“I’ll go to bed in a minute, I just need to look at something real quick.” Hallie had no idea what made her decide to check her office that night. She didn’t think of herself as particularly superstitious, only meticulous and thorough, but something guided her into the spare room before she called it a night and went to bed. At first glance, nothing seemed out of place and she almost let out a sigh of relief that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
As she closed the door however, she started to notice inconsistencies. Slight differences from the way she normally kept things that maybe the average person might brush off as forgetfulness. To Hallie, however, they jumped out, one by one, as if a light shined on them to point them out. The picture of her family from the last reunion was askew inside its frame, and she didn’t touch that picture enough to have caused that herself. One of the drawers on the cabinet next to her desk was slightly open in a way that immediately pissed her off. The odds and ends she kept on her desk to fiddle around with were out of place, even though they were still on the desk. The intruder had been careful, but not careful enough to hide their tracks from her.
She froze and scanned her eyes over the room through the part of the door that was still open. Briefly, the thought to grab her pistol ran across her mind, but she swiftly dismissed it. It would be handy, and it wasn’t like the neighbors would ask any unpleasant questions. An intruder was an intruder, and she could kill them and avoid any further unpleasantness about what the intruder stole. She already knew that the stolen objects came from her dossier on the Menagerie. Those were kept in very specific places, places that most people wouldn’t think to look for valuables or information, but were definitely looked through now. The death of an intruder and a quick call to 911 would give her time to erase that potential issue before the authorities showed up.
But, unfortunately, that would require her to leave the doorway unattended.
Instead, she stepped into her office and swung the door shut behind her softly. She couldn’t risk making any loud noises, not this late at night. In a move that would normally make the young woman laugh at how stupid it looked, she snatched a ballpoint pen off of her desk and flipped the cap off. It was stupid. She wasn’t a particularly strong woman, and the thought of stabbing an intruder with a pen was laughable, but it was better than nothing. It’d at least cause enough of a ruckus to let her husband know she needed help, and that was good enough.
Hallie crept quietly across the room, an extra effort made to not cause the floorboards to creak, with her pen at the ready. She checked underneath her desk first, empty, but one of the papers on the surface was slightly wrinkled as if someone had dropped it and awkwardly caught it. The space between two filing cabinets also turned up empty, and she felt her stomach sink in dread. She thought to close the drawer, so that it wouldn’t distract her. There was one place left to look, and she sure as hell hoped that it turned up a clueless robber that had no idea what they held.
Before she thought about it further she lunged across the room and ignored the sharp pain in her lower back that resulted from the move. In a single movement, she slammed the closet door open and kicked whoever might lurk inside.
Instead, her foot connected with thin air and the winter coats that they had put up for the season.
Any shred of calm analysis had left her by that point, and the hacker wheeled around on one foot to hurry back to her hiding places. They were gone. They were gone and she’d been none the wiser until the intruder had already left. Hallie flipped numbly through her hidden documents. Ledgers of what they’d stolen and what they’d sold for were still intact, names of contacts were left untouched. The only thing that she couldn’t account for was…
The alert from a new text startled her out of her daze, and she took her phone out to look at the message. It took a second for her to comprehend, all of the energy that she’d felt moments prior now trembled out of her hands and caused the screen to shake in front of her.
[23:03 -- UNKNOWN NUMBER] Too little too late, Mongoose! Or should I call you by your real name? You have a LOT of work to do if you don’t want the federales finding out your little secret! -- xoxo
-- x --
As far as she was concerned, a year in the Menagerie hadn’t prepared Jackrabbit to go dumpster diving.
The getaway driver threw a nervous glance at her colleague, a lanky young man with olive-toned skin and dark hair, before she confirmed her worst fears, “Cobra, you don’t think she hid the next clue in the garbage, do you?” She hoped he’d jump in and immediately tell her no. Tell her that the clue was hidden in a cute little cafe in the downtown area, somewhere she could get coffee.
She desperately needed that coffee, too. She’d gotten a call from Mongoose the night before, maybe around 1, where the hacker explained next to nothing and just told her to move her ass up to Florence as soon as possible, in no uncertain terms. It was that conversation that led to the Buc-ee’s in that city, where she had stood with a small bag of her things and a light snack. During this time, her phone remained irritatingly silent, with no further context given by either Mongoose or Cobra, the latter of which had promised to pick her up.
