The Dockside Lounge is an anachronistic relic from some time in the eighties. Struggling neon signs and a heavy layer of greasy dust on the fake tropical decor are enhanced by faded and peeling posters for beers and cigarettes that haven’t existed in decades.
The Handler leads Medic past a minuscule but packed dance floor, through a jostling crowd at the bar, along the periphery of the establishment’s perennially popular pool table, and to a somewhat secluded semi-circular booth at the back occupied by two men and numerous shot glasses. She identifies the men as Dominic and Dmitri. They’re both sitting beside stacks of bags and boxes. Medic remembers them from their previous encounter.
In stark contrast to his impressive bulk and battered look Dominic speaks softly, sometimes nearly imperceptibly. “Before you ask,” he says, “yes, I used to fight. Still can.” He finishes the tiny rejoinder with a nod, smiling with satisfaction as he sits back.
After a few uneasy moments, Dmitri breaks the din-filled silence over the table. “I mean, me, personally, I was never cut out for a regular job. Last place I worked was an IT pit. Hated it. I know some people really dig that dungeon feel but not me. Why should I spend my days like a hobbit just because I happen to be good with hardware?”
“How long ago was that?” inquires Medic distractedly.
“Long enough,” replies Dmitri with a nod. He extends a shot glass into the center of the table, inviting everyone to toast the remark. They do.
“So what do you do now?” asks Medic raspily as he recovers from the hit of overproof rum.
“A lot of the same stuff. Except now I work pretty much wherever I want. And agency work, it doesn’t feel icky, know what I mean?”
“Sure,” responds Medic hollowly, still feeling pretty shaken.
Dmitri’s face shifts into a relaxed smirk. “Yeah, so anyway, I heard about what happened to you tonight. R-” he halts.
“Umm, The Handler,” he emphasizes with mild snark, “told me all about it. Gray four-door? And there were four of them, right? All in black suits except the driver?”
“Yeah, I think so,” responds Medic with increasing anxiety. “They followed me home. When I got there the door was busted and my place was trashed. I didn’t even try going inside; left by the back entrance and peeked around the corner to see if they were waiting. Like you said, four people. Who the fuck are they? Can someone please tell me what the hell is going on?”
“First, another shot,” instructs Dominic. Everyone at the able obliges.
“Now, to answer your question,” he continues as the burn of the drink subdues. “We don’t know.”
“We don’t know for sure,” clarifies The Handler. “But Dmitri was sharing some intel when you contacted me. From what we’ve been able to piece together, they’re some executive training outfit named Shindan Academy.”
“That means new egg in Mandarin,” interjects Dmitri. “We’re assuming they’re Chinese but they’re headquartered in Southeast Asia, at least according to their literature. There’s not much to go on except that they had an office here in town. That was our one and only connection. They’d scrubbed the address from their website but we were able to retrieve an archived copy.”
“Office was abandoned in a hurry,” says Dominic, sliding back into the conversation. “The receptionist told me that some men had come there that morning looking for it. Asian, maybe Chinese. One of their neighbours said they’d seen someone come out but didn’t get a good look.”
“Hang on,” says Medic, pausing the conversation with a raised hand. “How do you know it’s this Academy that’s been following us?”
“Oh, right!” says Dmitri, slapping his head with embarrassment. “I got ahead of myself, sorry. It’s mostly because of this,” he says, patting the stack of bags and boxes beside him.
“Nothing fancy, all off-the-shelf. A prepaid cellphone texted us its GPS position every few seconds. The Handler here” – he points sideways with his thumb – “kept them busy while I planted it. Then I just watched where it went. At the end of the day I could even confirm that they ended up where they started in the morning. Got lucky on that one. Used some recorded traffic cam footage.”
“Huh,” replies Medic with mild surprise.
“I tried to get some biometrics. Not very useful,” adds The handler. “But I managed to record a few words that we determined were most likely Mandarin Chinese.”
“Used an online speech recognition tool for that,” explains Dmitri.
“So right now all fingers point to Shindan,” concludes The Handler, cocking her head assuredly.
Dominic leans in and taps a finger forcefully on the table.
