Ninja

Prologue: The Reception

From her vantage point, Maya had a perfect view over the hullabaloo going on in the ceremonial hall. She hated suit and tie events, but she had to look at least a bit presentable if she wanted to mingle with the crowd and be as one of them as she could possibly be. She pretended to be bored, just sipping on her drink, but her senses were on fire, never leaving her eventual target out of sight for long. To make her cover better, she was wearing a brown contact lens in her left eye. This was to hide the fact that her irises were of different colors, which would be a dead give-away of her identity. But not just any contact lens, nope. It was a state-of-the-art data collection system. A nice little gadget she had come to love when she was still a secret agent. A secret agent who had been disavowed after a mission went totally to shit and she had taken the blame for it, despite not being guilty of her team's demise. Out of her four man team, she had been the only one who had gotten out unscathed. The others were so severely injured that they had become dispensable. She snorted at that.

Suddenly, her spidey senses were tingling even more, as there was a presence among the guests that felt all too familiar to her. "Oh please ..." she begged quietly, hoping that she was wrong and her guts had been playing a trick on her.

Ethan Hunt had just arrived at the scene, arm in arm with Ilsa Faust, a former MI-6 agent who was now a new team member of the IMF. Their cover that evening was that of a couple, something they both immensely enjoyed, given that they had a bit of a romance going on, anyway. Luther Stickell was surveying everything from his black van, stuffed top to floor with state-of-the-art tech. "Showtime", he rumbled. Meanwhile, Benji Dunn was busy bugging the office of their target and installing some computer spyware which wouldn't destroy the data, but secretly transfer them to the team. They needed any additional info they could gather about their target, a mysterious arms dealer who apparently had gotten hold of the latest biochemical weapons. This evening's reception was hosted by one of the arms dealer's associates, some might say he was basically his right hand in any operations The Collective were planning and executing.

As she watched the crowd, Maya risked a longer look at Ethan. "Still the same handsome motherfucker", she muttered, "but who's that lady he's with?" She would be able to extract the info on that lady later, in her safe place, or so she hoped. "But who would've thought that I'd ever see him again?" A million of questions and musings started to wash over her, and that was the last thing she needed right now. She was there to observe, to find a couple of holes in the apparent fortress. She sighed quietly and moved silently to a different spot to check out her surroundings from another perspective.

Ethan all of a sudden felt his hair stand in the back of his neck. He stiffened and went rigid for a tad too long. Ilsa looked at him with a cocked eyebrow. "What's up?"
Ethan scanned the intermediate crowd, and quietly asked Luther, "Quick, can you get me some overviews on the upper stairs?"
"Why so?" Luther wondered.
"I think I've seen a ghost."
"A ghost?" Benji replied.
"Just let me know, can you get the drone to check this?"
"Gimme a second, bud ..." Luther said and let the drone fly, while he was steering it from the van.

"Benji, how far have you gotten with Morpheus?" Ethan asked. 
Morpheus was the spy program Benji was installing. "Running ... won't need long."
"Great. If you're done, please come back here and make sure to come down from the upper stair case."
"Whom or what am I supposed to look for?"
"A ghost."
"Can you be any more specific?" Ilsa chirped.
Ethan just tsk!-ed and continued to be as observant as he was trained to be. There. A stealthy movement at 11 o'clock, near the balcony.
"Luther, balcony at 11 o'clock from me", he muttered.
"Aye aye!" He steered the drone there and quietly let it float outside the balcony, the little camera focusing on whatever movement or ghost Ethan had seen.

Maya knew before she saw or heard that she'd been discovered. That Ethan was here, in this very same place, was no coincidence at all. She was sure that his friends Luther and Benji were there as well, and that lady on his arm definitely belonged to them as well. In whichever position. And just as she planned her escape Ethan looked directly at her, and their eyes met. "Fuck", she muttered, and quietly, albeit too late, disappeared into the night. She climbed down the wall, let go of the rope, and ran to her black motorcycle which she had parked a bit further down.

"Maya?" Ethan mouthed. "It can't be!"
Ilsa looked at him, puzzled, while Ethan looked like he really had seen a ghost. He knew she'd be gone already by the time he arrived at the balcony, so he let it go for the time being.
"Maya???" Luther and Benji echoed in disbelief.
"Is there something I should know?" Ilsa asked.
"Abort!" Ethan commanded. "Meeting at safe house. This is an unexpected emergency."
In all their years of working together on the most impossible missions, they had hardly ever experienced Ethan to be this flustered, let alone abort a mission because of ... Luther brought the drone back into his van and drove off to the safe house, while Benji took a different route, and Ethan and Ilsa set off a few moments later.
"So, who is this Maya and why did she make you nervous?" Ilsa persisted.
"Not. Now." Ethan replied through gritted teeth, concentrating on the traffic while driving to the safe house.
"Well." Ilsa was clearly a bit miffed at Ethan's rather brusque answer, but then again, he would fill her in at some point. Until then, she would have to make do with what she had witnessed that evening. Ethan Hunt becoming nervous because of someone was something new to her, and in a way, it also amused her.

Maya's heart was still pounding in her chest when she arrived in her safe place. Of all the people on this planet, she had to run into Ethan Hunt at the reception, likely causing him to give up on whatever he was doing there, to either find her (good luck in trying, buddy) or to abort this mission as it had proven to be another foe he had to deal with. She quietly chuckled at that, though. She definitely had ruffled his feathers – just like he had done with her. She had thought that he'd quit active duty and was "only" an instructor for other agents, but apparently, he hadn't. She removed the contact lens from her eye and started transferring the data to her computer. What she read about Ilsa only caused an "Oh ...shit!"

Meanwhile, the team had arrived at the safe house. "Anyone care to explain?" Ilsa pressed. "Who is Maya and why did she make Ethan nervous?"
"And how do you know it was even her?" Benji asked.
"That's the thing – I don't know it was her."
"So you aborted this for an inkling you had?" Ilsa gasped. This sure didn't sound like the Ethan she knew.
Luther had pulled Maya's file from the archives. "Here you go!" he announced. The word DISAVOWED in big red letters was screaming at them.
"What the ...!?" Benji uttered.
Ethan clenched his jaw. It was absolutely unbelievable. Improbable.
Ilsa still couldn't make head or tails of it, so she asked once again: "Who the fuck IS she?"
Before anyone could say something, Ethan quietly said: "She was my protégé. And it was my fault that she was disavowed."