5

He trusted Sloane, he knew, deep down, that he did.  So why didn’t he want to tell her about this?

As soon as they were done eating, and he suggested they hit the town and play tourist, she looked surprised. According to her, he was in “moping” mode, but he told her gruffly he was thinking, which was true ... he just didn’t admit that there was a bit of moping as well.  He thought maybe he had figured something out, except some pieces were missing, and he wasn’t sure it made sense.

The reason no culprits had ever been named on the Kyoto mission was because it had been a trap set by their own people, a deliberate “cancellation”.  The problem here was who was marked for it.  Lightning?  Most likely, since he was the one who'd died.  And from what Logan could remember of the guy, in spite of his code name, he was known for having short bursts of incredible speed.  But the emphasis there was “short bursts”; he had a rapid metabolism as well, and became exhausted easily, too exhausted to use his powers. In fact, if he remembered correctly, Lightning’s powers were killing him. Although he looked like he was in his late twenties on the outside, on the inside his body was aging and deteriorating at a rapid rate. His own system was using up his body's resources at an incredible rate; he’d have been dead in six months.  More likely than not, the Organization had simply decided they didn’t want to stretch out the death, and took it into their own hands to speed it up, like they had with Juliet.

(What?! What did that mean? Why had he thought that?)

But had he, himself, been included as a cancellation target? Surely they didn’t worry about Xia, as she had her field, and it rendered her indestructible as long as she had it up.  Maybe it had been a “two -fer”: take out Lightning, and get rid of him.  But why did they help him recover afterwards if that had been their intention?  Because it was inevitable, and they might as well get some use out of him while he was still around?  Or had Lightning truly been the only target, and Logan was just unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire? After all, if he was hurt, he would recover.  Did he not grow back a finger?

There was no way Static was a target. Not only was she widely liked and not much of a rule breaker (bender? Sure, but she had enough finesse to back off before the breaking point), but she had a rare and coveted power: telepathic and telekinetic interruption. If you had another teep or teek, it was no big deal, but to have someone who was neither, and yet could tap into their frequency and shut them down cold, that was just … fantastic. And extremely rare and valuable. He couldn’t see them ever canceling Sloane. Well, unless she did something really egregiously bad, like kill Control or go rogue. But otherwise she seemed bulletproof.  But him?  He honestly didn’t know.  He didn’t know much anymore, in fact.  Which was just adding an extra layer of problems to the existing ones.  Funny how that worked.

So they hit the town, heading for a big outdoor market that seemed to take up most of a downtown square, and reminded him a bit of the jumble of outdoor stands and hawkers in King's Road, or parts of New York.  Sloane shopped, he snapped pointless and often unfocused pictures, surreptitiously eying and sniffing the crowd for anything familiar, noting how taxis seemed to queue up near the head of the square.

He let this go on for about fifteen minutes, enduring Sloane putting a big floppy hat on his head (not a sombrero - that would have been more dignified), before he leaned in to supposedly give her a kiss, whispering, "You go South; I'm going to drift North, toward the guy selling the papaya drinks. Give me about five minutes and then head back to the hotel."

She pulled back, looking slightly worried. "What is it?"

He took the hat off, and put it on her head. "Mystique.  I want to see if she follows you or me."

Sloane clearly wanted to look around, it was almost a twitch in her neck, but she knew better than that.  She was too good of an agent to be caught looking. "What then?"

"Doesn't matter. She follows you, I follow her. She follows me ... good."

"We shouldn't split up."

"Yeah, we should.  Leave the blue bitch to me.  We're old pals."

She leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek, and after a moment's hesitation, she whispered, "Be careful."

"It may take a while, but don't worry - I just wanna see what info I can squeeze outta her.  See you back at the hotel."

He wandered off then, getting expertly lost in the milling crowd, going to the kiosk and actually buying one of the papaya drinks as he kept a corner of his eye on Sloane. She wasn't hard to pick out of the crowd, not with her red hair, and after pretending to shop a bit and buying a colorful wrap, she started walking back toward their hotel. He watched her long enough to confirm that she had no tail, no one following her.

