Episode 12: Mr. Body Beautiful
Part 2
Birds twittered above their heads. The sky was crystal blue and cloudless. It was so beautiful outside that it really didn’t feel to Pearl like she was working that day.
The scientist was sitting comfortably at a pretty glass table out on Brian’s back porch. A pair of old-fashioned rocking chairs sat in the corner, completing the homey look. Her fingers flew across the keyboard of her light blue laptop as it rested on the glass table. Beside her sat Ashavari, otherwise known as Opal Odyssey, who typed on her adjacent black computer. The two women were like night and day in appearance, but their shared love of knowledge had bound them together quicker than anything.
It was the first time that Pearl had left HimTak for anything work-related in over a year. After witnessing Drums throw JC to his death at Disney World, she’d retreated into her lab, surrounding herself with the only thing she could trust: technology, which never stopped making sense to her.
It felt good, however, to get out again. Maybe she would accept the next mission K assigned her. It wasn’t often that she was needed out in the field, but K had approved this trip because he wanted to know what the FBI had been up to since their escapades at the Playboy Mansion. Pearl and Opal had been trying for days to translate the alien language written upon the pieces of technology Pearl had stolen during that mission. The FBI had been unable to do anything with the devices they had confiscated and had enlisted the CIA’s help, which was how Opal had gotten involved. Although not a cryptographer like Opal, Pearl had been able to assist her by reverse-engineering one of the devices, which she had dubbed a “Cone of Silence.” They were on the verge of cracking the code; she could feel it. The knowledge of that excited her. There was nothing like the thrill of discovery.
Opal smiled at her. Although HimTak was never supposed to be on any country’s side, it was at times like these that Pearl questioned Nick’s unwavering mistrust of the government. It wasn’t all evil. Then again, Nick had a reason. It was a reason none except K and Jay seemed to be privy to, as he discussed it with no one. Not even her, despite their friendship. It was just a dark secret lurking within Nick’s otherwise open personality.
Pearl kept clicking around on files, looking for one in particular. She hadn’t brought the devices with her — too much danger in possibly losing them. They were safest at HimTak, especially the one she hadn’t been completely able to figure out. She had her suspicions, but until she knew for sure, she couldn’t leave them out in the open where anyone could get at them. Instead, she had high-definition photos so that they could examine the inscriptions on them with ease.
“I’ll be happy when this assignment is over,” said Opal with a sigh, running a hand through her long, black hair.
“What, you’re eager to get rid of me?” Pearl quipped.
“No, of course not! I just don’t like working for the FBI. The way they operate… well, it’s not…” Opal paused. “It’s not what I’m used to.”
“I bet. I didn’t like working with them either. Ugh, I can’t remember where I saved that file…”
“What’s that one?” Opal asked, pointing at a jpeg that was only numbered rather than titled.
Pearl clicked and immediately regretted it. It was an old photo taken just before Nick’s hiatus and the accident that had caused it. In the photo were Drums and Nick, sparring playfully in the training area. The two of them were laughing while Lancy watched hungrily in the background. Pearl sighed. A lot had changed over the past two years since the picture had been taken. Had it really been that long? Was it only a year-and-a-half ago that Drums had gone to the other side and FANS had started haunting their lives?
Opal gave her a questioning glance.
“Just… weird memories.”
“It can’t be easy.”
Pearl took a deep breath. “Nick and Justin… Drums… were close once. The three of us were recruited at the same time, went through basic training together,” she explained. “I thought I had deleted all the photos from… before… off of here. Has that happened at the CIA? Where one of your agents goes to the… dark side?” She laughed dryly. “God, I sound like a Jedi.”
Opal shook her head. “I haven’t dealt with anything like that, though I’m sure Brian has. You and Nick must have taken it hard.”
“We deal better now because he’s not that person anymore. He’s more machine now than man, twisted and evil.” Pearl sighed heavily. “Justin’s dead, you know? All that’s left is Drums. But it’s why Nick’s so determined to bring Dr. Rough down. He wants revenge for what happened, for everything. It’s personal and has been since the beginning.”
“What is your deal with Nick anyway?” Brian asked as he walked outside, a plate filled with tiny sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade in his hands. He grinned as he sat between them. “I know he chases any female that breathes.”
