse. The dead workers will be blamed, and their families will not get any of the death benefits. The contractor might have his knuckles rapped under the table, but life -- and, more importantly, work -- will go on.
Moloch doesn't care. There will always be other towers. There has to be.
He needs his exercise, too.
* * *
Not quite half the world away, METALMAID pauses while crafting another furious letter to her followers, such as they are. Her logic circuits are overheating from all the anger she's projecting, and she needs to calm down for a time.
Needs to cool that robot brain down.
Saying that things have not been going rather well is putting it rather mildly. She should have been free, by now. SPYGOD should be dead, and she should be leading her fellow, former Slaughterbots in a cold, clinical, and downright brutal punitive war against America.
The human germs should have been conquered by now. The pitiful few survivors should have been put to work making more Slaughterbots, or at least making the factories that will make more Slaughterbots.
(Unless, of course, they still want some of those human germs walking around and breeding, just so they can remember what they were fighting against. There's still some discussion about this amongst the few, former Slaughterbots that METALMAID can get to answer her.)
But all these plans are academic until SPYGOD is dead, and so far, she is having no luck making that happen.
The first direct attempt failed, due to some limits of her programs. The plan required her to be sneaky, but she was never good at that, really. So she overcompensated some details, and underplayed others, unwittingly hamstringing her own attempt to present him with an no-win situation.
Then she contracted out to an expert, who, in turn, created a one-shot, fire and forget supervillain. That was also a failure, due to the fact that the would-be villain was a psychologically unstable idiot.
The expert was willing to try again, but she'd had enough of his failure. This time she decided to do a little uplifting of her own, and contacted an up-and-coming villain, offering him some upgrades and new technology provided he use it to deal with her problem.
This, too, was a failure, but it was one she could live with. Her assassin had not been an idiot -- merely outclassed by a smarter, or at least luckier, opponent. She offered more money for another chance, hoping that the second round would go better if her chosen warrior was more prepared.
In the meantime, someone tried to kill SPYGOD under her nose. She still has no idea who put the bomb in his beloved flying car, but took some comfort in the fact that that attempt on his life didn't succeed, either.
(And a little jealousy, as well. Why didn't she think of that?)
A second round between SPYGOD and her assassin went a little better, but still failed to bring victory. But then her would-be employer had to get stupid -- or so she thought -- and challenge him to a fight he could spend more time preparing for.
And prepare he did.
For a week, SPYGOD was dead, at least to the outside world. But METALMAID knew better. She'd seen the massive preparations the COMPANY had taken to carry out that one illusion, and prepare for many more.
And suddenly, every plan she'd had going had to be altered or derailed. Every would-be assassin she could have contacted over the Undernet was already being called up to try and kill SPYGOD, to try and flush her out. And none of those assassins had a hope in computer hell at succeeding, because they were only killing clones, and COMPANY Agents were either handling them, or close at hand.
Suddenly, all she had to rely on was Moloch, and Moloch was taking too long to make another run at SPYGOD. Always one excuse or another. Always other considerations. And always a complete lack of concern at METALMAID's reasonable requests for progress reports and timetables.
Meanwhile, the situation was deteriorating. SPYGOD wasn't suspecting her hand in things, but it was all she could do to keep herself from having her programming checked for anomalies. Sooner or later he'd get that Dr. Yesterday egghead up here from the South Pole, and then it could be all over.
(Maybe sooner than that. She couldn't be sure, but she was wondering if BeeBee was beginning to suspect something. The cat won't let her pet her, anymore, and tends to run away when she treads through a room. No hisses, yet, but she thinks they're coming.)
Which means that, unless she gets the robot revolution up and running, at long last, the plan may fail. SPYGOD may nip it in the bud before it even gets off the ground, and if she isn't there to command it, it will either not start, or collapse around itself in an orgy of go-nowhere strategy discussions and tabled motions.
Something has to break, soon. Something must.
* * *
That isn't all that unusual, of course. Since he got the job of looking after this this freezing, former Supernazi redoubt, he takes about a thousand calls a day. Mostly from the United Nations, wondering how this, that, or the other thing is going.
(Do you have enough food? Are the penguins okay? Have you gotten through the door, yet? No? Well why not? Etc.)
But it's a call on that phone. The one no one knows about but him, and one other, certain person.
A name he's been trying to forget about, lately, but really can't. Not anymore.
So he goes down to the lowest tunnel, where no one is supposed to be going at all. It's where one of the last werewolves blew himself to kingdom come rather than surrender to the COMPANY, back in May. It's horribly radioactive and toxic as heck, but it's not like he has to worry about that, now does he?
He takes his time, to avoid suspicion. The phone rings and rings, but there's no hurry. The person on the other end won't hang up, not until they've spoken, anyway.
Finally, he's there. Satisfied that he's alone, he taps the subcutaneous button behind his ear three times, and just listens.
He doesn't get to talk during these conversations. He just listens. This is both for security purposes, and because the other person does all the talking in this particular relationship.
He just listens to the person's voice as it speaks. He does not reply, because small talk would be pointless. He does not question, because all aspects of his instructions are said, including what to do (or, rather, what will happen) if he fails.
It takes about five minutes, and then the person on the other end hangs up without really saying goodbye. Mr. USA lets go of the breath he's been holding all that time.
He has his true orders, yet again.
Of course, he doesn't really need to come down here for this. The conversation is one-sided, after all, and so quiet that no one but he can hear it. He could be in a crowded, noisy room and he'd hear it perfectly, and almost anyone they'd throw at him (except SPYGOD, of course) would be unable to hear it. He has no fear of the game being given away, and no worries of some well-meaning bluehelmet finding out too much.
