A disbelieving murmur filled the room. Kim possible, an Enemy of the State? Why, you could just as easily say that the oceans were shallow or the mountains were flat. Dr. Grain’s eyes roved over the people in her cabinet, judging their reactions and making mental notes of those that seemed either too accepting or too vehement in denial. She was disappointed to see that nearly everyone fell into one of those categories; she had been hoping to find her cabinet members less hasty to jump to conclusions. Her gaze brushed Dr. Director and she was taken aback by the expression of malice on the GJ representative’s face. There’s more to this than she’s telling us. She thought, I wonder why it’s necessary for her to discredit the kid? Her reverie was interrupted by an aide.
“Courier packet for you, Ma’am, JAG seal and priority delivery.”
She took the package and studied the seal and priority routing label. It was classified as “Secret” and since everyone in the room had that clearance, she went ahead and opened it. As she leafed through the documents in the packet, the heated arguments in the room faded into the background. In the package were security camera photos of Kim Possible and her accomplices engaged in what appeared to be burglaries. There were also copies of offshore account transactions in her name corresponding with the dates of the thefts. The account balances were astronomical by any reckoning and indicated that she had stolen considerably more than Global Justice had reported. She finished skimming the incriminating documents and pounded the table, calling for order.
Into the uneasy silence, she said softly, “The information I just received confirms the accusations of Dr. Director.” She waited for the gasps of astonishment and muttered self congratulations to quiet down before she looked directly at the GJ agent and continued, “However, you seem to have left out the fact that she was working for you.” Dr. Grain spread out the photos that had just been delivered. Betty Director figured prominently in about half of the pictures: here, with her arm around Dr. Drakken’s shoulders, sharing a laugh; there handing a briefcase to Shego; and, in one of the most damning, poring over a set of blueprints with Kim Possible, Drakken’s lab equipment plainly visible in the background.
“Captain, arrest her.”
Two Marines advanced toward Dr. Director, who was proclaiming her innocence loudly. When they reached her, she grabbed one by the arm and pulled him off balance forcing him to interfere with his partner. The young man recovered quickly and they worked together to back the one eyed woman into a corner. “Please come quietly Ma’am.” One of them said politely.
“Over my dead body, Jarhead!” Her foot lashed out catching him solidly on the side of his head. She moved into close quarters with the other Marine and landed several solid blows to his stomach and chest before dancing back out of his reach. The Captain signaled for two more men to advance. They did so, cautiously, but the she didn’t wait for them to come to her. She launched herself at the nearest man, trying to get through him to one of the doorways and they all closed in on her. The cabinet members, with the exception of Dr. Grain, crammed into a corner as far away from the action as they could. Dr. Grain calmly stayed in her seat. Dr. Director managed to keep the Marines at bay for a few minutes before finally grabbing one of them to use as a hostage.
She held the boy off balance with his ceremonial sword at this neck. “The rest of you, back off or this kid dies now!”
“Do as she says men.” The Captain’s calm voice cut through the chaos.
“I’m walkin’ outta here, and soldier boy is commin’ with me. Any of you yahoos got a problem with that?” The one-eyed woman looked around frantically, she was surrounded by Marines. “Captain, tell your men to get out of my way.”
“Company… DOWN!” the Captain yelled, and all the Marines fell flat on the ground. Dr. Director found herself facing him across the room. His weapon was out and pointed at her.
“You’re not going to shoot me; you might hit your own soldier.”
“He’s a Marine ma’am. He understands the risks of combat.”
“Wha-?” at a signal from his commanding officer, the young Marine let his entire body go limp. The slender woman was not able to support his weight and she was forced to let him slide to the floor, the sword was pulled from her grasp by his falling body and cut into his neck slightly, but not enough to do serious harm. Before she had time to recover, the captain shot her in the shoulder, knocking her completely over a service table. Deafened by the sound and reeling from the hit, she still tried to crawl to the door. A young marine stepped into her path. She heard the unmistakable sound of a bullet being chambered and looked up into the barrel of his sidearm. “You ready to come quietly now, Ma’am?” His eyes were full of menace, his politeness was nowhere in evidence.
The room was suddenly filled with the sounds of a dozen people talking at once as the cabinet members contacted their staffs and advisors. The captain called for his corpsman and saw to the restraint of his captive. Dr. Grain leaned back in her chair and tried to figure out what was missing in the information she had been given. Everything seemed a bit too pat.