The whole job had left an odd taste in her mouth -- one that hadn’t been helped by the prospect of dumpster diving. After Cobra picked her up, there had been a long, inexplicably tense drive to Greenville, where her counterpart pretended things were fine and normal, but also refused to answer any of her questions. The “refusing to answer questions” part wasn’t that weird in most situations, but Cobra normally briefed them all on jobs when he had to pick them up. Jobs weren’t secrets, not within the gang, but he’d acted as if he’d taken a vow of secrecy on whatever this was, only telling her that Mongoose had left a trail of clues throughout the city to lead them to the meeting point.
Cobra only gave a noncommittal hum in response, his eyes glued to his phone. There was a moment of silence between the pair, and Jack hopped up the side of the dumpster, ready to do something she’d surely regret later.
“Jack-o! Woah woah, wait no!” Cobra finally checked back into the conversation, his startled voice breaking the awkward quiet. “Don’t climb into the tr- I promise the clue isn’t in there.” His words came out rushed, and the man’s wide green eyes shot over to the dumpster looking horrified. “Jack, the trash?” At this question, and with the addition of Jack dropping back down to the pavement, Cobra burst into laughter.
“I would hide a secret clue that led to a meeting about a heist in the garbage. Who looks in the trash?” She retorted, her arms crossed.
“Yeah…” Cobra’s reply was drawn out on that one word before he continued. “I can promise you, though, Mongoose wouldn’t touch a dumpster if you paid her.” He scanned the surrounding area carefully, his voice trailing off for a second. “She hid the clue, and it’s more likely to be…” He let out another hum, before the tall man leaned forward to investigate a menu on the wall of the building, cautiously lifting the corner and watching as a slip of paper fell out. “Right here.”
Jack blinked in surprise before she walked over to investigate the paper with her friend. “That was fast, how did you figure it was right there?” It hadn’t taken him long to suddenly realize where their boss had left the clue, and she had no idea if Cobra had just received inside information, or if he was just good at guessing.
This question was met with a light shrug. “I’ve worked with Mongoose for a long time. It seemed like a place she’d put it.” He handed her the clue and opened up the bag of beaver nuggets he’d been holding on to since they’d left Buc-ees that morning. The British man read the bag for a minute before going, “I wonder how spicy “sorta spicy” even is?” He popped the chips open and tried one, making a face and muttering something in a language that Jack couldn’t quite place. “What’s the paper say?”
Back on task, Jack unfolded the little strip of paper, only to find…
“Nothing! The paper doesn’t say a damn thing.” Jack had been hoping to find an address, maybe some words to be decoded, something a little more concrete than a few symbols on paper. “A bell? A pair of curved lines?” She offered the paper to Cobra then, to see his take on it.
He took the paper from her, studying it for a moment. “You’ve got me about the bell, but maybe look up bridges around here? These lines right here, they’re sideways. Looks like a bridge?” At his request, Jack pulled out her phone and looked up bridges in the area after firing off a quick text to Mongoose.
“Think the bell could be Liberty Bridge? It’s the closest one to here.” She offered, only to be met with an agreeable shrug from Cobra. “I don’t know this area too well -- I’m not up in this part of the state that often -- but it’d make sense with the distance and the bell. Well, I think it’s a bell, anyway.” She folded the paper up and made her way back to the car, putting the directions to the park into the GPS.
“It’s worth checking out, yeah.” If Cobra had any doubts about her conclusion, he didn’t voice them. Her friend just plopped down in the driver’s seat and started the car without much more in the way of conversation.
-- x --
The pair made it to Falls Park -- and by proxy, the bridge -- in record time. The early hour meant that the streets were almost barren, and the sun had just begun to dust the park in light. It was a bit of a struggle to keep pace with Cobra, Jack assumed that they were finally at the meeting spot from the way he rushed down the path. “So what’s this whole thing about anyway?” She knew that Cobra avoided her questions like the plague, but now that they were nearly here she hoped that he would be a little more open.