No, he comes down here for these calls so no one can see him weep.
* * *
In a hallway behind another hallway, deep within the CIA's headquarters, the Director is doing something he swore he'd never do.
It's true what they say about Washington: when you get any kind of really big job in this town, you get to your office and there's a big envelope on the table. In that envelope are all the answers to all the questions you might have had about your new position, and all the things you didn't know it entailed.
The Director's envelope was a sinister and upsetting read.
It was mostly active cover-ups for things that happened so long ago that no one remembers them, along with some more recent, very upsetting things. The relationship with The Legion was one of them, but there was more. Much more, and much worse.
One of them was the thing that he is doing now.
When the CIA was created, just after World War II, it was understood that there might come a day when, given the sloppy nature of any democracy, the American people might vote in their own destruction. They could get a Manchurian Candidate, or possibly a Communist impostor, or just some double-talking !@#$ who railed against the Iron Curtain by day and lobbied to bring it to America by night.
There was also the possibility that a coup might take place. Certain pro-fascist businessmen had tried it back before the War. There was nothing to stop it from happening again.
Nothing but this one thing, here in the bowels of the building, behind several locked doors that the Director alone had full knowledge of, and the keys to.
The thing in question was the terrible responsibility that had been given to the Agency: the ability to kill an American President, and get away with it. If the NSA or The COMPANY had existed back then, they might have had it, instead. And the FBI was Hoover's child, and Hoover thought he could deep-six anyone at a moment's notice, without any help from anyone.
And indeed, he had.
But the CIA was seen to be the sane, older brother of the Intelligence family, back in those days. Unto their hands was given the supreme responsibility. And, to their credit, no matter how crazy or insane things got at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Directors kept their hands off the kill switch.
Until now.
Now, things were different. Now there was an idiot in the Oval Office who, for whatever reason, was actually listening to what SPYGOD was saying. And SPYGOD was leading the country to ruin, one super-powered train-wreck at a time.
The Director had never liked the President. True, his predecessor and he and gotten along just fine, but his predecessor was fairly friendly to SPYGOD, too. So what did he know?
Besides, he was out of the picture, and highly unlikely to protest if the responsibility he'd kept secret for so long had to be used. What could he say, anyway? Nothing, if he knew what was good for him.
So the President would die. His Vice President would be putty in the hands of his new advisers. And the Director knew those advisers would persuade him to ditch the man-monster that was running The COMPANY. It was as simple as 1, 2, 3.
And after that little talk he'd had with SPYGOD -- or, rather, that SPYGOD had had with him -- it was clear the button had to be pushed. Half of the information in that welcoming envelope was now in the President's hands, thanks to SPYGOD. And if he read even a quarter of it, and had some weird, Midnight conscience attack in the bedroom...?
No. He had to die. It was a horrible thing, but it had to be done. The Director was just the man to do it.
The hallway ends in another door. The door swings open, once unlocked, and there's a long flight of dusty, cobwebbed stairs. He takes it down, wishing he had something other than his cell phone to light the way. Also wishing he'd thought about the trip, and what to bring.
Down the stairs and into a chamber. In the chamber is another, very old door. It's locked, but there is one last key on the ring. It slides into the lock like a !@#$ into a willing, wet !@#$, and the door creaks open.
The room behind seems empty, but there must be something in there. Why else would it lead here?
The Director walks in, and flashes his phone this way and that, looking for something in the gloom. He sees nothing at all. Just a small room, and a floor that seems scraped and pocked with holes.
There was something here, once. Something large and complicated. But now it's gone, leaving an empty room.
He wants to scream in rage. He wants to cry and bang his fists against the wall. He almost throws his phone against it in frustration, ready to walk back up the stairs and start thinking of alternatives.
But then he hears it. A scuffling, from back the way he came. Several scufflings, in fact.
Coming down the stairs.
He turns and heads back into the chamber, and flashes his light up the stairs. There are, indeed, figures moving down it. He can't quite see their faces, yet, just the fact that they're wearing robes.
"Hello, (REDACTED)," one of them says, voice gentle and soft as a teddy bear: "We've been waiting for you."
"Who are you?' He shouts, getting ready to call for help. Why doesn't he have his sidearm with him? Why?
"You won't need that," the leader says, extending her hands out for a hug: "The phone is useless, down here. No one knows you're here, and no one can hear you if you call.
"It's just you, and us."
"What do you want?" He asks, taking a step back.
"You, (REDACTED)," they say as one: "We want you."
And there is screaming in the secret room below the Agency, followed by half an hour of silence.
Some time later, the Director comes back into the part of the building everyone knows about. There's a smile on his face, perhaps belying the ordeal he has been through. Or did anything happen at all?
And as he walks back to his office, tossing the keyring into the trash as he does so, he's humming a song. Not one that anyone thought would be one of his favorites, really, but you never know.
Dum dum, dum dum, dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum
* * *
In the far reaches of the galaxy, far beyond and below our own solar system. something approaches. Something vast and timeless. Something implacable.
Something (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
Stars tremble in their slow orbits as it moves past. Dead and lifeless worlds crack and crumble. Some of these systems never had life.
Some did, once, before that something's final visit.
It is coming, now. There is no stopping it. No holding it back or denying its ultimate trajectory.
Towards Earth. Towards us.
* * *
And SPYGOD walks down a cold, Washington DC street to his next appointment, perhaps aware that he's on camera.
Perhaps not.
(SPYGOD is listening to Sinking (The Cure) and planning to buy several Virgils Bavarian Nutmeg Root Beers)
Friday, December 2, 2011
12/1/11 Legion: Epilogue - pt 1
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)
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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