4-Nov-2000
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or any of its characters, I just borrow them on occasion then give them back.
Warnings: 1x2 implied, some bad language
Rating: PG-13
C & C Most welcome and highly appreciated
I am archived at www.akane.org/gw (that site is the most current)
Thanks to my partner, Nixy the Pixie for allowing me to make a reference to one of her fics Death and the Dead Parrot.
Heero and Duo had rented a small non-working farm, the house was old but still in good condition, the owners had taken pride in keeping it up, it was only because of their advanced years they had decided to move into town and rent it out. It was an ideal place for the two pilots, the owners had left behind most of the furniture and the barns and silos offered a perfect hiding place for the five gundams, as well as providing them with the secrecy and privacy they needed. The one piece of furniture they had to buy was a new bed. Duo had wanted king sized, he had gotten used to sleeping on one at Quatre's, and was disappointed when the measurements of the room proved too small. He perked up though when he saw just how cozy a double bed was. Heero didn't care what size it was as long as it was big enough for them both.
There wasn't much to do on a small nonworking farm and even Heero was feeling a little bored after a couple of weeks and had taken up reading some of the books the owners had left behind. Odin Lowe had taught him to read but had never allowed him the pleasure of reading for enjoyment, it was just another skill he needed. Dr. J, on the other hand, had encouraged him , giving him books by Dickens, Hugo, and Milton as well as Shakespeare's tragedies. It hadn't taken Heero long to figure out the books he was given dealt with human pain and suffering and the triumph of the human spirit over any obstacle. Dr. J, in his own way, had been trying to teach Heero what being human meant.
Heero looked over at Duo and smiled, he wondered what J's reaction would be if he knew that one braided baka had taught him more about being human in a couple of short months than all the years he had spent with J and reading the words of those purveyors of the human condition.
Duo's solution to his boredom had been to buy a pet, and had returned with a parrot guaranteed to have a vocabulary of a hundred words. They'd had the parrot for four days now and all it did was squawk.
"C'mon you stupid parrot, say something." Duo tried urging it to talk. He'd tried crackers, grapes, banana, carrot, and in exasperation some chocolate cake but no words came from the parrot's mouth, it still only squawked.
"At least it's not dead." Heero had observed.
"Polly want a cracker?" the bird just sat on his perch preening himself, "Polly's a pretty boy," the bird then squealed at the *other* parrot in the mirror. "Polly loves Duo and Heero", the bird started scattering seed everywhere. "Heero has a nice ass!" the bird just stared at Duo, who had his nose pressed against the cage as he tried teaching the parrot to talk.
"I wouldn't get too close if I were you." Heero warned.
The parrot gave Duo a sudden hard peck on the nose, drawing blood.
"Ow! That hurt you damned bird!" Duo clutched his nose with both hands, he was sure the parrot had taken a huge chunk out of it, "That's it, parrot stew tonight!"
"Let me see," Heero said as he pulled Duo's hands away, it was a small cut with an even smaller amount of blood welling up around it.
"Well? How bad is it?" Duo wanted to know.
"It's nothing." Heero answered, then kissed the cut.
Heero turned to the parrot, "Omae o Korosu", he said jokingly.
Duo leaned into Heero and gave him a kiss.
"Omae o Korosu, omae o Korosu, omae o Korosu," the parrot repeated.
They both stared at the parrot then started laughing, of all the things the parrot could have learned to say. . .
"I was going to take him back tomorrow, but now, we have got to keep him." Duo chuckled. "I think I'm going to call him Junior, after all he talks just like his `dad'."
"Hn."
Just then, the telephone rang.
Wufei, Quatre and Trowa arrived at the farm a few hours after the telephone call. They had a trussed up Nabor and Stefan with them, stuffed in the trunk.
Wufei had called Duo and Heero, telling them about the break- in. Heero had suggested Wufei bring the two men to the farm. It offered the isolation they would need when they began interrogating them. Wufei only had his motorcycle and had called Quatre and Trowa for their help getting them to the farm. He also brought the manga, as embarrassing as it was. This manga held a greater import than being a collectors' item. Wufei was certain those two were not collectors, they had called the manga a comic book. One way or another, they were going to tell him what was so special about it.
Georgie checked his watch, it had been hours since he had sent those two screw ups to the address he had given them and still no word. He waited until daylight then drove to the neighborhood to check things out for himself.
