Gold or Silver

Chapter I: strong willed

Song: Bustdown by Exce$$

       Chanel dug through the files on the computers. Time was ticking by and with each second passing was another second she could have used but had lost. Sweat was dripping down her body and damping her trembling legs. Her mind was completely focused on finding what she was there to find but every now and then there was a thought of what would happen to her if she was caught that would pop into her head. But she had little time to waste hesitating to think before her fears really did come true. Her eyes bolted between the large computer screens, trying to read through the codes, information, data and plans as carefully as she could without skipping last anything which proved to be similar to her training but of course a little harder.
No...
No...
Not that...
Nothing yet...
Yes!
She finally found it! But instead of loosening and relaxing her body, it only stiffened them. Because now she had to get them and get back into character before anyone noticed her missing. She quickly fished the small silver disk-like device from her bra and pointed it at the screens. She positioned it to be facing the exact center of the screen, using every drop of her concentration to keep her hands from trembling or her mind from wandering. She had to stay focused and hurry. With a swipe on the small, almost too small to be seen, screen of the device, it began to scan and drain. Her eyes followed the small red ray as she counted the seconds in her head. But to her each second accounted for three.      
      Adrenaline pursed through her veins in heavy streams, contaminating every drop of blood in her body. The small device drained the computer of every word of information it was carrying. That small device would carry some of the greatest secrets of one powerful country, a country that if at war could hurt so many other countries. The fact that the possibility of war and the lives of so many millions of people relying on her was crushing her to the floor every time she thought of it so she had to push it to the back of her mind no matter how many times it came back out to distract her. She cursed at them as she counted past twenty seconds. If only they had waited a few more weeks for her to complete the newer design of the device then she would have been out of here in just ten seconds and not close to thirty.
"Did you get it yet?"
The the voice startled her. Chanel almost jumped but her hand remained frozen in place. If she moved then she would ruin the entire process and have to start over again. Thinking someone had caught her, she had almost forgotten that she was in the room alone and took her a moment to remember where the voice was coming from. Just then the device clicked between her fingers. Relief washed through her limbs as she quickly stood up.
"Most of it." She replied in a whisper, hoping her voice was loud enough to be transmitted across to the other side of the world.
"What do you mean most of it?"
"Looks like I'll be staying here for longer than I thought." Chanel replied in a whisper that was just loud enough to be audible, "They don't have all the plans in the main controls. I'll have to look for them somewhere else."
"Shit... Chanel, do you hear anything?"
"N-No? Is something wrong?" Chanel asked.
"The radar's picking up-"
But before Chanel could hear the rest of the sentence, the door burst open. Chanel bolted up to her feet, her survival instincts kicked in before she could even get a good look at how many of them had ran into the room. All she could see was a small glance at the large men at least twice her height before she was quickly apprehended. They really were right, the North Korean military was not gentle. They shoved her on the table, pushing her head into the desk and digging her nose into the wood until she felt the numbness of a break in it.
"She's a really pretty one though." One of the men commented from a far in Korean.
"Focus, you idiot!"
"Who are you!" Another one yelled at her as he pressed the muzzle of his gun against the back of her skull while another one handcuffed her rather unconcerned with whether or not he broke her arms in the process, "I said who the hell are you? What are you doing here?"
Chanel wondered why they were wasting their breath when they were not even sure that she could speak Korean. But then again it was not difficult to assume that nobody would be going through the systems all written in Hangul would be able to speak Hangul.
"Does she even speak Hangul?" Someone in the room asked in a husky voice.
"I don't know."
"Pfff one of them finally realized it." Chanel thought to herself.
"We should just take her down, you can't get anything out of her here."
"Keep vigilant, Chanel, you know what they're going to do now." She said in her ear.
      Chanel had to fight the urge to yell at her to shut up. She wished she had taken the small almost invisible mic out of her ear before she had started on the mission. Her voice would only distract her now. If only she had never given the CIA her new mic designs in the first place! But now was not the time to feel remorse. She was right, she had to keep vigilant and brace herself for what she knew very well would happen next. And it came mercifully quickly. She felt the adrenaline eject into her blood, she had an instinctive urge to jump away from the electrical metals being stuck into her skin but the men kept her held down well, leaving her limbs to helplessly tremble. At first Chanel was enduring the pain and shock while still being able to focus on visual things around her completely consciously but slowly the shock began to set in. Her head began to spin, her counting slurred and her vision blurred. She could feel her control over her muscles cede along with her drained strength. She fell back into the man's arms limply like a ragged doll.
"Keep it together, Chanel." She said in her ear.
But this time other than being irritating, her voice served to keep Chanel tied down to consciousness. Her muscles were out of her control. Her eyes hung half open as if she were more dead than alive. She was aware of how they carried her limp body out of the room but strength was well out of her reach for the time being. Her head was still spinning but she could see the lights on ceiling passing by them and the men's voices around her.
"Is she alive?" One of them asked, "You better not have killed her."
"I didn't shock her that bad." The man carrying her replied.
      Their voices kept Chanel awake and hanging onto consciousness. Slowly and with monumentous effort, she regained most of her strength and awareness. But she made sure to not move a single muscle, playing completely dead the way she was just a few minutes ago. Her boots were thick enough that none of the men could see her toes dig into into the front of her shoes to click down on the small button in them. Chanel had designed the cameras to be so small that it would barely be visible even if someone focused to look for it. Which she doubted that any of the men would really be squinting their eyes at the bottom of her shoes. She felt a little sting cut into the heels of her feet. But it filled her with relief because she knew that the sting was a signal to let her know that it was recording everywhere she was going now. She could feel them walk and walk and she could tell that they were in an elevator when they stopped walking with a ding.