That hope was dashed within moments. Once they arrived at the bridge, Cobra draped his arms languidly over the side of the bridge, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He regarded the bag of beaver nuggets that, despite his obvious distaste earlier, he’d refused to leave in the car. “Think I could safely feed these to the ducks? I’d worry about ducks and spice, but they’re not all that spicy.” Jack knew he wanted to look casual, but she’d seen him truly at ease before, on other heists, and this wasn’t it. There was a certain set to his jaw, a muscle tensed unconsciously, that belied the opposite.
“I don’t know. Yes? That’s not the important thing right now, Cobra, and I really wish…” Jack bit down several harsh words when she saw that her accomplice had entirely ignored her, typing on his phone instead.
“This says ducks can’t taste spice, so it’s probably fi-” Cobra started, but she’d had enough of his efforts to dodge the conversation at this point.
“Damn the ducks, Cobra! Why are we here?”
Cobra let out a long sigh and put his phone away, his cheerful mask dropping for a moment. He turned to Jack, expression neutral. “I’m not supposed to tell you until everyone gets here. The situation is…complicated, and Mongoose is worried about information being compromised. It’s why we followed the clues here, it’s why I didn’t brief you like normal. This isn’t a normal job, and I can’t tell you more than that.” Well, Jack supposed that was some form of a serious answer, even if he didn’t tell her what the actual situation was. It did, however, make way for more questions.
“Why is Mongoose so involved with this? Meeting her in person like this is kind of odd, doesn’t she usually keep to herself? I figured Croc made sense being here, and I guess Mock too, if we got hurt, but isn’t her job usually just…kind of remote?” Jack couldn’t think of a single job that their boss had actually shown up in person for. She was remarkably introverted and hadn’t even shown up in so much as a video chat before. “Is this job really that big of a deal, where she’s going to be working out here with us?”
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“She’s not going out on the field with us,” Cobra’s voice was firm, as if that part wasn’t up for discussion. “But the job may involve travel, and at this point, it’d be more convenient for all of us to travel together.” Jack’s taller friend shifted his weight and looked back down at the ducks. “It’s…let’s just wait for the others to get here.”
Silence fell between the two of them then, and Jack’s attention turned to the park around them. The sun was fully up by now, and that meant that more people were out and about. Two young men laughed and shoved one another, probably trying to push the other into the Reedy river. A young woman wandered by with a stroller, embroiled in a heated conversation that Jack would’ve tried to eavesdrop on, if the woman’s Spanish wasn’t so rapid. A muscular woman paused her morning jog on the bridge, leaning against the rails to text and catch her breath.
Further off down the path, however, Jack spotted a couple of familiar faces. A buff, dark skinned man with long braids that towered over his companions met her eyes and flashed his familiar wide grin in her direction. Beside him, a thin, pale woman with a neat blonde bun gave a small wave.
The only warning Cobra got was the hurried, “They’re here!” that Jack gave before she darted off towards Crocodile and Mockingbird. “Guys!” She lightly punched Croc’s shoulder in greeting, before she gave Mock a wave in return. Croc’s returned shove, however, launched Jack into someone else, and she spun around to apologize.
“I’m so sorry! We were just messing around and I lost my balance, are you okay?” As the jogger steadied her, Jack contemplated the pros and cons of just vanishing through the metal bottom of the bridge and letting the river carry her off.
The jogger laughed, waving her apology off with her hand and tucking a strand of black hair behind her ear. “Don’t worry about it, none of us are really awake yet. Just be more careful, we don’t need someone falling off the bridge and getting hurt.” With that, she put her phone away and jogged further down the bridge.
Jack tried to shake off the embarrassment that still lingered from the incident and turned to her friends. “Okay, so we’re all here, right? Will you two please-” The young ginger woman paused herself this time, taking a mental count. “Where’s Mongoose? Didn’t she come with you guys?” The question was directed to Mock and Croc, who as far as she was aware, were picked up at the airport by their boss.
“She stopped at a little stand to grab some coffee -- said something about being awake all night, and asked if we wanted any as well.” Croc offered in response, and looked over his shoulder in the way they’d come from, as if he were trying to spot her. Jack tried to stretch up on her toes to look farther, figuring that even if she didn’t necessarily know what Mongoose looked like, she’d make herself obvious enough somehow.
