/sectionb: DOUBLE AGENT
Posted on October 16th, 2022 – Be the first to comment… in which Brock wanders the night streets of Bangkok, exorcising his doubts about Section B with the help of an impressive demonstration by Mirabelle.
… in which Brock wanders the night streets of Bangkok, exorcising his doubts about Section B with the help of an impressive demonstration by Mirabelle.
… in which the section gets a foreign tongue and the Handler loses her handle.
… in which the members of Section B are reunited in a secluded Bangkok guest house. Medic begins to express some serious misgivings.
… in which Medic finds himself onboard an overnight train to Bangkok with The Handler and a new acquaintance. An unusual detail emerges.
Along with the heat and the tropical flora, Mindelo has the feel of some city in the West Indies. Surrounding it, the sharp crags give everything else the appearance of a barren wasteland. On the beaches, the volcanic rock metamorphoses into glistening sand that slides into a turquoise sea.
Sitting on a glistening beach and watching the dreamy image of the boats on the water through the liquid crystal display of a digital camera, Medic inhales deeply and slowly.
He and The Handler are relaxing in the shade of a pavilion off of Avenida Marginal, a sun-drenched road that traces the western limit of the city. They’ve explored a small part of the sprawl which extends east from there in a mix of colourful colonial houses, restaurants, and modern establishments. It was a nice change of pace from the previous night.
Although he finds it difficult to understand why, every day Medic becomes more comfortable with the whole situation, lingering doubt and questions subtly transmuting into proactive involvement with the mission.
“Shouldn’t we be trying to get more info on the Academy?” he asks The Handler after a few days of growing restlessness.
The Handler holds up a pausing finger as she cranes her head forward, listening.
Fast-forward a few days to the middle of the Atlantic.
Once he got his sea legs, the constant rocking of the ocean became just an annoyance for Medic. Early on he noticed that The Handler also got a little green in the face a few times. In fact, the more he observed her the more she descended down to his own level of physical ineptitude.
She’d tripped gracelessly a few times over the bulkheads. She’d spilled food and drinks a couple of times. She’d once worn a shirt inside-out. And there was that bright orange discount price sticker stuck in her hair for a whole day. It made him comfortable enough to start calling her Handy in private. She took it with a sarcastic smile.
Then again, there was one time when Lukas the leisure-suited, gold-chained, slick-haired Lithuanian burst into their cabin with a rifle in one hand, near-empty bottle of liquor in the other, demanding to know in muddled English how she’d convinced him to take his ship to some island off Africa.
Medic slowly regains consciousness as pain and nausea creep in.
With eyes still closed, he tries to remember the previous night. He’d been out drinking by himself, took an unusual shortcut through the park, met some odd characters, then crawled home and into bed.
Right?
No, wait; that was a few nights ago. What happened after that?
“So,” she answers slowly, a sly smile spreading across her face. “I think the best way to answer that might be to demonstrate. Show you a bit of the old modus operandi.”
The Handler stands up abruptly.
“Pick anyone. Anyone at all,” she instructs Medic, pointing to the crowd around them. Medic takes a few moments and finally selects a tall man sidled up to the bar. A cocky confidence oozes out of every part of him, from the top of his perfectly styled coif to the bottom of his leather Italian loafers.
Swaying mildly, The Handler laughs out loud before responding. “Those kindsa guys are the easiest! Okay, great. So how much money should he give us?”
“So you work for some government?” asks Medic, partially amused and partially irritated, feeling like he’s being pranked. Or worse.
“No. No governments. No corporations. No large groups of any kind, really. Unless it suits our purposes,” she explains flatly. “There’s just the agency and our little cell. I don’t know if there are others because, as I said, the organization keeps a pretty tight lid on things.”
“Wait. So what is it that you actually do?” he asks with an incredulous frown.
She pauses briefly as a stern expression creeps across he face.
“I should’ve told you off the top,” she says firmly, “that there are many things I simply won’t be able to tell you. Some are classified, some I just don’t know. Of the things I can tell you, some you’ll find out later and some you never will.”