One...
Two...
Three...
She could count how many floors they crossed down and down until there was no way they were less than ten floors under ground before the elevator door opened with yet another ding and they stepped out. They kept on walking, occasionally glancing down at her to make sure that she was still the void of consciousness. She had to force her mind to stop wandering off. But it was difficult to keep herself from picturing Alaya's beautiful tiny little face as a simple effort to comfort herself just a little bit. Though she had never been oblivious to what would happen to her if she did get caught but just the knowledge of it would not make what she knew was about to follow any less scary of a blow. But either way she had to concentrate. She had to forget about her child for the moment and focus on the mission she was on before she not only lost her life but the mission as well.
"Oh she's a pretty one." The same man from earlier repeated but this time only with a slight more disgusting touch.
"You must really be enjoying the view if you say that twice." Another answered with a laugh, "If you're lucky then you may have your chance with her."
"So the outfit works." Chanel thought in satisfaction.
But her satisfaction was short lived. She recognized the click of the lockpad unlocking the door almost instantaneously. Her hands and feet froze over with anxiety as she felt them carry her inside the room she knew all too well that she would not get out of painlessly or even in one piece if things got too bad. Her heart was jumping and banging in her chest with every step the men carried her.
She heard the commotion around her in the room. She could hear some clutter. She felt another pair of hands on her legs. Blood rushed to her head as her body was turned up side down. And like nothing more than a chopped up cattle, her ankles were put in chains and she was left to hang up side down. Keeping her body as limp as an unconscious rag doll as they chained her arms up above her head proved to be harder than she thought it would be. Her heart sank down to the bottom of her chest for she knew that now nothing except her charms had any chance of saving her life. But she had to keep her breathing steady or else she would be exposed and her one chance of not only succeeding in the mission but also simply surviving.
"Is she awake yet?" A foreign voice she had not heard yet asked.
"No, not yet."
"How hard did you shock her? Is she dead?"
"No, sir, she's not dead."
"Then wake her."
Chanel gulped. She did not need to be told what would follow and readied herself for pain. But pain never did follow. "Hold your breath." Her coarse warned in her earpiece.
Chanel though she was annoyed was glad to have that warning. She took in a deep breath into her chest and held out. It took a moment or two she realized why she had been warned to hold her breath. Ice cold water splashed down her face. For a moment it felt like she would drown and out of panic, she was about to gasp for breath. But she was able to contain herself even as the cold water rushed down her nostrils and down her face, ice cubes and blocks of ice melting on her skin. Chanel finally opened her eyes and gasped for air, coughing out the water that was stuck in her airways.
"Ah there we go, she's awake." The man who had been carrying her said in satisfaction.
"Pretty little thing, she's turning blue." He yanked her head back by her hair, "Good morning, sweetheart."
"I don't think we've met, have we, darling?" One of them, who seemed to have been the highest ranking one there, said as he knelt down by her side, "Why don't you tell me who you are?"
"You can speak Hangul, can't you?"
Chanel only stared at them with a smug smirk on her face that served its purpose to degrade the masculine ego of the men that they valued so much. She watched as their arrogant grins sank into frowns.
"I said who the hell are you?" He bellowed, pulling at her hair but the leader stopped him.
"What's that smirk for, hm?" The leader asked calmly, "Can you speak Hangul, girl?"
Chanel let the silence hang in the air for a moment. She enjoyed the growing look of desperation and frustration on the leader'sface and had to fight the growing urge in her to just let him stay in that state.
"You really want to know, big boy?" She asked mischievously, winking with a small smirk and enjoying the annoyance she provoked.
The men though seemed relieved to know that she could speak Korean Hangul also seemed rather surprised that a foreigner could speak such perfect fluency.
It was nowhere close to easy but it was nothing that Chanel had not predicted. Though nobody else had thought it was a likely candidate, Chanel had never for a moment expected to get through this extremely risky mission without being caught or at least spotted. She had mentally and programmatically prepared herself months before the day she had embarked on the mission. Being hung up side down, molested every now and then though not much, interrogated for hours and sometimes a day or two without so much of a few minutes of break, the denial of food and the rambling starvation of her stomach keeping her awake at night were all things that Chanel expected to be met with. To her the one thing that really tortured her was the wait. The weeks that passed by and slowly growing into two months that she spent starving and rotting in a prison cell with nothing than the thought of her baby daughter and the occasional check up in her ear piece to keep her company. The pill in the small pocket embedded into the inside of her bra was always there to mock her, reminding her that if she were to fail then that pill should slip down her throat and drain life out of her without a moment of hesitation.
      Chanel though was not simply sitting and bad given up to captivity. Had it been a few years ago then she might have but not now when she had so much to live for. She ignored all the instructions she was given multiple times a day for the sake of completing the mission as soon as she could. After all she knew her survival chances better than they did when they were written right in front of her eyes while they could only make a guess a whole world wind away. With barely enough food to keep her simply alive and little to no basic accommodations, Chanel was more than sure that her body was not as eye catching as it was when she first got there. With no make up or magnificent clothing, Chanel was left to nothing but sneaky wit and flirtatious charm to get her out. Time passed by slowly, every moment of everyday was stressful. But Chanel was glad it was stressful for it overshadowed the terror she had to live with for the time being. She had to remember everyone's names, tastes, intentions, positions, ranks and reliability. Knowing all too well that one mistake could leave her dead when she was sinking deeper into the death chair already everyday by refusing to confess to anything.