“Friends. We’re close, but that’s it.”
“Too much of a womanizer, huh?” He grinned and took a big bite out of one of the sandwiches.
She shrugged; she really didn’t want to think about it.
“You know Jay was talking about you with Leo,” Opal chimed in. Pearl was thankful for the topic shift as she clicked out of the old photo and deleted the file. Some memories were better left buried.
She laughed, unaware that a new window had appeared on the screen of her laptop. “Leo? He’s cute, sure, maybe not as cute as Nick, but pretty. Leo’s too cocky, though. I tend to not think about that stuff much.”
“Pearly! I knew you thought I was cute! Maybe…” Nick’s voice yelled out happily. The noise caused her to jerk with surprise. She stared down to see K on her monitor with Nick trying to peer in behind him. Sometimes she regretted making the paging system two-way on her laptop. She only hoped they hadn’t heard much.
“Nick, be quiet!” K said sternly.
Pearl smirked. “Cute like a puppy, in that ‘aww… he’s so adorable but still wets the carpet’ sort of way.”
“Take that, Carter,” she heard Leo say somewhere off-camera.
“Shut it, Di-Crapio; I told you that you didn’t have a prayer with her.” He sounded all too smug. Ugh, perfect.
“Both of you shut it before I demote you!” K snapped impatiently before smiling charmingly up at the two women and Brian. “Be glad you’re away.”
“Everything okay?” Pearl asked. Normally, her superior had more patience with Nick’s antics.
“Other than the fact that Dr. Rough seems to want my head on a platter? No,” Jay replied dryly, his face appearing next to K’s.
As K pushed the camera back to fit more people into the frame, Pearl realized they were in her lab. She spotted Leo, Lancy, Red, and Styx standing in the background. Leo glowered at Nick before he walked away. Pearl watched him wander around her lab, inspecting certain devices carefully, and frowned. She was going to have to talk to Jay about everyone being in her lab while she was away. She still hadn’t forgotten the machine gun bra incident. “What’s going on?” she asked.
K quickly filled her in on the latest of FANS’ plots. She couldn’t believe Dr. Rough had somehow managed to implant him with a microscopic bomb. Besides the obvious threat to K’s life, the implications of such a breach frightened her. How could one of Dr. Rough’s henchmen have gotten past HimTak’s supposedly impenetrable security to reach their leader? She didn’t voice her concerns aloud, as K hadn’t. She wondered if he was waiting until Styx went away. “You want me to come back?” she asked instead.
“No. You should stay there. We just need your brainpower here. And your technology.”
Pearl sighed. “I’m thinking…” Her mind raced through possible solutions. “Red, you can’t operate on it, can you?” She was sure the answer was no; if surgery was a possibility, they would have tried it already rather than seeking her help.
Red Jewel came into the foreground, shaking her head. “Even if I had the right equipment and people I’d need to attempt to remove it surgically, I couldn’t — not without triggering it.”
Pearl nodded. It was as she had expected. After some thought, she was struck by another question. “How did you find this out anyway?” she asked.
Jay smirked. “Dr. Rough was able to crack into the system enough to get on the paging line.”
“WHAT?!”
“Oh shit, Pearl’s pissed…”
“That’s kind of hot.”
Opal rolled her eyes at Leo’s remark before giving the blonde beside her a look of sympathy.
“Oh, hell no! No one cracks through my security walls and gets away with it! That twitchy son of a–”
“Can we refocus?!” K hollered.
All the agents in the laboratory looked sheepish. Brian smirked around a mouthful of sandwich with some morbid amusement. He was worried about his cousin, despite knowing that all the agents at Himitsu Takana were very capable of taking care of him. The laughter he fought back was out of nervousness more than anything else. But he couldn’t go to Nevada. He was about to go on assignment again himself, as the CIA was currently trying to track down FANS’ headquarters in an effort to bring all of Dr. Rough’s madness to an end.
“Sorry, K.” Pearl stroked her chin, deep in thought. Suddenly, she said, “I’m thinking the shrink ray…”
Brian blinked. “Y’all have a shrink ray?”
“What, you don’t?”
“Ooh, I wanna be the one to use it, Pearly!” Nick said with the most charming of grins.