Kim and Ron stared at Bonnie with open-mouthed disbelief. She split her time between looking at them and reading the scroll across the bottom of the television behind the bar in the café where they were having lunch. Only Rufus seemed unaffected, probably because he had his head completely buried in a cheese dish and wasn’t really paying attention to what the brunette was saying.
Kim recovered her voice first. “Are you sure that’s what they said?” Fear and denial warred for supremacy in her voice and her eyes darted back and forth between the screen and Bonnie. There was no mistaking the images for anyone else and little doubt about the nature of the broadcast but she was hoping it was a joke.
“At least they used your yearbook picture, Kim. No one will be able to recognize you from that.”
“Gee, thanks, Ron. That will be a lot of comfort to my parents when they see that I’m an internationally wanted criminal!”
He grinned sheepishly, “Well, if we hadn’t pulled that job in Brussels, we’d only be wanted-“
“What?” Bonnie interrupted. “What the hell are you talking about?” she turned to Kim, “What job in Brussels? They’re making this up, right? He’s kidding… You two aren’t… You didn’t…” She glanced back and forth between them. “Oh, my God! You are! You did! It’s true?”
“Bonnie, it’s not like that!”
“It’s not like you two stole millions of dollars and hid it in offshore accounts?”
“Well…”
“Wade helped.”
“You’re not helping, Ron.”
Bonnie stood over them, both hands on the table watching Kim with half lidded eyes. “All this time I thought you were so goody-goody. It turns out you’re just as selfish as anyone else, you just hide it better.”
“That’s not what happened, Bonnie.”
“Did you steal the money?”
“Yes, but-”
Bonnie held up her hand. “No ‘buts.’ Did you steal the money?”
“Bonnie you’re not listen-“
“Did. You. Steal. The. Money?”
Kim sat back and folded in on herself. “yes.”
“Well…?”
“Well, what?”
“Where is it?”
Shego checked the torque on the last bolt and wiped the sweat from her forehead. There wasn’t enough room in the hangar to work on her plane inside, so she had to pull it out on to the runway whenever she had the opportunity to make repairs and it was pretty hot out on the tarmac. The engine on her Cessna had seized about a mile from the Senior’s island and she’d had to dead stick the thing in. She’d walked away from the landing and the plane was in one piece, so she considered it a good day, even though it meant she had to work out in the hot sun to fix it.
Of course, being trapped on an island off the coast of Spain with no transportation of her own had presented a unique set of problems. She had worked out a deal with Senor Senior Sr. to trade her services as a thief for a small stipend plus room and board until she could fix the plane and figure out where she wanted to go next. It wasn’t a great deal for her, but she still made a little bit off each job and she really couldn’t think of a more secure hiding place. She spent her free time either working on her plane or in the Senior’s fully equipped gym.
She went inside to set up the compression tester so she could test the cylinders.
“Hello, Shego.”
“I’m busy, Junior.”
“Always you are busy. Busy with your little toy aero plane, busy with your work out routine, busy with your nail filing, busy with your hair wash-“
“I’m a busy girl, Junior. Whaddaya want?”
“Father requests that you join him in the lounge.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, it is true. He sent me out here like some kind of fetching servant boy.”
“Tell him I’m busy.”
“So now you wish for me to be your messenger flunky boy too? I will not be some kind of message carrying beeping device for you!”
“That doesn’t even make sense…”
“You are not listening to me. I do not wish to be your fetch-“
“AARRGH! If I go to the lounge, will you shut up?”
“There is no need to be Mrs. Rude Person.”
Watching him slide across the concrete floor of the hangar and slam into a tool box made Shego feel much better.
Special Agent Thomas walked carefully across the cluttered office. The soft, rhythmic breathing sounds seemed like they were coming from his couch, but there was no one on it. He moved around the room trying to pin point the source, but no matter where he stood, the sounds were coming from the couch. He picked up his umbrella and gently passed it through the air directly above the couch cushions. It met no resistance. He moved across the room to his desk and grabbed the first thing he came to that didn’t look breakable. He tossed it onto the couch.
The staple remover dropped through the couch as if it wasn’t there and the rhythmic noise stopped. Thomas moved cautiously forward to the edge of the couch and reached a hand out. Where he should have encountered the arm of his couch, there was nothing. His fingers just disappeared. “I know you’re in there.” He said quietly. “Stand up slow. And keep your hands in plain sight.” Even though he was fairly certain of what would happen, it was still eerie to see a hand emerge from his seemingly solid sofa cushion. When the culprit’s head became visible he said, “Mr. Load, how nice to see you. How is that you came to be sleeping in a hologram of my sofa?”