And he wouldn't think so.  He hadn't actually smelled Mystique, or anyone familiar.  He'd just needed an excuse to do this part alone.

He gulped down the odd but not unpleasant pureed papaya concoction in three gulps, then tossed the empty cup in a garbage can before grabbing the door of a taxi and hopping in.  He'd already used the ATM in the hotel lobby to pull cash, not a suspicious activity at all when they were supposed to be shopping, and told the driver in fluent Spanish where he wanted to go.  Technically, by speaking the language, he'd just broken his cover, but since he thought this assignment was a trap anyway, it didn't matter.

He had the driver, a man who could have used either a stronger deodorant or a better air conditioner (or both), take him to the outskirts of the city and wait for him as he walked another block over, and cut through some underbrush and a chain link fence before spying the abandoned automotive factory.  He smelled people here all right, many coming and going very recently, but he also smelled ... chemicals?  And coca, the building block of cocaine.

He followed the scent of cigarette smoke to a young man, probably no older than nineteen, dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, sitting on the abandoned husk of an old, gutted Chevy, an Uzi on a strap slung across his chest as casually as a baby carrier.  Logan snuck up on him quietly, hearing the tinny sounds of music leaking from a single earphone in his right ear.  Now, see, that was sloppy guarding; stuff like that could get you killed.

He grabbed the boy from behind and let him see a single claw at eye level. "Tell me what's going on here," he growled in perfect Spanish, "Or I'll cut your eyes out."

The kid was more than happy to oblige him.  His name was Jorge and he was working off a debt to the Mendoza cartel, guarding their processing plant before a big buy could go down.  He really wasn't a big player, or a member of the group at all, and he didn't want to die.

Since he was so scared he reeked like vinegar, Logan figured he was telling the truth and knocked him out, mostly so he couldn't identify him.  Because it was daylight and an abandoned area, he went to have a look himself, just to make sure - it wasn't like they had any decent guards or anything.

And while he spied a couple of guys inside, playing cards and sampling the product, they didn't notice him. Yes, it was what Jorge said it was: a cocaine processing warehouse. It looked like there was at least five kilos of the processed stuff sitting at the end of the plant, awaiting distribution.

Nothing but drugs.  Either this was faulty intell, or a deliberate ruse.  Quite possibly these people got a majority of their funding from drug sales - actually a good bet, as the government did too.  But either way, this was a dead end.  Only the big guys at the top of the food chain - ones who would never come here - would know about any connection.  He had a name at least, but it really wouldn't help him.

He went back to the taxi and asked the driver to take him back into the city, to a decent bar.  Not a tourist bar, a gringo bar, but a decent one, somewhere where you could get an actually good beer.  Although the man seemed dubious, and warned him it might be dangerous for a gringo, he took him to one of the rougher parts of town, the kind not gussied up for tourists, to a bar whose name translated out to "The Lizard's Tail".  Somehow, that seemed appropriate.

The interior was dark, stuffy, and reeked of stale beer and old vomit.  The bartender was a grizzled old guy with an eye patch and two missing fingers on his left hand.  Logan felt at home instantly.

There were a few locals in the place who had the look of career drinkers, and they gave him cold stares that were just this shy of hostile, but he stared back, refusing to be cowed, aware that they could just decide to kick his ass whether he stared at them or his shoes. They must have decided he looked like too much trouble or just wasn't worth the bother of getting up, because they eventually looked away and muttered about him in low tones.  Logan took a stool at the end of the bar, threw down some cash, and told the bartender - whom one of the regulars called "Stumpy" (that made sense) - to keep the beers coming.  That made the old guy smile, revealing that he'd had three of his front teeth knocked out at some point (rough bar), commenting that the beers were a lot stronger than he was probably used to.  He replied, sticking to Spanish, that that's what he was hoping for.  So he got him a beer.  It was kind of tepid and foamy, but at least the glass was clean.