Pearl suppressed a smile. “I can walk you guys through it. We could shrink a few of you and…” She sighed. “…my car, which has water capabilities. Then have them…” She knew K would hate what she was about to suggest. “…go inside you and defuse it.”
K visibly paled. She couldn’t blame him. But she had to hand it to their leader: he sure knew how to stay calm in a crisis, even when it was his own life in danger. “I don’t like it, but the deadline we’ve been given is in less than ten hours, and it might be the only viable option we have. Do you think it would work, Red?”
Red Jewel’s eyes were wide. “It’s risky,” she said, “but it just might work. Dr. Rough said the bomb is rigged to detonate if we try to extract it from your tissue, but if we could disarm it first, then removing it would be no problem. We’d have to be almost microscopic, though, like the bomb itself must be…”
“My shrink ray can do it,” said Pearl with confidence.
K nodded with grim determination. “Then here’s what we’re doing. Jay, you and…” He swallowed hard, and Pearl knew he was wishing Emerald wasn’t out with Diamond on a mission. “Carter,” he choked out, “prepare to be shrunken down. Take Styx with you, too. Red, I’ll need you to monitor these three inside me from the outside and make sure nothing goes wrong. Lancy, you help her. Pearl, I need you to be on call and walk them through everything they need to know. Will that be alright?”
“No problem. You know me — computer nerd, always online.”
“Vitruvian–”
Leo looked up from the device he was holding. It wasn’t much bigger than the palm of his hands and about six inches thick, with strange lettering. He set it down, and Pearl breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing she needed was him setting off something she wasn’t sure how to operate yet. “Yes?”
“Hold down the fort here until the other agents get back. Then I want you to go to Las Vegas. They’re expecting Jay. See if you can track down or capture any of them. We need all the information we can get.”
Leo gave a single nod, accepting his mission without question.
“Everything clear?”
Everyone, both at HimTak and Brian’s house, nodded in agreement.
“Good. Let’s get to work and get this thing out of me.”
***
For the past hour, Pearl had been walking Nick through the specifics on how to work the shrink ray. He was tired of listening now and was just eager to try it out. He’d used to love that movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids when he was younger, and now he was about to reenact it. Just another cool thing about the life he lived. He sighed deeply as his friend’s voice continued from the monitors. He knew he could handle it — come on, a baseball managed to get the machine to shrink stuff in the movie! Surely, he could press a few buttons just as simply. The beauty of this was that K wasn’t there to yell at him. While they got the machine ready, K was in the infirmary, being prepped for the bomb-removal procedure.
“Okay, I got it.”
“Nick, make sure everything is calibrated correctly before you start; otherwise, it won’t do anything but–”
He grinned at the feed. “I got it; I got it!”
“Are you sure?”
The device was tall (more than half Nick’s height when placed securely upon its tripod stand), silver, and a lot sleeker than the one in the infamous movie. While the mini touch monitor looked simple enough, Pearl had repeatedly tried to remind him over the live feed to DC that it wasn’t. He scoffed to himself. She should have faith in him. He could totally handle anything her mind cooked up. Look at how he’d been with his car — well, that was Canada’s fault for using kilometers instead of miles like normal people. And the machine gun bra was glitchy to begin with. But everything else he’d handled alright! So he knew he could deal with this.
“Sure!” He aimed at the first thing they’d grabbed as a tester: an orange on a little side table. “I got this. This doesn’t look hard at all…” He aimed, fired, and within seconds, the orange exploded beautifully across the walls of the lab.
“You’re cleaning that up.”
Leo rolled his eyes. “He’s got us under a death wish; that’s what he’s got.”
“It’ll be fine this time.”
“I’m not standing in front of that thing until we know what we’re doing,” Jay said dryly, adjusting his shades. He was dressed like he was going on a vacation instead of a mission inside his boss’s body. The Hawaiian shirt he wore was blue with pink hearts floating in round, red innertubes, interspersed between big, spiky, white balls. Nick wasn’t sure what those were supposed to be. Clouds? Blowfish?
The blonde scientist nodded her head in complete agreement. She bit her lip, looking around as much as the camera in her lab would allow her. “Test it on my couch.”
Behind the desk, surrounded by the many monitors, was a bright blue, worn, and comfortable-looking loveseat that Pearl used when trying to take a break or keep a close eye on the security feeds.
