Chapter Text
In his dreams, Ricardo Morales was in France.
He couldn't sleep. Every time he laid his head down on the thick Persian carpet that they'd snatched from a burned out brothel across the street, he swore he heard the distinctive off-key hum of German bombers, creeping up on them through the cloudless night.
Nerves, Reynaldo reassured him. The Luftwaffe didn't have the time to send bombers after a small band of irregulars in an abandoned town, not with the hell the Americans were giving them along the coast. It wasn't likely anyone even knew they were there in the first place.
Nevertheless, it was Reynaldo who sacrificed his own rest to sit up with him far past midnight, the two of them perched awkwardly on rickety wooden chairs at a tiny tin table. The glow of a single candle, stolen from the ruined church three blocks south, provided just enough light for a game of Gin Rummy.
It was their mutual favorite.
Ricardo sipped the juice from the tin of anchovies that had been their dinner, savoring the salt. He preferred it to fine wine in those days, when hunger made every can they scavenged the most delicious meal they had ever eaten.
Reynaldo made a fussy show of rearranging his cards. He certainly wouldn't gin this round, but he was too proud to accept it until he'd made a proper effort.
The creak of wooden floorboards overhead testified to the fact that some of the men were still awake as well: answering the call of nature, gambling at some other game, perhaps even listening for the Germans themselves.
"Knock!" Reynaldo declared, laying down his cards and looking unhappy about it.
"Pobrecito," Ricardo chuckled, laying down his own hand. He reached across the table to tuck his singular ace into his opponent's meld of three.
"Bollocks," Reynaldo muttered, "absolute bloody... well, that's gin for you then, isn't it?"
"I must still draw," Ricardo mused innocently.
"And it'll STILL be gin," Reynaldo huffed, scooping up his own cards with an exaggerated sigh.
At that final breath, the very air seemed to punch its way from ceiling to floor like the fist of a vengeful god. Time slowed to reveal how everything in the room was at once crushed down to the stones and swept away.
The cards, strewn everywhere, fluttered and turned like autumn leaves through rays of searing white light that pierced through the narrow cracks and knotholes of the ceiling planks above as they buckled -- then splintered to pieces -- under tremendous force. The Persian carpet lifted up from the floor and flew as if it was enchanted, only to dash itself into a wall and collapse in a heap. The tin table screeched as its metal legs crumpled like those of a dead fly, tumbling uselessly into the corner.
The candle, extinguished, struck Ricardo square across the bridge of the nose with a smart snap and splashed scalding wax into his eyes. He was blinded an instant before he felt his shoulder strike the floor, dislocating on impact. He went tumbling like a log over the stones until his back collided with the wall.
Then it was dark.
Ricardo clawed at his face, desperately trying to clear his vision.
There was a fire somewhere. He could smell the smoke, thick and oily from burning fuel, and tinged with the all-too-familiar scent of burning flesh. Where? How close? His whole body was still vibrating with the blast, too disturbed to yet decide if he was in pain or not; if he was on fire or not.
Christo, why couldn't he see? Was he blind? The hot wax in his eyes was relentless, no matter how thoroughly he tried to clear them, and his left arm felt locked to his side. He could sit up, at least, by finding gravity and pushing back against it.
At last upright, one of Ricardo's eyes seemed to clear a bit. A cloudy, unfocused image emerged, alternately lit by the flickering flames and obscured by the billowing smoke. The north and east walls of the parlor were altogether gone, dashed to pieces of stone and wood, iron and glass, all upturned and exposed into the cold night. The explosion had peeled open their shelter like a child's dollhouse.
Overfed flames leaping in and out of in the rubble threatened to bring down what remained of the two stories of the building that were still hanging precariously over his head. The ceiling sagged, planks splayed like fingers reaching out from the masonry. Fully half of the timbers that once supported the the ceiling over their heads were broken and cast onto the pile of debris that now buried the ground floor below. The roof was altogether gone, and the ragged walls of the second floor were scorched so deeply black by the incendiary explosion that it merged seamlessly into the night sky.
There had been seven men on the second floor, Ricardo thought. Another six on the floor below. And on the ground floor, it was only himself, and-
"REYNALDO!"
He put everything he had into that shout, but heard nothing in response. His own voice was only a muffled, distant thunder inside his skull. He gave up trying to clear his eyes to feel at his right ear, hoping to remove some blockage, but found only more hot liquid wax running there, the same consistency as that dripping into his eyes.
Not wax, he realized.
Blood.
Ricardo shifted to his knees. His legs, at least, both seemed in working order, in spite of the jagged wooden splinters impaled at odd angles into both of his calves. His canvas pants did a good enough job of stopping the bleeding, he thought. With no small effort, he finally managed to stagger back to his feet.
