We were driving across Rimona's outskirts, pretty slowly too. Neither Mika, Akito nor I were familiar with how to get to the capital, and much less the specific parts of it.
“We're lost,” Akito muttered next to me in the backseat for the tenth or so time, the Toyota temporarily taking the space of a bus stop.
“No, we're not.” Mika retorted, leaning over the wheel with her hands in her hair and her eyes narrowed at one of the roadsigns. “I've been here millions of times and all we need to do is keep driving until we get out of this slightly confusing web of streets.”
“Where are we, then?” He groped for the road atlas in the the glovebox, rummaging through whatever stacks of paper and torches there were. Finally, he pulled the heavy book out, laying it on his lap beside me.
“Capital.”
“Specifically?” There was a slight eye-roll to Akito's tone, his fingers flipping through the pages of the atlas. And when Mika gave no answer, he pressed on. “... You don't know either, do you? We are lost.” He furrowed a brow, tilting the map for a bit once he found the page to get a proper look at it. For a minute or so, the silence swelled inside the car, Mika obviously seething to herself. Then, Akito snapped shut the heavy book, leaving it there on his lap. “Alright, I'm happy now. Take the next left, Mika.”
The engine whirred to life, the car lurching forwards and turning slowly at the crossroads. We came to another stop at the traffic lights, and Mika sighed. “You're such a control freak. It's not like we know where in the capital to look for all these people anyway, so why not start here?”
“I'm not a control freak, I just don't like being disorientated.” He brushed her question off.
“Ah,” Mika smirked in the rear mirror, “not just a control freak, a defensive control freak.”
Akito didn't say anything in response to that. After all, there wasn't much to say. He continued to study the atlas, or pretended to, for the remaining of the ride, and I dozed off against the window.
An hour or so later, I was woken as the engine switched off. As I opened my eyes, I noticed that the Toyota was parked on the curb of the road, the shops lining both sides filled with clutters of children and teenagers. It was a total contrast from the quiet area of Rimona.
“Where exactly are we?” I asked, trying to swallow down my second thoughts in regards to being a few hours away from home. “And where are we going?”
“Off to the lair of this old geezer who considers himself to be a detective. And oh, did I mention? He considers himself to have adopted Aki and I, too.”
Oh...
She continued without pausing for my taking in of that fact. “We believe that Henryk wasn't just randomly chosen to be one of the dead bodies that turned up, but instead he might have known something that he shouldn't have,” Mika said in a cold yet certain voice. She climbed out of the car, slammed the door and stood on the streets.
“That always happens, yeah?” Akito mused, pulling his lips into a smirk of sorts. “Dead men tell no tales.”
“Yeah.”
With that we started walking,
~*~
Hiding in plain sight. That's what he called it, walking down L Street at five in the afternoon. He wore a black shirt with jeans and combat boots, the knife and cyanide capsule concealed on the inside of his leather jacket. Guns would be too easy to track down, and he disliked being tracked down. It was irritating to exterminate law enforcement officers.
To everyone else, he was just another foreigner who lounged around aimlessly, and that could be the accurate description or not depending on how you looked at it. He did, however, look like everyone else, talk like everyone else and sound like everyone else. He could be anyone's next-door-neighbor, the man down the road or the man on the bus.
He could walk right up to Akito and touch him; the boy wouldn't even realize it.
And that's just what he did, strolling through the semi-crowded streets anonymously with a paper pamphlet in one hand. He was decent-looking enough to get pass any reasonable suspicion, but not superficially charming as to gaining unwanted attention. Right at the crossroads, he spotted the three of them, walking in a herd like every other uniform-clad herd on the street. He probably would have grinned to himself if the concept of using his facial muscles here made sense to him at all.
“Ah, sorry.” He brushed an arm against Akito's, the pamphlet falling onto the ground. The boy was as tall as he was, and he made a mental note of that. Such information might come in handy later, one could never know.
Akito turned around, bowing his head slightly before bending down to pick up the paper pamphlet. Everything was going as planned. He studied it for a moment — Of course he would, that was part of the plan as well. The two words printed on the front read Henryk Sampson.
The Prodigy blinked at Akito, as if he was confused as to why someone might find the two words interesting.
“He's a very good photographer, I heard,” the Prodigy said with a heavy German accent. It didn't matter if the accent was learned or not, it sounded natural. He was a natural — His title wasn't given by chance. Everything had gotten so easy that his job started to become boring. Maybe he'd gloat to the Mastermind and soften him up a bit later on in the day, for that would definitely bring him closer to the top of his rankings. In fact, he already was at the top. The Prodigy figured that he'd keep the Mastermind under his spell for a little while longer before taking the ultimate position for himself.