“Sweet,” Nick said, swirling around and aiming.
“Shit! Let me get up first!” Styx scrambled off the couch, where he’d been lounging with a recent copy of Weekly World News. Nick saw the headline “Alien Playboys!” printed in bold font across the cover.
“Tabloids, really?”
His trainee shrugged. “The crazy stories make me laugh.”
“But–”
“Nick, focus!” Pearl snapped. “Now, this time, be sure everything is entered correctly. You overshot it last time. The energy level was too high, and rather than shrinking, everything combusted.”
“No problem.” Nick took more time this go around, not wanting to blow up something he knew would upset his friend.
“Okay, now be sure to enter the right sequence of commands.”
“Hey, trust me!” Nick reassured her as he did as he was told. He grinned and aimed again. A bright, almost blinding, white laser shot from the gun and hit the couch directly. It consumed the object with its light, and, within seconds, the couch had disappeared.
“Holy shitballs! That was awesome!” Nick glanced at the ground. “Where’d it go?” He walked forward. “I didn’t explode it, did I? Pearl will kill me if–” Feeling a tiny crunch beneath his foot, he jumped back.
Stepping over, Jay kneeled down and examined the almost microscopic remains of what had been a full-size piece of furniture. “She still will, Carter; you crushed it.”
“Shit! Pearly, I’m sorry–”
“I loved that thing! You owe me another couch, Blondie! First the machine gun bra…”
“That wasn’t my–”
“Then your car…”
“Blame Canada!”
“And now my couch. Ugh, I swear, Nick…”
He smiled at her. “You still love me.”
Jay rolled his eyes, fighting back the faintest beginnings of a smile. “Are we done, children?”
“Yes, though I don’t know why.” Pearl smiled. “I’m behaving, boss, no worries.”
Meanwhile, Leo fetched her keys from the drawer where Pearl had said he would find them and pulled the fabric cover off her car. The bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle, decorated with blue flower decals, fit her sunny personality perfectly. He chuckled to himself when he saw it. “Hippie in a past life?”
She chose to ignore that comment, rolling her eyes at something Brian said in the background where she was. “Hey, shush!”
As Leo fired up Pearl’s car and pulled forward, the other blond agent’s eyes lit up. “A yellow submarine!”
Jay gave Nick a warning look. “Don’t even start.”
Leo rolled his eyes at him as he parked the Bug closer to the shrink ray and climbed out. “It’s a car.”
“That can turn into a sub! So ha!” Nick turned the shrink ray towards it. “Okay, now to shrink Jay and…”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense if I do it? Then we only have to do this once,” Leo suggested. “I watched you do it both times. And I actually listened to Pearl while she explained what to do.”
“What? No!” Nick protested. “You’ll just–”
Their superior sighed deeply and, in a rare moment, resembled K. “If he wanted to kill you, Carter, he’d have done it by now. Now get over here.” He glanced at Leo. “After we’re in K, get straight to Las Vegas. No delays.”
Nick didn’t miss the haughty smirk Leo shot his way as a result of Jay’s words. “Fine,” he muttered and begrudgingly did as he was told.
Lancy stood next to Leo, not wanting to miss a thing. “Oh, now Nick will be Nicky Pocket! I can just tuck you away and…”
Leaning over towards Jay, Nick sighed. “Can’t I get a new secretary?”
Jay snickered. “No way. Besides, Lancy’s good at what he does and keeps quiet about it.”
“Clearly you’re not around him enough,” Nick grumbled as he gathered with Jay and Styx in front of the car.
Being on the receiving end of it this time was almost impossible to describe. One moment, everything seemed normal, and the next, they were practically consumed by the blinding light Nick had seen when he shot the couch earlier. In an instant, everything around him was enormous and overpowering. It would have been enough to really unnerve him if his adrenaline hadn’t already been so high.
“That was a fuckin’ trip,” Jay mused. “Okay, Pearl said the wetsuits were in the trunk for when we’re in his bloodstream.”
Nick laughed as he opened the trunk and pulled out three scuba diving suits. “I think I’ll put my spacesuit on, so I can jump into my rocket!”
Jay raised a brow at him as he removed his wacky shirt and put his own suit on. “What are you singing now?”