Although there were more stares, the other patrons left him alone, and he was on beer number three when a strange guy came into the bar. He looked just like every other guy in the place - slightly shorter than average, with a beer paunch belling out the bottom of his thin white cotton shirt, khaki colored pants dirty with what appeared to be road grime, a small moustache like a stain on his upper lip, face like a stubbed out cigarette - but there was something immediately odd about him.  First of all, unlike all the other locals, he didn’t do a double take, or stare at him; in fact, it looked like he was avoiding looking at him.   And when he spoke to the bartender, he seemed to have an unusually flat accent.

Wasn’t that funny?  Reality conforms to a lie.  Even before Logan caught the scent, he knew who it was: Mystique. It could have been a coincidence, but he doubted it.  She’d probably heard about a gringo, and figured it for competition or a tourist - but either way, she was checking it out.

She actually took a stool two down from him, but as soon as she settled in, still not looking at him, he moved down the stools to her, and slapped her hard on the back, like “he” was an old chum. “Hey Pablo, how’s the mistica?” He kept his hand on her back, just below the neck, and made a very casual fist. In a sinister whisper, he added, “Think you can morph yourself a new cervical vertebrae?”

She had stiffened at the word mistica - Spanish for Mystique, what else? - but now she chuckled under her breath as she took a sip of her beer. “How’s it hangin’, pendejo?” He heard her make a noise of disgust in the back of her throat, and put down her beer. “That tastes like piss drained through a dirty sweat sock.”

“I know. Amazingly authentic. So, how are we gonna play this?”

She looked at him, and very briefly he saw a flash of yellow behind the dirt brown eyes of the man sitting beside him, and his lips curled up in a smirk. In fact, now that they were close up, he was pretty sure she’d mimicked the look of a bandito in a Clint Eastwood western.  For A Few Dollars More?  Hang ‘Em High?  Eh, one of those. “I’m not fighting here, Wolverine. We’d probably have to get a tetanus shot afterward.”

He shrugged, and let his hand fall off her back.  "You would, maybe."  It wasn’t so much that he trusted her but that he knew he had the drop on her. “I’ve been in worse places.”

“I’m sure you have. So where’s your wild Irish rose?”

“You really think I’m telling you shit?”

“Why not? You’ve got nothing to lose. I’m done here, I’m on my way out, and not nearly soon enough. I can’t believe you Org guys were so late getting in on this. You’re usually right there, blocking my view.”

“We’ve been in on this. We got an invisible guy. “

“Really?” She glanced around the bar, and muttered, “As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.  He wasn’t there again today … “

“ … I wish that man would go away,” he said, finishing the poem for her.  Until she started reciting it, he hadn’t realized he knew it. “Don’t worry darlin’, he ain’t here. We haven’t met up yet.”

“Oh? Is he hiding out in the girl’s locker room at the nearest high school?”

“I should think that’d be more your style.”

She laughed, although she stayed in character and it came out a man’s laugh, deep and booming, with just the hint of a feminine lilt to it. “Ah, Wolverine, you could have been a comedian.  Your facial hair alone is a riot.  How’d you get it off anyway?  Blow torch?”

He gave her a tight, hard smile. “I just thought of you, and it all fell out.”

She echoed his smile with what he guessed to be mirror precision, then scoped the room surreptitiously. “They’re starting to give us the evil eye, gringo.  We should talk somewhere else.”

“I think we’re done here.”

“No, trust me, we’re not.  I have a proposition for you.”

He raised an eyebrow at that. “Uh huh.  And will you tell me about it before or after you spring the trap?”

She rolled her eyes in a very telling, female way, but only he saw it. “Please, Wolverine, give me a bit more credit than that.  Besides, you aren’t worth that much on the open market.  Nearly everyone thinks you’re dead.”