"¿¡REYNALDO, DONDE ESTAS?!"
No reply.
His field of vision was still no more than a thin sampling of the ruinous carnage around him, blurry and narrow, further muddled by the smoke and the darkness. He was beginning to hear things again, but they were distorted through his blown-out eardrums. He could not be sure what each sound was: the groan of a dying man, or the creak of a failing pillar? A whistle calling for help, or another falling bomb?
"REGINALD CRANE, ANSWER ME!"
Something recognizable finally emerged into his range of view: a hand, gripping a bloody stone in the rubble. The arm to which it was attached disappeared beneath more hewn rock and debris, crossed over by a colossal oak timber.
He knelt by the hand and felt for a pulse, not knowing what action he could possibly take if he found one. He had only one functional arm himself and could barely distinguish the edges of each slab of collapsed stone through his unfocused eyes. His men, if any of them had survived, were likely in similar states, and the masonry that yet upheld the towering walls of the house had begun to warp inwards, threatening to collapse altogether.
If there was a pulse in the buried man, he could not be sure. His own hand was shaking too hard from the flood of adrenaline, the smoke in his lungs, the exertion, the blood loss, and the cold. He was determined not to leave until he knew for certain, though.
So he remained, crouched there, for what seemed like the rest of eternity...
"CHRIST, RICHARD, GET UP!"
...until someone grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet, barking orders like a mad dog.
"GO! MOVE! NOW!"
They stumbled over the wreckage together, a sense of pain finally striking Ricardo for the first time that night as his savior/assailant grabbed him by his dislocated arm to yank him across a deep chasm in the pile. The shouting and shoving didn't let up until they had both finally staggered out into the cobblestone street, clear of debris, and collapsed together in a heap.
Reynaldo was on him in an instant, pouring water over his face and tearing at his own bloodied sleeves to make bandages. Shouts of warning and the cries of increasingly desperate soldiers sounded in the streets around them.
"¡Por el amor de Dios, ayúdame a cavar!" For god's sake, help me dig!
"¡Esta cayendo!" It's collapsing!
"¡Pero Lluís... Lluís sigue allí!" But Lluis, Lluis is still in there!
The two remaining walls of the old chateau at last fell inward with a deafening roar, finally burying whatever survivors may yet have lain trapped alive under the rubble of the blast. The collapse was so swift and forceful that it hurled chunks of mortar and chips of limestone as far as a block down the empty streets in every direction, powdering the ruins into a chalky white dust that rose from the site and hung in the air.
Ricardo's last memory of that night was Reginald "Reynaldo" Crane hovering above him, howling orders to rally the survivors even as the white cloud enveloped them all.
A peal of thunder awoke Ricardo Morales from his dreams.
Though the Nite-Glo clock on the bedside table insisted it was already 5:59 am, his bedroom was still black as pitch.
He lay very still in bed, listening to the wind rustle the elm trees along the parkway outside. The first fat, cold drops of an early summer rainstorm began to rap at the roof of his modest little American home just as the clock snapped to 6:00am.
As Ricardo sat up to dismiss the alarm, a bright flash and a second clap of thunder heralded the destruction of a transformer station somewhere nearby. The street lamps all went black at once, and the electronic chirp of the alarm clock died in his hands.
He sat a moment more in bed, listening to the rain as it grew stronger. Listening to the roar of victorious thunder rolling over the land from horizon to horizon. Listening to the furious, futile barking of the neighbor's dog as it tried to defend its master's home from the storm.
In defiance of all these things, alone in his darkened house under the falling gray sky, Director Morales of the Enhanced Operatives Division slowly rose to begin the day.
In the bathroom, he brushed his teeth slowly and thoroughly. The toothpaste they sold here in the States was too powerfully minty for him; it always burned his tongue.
The wind was unpredictable, quiet one moment and whipping wild the next. It rattled the windowpanes over the bathroom sink, plastering handfuls of young green leaves up against the glass before tearing them away in a fury, again and again.
In the kitchen, Ricardo lit the stove with a match and toasted two slices of fluffy Wonder bread. The last bit of tomato paste in the house was only enough to give each of them a thin layer of flavor. He ate over the sink in pensive silence.
The rain fell fast and heavy, coursing down the sidewalks in rivulets and puddling in the streets. Soon even the city drains were overwhelmed. The backup created a pond at the bottom of his driveway that shimmered and splashed as it was pounded by raindrops the size of shotgun shells.