A shrug. “Just something I made up.”
Another eye roll. If there was a dollar for every time Nick had made that happen, they’d all be millionaires. “Let’s get in so we can get this done and over with,” said Jay, pulling his Hawaiian shirt back on over the suit. “To the Bug!”
“Alright. I prefer the Beatles anyway.” As he climbed into the passenger seat, Nick started singing a new song. “In the town where I was born lived a man who sailed to sea… and he told us of his life in the land of submarines…” He wished he could drive, but Pearl had made it clear that under no circumstances was he to get behind the wheel of her car.
“Is he gonna sing the whole mission?” Styx muttered to Jay, who flipped the driver’s seat forward so the shadow agent could squeeze into the back.
“Knowing Nick? Probably,” replied Jay as he put the seat back into position and slid behind the wheel of the yellow Bug. “Seatbelts, everyone!” He buckled in and prepared himself for what would probably be one of the strangest missions he’d ever been on. And that was saying something.
“So we sailed on to the sun… ‘til we found a sea of green,” Nick sang on next to him. “And we lived beneath the waves… in our yellow submarine…”
Finally, Jay gave up and started singing along, the way he always did when he was paired up with 008. “We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine…”
***
Red Jewel looked up as Lancy strolled into the infirmary. “Where have you been?” Her voice sounded unusually sharp.
“Just getting all gowned up,” he replied, doing a little twirl to show off the outfit he’d put together for the occasion. “You like?”
Lying on the bed in front of him, K lifted his head to get a better look at him and groaned. “God, Lancybassy, what are you wearing?”
Lancy glanced down at the pink-and-white-striped pinafore he had put on over his crisp, white shirt and slacks. “What? I was just trying to look the part!” He patted the matching white nurse’s cap perched jauntily over the frosted tips of his hair, making sure it was still in place.
K closed his eyes and sighed as he slumped back onto his pillow. “God help me…”
“Relax,” said Red in a soothing tone, rubbing his shoulder. “You’re gonna be alright. We’ll get that thing out of you.”
“Of course we will!” Lancy cried with confidence, remembering how he had helped Diamond disarm the bomb on that Zamboni at the Olympics. “We won’t let mean old Dr. Rough blow up that beautiful bod of yours.” He couldn’t help running his eyes down the length of K’s body, unaccustomed to seeing his boss in so little clothing. K’s usual black suit and white shirt — one of seven identical outfits that hung in his closet — were folded neatly on the counter in the corner of the room. His bare chest was wired with electrodes, which would allow Red to monitor his heart rhythm throughout the mission. Lancy felt his own heart flutter as he followed the thin trail of hair from K’s toned abs to the waistband of his tight, black boxer briefs, which left little to his imagination. “Is it hot in here, or is it just me?” he asked, fanning himself with his hand.
“No, it’s a little stuffy,” Red replied innocently, rolling up the sleeves of her white coat. “Hey, Archie!”
Archie? Lancy looked around in confusion as a young man with red hair and goatee came out of one of the back rooms, rolling a red cart full of equipment. “Sorry,” he apologized to Red. “I couldn’t find it at first.”
“That’s okay,” said Red, taking the cart from him and parking it at K’s bedside. “Can you turn the air up? The thermostat’s over there.”
“Okay…” The redheaded man hesitated. “Turn it up as in make the temperature higher, or…?”
Red stared at him for a second. “No, turn the air conditioning up, so it lowers the temperature.”
“Oh… right!” He blushed, his face blending in with his beard as he hurried to follow her instructions.
Lancy watched his back as he retreated. “Is it Bring Your Brother to Work Day or something?” he asked Red.
“What? No!” she laughed. “He’s not my brother. That’s my new assistant, Archie.”
“New assistant?” Lancy couldn’t believe he had missed hearing about a new hire. His secretarial gossip ring had failed him! “What happened to the old one?”
“I had to let her go. She was never here when I needed her! Always calling in ‘sick.’” Red rolled her eyes as she made air quotes with her fingers. “Terrible work ethic.”
“Oh wow, that’s too bad. I hope Jay or K wiped her memory before she left — don’t want any of our secrets getting out!”
“Don’t worry,” K said quietly from the bed. “We did.”
“Did what?” Archie asked as he returned.