He wished that was a surprise, but somehow it wasn’t.  He felt like he had been dead for a very long time. “The Kyoto thing.”

“I heard you blew up real good.” She slid off her stool and started sauntering towards the door, only pausing to look back at him.  He knew he’d regret it, but what the hell?  Maybe he could get that information out of her after all.  He gulped down the rest of his beer and followed her out.

Out on the street, she ducked into a dark, piss smelling alley, and morphed into a very convincing replica of Sloane, with a few minor but obvious goofs that suggested she’d only seen Sloane in photographs, and not the most recent ones either. “This better?” she wondered, fluffing out her long red hair.  Her Irish accent was better than her Spanish one, but her voice was still a bit too high for Sloane.  Then again, that just meant she hadn’t heard her talk.  Mystique could mimic a voice as easily as a face.

“Hair’s wrong.”

She pouted, revealing a face too young.  Sloane had nascent fine lines in the corners of her eyes when she frowned. “Is it longer or shorter?”

He smiled, not about to tell her one useful thing. “Mohawk.”

She glared at him, and for a second there, she did look remarkably like Sloane. “Yeah, I bet you’d like that.”  Her skin seemed to ripple, going from blue to bronze as she morphed once more, the change coming over her like a sudden wave, crimson hair washing a sudden raven hue as the bones of her face shifted like tectonic plates beneath the earth, lips reddening and swelling ever so slightly as her body became slightly fuller, more curvaceous, and clothes seemed to grow out of her, a loose blue dress not unlike the color of her real skin.  He was looking at a young Spanish woman, maybe twenty or so, very pretty, her black hair falling like a veil across the left half of her face. “Well, gringo?  What do you think?”

“I think Rita Hayworth wants her look back.”

She grinned, flashing perfect white teeth. “Too bad.”

Even though he knew he shouldn’t, he followed her down the dusty streets and cracked sidewalks until they came to an honestly nice open air plaza, which was - of course - beside a fairly large church, and a small footbridge that spanned a narrow length of a lazy river, now rather low due to the heat and a silty brown color, as if deliquescing to mud before their eyes. They stood on the bridge side by side and looked over the railing at the muddy water below, watching bugs buzz its surface, only occasionally coming under attack by camouflaged frogs.  There weren’t any people about, but there were a couple of chickens scratching and clucking in the courtyard behind them. “What the hell do you want from me, Mystique?”

“I don’t want anything from you. What do you want?”

He sighed, and hung his head like he was about to get the lash. “Are you born again or some shit?”

That startled a laugh out of her, and while he wasn’t a hundred percent sure, he thought it sounded enough like Rita Hayworth to be eerie. “Hardly.  But I’ve been thinking - why the hell am I doing anything to help the homo inferiors?  There’s more and more of our kind every day, we’re the future, and these … backwards animals treat us like we’re lepers, or worse.  Did you hear about the new law they just enacted in Pakistan?”

“And did you hear that women still aren’t allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia?  Lots of places indulge in backwards, stupid shit.   As long as people allow their leaders to act like morons, they will.   There isn’t a hell of a lot we can do about complacency, or the domination of the minority by the majority..”

She grabbed his arm, and he reflexively yanked it out of her grasp, not really caring to be touched by her or anyone.  Sometimes he just didn’t like to be touched, and he wasn’t really sure why.  She didn’t let it bother her. “That’s where you’re wrong, old man. Unlike the women in Saudi Arabia or the Buddhists in Tibet, we are not powerless.  They have a numbers advantage over us for now, but it won’t always be that way, and long before that happens, we can turn the tide.  Together, with our powers combined toward a common goal, nothing can stop us; nothing can stand in our way. We can make them respect us.” Her eyes burned with zealotry, the fire of the true believer, and he couldn’t help but snicker.  He felt like patting her hand and giving her a dollar to treat herself to an ice cream cone.

“Respect? You can’t make anyone respect you; that’s given.  You can make ‘em fear you, though.  That’s easy.”