Before long, however, a likely candidate appeared, and Jack was a little taken aback at how normal she looked. In film and anime, the hacker usually appeared as a scrawny, greasy little man with shiny glasses that looked like he hadn’t seen the light of day in a week. In real life, apparently, you could lose track of them in the nearest Starbucks. With curly, dark red hair and a cardboard tray of five coffees balanced precariously in her hands, she looked no more dangerous than any of the other random passersby on the bridge. As she reached the group, she began to hand out the coffees. Cobra handed her the nearly full bag of beaver nuggets in return, with a casual “Don’t worry, they’re not spicy, even the ducks could eat them, so you won’t have a problem.” While Jack expected Mongoose to scold him for focusing on something so stupid, this comment just earned an odd look from her.
“We’re all here now, are you gonna tell us why?” Croc spoke up just as Jack was about to question this whole spectacle. Despite his direct question, he gratefully took the coffee that Mongoose handed him, no actual animosity visible on his face.
There was no way that Mongoose hadn’t heard him, but she ignored the question until everyone had received a cup. Jack cleared her throat to prompt her, but then took a sip of her coffee as their boss turned a withering glare on her. Upon closer inspection, it appeared that her accomplice hadn’t slept at all recently, her brown eyes rimmed with red.
“My office was broken into last night.” She began plainly, before she took another sip of her coffee. The drink seemed to galvanize the woman, and she continued. “It was broken into, and sensitive information was stolen. I have no leads on who could have done this, and obviously, no legal way to investigate it.”
Jack felt her muscles loosen a bit at this knowledge. Sure, this was bad, but not incomprehensibly bad. They could still fix this. Mongoose wouldn’t have called them to fix this if she didn’t think it could be fixed. Some enemy had stolen some sensitive information, whatever that might have been, and they just had to find the bad guy and steal it back. Maybe not an easy task, but Cobra had been wrong. This was just another job.
She clapped her hand down on Mongoose’s shoulder, which caused her older friend to startle and stare daggers at her. “Don’t worry, Mongoose! We’ll get the files back, no problem! I’m sure between the five of us, it’ll-”
Mongoose removed Jack’s hand from her shoulder and delicately dropped it away from her. Jack tried not to take that move personally. “Yeah, there’s just the problem that we don’t really have any idea who could’ve taken it.” She reminded her. “We don’t really have any leads. The thief was careful. No hair, no fingerprints, nothing along those lines.”
“All we know is that whoever came in and took it, they know Mongoose very well,” Cobra cut in, accompanied by a glance at the curly-haired woman that Jack couldn’t quite read. She rolled her eyes and soldiered on with her explanation. “He’s not wrong, there’s no way that they found all of that information in the…hour that I’d been out of my office before I checked it again and noticed that things were out of order.” Her gaze seemed a bit far off and Jack was almost concerned that she’d dozed off, before she spoke again. “But that’s…”
“So what is this sensitive information? I mean, we’ve got to get it back regardless, but how bad are we talking here? Blueprints to our newest job? A customer list? Account numbers for a secret offshore ban-” Jack found herself cut off with a bleak, “Information I kept on all of you. For insurance purposes.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?!” It was Mock that spoke up, then, and her voice cut through the group like a knife. It must have come out louder or more quickly than her friend intended, however, because her pale blue eyes widened in shock, and the next time she spoke, it came out as a quieter hiss. “Mongoose, what the hell do you mean, “information for insurance purposes”? Do you realize how bad this is? We have families, kids even! They could get h-”
“Birdie, I promise you that I’ve had exactly seven hours to realize how bad this is!” Mongoose snapped back. “So if you could just maybe hold off on the “that was stupid and an invasion of privacy” lecture that I know you’re dying to give, let’s maybe get it back first?”
The two older women stared each other down in what felt like hours of silence, and Jack realized that she had unconsciously shrunk back towards Croc and Cobra during this time.
Mongoose brushed off the tension, then. “Besides. You take a job, you give your employer information. You don’t call that an invasion of privacy. It’s just the difficult business of doing business. It’s not like I gathered that info with the sole purpose of it getting stolen.” Their boss began to walk away from the bridge, then, and gestured for the group to follow her.