“Nothing,” said Lancy quickly, turning to him with a smile. “I don’t believe we’ve met yet — Archie, is it?” He held out his hand. “I’m James Lancybassy, secretary for 00Carter.”
“Double-O… Carter?” The look of confusion came back across the new guy’s face.
K cleared his throat. “Agent 008. Although his actual code name is–”
“It’s 00Carter!” As if on cue, Nick’s voice rang out through the room.
Looking around for the source of it, Lancy finally spotted his flawless face filling half the screen of one of the monitors mounted on the wall of the infirmary. On the other side of the split-screen, he could see Pearl, her blonde hair in pigtails. It looked like she had left Brian’s back porch and was sitting somewhere inside now.
“It seems our three-way video call is working,” Pearl said, laughing. “This will allow us all to stay connected throughout the mission. Red, you’ll be able to see what Jay’s team is seeing inside K so you can help guide them through his body–”
“Great,” muttered K, grimacing.
“–and when they get to the bomb, Brian and I will try to talk them through how to defuse it.”
“Not ‘try,’” Brian interjected, his face appearing next to Pearl’s as he leaned in front of her camera. “We will talk them through how to defuse it. You’re gonna be just fine, cuz.” His blue eyes blazed with a fire Lancy had never seen in them before.
K may be fine, but his cousin’s even hotter when he gets mad, Lancy thought, shuddering as a little thrill shot through his body. So intense!
“Of course,” Pearl added quickly. “Don’t worry; we’ve got you, K.”
With a tight-lipped smile, K nodded. “Thanks, guys. I know I can count on you.”
“Let’s just hope we can count on Di-Crapio to get us to you without dropping us,” Nick said. “He’d never find us if he did.”
“I heard that, Carter.” Leo’s voice joined the others as he shuffled into the infirmary, carrying an empty petri dish. At least, it appeared empty at first glance.
But on closer inspection, as Lancy leaned over it and peered inside, he could see something small and yellow sitting in the center of it. Realizing what it was, he gasped. “The shrink ray worked?!”
“Hey, Lancybassy!” Lancy glanced back up at the monitor to see Jay waving on the screen. “Down here!”
Looking down into the dish, Lancy blinked in disbelief. Pearl’s Beetle had been reduced to the size of a flea. The people inside were too tiny to see. But to Jay, Nick, and Styx, he must have looked like a giant.
“Do you pluck your nose hairs, Lancy?” Nick asked. “Because you have way less nose hair than Leo-nasty-o here.”
“Careful, Carter,” Leo warned, glaring at the petri dish. “Remember, your life is literally in my hands right now.”
“Yeah, well, so is K’s. You wouldn’t risk killing your boss, would you?” Nick retorted.
Leo just smirked and said nothing.
“For the record, Nick, I did do a bit of manscaping this morning,” said Lancy, batting his eyelashes. “I’m so flattered you noticed!”
Red cleared her throat. “Um, guys? As important as this discussion of your daily grooming habits no doubt is, I want to remind you that there is a literal ticking time bomb inside K’s chest right now! Can we get a move on already?”
Nick chuckled. “Ooh, I love it when the fiery redhead comes out of her.”
“She’s right,” said Jay. “I’m ready whenever you are, Red! Let’s go!”
“Yo, how are we getting inside K, anyway?” Lancy heard Styx ask. Turning toward the video monitor, he could see the trainee’s face peeking between Nick’s and Jay’s from the car’s back seat. All three of them were wearing wetsuits. Lancy wished the camera were further back so he could see more of their bodies. He loved the way Nick looked in skin-tight neoprene.
“I’ve thought about it, and I think the best course of action would be to insert you into his nose,” said Red.
“My nose?” K repeated, wrinkling it.
“Don’t worry — I’m gonna give you something to help you relax before we get started,” she said reassuringly, patting his shoulder again. “Otherwise, you might end up sneezing them right back out.”
“Ew.” On camera, Jay made the exact same face as K.
“I know. It’s not going to be pleasant for any of us, but consider the alternatives. The mouth would put you closer to his heart, but I would worry about him accidentally swallowing you… and I don’t think you want to end up in his digestive system for a multitude of reasons. Obviously, the rectal route isn’t the best option either–”
“Rectal?!” Now it was Nick’s turn to look nauseated. “No way! That’s the worst option!”