“I feel I need to add that those guys were most likely just distractions,” he says with concern. “There’s a good chance that someone else was watching us nose them. Either that or this Academy is incredibly sloppy.”
Dmitri and The Handler both agree with small nods. “Nose is the opposite of a tail,” explains Dmitri, seeing the look of confusion on Medic’s face.
“Yeah but what the hell do I have to do with any of this?” asks Medic a little more calmly now that the rum is working its way through.
“Place and time,” responds The Handler.
“Huh?”
“Basically wrong place, wrong time. Except in the agency we don’t believe in the wrong part. Not in cases like this,” she elaborates.
Now with even more questions, Medic decides to start with a nagging one. “So, what, you’re agents? Like, secret agents?”
As he surveys them slowly, all three nod in sequence.
His face hardens into emotionless stone. “Who do you work for then? What is this agency you keep talking about? Why would the Academy want to come after you?”
“I like to think of us as a group of freelancers,” replies the Handler, “and the agency as a sort of guild that we belong to. It’s a bit more complicated but that’s the Coles Notes version. Our little cell is mostly around this table. We go by Section B, mostly cuz we think it sounds kinda apropos. Like my alias.”
Dmitri smiles and tilts his head in a gesture of simultaneous agreement and tepid disapproval. “Not all of us think this way,” he quips.
“You don’t like The Handler?” she asks.
“The Handler?” responds Dmitri. “It’s so awkward. Like, how am I supposed to address you? Hello, The Handler, how are you? It’s just weird.”
“You can j-”
She’s cut off by an irritated Medic. “Let’s just please focus on the current topic. Like what’s the name of your agency?”
“We don’t know,” responds Dominic. “If it has a name it’s a closely-guarded secret. But then again we are a clandestine organization of secret agents. Anyway, we only ever call it the agency or the organization.”
“Okay, so you don’t know who you work for. Fine. Can you at least tell me what you do?”
Dmitri takes over. “Hard to say exactly. We get all sorts of missions and intel from the agency. We decide which missions to choose, which intel to use. Ultimately it’s up to us to call the shots and pull the triggers.”
“Yeah, but what is it that you actually do?” asks Medic pointedly. “What are the agency’s aims? What are its goals?”
The Handler breaks out into lyrical laughter. “Dude! If we don’t even know the organization’s name you think we’re going to know something like that?”
Medic frowns in profound confusion. “You mean to tell me that you seriously don’t even know why you work for the agency?”
“Oh, we know why we do what we do,” she responds snappily. “And maybe we’ll share those reasons with you when we’ve gotten to know each other a little better. But you should know that whatever you’re thinking those reasons might be, you’re probably wrong.”
Medic shrugs his shoulders and nods his head in unconvinced surrender.
Dmitri breaks the sudden tension with, “A toast! A toast to reasons!”
A round of shot glasses is hoisted dutifully above the table and, in unison, tipped backward into open mouths. The alcohol is smoother, the mood lighter.
“Look, man,” says The Handler to Medic in a conciliatory tone,”it’s just that you’re new and we’re dealing with an unprecedented situation here. I’m just a little on edge, that’s all.
“As you can see”, she continues, pointing to the stacks of containers beside her partners, “we had to leave our boo in a hurry, just like you.”
“Base of operations,” whispers Dmitri into Medic’s ear.
“Ransacked,” she continues, seemingly unaware of Dmitri’s aside. “And they stole my stuff. My research. That night that we first met we were hunting down the little rat who took it.”
“So that’s what that was about,” realizes Medic with audible surprise. “Who was he?”
“Some dipshit that worked in the building,” recalls The Handler. “Got in there after hours, took my material. He must’ve left the doors open because the place was turned upside-down when we got back there.”
“You think someone else got in there?” asks Medic.
“Must’ve. The guy we caught said that he only grabbed what he came for and left,” she replies matter-of-factly.
“How do you know he wasn’t lying?”
“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?”
Medic doesn’t answer, unsure of where this is leading.
“Whaddya think? He’s got maybe five hunred in his wallet?” she slurs. “How about I just get the whole wallet? Cool?”
“Okay,” nods Medic uncertainly.
“Cool,” she confirms, embarking on a slow and somewhat unsteady journey to the bar.