In the foyer, Ricardo put on his jacket, hat, and gloves. He tied his shoes, then fetched his galoshes from the doormat only to discover they remained wet from the previous evening's rain. His umbrella, too, left upright in the stand beside the front door, proved unpleasantly damp to the touch.
Before stepping out to head to work, he opened the front door a crack to plead silently to the unimpassioned sky to relent, if only for a moment or two.
But the sky had no mercy for Ricardo Morales, and it kept raining. By the time he parked his black sedan in the lot of KEOD Radio Broadcasting Studio, it was raining as hard as it ever had in the state of Texas.
The address assigned to house the Enhanced Operatives Division of the Secret Agent Group on the outskirts of downtown Austin was an old radio station headquarters built just after the turn of the century. It did not hide its age, inside nor out.
The massive radio antenna on the roof defined the entire structure. It was far taller than the modest building itself and dominated the local landscape of auto body shops and warehouses. In decades past, it would have been painted in bright vermillion red with bands of white, but it had long since rusted to a mellow orange and was left that way. The iron security fence around the perimeter was in much the same condition beneath its lumpy coat of black enamel spray paint, touched up every now and then when the maintenance crew got around to it. The parking lot was cracked and potholed, the white lines demarking each space now just ghostly suggestions with no remaining authority.
The large illuminated sign proclaiming the radio station's identifier hung halfway up the tower. It's four giant letters, KEOD, were weathering the present storm with an attitude that leaned more towards resigned than stoic. The E oscillated a few inches to either side in the furious wind, its light extinguished.
In point of fact, no-one working for the Agency could recall having ever seen all four letters in the sign lit at the same time. A rumor had developed among the agents that this was intentional -- illuminating all four letters, they quipped, was a signal reserved for the apocalypse -- but the truth was much simpler. Light bulbs and electricity cost money the EOD's budget did not contain.
Director Morales did not mind that the carpet in the entryway was worn down to the linoleum beneath it, nor that the security cameras squeaked as they turned on their mounts, nor even that the metal detectors were famously unreliable, either declaring everything or nothing at all to be a threat, depending on how they felt about each person passing through.
The work his division did still needed to be done, all the same.
The Director took the stairs to the office (the elevators were even more temperamental than the metal detectors, after all), his face expressionless as his wet shoes squeaked on every step and echoed in the barren stairwell.
He paused his ascent at the fifth floor, not to catch his breath, but wondering: was the light on in office 501?
It seemed an inauspicious moment to look.
The fifth floor was reserved for the EOD's handlers, specialized staff who managed the assignments and objectives of all the agents in their stable. Many of these were former field agents themselves, elite survivors who reached retirement on the basis of their age and experience (and to some degree, luck). Room 501 was the Master Handler's office, set aside for the seniormost chief of the Division's handling personnel.
He had vanished from his assigned post nearly three days ago.
Surely he'll return, Morales thought. He always does. Certainly, this time too...
...but the Director's conscience wouldn't allow him to pass by without cracking the stairwell door for a peek down the hall.
The frosted glass window set into the wooden door of room 501 was still dark, as grim and silent as the sky outside.
Morales quietly closed the heavy steel fire door to the stairwell and slowly climbed the last flight of stairs.
His own office was at the very end of the sixth floor hallway on the left. At the end of this hallway was a wall of photographic portraits etched in black on thin brass plaques. They were arranged in rows and columns, each neatly labeled with a name. Most of the figures were in suits, but a few were in military uniform. Some of their faces were smiling, others stern.
A narrow stone shelf protruding from the wall below the faces hosted an everchanging collection of curious trinkets. There were always flowers: some fresh, some dried, but never any wilted. Other offerings were more cryptic. A small silver key. A toy soldier. A cigarette. A blue glass marble. A bullet casing. And, of course, notes. Dozens of notes, each folded up tightly and tucked behind the brass plate of their intended recipient, never to be read.
Privately, Morales was having a harder time looking those faces in the eye every morning. Whenever a new plaque was added to the wall, it became all the more difficult.
"Good morning, Sir," said Miss Virginia. She stood beside her desk in a formal salute as the Director entered the room. She did so every morning, and he always felt terribly awkward about it. For all his time on the battlefront, Morales did not have military rank to his name.
"Good morning, Virginia," Morales replied as he closed the door behind himself, "How are you today?"
"Excellent, Sir," she replied, dropping her salute and falling to a parade-rest stance. This was another thing she always did, regardless of her actual condition or circumstances, that somehow stung Morales in the heart.
Always "excellent". Never a hint of trouble. Eternally prepared to take orders.
"As you were, please, Virginia."