He was wearing a utilities uniform, people usually didn't pay attention to a meter reader. He walked around the building and nothing seemed out of place, nothing had appeared to have happened there at all. There were no broken windows and no glass laying on the ground.
He stood there, looking at the window he knew was to the apartment he had sent them, and scratched his head. He was confused, he knew he had given them the right address – unless – no, even they couldn't screw up reading an address. So where were they and where the hell was that comic book?
"Lord Treize, your orders have been given and the troops have been deployed to the hacker's location. They are on their way now."
Lady Une handed him a copy of the orders he had issued earlier. He scanned the orders briefly, paused, then re-read them more carefully.
"Lady, please contact Captain Denis and tell him to hold off until I get there." Treize ordered as he donned his uniform jacket and left.
Until now, Treize had not known the location of the suspected hacker. It seemed familiar and he wanted to make sure his suspicions were correct.
Wufei very reluctantly filled in the others on the purchase of the manga and subsequent events surrounding the purchase.
"It's apparently important to someone," he said."Otherwise, why would they try so hard to get it?"
Trowa, Quatre and Heero had no idea why Wufei seemed so embarrassed when he told them about buying the manga. Duo was another story.
"Bronze?" Duo was laughing so hard his sides started to hurt. "I can't believe this, Wufei Chang is a closet shoujo otaku. This is too much." Duo wrapped one arm around Wufei and started batting his long eyelashes at him. "So tell me Wu-man, which bishounen turns you on the most?"
Wufei pushed Duo away, why was he always giving Duo ammunition to use against him? "That's enough Maxwell. I might ask why you seem to know so much about it as well."
"I've never denied being hentai," Duo grinned.
"That's enough, you two, we have work to do." Heero chided.
"Yes", Quatre agreed. "I was thinking we should try intimidation first, if that doesn't get them to talk, then we'll have to use more extreme measures. I hope it won't come to that but I'm warning all of you now, if it does, it will get very unpleasant."
"From here on out, do not call each other by name, instead just use your first initials. Whoever they are, we don't need them to find out who we are. H & D, please remove our two `guests' from the trunk."
"Gotcha Q", Duo returned.
They returned outside, opened the car trunk and looked down at the two fools laying inside. They started to pull them out when Duo got an idea and nudged Heero's arm.
"Wait", Duo said, loud enough to make sure the two heard him, "maybe we should just leave them in there, find a nice deep body of water and push the car in. No one would ever find them and we won't have to mess with them anymore."
"What? And spoil our fun? I'm looking forward to making them talk. You know how anxious I've been, wanting to try out that new technique." Heero said just as loudly.
"Which technique was that again?"
"You know, 101 Ways To Make Them Beg For Death."
"Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, I've been a little curious about that, myself. Mind if I watch?"
"Not at all, you might even learn something."
Stefan and Nabor were frozen with fear. Their mouths were taped shut and they were blindfolded. Their hands and feet were tied so tightly there was no hope of escape. They had already been inside the trunk of the car for hours, wedged tightly against one another. Every muscle in their bodies was stiff and they were in pain, whatever it was that guy hit them with, it still hurt. And this guy had some very pissed off friends who were talking about doing them bodily harm. To top it all off, they had to pee really, really bad.
Georgie had a meeting later that day with someone he'd rather not face right now. `Sasha' was a new name to the local underworld but had already built a reputation for making no allowances for failure. Georgie knew he was going to have to do some fast talking if he wanted to leave the meeting on his own two feet instead of in a body bag.
He was regretting he had ever gotten involved with this. Fencing stolen goods such as gold, jewelry and art or dealing in black market goods such as liquor and drugs was one thing, there was always a demand for items such as that, and it was relatively safe, the fence rarely got caught. But to get involved in the sale of secrets to the highest bidder, that was espionage pure and simple, whether it was corporate or political, someone was bound to notice, eventually. Why had he allowed his greed to get the best of him? Why had the allure of instant wealth blinded him to the danger? Why didn't he just turn tail and run?
Nabor and Stefan were still blindfolded but the duct tape had been removed, none to gently, from their mouths.
"What's so important about the manga?" Wufei demanded.
"Manga? What's a manga?" Nabor asked.
"Don't say anything, Georgie's gonna get mad if you do."
"The comic book, you moron." Wufei said with a grimace, making note of the name the taller one had mentioned.