Medic watches her pull up next to the target and attract his attention. She looks directly at him as she speaks, almost like she’s carrying on a conversation, except that he’s not saying anything.
In a few moments the man smiles at her, which The Handler reciprocates, then he reaches into his back pocket and hands over what looks like a black leather wallet. The target then turns suddenly in the opposite direction and leans over to get the bartender’s attention. Meanwhile The Handler signals a thumbs-up toward the table behind the man’s back.
Medic doesn’t understand why she’s still hanging around at the bar until he sees that she’s being handed a cocktail, at which point she leaves. As she departs back for their table the man remains seemingly oblivious to her presence, as though she’d never been there.
“Needed something to break up that awful rum!” she explains loudly as she approaches.
Sitting unsteadily, she plops the wallet on the table and takes a sip of her drink through the straw. “Mmm!” she exclaims enthusiastically. “The whiskey sours here are great!”
Despite his growing inebriation, Medic is dumbfounded.
“You can go through that,” she says, pointing lazily at the wallet. “Take what you want.”
“No thanks,” he replies. Something about this feels like some sort of test.
“Cool. That’s cool, yeah,” she responds in a disjointed manner.
“So are you ready for the finale? No, ser-sly, dude,” she slurs again as she leans in close to Medic. “This is the shit that’ll keep you up at night. Okay? Dude” – she burps – “go over there and tell that guy that you think we found his wallet. Get him to come over here. Tell ‘im I wanna give it *hic* to him myself.”
Medic looks around the table to see if he can spot any sign of an impending practical joke. There are no stifled smiles and, moreover, one else seems particularly surprised by the challenge. Seeing no harm, he gets up and wobbles his way toward the tall man at the bar.
“Excuse me!” he says to the man as he gets near. “My friend over there thinks she found your wallet and said she wants to return it to you personally!”
The man spins around with a look of confused anger. The look is quickly replaced by a laser-focus at something over Medic’s shoulder. Medic looks backward to see that that something is The Handler, smiling invitingly and holding up the wallet.
This time it’s Medic that seems invisible as the man steps around him and maneuvers swiftly through the crowd to the group’s table. Medic follows hastily, eager to see how The Handler resolves this.
The conversation has already started by the time Medic reaches the booth.
“… found it on the ground,” says The Handler bashfully to the man as Medic slides into his former seat. “I recognized you by the driver’s license. Hope you don’t mind that I looked through it.”
“Oh, no problem at all,” says the man with a broad smile, very obviously hitting on her.
“But,” says The Handler as she gives him back his wallet, “haven’t I seen you before? Like, recently?”
“I don’t think so,” says the man genuinely. “I think I’d remember you.”
“No, seriously,” says The Handler sternly, dropping all semblance of coy. “You sure we didn’t meet just a minute ago at the bar? And I said something to you and you handed me your wallet and then ordered me a drink?”
The irritation in the man’s face returns as he pulls his head back in rejection. “What? No! The fuck are you talking about?”
“You gave me your wallet,” maintains the Handler. “You ordered me a drink. Everyone at this table here saw it.”
The man steps backward into the crowd, checking the contents of his wallet with one hand and signalling his unwillingness to continue the conversation with the other.
“Listen,” he says as he recedes, “I don’t know what you think happened but I promise you that we never met. Okay? And we definitely didn’t meet a few minutes ago. But thanks for returning my wallet. Really, thank you.”
And then he’s gone.
The Handler turns to Medic with a cocked eyebrow. “Huh?” she prompts him in a nudging tone, then takes another sip of her sour.
Medic shakes his head slightly, unsure what to make of what he’s just witnessed. “What was that?” he asks.
“That there,” replies The Handler as she pushes the straw out of her mouth with her tongue, “is just a little taste. See, we’re not ” – she burps again – ” we’re not, umm, regular secret agenz.”
“What she’s trying to say,” explains Dominic, “is that this is a skill most of us have, more or less. She’s better at it but we can all do it. There’s a good chance you can too, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“I dunno,” responds Medic, the alcohol slowly dissolving his apprehension.
“Then let’s drink!” yells Dmitri boldly, holding up another shot glass. “And think!”
They all take another shot.