Valkyrie's Last Warrior

Chapter 10

Valkyrie returned to her operations room with a half empty glass of red wine and sat back down at her computer station. Several screens on the multi-monitor display wall were filled with nine other smaller screens that showed the goings-on in various parts of her target's home in real time. For the first hour, all she saw was a few household staff going about their evening. Otherwise, the place was as quiet as a tomb. Swallowing another gulp of wine, she sighed and muttered to herself, "Where are you, Mr. Dae?"

As if on cue, on one of the monitors that was sending live feed of the ground floor, she saw a familiar man walk into the camera frame. She said aloud, "Well, hello there."

The location of the surveillance camera feed where Agust had just appeared, was labeled as "ground floor, north-east corridor." As the man walked past the frame of the first video feed, Valkyrie's eyes naturally moved to the adjacent screen, which showed the subsequent segment of the same north-east corridor, where she expected the man's figure to reappear. But instead, the only thing she saw was a brief blur on the small screen, as if the camera was glitching.

Aside from the flash of blur, there was nothing else that she could see on any of the screens. Agust didn't walk by the next camera like he was supposed to. It was as if he had just disappeared between the two surveillance cameras. Thinking that the camera feeds were malfunctioning somehow, she decided to see if she could locate him elsewhere in the mansion.

She carefully scanned the feed which showed the rest of the ground floor, but there was no sign of him anywhere. Valkyrie immediately shifted her attention to the screens that were monitoring the second floor as she muttered to herself, "Where did you go, my dearest."

Valkyrie realized immediately that she had called the man, "her dearest," and wondered where that came from. Before she could give any more thought to that revelation, she caught movement in her peripheral vision. Valkyrie's eyes shifted to another screen that showed a live feed of the second floor, on the opposite side of the mansion. There, she spotted her mark, walking at a leisurely pace, without a care in the world. She thought, "Wait a minute. Hold the phone. How the hell did he get to the other side of the building on the second floor so fast?"

Thinking that she may have either mislabeled or misread the location tag on the surveillance feed, she looked once more. But no, she was reading it correctly. The label on the small rectangular screen did indeed read, "Second floor, south-west corridor."

Thinking that perhaps she was remembering the layout of the home incorrectly, she pulled up the schematics of the enormous estate on a separate screen and looked at it closely. She wasn't mistaken. The man had walked from one end of his 100,000 square-feet property to the other, in less than thirty seconds. Valkyrie asked herself aloud, "How the hell did he get all the way over there? Short of teleportation, that's not physically possible."

She tried to make sense of what she had witnessed in real-world terms. Even if she ran at full speed, there was no way she would have gotten from one corner of that house to the other and end up on the floor above in less than a minute. So, how did he manage it? She continued to watch the screens as she tried to work out this puzzle. When she couldn't make it fit reality, she concluded that her equipment most likely was the issue. Perhaps some of the cameras monitoring the ground floor were malfunctioning and there had been a greater delay than what she had expected in the live feed. Valkyrie wasn't entirely comfortable with that idea either. But without any other explanation, she had to settle for it.

On yet another screen, Valkyrie watched as Agust opened a door and disappeared behind it. She let out a frustrated sigh and thought, "I guess I'm going to settle in for another night of surveilling the most boring man on earth. God... what I wouldn't give to see something interesting happen."