Not always, thought Lancy with a wistful sigh.
“I agree, dude,” said Styx, his eyes wide. “At my old job, we were never expected to drive up someone’s asshole.”
“That’s what I was trying to say,” Red replied patiently. “It wouldn’t make sense to go in that way. But if you go in through K’s nasal cavity, you can travel through the nasal passages to his trachea and take that down into his lung. From there, you can cross into his bloodstream, which will carry you into his heart.”
She sounded like she was giving driving directions — which, Lancy supposed, she technically was. But this time, the road map was a diagram of K’s anatomy.
“According to my research,” Pearl chimed in, “the bomb is likely to be found near the sinoatrial node, the part of the heart that controls its rate, like a built-in pacemaker. That would explain how Dr. Rough has been able to make K’s heart speed up and slow down at will. If it’s truly as destructive as he claims it can be, it must be some type of atomic bomb to be able to pack that much power into a microscopic casing.”
Archie’s eyes widened behind his glasses. “Maybe I should have stayed home today,” he muttered.
“Hm,” said Leo, his brow furrowing as he looked at Red. “Dr. Llewellyn? Do you concur?”
Red raised her eyebrows, clearly caught off-guard by his question. “Well… I don’t know much about explosives, but what Pearl just told us about the SA node is correct. As for whether or not that’s where the bomb will be, I guess we won’t know for sure until the team gets there.”
Leo nodded. “Very good, Dr. Llewellyn. Very good point.”
“Prick,” Nick coughed. Giggling, Lancy looked at the video monitor to see him making the same disgusted face as before. But, this time, it was directed at his latest nemesis, the new 009.
K cleared his throat. “Uh, Red? Can you go ahead and give me that sedative now? Y’all are making me kinda queasy here.” He ran his hand up and down his chest.
“Of course,” Red replied, her voice softening as she glanced up at the heart monitor that was mounted over his hospital bed. It seemed to be beeping faster than before, the little green waves spiking across the black screen with every heartbeat. Following her line of sight, Lancy watched the number in the top right corner climb from ninety-seven to one hundred fifteen beats per minute in a matter of seconds. “Just try to relax,” Red told K. “We don’t want your heart rate to get too high. That will only make it harder for the team.”
K took a deep breath, and the number dropped back down to one ten. “I’ll try.”
Turning her back to him, Red drew up a syringe full of clear fluid from a small vial. She held it up to the light, looking closely at the lines on the side of the syringe, and flicked it with her finger to get rid of any air bubbles. “This should help,” she said as she injected it slowly into the IV line she had inserted in his arm. “It won’t put you all the way under, but it’ll make you sleepy enough to doze off while we do this. When you wake up, you probably won’t even remember what happened.”
K nodded, but Lancy could see the fear in his eyes. “Good luck, agents,” he whispered. “Get the job done.”
“We won’t let you down, boss!” Jay called from behind the wheel of Pearl’s car. His voice projected through the television screen, too tiny to be heard in person.
“Yeah, you can count on us!” added Nick from the passenger seat. It was no surprise Pearl wouldn’t let him drive after what he had done to the last car she’d loaned him.
“We’re all praying for another successful mission,” said Brian as Pearl nodded along next to him. “We love you, Kev.”
The others echoed the same sentiments as they stood around K’s bed, watching him while they waited for the drug to take effect. Gradually, his heart rate dropped, and his breathing slowed down as his eyelids began to droop.
“K?” Red asked quietly when his eyes were finally closed. There was no response. Raising her voice, she called him by his real name: “Kevin?”
This time, he let out a low groan but did not open his eyes.
With a nod of satisfaction, Red turned back to the others. “Okay — it’s go time,” she announced as she took out a tiny pair of tweezers. “Vitruvian, if you could bring our little friends over here, please.” She positioned herself at the head of K’s bed. With a steady hand, she used the tweezers to carefully pluck the minuscule car out of the petri dish. Bending over K, she placed the tip of the tweezers inside his left nostril.
“Here… we… go!” Lancy heard Jay’s voice shout. Despite the stress of the situation, he almost sounded excited.
As Red released the car, all eyes turned to the video screen to watch the mission unfold.
***