"Oh, we don't know, really!" Nabor exclaimed.
"Then why did you want it so badly?" Wufei questioned.
"We don't know." Nabor said.
"Shut up Nabor, I already tol…" Stefan stopped, he realized he had called Nabor by name.
Wufei signaled Trowa, who took the carving knife and the sharpener out of the kitchen drawer and started sharpening it, making awful metal against metal grating sounds as he dragged the knife slowly across the sharpener. "I guess we're going to have to start cutting," Trowa said, "who gets to be first?"
Trowa moved over to the larger one and placed the blunt edge of the knife against his throat. Stefan screamed at the feel of cold steel on his neck, as he screamed Trowa stuffed a cloth in his mouth, muffling the sound of the scream, then replaced the duct tape. Stefan then did the smartest thing he could do, considering the situation he was in, and fainted.
"It seems your large friend wasn't as tough as he looked." Trowa whispered menacingly in Nabor's ear.
"No!... Stefan!... Please don't hurt him, I'll tell you what I know, just please..." Nabor broke down in tears. The money Georgie was paying them was not worth being tortured or killed.
"I'm listening…" Wufei responded.
"W'...W'...We don't know anything except Georgie was supposed to get that comic book from the bookstore." Nabor confessed in a quick stream of words uttered in one breath.
"Who is this `Georgie'?"
"He's our `captain', our boss." Talking calmed Nabor down a bit, although he was still shaking from fear. "Please, what happened to Stefan?" His question was ignored.
"Your captain? You're with Oz?" Wufei asked with surprise, Oz must really be hard up if they were accepting recruits such as these two.
"No, no, not Oz. Georgie's a fence, he finds buyers for stuff people are selling." The more Nabor talked the better he felt, the old saying that confession was good for the soul must be true, especially if you didn't like what you were doing in the first place. He had gotten involved with Georgie because Stefan had talked him into it, big brothers had a way of doing that. Stefan had told him it would be easy money, just do what Georgie wanted and they'd get paid well for doing it. The problem was, Nabor had never liked what Georgie would tell them to do. Nabor didn't like being a `criminal', it was probably why he was so bad at it.
"I take it, you are talking about illegal or stolen items?" Wufei asked.
Nabor nodded.
Wufei and Trowa looked puzzled, they were thinking the same thing. Trowa vocalized it first. "What would a fence want with something like this? Surely it couldn't bring enough money to be worth wasting your time on."
"I keep telling you, I don't know, Georgie just said it was something important, something that would make all three of us rich, but he never said what it was."
Wufei and Trowa exchanged glances once again, Wufei understood now, it wasn't the manga itself, it was something someone had placed inside the manga that Georgie was after.
"Where can we find this Georgie?" Trowa continued the interrogation as Wufei left the kitchen.
"Where is the manga? I need to take a closer look at it, the smaller one, Nabor, says there is something in it their boss was looking for."
Heero handed it to Wufei, he had been glancing through the manga wondering why Wufei had been so uncomfortable about it and why Duo had teased him, after reading bits and pieces and figuring out the plot, he now understood. Poor Wufei, sometimes he couldn't see the forest for the trees.
Wufei slowly went through the manga, page by page, he saw something in one of the panels and wanted to see if it repeated in any of the others. A few minutes later he was finished, his idea confirmed.
"I think I've found what Georgie is after," he said, laying the manga down on the coffee table. "Look here," he pointed to a full page panel.
"It's a picture of Izumi," Duo said, "So?"
"Look again, `D'…" Wufei said.
Duo looked at the panel. "Well there is a dot on Izumi's face, like a mole, near his eye. Is that what you mean?"
"Exactly, Izumi has never had a mole in any of the Zetsuai issues, and he doesn't in any of the other panels in this issue, and there is a full page panel of Koji as well, and he too has a mole.
Do you have your pen knife handy? Oh, and any plastic bags, you know, like you use for food storage?"
Duo took his knife out of his pocket and handed it to Wufei, as Heero went to the kitchen to get a storage bag, the self sealing kind. Wufei opened the knife and gently scraped the blade around Izumi's mole. It came off and Wufei picked it up on the tip of the blade then placed it in the bag Heero was holding open for him. He repeated the procedure with the mole on Koji's face, then sealed the bag.