Wade looked at the agent sheepishly. “Well, when they raided my lab, I had to go somewhere-”
“They found your lab?”
“Yeah, I was making a lot of public transactions, trying to arrange transportation out of the country for as many of my friends and their families as I could.”
“How’d you do?”
“About sixty percent, they found me a lot faster than I figured they would. I think they tapped into my com frequency and triangulated my position that way. I should never have let Global Justice get their hands on a Kimmunicator, even an old one.”
“While they were ‘interviewing’ me I overheard a conversation about your escape. Field agents reported that you were taken by a rival organization in an invisible truck.” Thomas fumbled around in his coat for a pack of cigarettes, “I’m pretty sure the NSA doesn’t have an invisible truck. I’m pretty sure that none of the intelligence organizations have an invisible anything, but when I see you sleeping inside an incredible simulation of my couch, I think… Maybe it wasn’t invisible, maybe the boy built a truck with stealth capabilities and he used it to escape.”
“Well, I didn’t build it-”
“Then it was Dr Freeman’s?”
Wade gaped. “How do you…?”
“His research isn’t exactly secret, you know.”
“Yes it was. It was exactly secret.”
“No time to worry about that now.” Thomas finally found a cigarette and lit it. “I think we’re missing the important question.”
“Which would be…?”
“Why are you here?”
“I found out where biological agent used in the attacks was designed.”
“And where is that?”
“Here.”
Bonnie looked at Kim with thinly veiled disbelief. “You gave it all back?”
“Not all of it. Not yet. Wade and I just started working on returning everything when all this stuff happened.” She ran a hand through her hair absentmindedly, “Like I told you, I mainly did it as a way to keep the Chief from being able to get to me in the first place.”
“I still don’t understand how that was supposed to work.”
“I’m not sure myself, I wasn’t thinking clearly then. I thought… if I have some kind of blackmail or… something, maybe she wouldn’t… you know… I don’t know.”
“Her head was all screwed up, Bonnie.” Ron interjected. “Cut her some slack. She was trying to protect herself from a psycho bitch with a bent for world domination who had tried to brain wash her.”
“I guess you’ve got more in common with the green chick than I thought.” She glanced around the small café; no one seemed to have noticed them or their resemblance to the pictures on the TV screen. “What are you going to do? You can’t just go check in to a hotel…”
Kim smiled winningly, “That’s where you come in.”
Shego stalked into the room, ready to give the elder Senior a piece of her mind. A glance at the big screen TV that dominated one of the walls stopped her in her tracks and wiped what she had planned to say clean out of her mind. Four pictures dominated the screen. One of herself, one of the buffoon, one of the nerd and one of a chimpanzee in a hideous green dress. The scroll across the bottom of the screen indicated that these were the members of a notorious international gang of terrorists wanted by the US government in connection with several biological attacks. Kim’s name was under the chimp’s picture and they had spelled ‘Shego’ wrong.
Senor Senior Sr. was standing near the bar. “Kim Possible, a notorious international terrorist? This does not seem to be credible, and the picture they have of her is not very flattering.”
Shego shook her head to clear it and turned to the man. “Not flattering? It’s a freakin’ monkey!”
“Ah, she did seem to be a bit… hirsute.” He mixed a couple of drinks and handed one to Shego. “I’m sorry to see that you are also included in this list of terrorism suspects. It changes drastically the arrangement we must have.”
Shego took the drink and sipped it absentmindedly. Kitten, what have you got yourself into? Who did you piss off that has this kind of power?
“You see, they will come looking for you now.” Senior continued, “And I must apologize but I do not wish to be associated with a terrorist.” He waited until she took another sip to continue. “That is why I have notified the authorities of your whereabouts.”
Shego turned to him, “What?”
“The authorities will come here looking for you now. I will turn you over to them.”
“What? Listen here you stupid old man, I…” her vision blurred for a moment and then cleared. “You drugged me?” She felt like she was in a vat of molasses.
“It seemed prudent. You are quite capable of disabling my son and me, then overcoming my security.” He reached out and took the glass from her unresisting fingers. “I thought it would be safer if you were unable to move.”
“…”
“Please understand that I hold you in the highest regard and I promise you that if you survive, I will share with you the reward money.” He shook his head sadly as she lost consciousness. The last thing she felt was his strong arms catching her before she fell to the ground.
Next Time:
The Other End Has Teeth