“We just need to hear from this person again. If they wanted to release the information and sell us out, they would’ve done it already. Blackmail isn’t great, but it beats the alternative.” Cobra brought up, and his voice sounded hopeful. “Chances are, they’re watching us, and now that we’re all here, they’ll reach out to us.”
Jack had to admit that he had a point, and searched the surrounding area for anyone that looked suspicious. The mother had ended her angry phone call and now sat on a park bench, rolling the stroller back and forth. A young man sat underneath a tree, by the water’s edge, and sketched something he saw on the bridge. The jogger from before jogged back towards the bridge, careful to avoid other pedestrians.
No one looked suspicious, but even still, Jack felt her phone buzz. As she pulled it out of her pocket, it felt as if it weighed half a ton. She unlocked the screen and touched the unread notification, dread already filling a pit in her stomach as she read it.
[07:14 -- UNKNOWN NUMBER] - Whoops! Afraid I gave y'all the right instructions and the wrong address. My mistake! Make your way to London, and then we'll talk. (:
“They…want us to head to London?” Jack really wished that she could say that with more confidence, but the sudden change in direction had thrown her for a loop. Sure, she doubted there was anything in South Carolina to really steal. Nothing that would be of any interest to an enemy or anything. However, it felt like a waste of everyone’s time to have three of the five members of the team fly here, drive everyone around, and turn around and tell all of them to get on a plane again. “Does GSP even do flights to-”
“They do, yeah.” Cobra answered quickly, then shrugged. “At least we don’t have to do another long drive?” He offered to Mock and Croc, who had initially flown here as well. Jack caught a quiet, “My legs are still killing me from the last one.” From the team’s muscle, who stretched for emphasis after the statement.
“I’m guessing these tickets are coming from the business fund? Last minute flights to Heathrow are obscene.” Mockingbird must have pulled up the tickets as soon as Jack read the message, and was now staring at her own phone in clear disdain. Waiting for a moment, with her pale eyes on their boss, the tall blonde woman tried once more, a little louder. “Mongoose?”
Mongoose, who had been quiet during this whole exchange, startled violently. “What?” She snapped, before collecting herself a bit more. “Right, the tickets. Don’t worry about them, no. Just get your affairs in order, call whoever you need to, keep from raising any alarm bells, you all know the drill.” This return to their standard routine appeared to steady the older woman a bit, and she continued. “Remember, nothing too outlandish. A work trip that you need to accompany your employer on,” This was directed to Mock. “A sabbatical for your practice,” She nodded at Croc next. “Something that makes sense.” Jack’s cheeks flushed at this comment, her gaze meeting Mongoose's.
So she still remembered the botched "art show" alibi, then. Neat. She wasn't living that down any time soon.
She probably should call her brother, though. Jack hadn't had an alibi when she headed out this morning, she hadn't really had enough information to tell Dylan anything right away. Her solution at the time had just been to sneak out of the apartment and leave a note that she'd be back later, but a note wouldn't hold him long. The fact he hadn't already called had been a miracle, it had been hours. She dialed his number as she took a couple of steps away from the group.
She was met by the busy tone, and she frowned at the sidewalk beneath her, confused. Who in the world was he talking to this early in the morning? It went to voice-mail, and while she wanted to know what he was up to, she was a little relieved he hadn't picked up.
"Hey bro, it's me. Sorry for the vague note, some friends wanted me to come on vacation with them, and it was a bit of a last minute thing. I'll call you back later, bye."
Jack hung up and made her way back to the group. Mock was the next one back, her eyebrows furrowed as she read something on her phone screen. Croc hadn't even walked away from where Mongoose was standing, and she heard the last snippet of his conversation, "Tell Mom I'll call her when I get to the hotel, keep Iyana in line, I love y'all. Bye." As Jack reached the others, Mongoose hung up her phone as well with a quick, "Alright, dear. Bye." Cobra was the last one to return to the group, having already hung up before he got there.
Jack looked between her teammates, then, nervous. The energy was weird between the group right now, and no one was really saying anything. It was Croc who finally broke the silence.
"Let's get going then?"