Work Text:
For a bent kopeck, I would quit UNCLE
It started out like all other affairs: another Mad Scientist in another Secret Laboratory with yet another Diabolical Plan to Conquer the World. Mr. Waverly suspected that THRUSH was, as always, behind this venture. Perhaps I am getting blasé, but this was the fifth such mission this month.
We easily located the small, isolated laboratory. There weren’t many defenses or personnel, which suggested that it might not be a THRUSH installation, but something financed by an amateur World Conqueror. They are often the worst kind because they are less predictable.
We got in by jamming the air vents and then pretending to be air conditioning repairmen. There were few guards and we were able to put most of them out of commission without needing our guns. With so little resistance, we switched to the sedative darts our guns are modified to fire.
The Mad Scientist was alone in her laboratory and crazed enough to attack two armed UNCLE agents. She fired a revolver at us a couple times, but her aim was terrible. We easily darted her, but as the realization that she was captured hit her, she managed to raise her gun to her head and fire one final time. Mr. Waverly had wanted her alive, so that was the first thing to go wrong.
Napoleon stood watch while I set the explosives that would destroy the complex. He had just turned to see if I was through, when a shot rang out behind us and Napoleon gave a startled gasp. Like the well-trained agents that we are, we whirled and fired.
Then we saw the shooter was a child, a little boy of about six years. At first, we felt relief that we had used the sleep darts, but when we had carried him a safe distance away from the laboratory, the boy began to convulse. Then he stopped breathing. Napoleon and I performed CPR. Thirty-five terrible minutes later, the ambulance arrived and the child dead was pronounced dead.
Back at headquarters, we learned that the boy had had an allergic reaction to the drug in our sleep darts. Almost the last thing the child saw was his mother’s head blown apart by a bullet. That is the image that keeps playing over and over in my mind.
I finished my part of our report – the plain facts – and handed it over to Napoleon to add the adjectives, adverbs, and other little touches that gave our reports “flair” and made our rare missteps sound like brilliant improvisation. I briefly wondered how he was going to make “we murdered a small child” sound like an astute move.
I suppressed that thought because Napoleon had been sitting there for the past half hour, still wearing the shirt with the torn and bloody sleeve, spinning his pen on the desk as though that were the most important thing in the world.
I had nothing left to offer, so I just stated, “I’m leaving” and walked out. I don’t know if I will come back.