Miss Virginia smartly stepped away from the side of her desk and resumed her prior business. Namely, wrangling a series of plastic buckets placed conspicuously about the office.
Morales followed her deft motions about the room as he hung up his coat and hat. Miss Virginia's desk had been displaced rather significantly from where it usually was, and two orange pails and a small waste bin sat on the floor in its former location, each collecting water from a constellation of three leaks in the ceiling. The carpet that usually graced the floor had been neatly rolled up and set aside in the corner. A damp mop leaned against the wall beside Miss Virginia's chair.
"I'm terribly sorry, Virginia. I did put in an order to fix the roof..."
"I suspect this is a new leak, Sir," Virginia replied indifferently.
Morales sighed. It was the same damn leak as last time, and they both knew it. He could write repair orders until he was blue in the face, but without the next year's budget, there wasn't even enough money for roof tar.
"I will be sure to notify maintenance-"
"I have already notified them, Sir."
Of course she had.
"Well, in that case," Morales pulled off his gloves one finger at a time, "If you would give me the overnight briefing, please."
"Yes, Sir."
Miss Virginia pressed a series of buttons on the underside of her desk to unlock the middle drawer in a smooth, practiced motion. From the drawer she withdrew a hard black clipboard, peeling back the cover page upon which several signatures and a bold red stamp had been imprinted. In the same patient, unimpassioned tone she always used, she began to read:
"The following are the overnight events of record for Tuesday, the 25th of May, 1965, 21:00 to Wednesday, the 26th, 07:00, local time:
- Operation Halfdash has failed. Agent Caliber is confirmed KIA. French authorities are aware at the highest levels, and they extend their condolences. Handler Emmet Rhodes will report.
- Operation Valence has failed. Agents Loch and Michigan are currently unaccounted for. The window for contact remains open until noon local time. Handler Chikwendu Osisi will report thereafter.
- Operation Dilettante has failed. Agent Ersatz is missing. Handler Aino Karhu will-"
"I'm sorry," Morales interrupted her as delicately as he could, "simply missing? Not missing in action?"
Miss Virginia blinked and straightened her spectacles, as great an indication of discomfort as she ever revealed.
"It would appear that Agent Ersatz did not report for duty at the appointed time," she explained. "Unconfirmed reports suggest patterns of Zoraxis activity in the area have also changed. Abruptly."
"...another cross, then." Morales scoffed.
"Most likely, Sir."
"¡La hostia...!" roughly equivalent to "Fuck's sake!"
Morales pinched the bridge of his nose as he felt his blood pressure begin to rise. The thick scar tissue hidden below the skin rolled under his thumb, and he squeezed it as tightly as he dared for a moment.
Miss Virginia had seen this response to bad news before. She replaced the cover page on the overnight briefing and passed the clipboard to Morales, who took it wordlessly and began flipping through report after report, silently absorbing the news of failed operations, objectives unachieved and agents lost.
He was only mildly less upset by the time he had reached the end.
"Nothing about our Master Handler, then," Morales concluded, neatly resettling all the pages on the clipboard.
"Sir?"
"I am absolutely certain he will return to us," the Director assured Miss Virginia, "but please inform me at once if any news reaches you regarding his whereabouts."
"Sir," Miss Virginia tried again, inclining her forehead the slightest bit to aim a nod across the room.
"I would also appreciate if you swiftly put down any rumors of AWOL and the like, should you hear them," Morales added thoughtfully.
"SIR," Miss Virginia raised her voice a single decibel for a third attempt, but it was the distinctively British sound of a man clearing his throat with an enunciated "eh-hem" that finally caught the Director's attention.
Sitting in plain sight in one of the mid-century style wooden chairs along the wall across from Miss Virginia's desk was the formerly missing Reginald Crane, Master Handler of the Enhanced Operatives Division. He had been hidden from view by nothing more than his own habit of being exceptionally still and quiet when he was in a dark mood.
On closer inspection, he was uncharacteristically unkempt. The wool of his jacket was perceptibly fuzzy about the edges, his trousers were thoroughly wrinkled, and his leather Oxfords were quite stripped of their polish by what looked to Morales to be water damage. Even his moustache was in sore need of a trim.
Morales blinked at him, momentarily dumbstruck.
“Reynaldo!”
"Richard."
"How long have you been-"
“2 hours, 56 minutes," Crane replied flatly.
"Where have you-"
"NAS Alameda, Oakland Army Terminal, USS Forrestal, Paracel Islands, and back in reverse order."
"Why did-"
"You bloody know why."
Neither of them said anything for a moment, and Miss Virginia took the opportunity to quietly return to bucket duty.
"May I have a word with you in private, Sir?"