Underlings (Not being updated at this time)

Underlings - 12. The Hive

A new day and new blouse for Landry; three hours sleep and a shower left her refreshed and raring to get to the bottom of Faisal Sethwi’s unexplained disappearance (and reappearance) at Shanghai Airport, preceding his murder and the suicide of the man that committed it.

Ambrose introduced Landry to her team in a rented room on the third floor of The Great Northern Telegraph Building on the Bund, facing Pudong. The area was once host to the opium dens of the city, thanks to the East India Company who got the Chinese hooked on smoking it with tobacco, back when the British had an empire.

Ambrose made it clear that Landry was in charge; skilled (directly relevant), trusted (proven history and credit in the bank of MI7), empowered and entirely accountable for the actions of her team. Buzzwords, all of it...

Landry pictured Ambrose once more as that kid in the imagined bow-tie that had become an Ambrose-fixture in her mind; this time playing the board game Monopoly and somehow rigging the game so he got all the Get Out Of Jail Free cards.

He left, appearing to wait for a round of applause which did not come, yet he expected one whenever he spoke to a group of people. Landry looked at her watch and guessed he was going for breakfast somewhere. It was so Ambrose, so British and so ex-pat.

Landry eyeballed her team and the workstations, projectors, screens streaming and playing back CCTV from the airport, other audio/visio equipment with a multitude of purposes and whiteboards which surrounded them. Standard set-up, nothing overly extravagant... Within minutes the space they were in would become their hive and they’d all spend more hours within it than in their own homes;

Jason Miller was thirty and a rare example of a guy that would model underwear in a parallel universe, but had the brains to back it all up and flip every preconception of him on its arse. Miller was her blue-eyed analytics bloodhound; the one that would find a trail and follow it until he had all the pieces and they equalled the sum of what he sought. He was good with problem-solving in the same way that Rainman was good at maths. Miller had more than a thing for Landry and once, or twice, she had let him get her drunk, take off her clothes and do his best to satisfy her. The rule was that he never stayed the night and he would never speak to her about it afterwards. On top of that, she made it clear that he would continue to be excellent at his job. If his work slipped, she’d have him moved to KL.

Ella Kinnear was arrested by the FBI when she was thirteen years old for hacking into just about every secure system they had. The British Government agreed a deal with the Americans, gave her a formal education at MI6 and bought her parents a semi-detached house in Henley-On-Thames. At twenty five, she was the backbone of the team; the one that got them into buildings and out of them again... the one that allowed them to eavesdrop on conversations and inflict damage that a bullet couldn’t. Miller and Ella had also shared a bed, as well as a desk, but it didn’t bother Landry. He was a fuck when she really needed one and Ella was as streetwise as they come. Landry looked at her; bobbed brown hair, curvaceous, legs like a tennis player and nipples like football studs. Landry was half tempted herself, though she’d never drunk from the furry cup before... still, alcohol did wonders for trying new things and Landry loved two things in equal measures; Penis and Pinot. There was always room for squirt of Pussy in the mix.

Nathaniel Price was an actor at Oxford when he was recruited by MI5; Landry thought he was surely the blueprint for the 1960s James Bond, but in Landry’s team, he was the networker; the fixer and the link between all of the other Agencies; hitting the echelons below those which Ambrose schmoozed with. He got information by whatever means. He created the lies and shared the truths that Landry wanted him to. He also sourced whatever the group needed from their supply chain; weapons, cash, drugs and hid it well... At Oxford he’d trod the boards for the Dramatic Society as well as being part of The Oxford Revue and this made him the chameleon of the team; a barrow-boy one day, a rich entrepreneur stealing information from a corporation the next. When he was playing himself, he was naturally eccentric and entirely likeable. He’d already made his mark in a couple of high profile cases in London and he was in Asia because he saw Landry as his ticket to superstardom. He wanted an Oscar and Landry was Hollywood. Price was weapons trained, but nowhere in the same league as Landry’s twin pitbulls...