"Now all we need is to find out just what we've got here. Can you use your computer to find out what's on these, H?" Wufei asked holding the bag closely to his eyes, he had never actually seen a microdot before.
"I can try".
Wufei returned to the kitchen, "Get anything more out of him T?"
"We know where to find Georgie, do you feel like taking a ride into town with me?"
"No, Georgie knows my face, if you're thinking of grabbing him, you'd better take one of the others with you."
"What are we going to do with these two?"
"I don't know, but we'll think of something." Wufei grinned.
Georgie was as ready for his meeting as he would ever be. He swallowed hard and entered the small office at the back of the warehouse. Two very large, very burly guards showed him in. Sitting at the desk was a young, very attractive woman.
"I'm here to see Sasha", Georgie said trying hard not to sound nervous.
"I'm Sasha, please have a seat."
Georgie's eyes grew wide with surprise, he had never expected Sasha to be a female, much less a young, attractive female. He quickly regained his composure and sat down, female or not, she had one hell of a reputation and Georgie needed to think with a clear head.
"I know, you men are always surprised when you meet me, but believe me when I tell you, my reputation is for real. I will have your heart cut out if I even think you are trying to cheat me or double cross me, am I understood?"
"Quite." Georgie croaked. All of his composure had just flown out the window.
"Good. Now where are my microdots?"
Georgie knew, instinctively, not to try to bullshit this woman. He drew in a deep breath and decided to tell her the truth.
"They are temporarily unavailable right now, but believe me, I know where they are and my men are retrieving them as we speak." He had to bluff a little. If he admitted that not only were the microdots missing but his men were as well, he'd be dead in five minutes.
"What happened?" Sasha asked, acid dripping in her voice.
"My source in the colonies, the seller, in order to get them smuggled through customs, placed them in a comic book that was part of a shipment to a used bookstore. The owner was to place the comic book in a stack with some others, where I was to retrieve it and `buy' it, letting him know it had been delivered. When I entered the bookstore, the owner was not at the sales counter and I discovered the comic book was missing from the stack only after I had gone through it. I asked the clerk about it, telling her the owner had ordered it for me and was supposed to be holding it. She explained the young man who had left as I entered had just purchased it. I left and tried following him but I did not see him anywhere. He must be new to the neighborhood because we have not found him yet, but we will. We just need to keep an eye on the bookstore, he'll be back for more comic books."
Upon hearing Georgie's story, Sasha burst out with laughter. She and Georgie were going to get along fine, he had admitted to her that he didn't have the microdots. A lesser man would have lied, she had to admire Georgie's guts for telling the truth.
"I will give you one day to find those microdots, since you've already received partial payment it would be wise for you to finish the contract. You will get the rest of the money once I have them in my possession. I would suggest you waste no more time and leave– now."
"I will be back tomorrow, with the microdots, I give you my word."
"You had better, and if you even think about taking what money you do have and skipping out on me, remember, I will find you and take great pleasure in killing you myself."
Georgie left and went straight home. He was hoping Dufus and Goofus were there with the microdots or at least had tried to contact him. They were not there, there was no sign they had been there, there were no messages on his machine. It was as if they had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Georgie was sweating. Georgie was getting scared. Georgie had an uninvited guest.
"Hello Georgie", the masked man said as someone came from behind and pressed a cloth to his nose and mouth, Georgie slumped down,unconscious.
"Let's get him to the car." One of the masked men said.
The taller of the two slung Georgie over his shoulder and they walked to their car. The other opened the rear passenger side door as the taller one bent down and leaned into the backseat laying Georgie down on it. The other one had gone around to the other side and after opening the door, began helping to pull Georgie all the way in, he got into the back as well, closed the doors then started tying Georgie up. The taller one got into the driver's seat, started it up and drove off.
"Don't take your mask off yet," the one in the back said, "wait until I get the blindfold and the tape on."
"Let me know when you're done," the driver answered,"this mask is hot."
"Done." Duo said, crawling over into the front seat. He and Trowa removed their masks and rode back to the farm.
"What is the current status of your mission?" Duke Dermeil wanted to know.
"It has hit a snag, sir, but I should have that corrected shortly."
"Good, good, we have placed a lot of faith and responsibility on your shoulders, do not disappoint us."
"I won't sir."
Sasha Cooper, special agent for Romefeller, turned and left the counsel room.
TBC
End of Act 2
KwyckSylver
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