Becoming Agent Rider

Bait

Whistling as he made his way down to one of the basement floors, labeled B1, Ben thought about the team he had put together. There were three other agents and an SAS team. He was frustrated that the three agents were the only ones, with high enough clearance, available for now. The agents weren't newbies but neither were they highly seasoned operatives. What put him in a good mood though was working with the SAS team. He didn't mind too much that it wasn't his old unit. M-unit had been in training with them and he knew they were good people to work with. More than that, he liked working in Special Operations but missed the way that soldiers worked. It would feel good to be working once more with people you know will have your back, no matter what. As he reached the room he had left Alex in, he couldn't help smiling at the sight that greeted him. The sleeping teen looked so innocent and peaceful. Very different from when the teen was awake. Which was starting to happen. His whistling must've woken the boy. Ben frowned as he watched Alex slowly rouse himself from sleep and scan the room warily before relaxing minutely in satisfaction of having no immediate danger present. The teen no longer looked like an innocent and peaceful child. Instead, he was back to the confident but wary young man that he had gotten accustomed to in the last week. He remembered the first time he had tried to wake the boy, who was in the middle of a nightmare, when they were staying in Berlin. Shaking the teen's shoulder gently and telling him it was time to wake up had resulted in a bit of a shock for both of them. The teen's eyes had flown open and Ben had frozen, both staring at each other with wide eyes until Alex had relaxed as he recognized where he was and who he was with. The boy had asked him what time it was and they had continued on as if nothing had happened. But since then, Ben had always made sure to make some noise before waking the teen up. He wondered what had happened to the boy to make him react like that. It was often a problem with soldiers but it wasn't a normal occurrence for anyone else, much less a 15 year old boy. The teen's age was another thing that had shocked him when he had found out and it only served to enrage him further.

"So, what's going on?" Alex asked while turning off the telly, pulling Ben from his thoughts.

Ben smiled and replied, "I've put together a team but I'm waiting for everyone to arrive. We're going to get dinner in the cafeteria before we meet up and plan the operation."

"There's a cafeteria in the building?"

Ben laughed lightly at this and just nodded, leading the way to the cafeteria on the eighth floor. As they entered, there were a few people scattered around the room and they looked up at the new arrivals, raising their eyebrows at Alex's presence. Ignoring the reactions they received, they went to grab some food and Ben said, "It's not much but it'll do for a quick bite."

Alex didn't care that the food wasn't great quality or that there wasn't a large selection. The cafeteria had soups, sandwiches, water, juice, and coffee. It was the basics but it was food which good enough. And it wasn't until Ben had mentioned dinner that Alex realized he was starving. He hadn't eaten anything since breakfast that morning. As they ate, Alex could feel the disapproving looks the other agents in the room were giving him but nobody accosted him so he studiously ignored them. Once they finished eating, he followed Ben to a conference room on the twelfth floor where three agents in cheap suits and four men in fatigues were waiting for them. These people all looked at the teen with contempt. Alex recognized the SAS unit as one he had been in training with but they didn't seem to recognize him. He wasn't surprised. They hadn't had a lot of contact with him. It had been a year and he'd grown a few inches so he now stood at 5'7". His experiences had aged him too. Sometimes, he couldn't even recognize himself in the mirror when he tried to compare his face to the way he looked a year ago.