“And fun too.” She wasn’t kidding.

Wow - a specist.  He knew they existed, but he wasn’t sure he’d met one before.  He knew Mystique was dangerous - according to Interpol, she was a terrorist wanted in about half of Europe - but this just struck him as plain bizarre.  But, then, didn’t terrorism and fanaticism go hand in hand? “What’s this “we” shit anyway? You join a cult?”

She’d let her eyes go from soft brown to normal yellow, as he was the only one around to see it.  She gave him a smile that was sharp as a razor, and twice as cold. “We, Wolverine - you and me.  Are we not the same?  Brothers of the genome.  Mutants.”

He shook his head and looked down at the shallow water as a quickly retreating frog left a growing ripple on its surface. “We are not the same.”

“Are you denying your mutant birthright?”

He rolled his eyes and sighed, almost wishing she was a cultist.  Hell, he’d settle for Scientologist at this point. “Considerin’ I got my ass blown to pieces a couple of months ago, I can hardly deny it, can I?  But I have no interest in … well, whatever the hell you’re peddlin’.  So save it for someone who cares, okay?”

She glared at the side of his face, hand on her hip.  After a moment, she said, in quiet awe, “You actually think you’re a good guy.  Say it isn’t so, Wolverine.”

The fact that she kept calling him by his code name was starting to irritate him, and he wasn’t sure why.  Then again, he wasn’t sure how he knew her, but it was clear that she knew him well enough to not worry about him as a threat either.  Funny how they would have that in common. “And what the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re operating under the delusion that the Organization are the good guys.” She threw back her head and laughed, a real one that seemed to rise from the diaphragm and expand to fill the still air around them, full of genuine humor and bone deep contempt. “Oh man, have they gangbanged your brains into pure mush.” She fanned herself with her hand, as if the laughing was too much for her.

For some reason, his heart seemed to start racing, doing a marathon inside his chest as he stared at her, wanting to throttle her, to squeeze her neck until her head popped off her neck like a cork.  “Nobody’s fucked with my head,” he snarled.  But even as he said it, he knew it was a crazy, blatant lie.

From the look of amused disdain Mystique gave him, she knew it too. “Oh really?  So why don’t you tell me your full name?  Where you were born? Hey, where did you go to school?  How did your parents take the knowledge of your mutation?  Are they still alive?”

Each question felt like a hit, when he realized he didn't know.  He actually wished she'd punched him; it would have hurt less. “Fuck off and die,” he snapped, turning and stomping off toward a small copse of trees beside the church.  Just the smell of greenery and flowers as sticky sweet as wine was calming; something about the smell of earth was more relaxing than a keg of the strongest beer could ever be, and yet even he knew he was more likely to try and drink his sorrows down than go tree planting.

He knew she was following him, but she waited until they hit the trees before she grabbed him and made him stop, placing herself in the way.  It was probably due to the fact that she wanted the coolness and darkness of shade. “Do you want to know the real score, Wolverine?  Want to know what the Organization is really doing while you think you‘re gallivanting around the world playing good guy?” Fully engulfed in the shade of lemon trees, she changed her shape again, letting the change flow over her like water, the shapely Rita Hayworth clone becoming subsumed by a petite Japanese woman in a sharply tailored business suit, striking but not remarkably beautiful.  And yet, he froze.  It felt like his stomach had seized up, closing like a hard fist and lodging itself somewhere just below his windpipe, as his blood became liquid nitrogen, and he felt ever so slightly dizzy, like the earth had speeded up and was trying to throw him off its axis.  He didn’t know who Mystique was supposed to be, but whoever she was … she'd won. Mystique had just trumped him because - for some reason - Logan felt completely beaten, his knees threatening to give way and drop him to the dirt.  He couldn‘t speak; he could barely breathe.  He felt sucker punched.

She cocked her head, a smirk on her face that didn't belong on that visage.  “Do you want to remember your little piece of sushi … and what they did to her?”