“Are you planning to hire him by any chance?” The boy's green gaze met his, and the Prodigy shook his head.
“No, no. You can take the pamphlet if you want.” He put on a smile and raised a hand slightly in a perfectly conversational manner.
“Ah, thank you.” The lights turned green and three of them walked off, the boy taking the ball with him. A slightly shorter brunette beside Akito turned to give the Prodigy a last glance, though he didn't hang around to see it.
His first job was already done; he just wanted to see what Akito Cross was made of.
Not worthy of his attention after all.
The Prodigy then headed towards T Street, where the real fun would begin. He turned into a residential building on the left, walking right under the noses of the security guard. Their security sucked. He took the elevator right to the top, where he exited broke into the apartment. The process itself took no more than a few minutes, and the Prodigy knew that Mrs Greene would only return after ten. He'd been watching her for an entire week.
The Prodigy glanced around the living room that he first came to face. Blanche Greene was an FBI agent and a few things in her apartment showed it: Stacks of confidential envelopes were piled up on the dinner table, some unopened and others hastily ripped open. There was a diary of sorts too — He might have a look at that after he was finished here. What went on in the personal lives of these people didn't interest him at all, but he did gain some sort of pleasure from knowing that his own observational notes matched those written by their own hands.
Minutes ticked by. The Prodigy wandered into the master bedroom, having cleaned the finger and footprints off everything he had come into physical contact with. The apartment's door clicked open, and he knew that Greene would enter the room within seconds to get changed. And when she did, the Prodigy stepped out from his place behind the door, and held a knife to Greene's neck.
She didn't scream, she didn't flinch. Instead, her hand flew down to the Glock at her waist the moment she saw him; she was a well-trained FBI agent after all. The Prodigy was not impressed. He retracted the knife and pulled out his own pistol, pointing it not at Greene herself but the gun in her hand.
“I'm not here to take your life, and you probably wish not to take mine. We both have families and friends, so how about we co-operate?” The Prodigy knew he was spouting bullshit, but he said it anyway. He wanted to see Greene's reaction, before he put the woman out of her miserable life. “I only want to ask you a question, with the life of your loved one at stake. Nod once if you understand. Any other response, or lack of it, will be treated as a sign of aggression.”
Refusing to lower the gun, he fished out a photograph of Greene's spouse, tied to a chair with a gag in his mouth.
Greene nodded, fear starting to register in her eyes. The Prodigy got straight to the point.
“How can I get to the center of the Yotsugi Clan?”
His eyes were narrowed, locked into Greene's frantic gaze. She blinked twice and shook her head.
“I... I really d-don't know. It's classified information t-that even I do not have.”
The Prodigy ground his teeth and lowered his weapon. God, these people were fucking stubborn. He wasn't going to ask twice either — He disliked begging for results.
“You know what this is,” he said, pulling out a capsule. “And you know what to do with it. Or, we can do this the slow, messy way. Your choice.” He folded the photograph in one hand to show exactly what he meant, making it apparent that Greene was outclassed on many different levels.
She knew that it would come to this sooner or later, the certain demise that awaited those working on the Yotsugi case. The only thing her superiors were concerned about was to keep their findings under lock and key. However, Greene wasn't about to commit suicide in front of this freak of a man — She quickly turned her gun towards the Prodigy, and pulled the trigger.
It clicked uselessly in her hands.
Of course, he had already taken the bullets out beforehand. He'd done so the previous night, sneaking in the apartment through one of the windows and leaving just as swiftly without a trace. He was the Prodigy after all.
Losing patience, he lunged forward with the knife, driving the hilt between Greene's eyes. She opened her mouth to say something then closed it, rocking backwards and forwards for a moment before collapsing into a heap on the ground. She was alive. Stunned, but alive. The Prodigy knelt down before her, a knee over her jaw to hold her down as well as silence her. With the tip of the knife, he carved the letter 'A' on the side of her slender neck.
Greene's expression was frozen in anguish. She screamed into the fabric of his jeans, fumbling for her own knife. It wasn't exactly a blissful experience to the Prodigy, but it did quench the murderous fire in his heart. Slightly. He took his time with the job, cutting off a few of her fingers and toes to leave a message for Cross to decode.
That boy would at least follow the trail it for a bit.
The Prodigy stood up as Greene stopped twitching, cleaned up, and exited the way he came in. For some reason the diary or letters no longer interested him. Greene herself was an open book, as easy to read as the other Sampson guy.
He sighed to himself. All that was left now was to silence the man he'd taken as hostage. He had planned to kill him, right from the start.
Remorse was nonexistent to the Prodigy.