P is for PURLOINED PLANS
The unremarkable green sedan
stopped at the mouth of the alley, then pulled away and drove on, after Agent Q
stepped out of the car and headed down the narrow passage, past the overflowing
trash cans and rain soaked refuse. He slowed his pace as he approached the
angled base of a fire escape, and using the fingers of his right hand, pushed
an L-shaped bracket on the side of it as he continued on.
A small section of the brick wall
behind the fire escape swung inwards. Q passed through the dark aperture. The
wall closed behind him with no trace of a door for any who might’ve followed.
Q moved down a dark hallway,
stopping when he reached the single door at the end of it. He fished a keychain
out of his pants pocket, and found the small, round-headed silver key that
opened it. Flipping on the light, he stepped inside and closed the door behind
himself, pausing to hear the locking mechanism click into place.
By all outward appearances it was simply
a cramped maintenance room. There was a grubby mop bucket off to the side, some
mops and brooms stacked in one corner, a floor drain framed with a lip of
concrete about an inch and three-quarters high, and a large water main pipe
bulging out of the far wall with a bright red valve wheel on the side. He
twisted the valve wheel ten degrees to the right, and waited. He heard the
faint his of hydraulics activating, and the room descended.
When the incognito elevator reached
its target level, three floors sub-basement, Q stepped off and into another
hallway; this one a brightly lit corridor walled with teak paneling and padded
with plush alpine green carpeting. There were office doors intermittently
spaced on either side, but the one Q wanted was at the end.
“Sit down, Q,” Reginald said. He
looked considerably older since the last time Q had met with him face to face.
“Another bit of bother that needs clearing up. This time the client
is…well…us.”
“Us?” Q said, trying to make
himself comfortable in the stiff-backed chair that sat facing the agency
director’s desk. It was small and hard and made one feel like they were back in
grade school. Q fought the urge to run his hands under the seat to look for
waxy blobs of old chewing gum.
“Yes. A madman calling himself The
Bronze Panther has stolen a number of dossiers from out intelligence office in
Paris and headed back to Ceylon. A great deal of our personnel have been
compromised.”
“Including me, sir?”
“Impossible to tell,” Reginald said
with a sigh. “The office was a mess. We still don’t have all the pieces put
back together, and even when we do, it’ll take some time and lucky guesswork to
know exactly what he got away with.”
“And I’m to go to Ceylon and
retrieve these documents and tie up any loose ends regarding the spreading of
said information.”
“Correct, Agent Q.” Reginald
dropped a manila envelope on his desk. “Everything you need is in there. The
usual passports, papers, intel we were able to glean on this Bronze Tiger.”
Q grabbed the folder and stood. “Is
there a deadline?”
“Success,” Reginald said in a quiet
and firm tone.
“Understood.”
With that, Q was gone, back to the
top level and the green sedan that would be waiting in the parking lot of a
restaurant three blocks west.
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