Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Ferrari Delguessimo: A Break

I didn't realise my friends were looking for a chance to go behind my back and open the Box. I'd been trained into habits of suspicion, but I always did my best to suppress that when around the LUSARS. I wanted at least one part of my life to be normal; I was desperate to have one group of people I could trust. When it came to an actual mission I should have changed that attitude, but I didn't.

Once the Box was sealed away, I was pretty confident we wouldn't be in danger much longer. I'd talk to Monty, convince her that the government serves the people, and then Trevor Halett would come and pick it up. No guns, no threats, just the easy way out. I'd rather not have the others in the house while we waited, though. There was always the possibility that Spenser and some of his men would come back, or the Russians. I still had no idea if they were two distinct sets of enemies, or if they were working together.

It wasn't that I didn't trust my friends. I cared about them dearly, and I didn't like to go behind their backs. And I was sure that given a little time, they could accept that I was a spy. They'd never share the secret, I was sure. But Marco and Dwayne had already encountered Spenser's guys calling themselves CIA, and seemed to be having difficulty remembering that they weren't the real deal, despite the lack of American accents or any legal chain of authority. Right now, they were acting so erratically that I couldn't predict what they'd do when my backup appeared, so I wanted them to be out of the way.

"I think we still have a job to do," I said as we went back up the stairs, "We all need to do our bit to keep this Box safe. You need to stay somewhere there's people around, though."

"Don't you mean 'we'?" Dwayne challenged, "I mean, you're the best fighter of any of us."

"Exactly. That's why I'll be here. If they're dumb enough to attack directly, there will be no way they can get into the safe before the police get here. All I have to do is make sure Monty is safe until then. But if they see you walking around on campus, there's a chance they'll realise we've separated the Box from the key. So they won't come here, they'll come after you. But they don't know who's got it. I'm the obvious choice, but they don't know where I am. So they'll be stalking you. Meanwhile, I'll have called in a favour with campus security, and also made an anonymous tip to the police. If Spenser tries anything on campus, he won't know what hit him."

"Why not just stay here?" Monty was the one to question me this time, "I think she'll be scared all alone in that safe, I want to stay and check on her." I nodded, and smiled at her innocence.

"That's fine, Monty. You can stay wherever you want, it's your house after all. But there's a chance the bad guys will come after you, because you can get into the safe. So I'll stay here with you, and I'll go with you when you go out for a while. Until they've been arrested. But we've all got lectures and stuff to go to, and it would look suspicious if we all just vanished. They'd know we're hiding out somewhere, and if we start failing our courses we'll lose the society anyway. The Box isn't that important. So the guys should keep mostly going to their normal studies, maybe we can take turns at some point. I'll call the police, like I said, so they'll be watching everyone, ready to slap the cuffs on Spenser as soon as he appears. Then once he's out of the way, we can go back to normal and keep the Box in the safe until we have to give it back."

I felt bad about lying, but told myself it was only to protect my friends. I felt worse when they accepted my words without question, and only gave a few quibbles over the technicalities of the plan. It had taken longer than I'd expected to get the Box into the safe, and it was already too late for Dwayne to get back to his lecture. It was too late for Monty's educational commitments too, but she pointed out that the teacher almost exactly said what he'd written in the textbook. As long as she read the book she'd be able to do the exam at the end of the year.

"You should all stay over," she spun around and grinned as soon as we were back in her room, "There's a spare room, and somebody can use Mother's room, I've got to clean it before she comes back from Barbados anyway, and somebody can sleep on my couch. You've all had a pretty tough day, and the last thing you need is being alone when you're still adapting to psychological trauma."

"Your parents aren't here?" Kris seemed surprised, "I thought this was your family home?"

"Well it is, kind of. But Mother's on vacation because she got all stressed and needed a break, and Daddy's in Mauritius advising a client about tax evasion. He'll be back on Friday, and Mother's coming home next Tuesday, so that's when I really need to have the house spotless for. I got the whole place to myself for now."

I shrugged. She was probably right, for all her naiveté she knows this stuff better than anyone. It would be easy enough to call my guys and let them know to come in the morning, and I think we all needed a little R&R after the last day. It was hard to believe, but it was only just twenty-four hours since we'd first found the Box in our club room. Maybe I could even talk to her tonight, on the assumption I was the one being offered the couch up here after the guys were divided between spare rooms. I could just tell Monty I thought we'd be safer without the Box, and ask her not to tell the others about it because they might get upset. She wouldn't argue with that, would she?

We started to relax in front of the TV in Monty's room, chatting and having a few drinks while we enjoyed some of her vast and eclectic anime collection. Then someone suggested we move onto martial arts movies, and Monty got so animated explaining the difference between Chinese and Japanese styles, and more importantly the difference between Xianxia and Wuxia movies. It was an interesting topic, and not a distinction I'd really thought about. That's one of the things I loved most about getting together with the LUSARS: it showed me a different side to the world. And that no matter how obscure you think some hobby or interest is, there will be smaller niches within it that have their own breed of die-hard fans. Even if you lived a thousand years, you couldn't scratch the surface of everything there is to learn in the world today, and our common interest with all the different facets it connects to is a perfect proof of that.

After we'd watched typical examples of both types of Chinese martial arts movies, I was starting to feel a little sleepy. It had been a tough day, and I figured I'd probably worked my body harder than I normally did, even in the run up to a tournament. I said we should probably get some sleep soon. While the guys were debating that, I sent a text message to Trevor, letting him know I might be able to arrange a pickup soon. Dwayne pointed out that the movie we'd just watched had a Japanese remake, which took it in a completely different direction, and everybody wanted to see that as well. I said we needed to be rested, especially in case Spenser's men came for us in the night. We compromised on just one episode of this show, which turned out to be a TV series. One Kris had seen before, in fact, but hadn't spotted the similarity of the plot when the characters had different names.

I don't remember if the Japanese TV show was better or worse than the Chinese wuxia movie. I remember they combined two characters into a single fighting monk, and then gave him a pet monkey. I remember being interested in seeing how that would play out, because if they followed the same story as the movie he'd end up having to face himself in a duel to the death once he found out he was secretly the one who'd killed his sister in an attempt to conceal their illicit romance. I don't remember what actually happened, probably because I was asleep before the end of the episode.