Mr Hook's Big Black Box

«Anticlimax»

Author's Note: Sorry this chapter was posted a little late. I'll try to keep on top of it a little better in the future.

This time, the whole group had been listening in silence. This was an enthralling story, and Ferrari had got a lot more confident as she started telling it. Nobody judged her, at all. She didn't need to explain every action because her friends really understood.

"Well, come on then!" Marco prompted. Dwayne looked at him a little oddly then.

"These must be pretty rough memories," Kris said, "If she wants to take a break before recounting the next day she can."

"Not the next day, I want to hear about the fight. You pretty much skimmed it last time, and I didn't get to see you with a sword. You fought a couple of times that week, and I didn't get to see any of them properly."

"Is that all?" Ferrari chuckled at Marco's predictability, "Sorry, but I can't really tell you that much. They were moving in slowly, they wanted to catch me. One ran forward, looking at the sword, and I caught him with an elbow in the gut. Then they were a bit more cautious. One of them said they should just shoot me, nobody would care about a missing student. Guy with a Georgian accent, I don't remember any more. The sergeant snapped at him and said they don't work like that, so the rest were all circling round, none of them wanted to be the second guy with my boot on his neck. It was almost an impasse, but that was when we heard the chopper coming in, roaring towards the building from the other side. It dropped down out of their sight, and I could see they already had a winch extended at the side. Just like they were picking up cargo in a hurry, you know? The guy on the winch was Jacob Walker, I knew him by reputation. He picked a part of the roof that didn't have any Russians on it, dropped down, and then left without the crane extended. There was no way for anyone to tell whether they had the Box or not, but when I cheered the Russians all assumed they did. No more fight, they didn't want to risk it when the cargo they were after was already gone."

"Well, it's better than I would have done," Marco shrugged, "So they just ran away without a fight?"

"Pretty much. And then it's all straightforward, I guess. I had the same idea as Marco, get at the Box and see if I can get in it before anyone else arrives. I only needed to check on it, to see if there was anything suspect in there. I assumed that if it was this much trouble, it would have to be something pretty obvious. But I ran into Marco on the way in, and then when we got inside, Monty was already there. I think you already covered pretty much everything that happened, so I'm not going to go over that again."

"But the CIA guys meeting us at Creswell House, then you knew more than we did. Right?" Dwayne asked.

"Not much. I knew they weren't CIA, but if you'd seen the badges even you could have figured that out. They really were bad. I got back onto campus, got to a landline phone, and called one of my contacts. I can't tell you much about that, for obvious reasons. But that's how I found out who our fake agents were. I called in another favour, pulled the owner on the car. It was stolen, no surprise, but they had a pretty good guess who it was. This guy Spenser, he's a courier. Ships containers internationally, takes stuff off and divides boxes up to wherever they're going. He doesn't know what's in them, and he's very careful never to find out in any way that can be proven. Does a lot of shipping for a certain Greek organisation, shipping stolen consumer goods one way, and meth the other. But I guess we already know a good deal about that."

"I don't know as much as you think," Kris was on the defensive, "The core of our business is our people protecting our people. We have different fields, the people in the Circle, but whatever you want there is often someone who can requisition it for you. I can tell you now, though, we won't support anyone moving drugs. Spenser was a known contact brought in to help us out, not a part of the Circle, and unconnected with my family."

"Did you have the address Kris had sent us to?" Dwayne spoke quickly, before Kris could get any more embarrassed by the antics of people he hopefully no longer worked with, "I mean, it was Spenser and Sons. If you knew Spenser was the bad guy you should have told us."

"I'd seen the address on that piece of paper. I was worried then. I thought about calling on Trevor again, but I knew I'd be pushing my luck. I already owed them enough favours, and I didn't want to convince them I couldn't run this on my own. I guess the joke was on me, though. They sent a squad to the Spenser place just in case, they knew what I'd been looking at and they knew Spenser was trying to get his hands on the Box, so it made sense to watch his base of operations in case he actually got it. I'm sorry, guys."

"What for?" Destinee moved away from Kris for a moment, to give Ferrari a big hug. It would have seemed strange from anyone else, but for her it was just the right gesture. "They didn't hurt us, even if they tried. I got out of this whole situation safely, which is pretty much a miracle and all down to you five."

"I think if we hadn't been here, your life could have been safer," Kris contemplated, "But it wouldn't have had us in it. I'm certainly happier this way, and I hope you are too. But we can't get all the credit, we did plenty of stupid things."

"No," Destinee smiled, "I remember that fight, kind of. One of my earliest clear memories, now. I was just huddling up, trying to make myself as small as I could. My eyes squeezed closed, trying to imagine this was just another dream. So the scene I remember is a bubble of darkness with the sound of bullets whistling past just a few feet away, the clang of metal on metal. There were people out there fighting with reasons I couldn't understand. But then there were people I knew I could trust, doing what they were doing for very personal reasons. And I knew that whatever your secrets were, whatever was driving you, you would try to keep me safe. I never doubted that for a moment."

"So what literally happened?" Kris asked. Marco and Dwayne looked at each other for a second, and then Dwayne started speaking again, with occasional reference to the documents on his phone.