How did they set up a second team so fast?What had started as a somewhat suspect but ultimately harmless encounter at a piano had quickly transformed the teenage soldier's head into a hornet's nest of instincts and teachings. Jer had known being social was part of his cover, and was doing his best to compensate, but keeping conversation up without the constant guidance of one of his more affable teammates was proving difficult. Already, his regular personality was starting to bleed through.
Maybe if the idiots back there knew how to prepare seafood, I wouldn't be so quick to criticize it.What a mess. Everywhere he looked, Jericho seemed to find another set of eyes on him. Towards the back of the room, he had caught sight of some bedraggled little dweeb (
Has he really permed only one single strand of hair? He must be a psychopath.) making eyes at the piano bench and mouthing something under his breath. He disappeared as quickly as he had come, and his wardrobe was so completely unremarkable that an untrained eye would likely have a hard time
finding the small fry until he was standing right under you, with a gun to your stomach and that stupid hair tickling the bottom of your chin.
And that was to say nothing of the perimeter guard at the pool, staring wide-eyed through a large glass window that comprised one of the lounge's walls.
Newsflash, lady - people aren't submarines. You can't raise periscope and expect someone not to notice. She had only raised the top half of her head from the pool to observe them, but this cruise ship had more lights and song blaring through one portion of the vessel or another than Heaven itself. No one outside was going unnoticed.
Is this what espionage training outside of Atlas does to people?As a child, Jericho had been forcibly coerced into watching Rocky and Bullwinkle every night until he went to sleep counting squirrels. He'd already had his sights on Bastion Academy, training four and five days a week to make the cut into the elite combat school by the winter cut-off date. For a kid like that, there was no greater inspiration to a budding Atlesian specialist than the two Bratva-accented spies that always had to go home to East Atlas explaining why two grown agents had been foiled by a motor-mouthed squirrel and a retarded moose. And this group - or rather, if his suspicions were correct, this full-blown hit squad - reminded him an awful lot of those cartoon characters.
Especially Bianca Badenov over here.
If only I could kill moose and squirrel and young devil!As much as he wanted to underestimate the dreamy young woman beside him, doing so would be a quick ticket to an early grave, even for a Gold Stripe like Jericho. This entire encounter had the same saccharine vibe that Jer recognized from all of Speer's jury-rigged blind dates, and something about this girl - be it the sudden arrival, the air of sophistication, or the classic manic angel dream girl demeanor - seemed a bit
too on the nose. She could be a classic swallow who had watched too many Bond movies. Or she could just be a dreamy girl who had been manipulated into talking to him by the tails.
...Or she could just be an idiot who thought Jer Piper was a total dime that they could forcibly defrost after a few lattes and cuddle seshes. There were plenty of those in Atlas, and Jer - not being a card-carrying member of the secret society of letting girls down easy - had learned the hard way that a girl's skill with a knife was
not always contingent on their skill as an assassin.
If Bianca wanted to shank him in the side, this piano bench would be her dream spot - and without a team member there to laugh at him, or at least hold the bourbon Team HJNS kept around as local anesthetic, he had no intention of being disemboweled by a vengeful teenage girl again.
He would have to extract himself.
You're a waiter. You're Jericho the waiter. You have her order. She's got both hands on the piano. Be polite, take it easy, and get up when you can....
"--is is new for me."The waiter blinked. She'd been talking.
"I grew up around girls," Jer replied, looking down at the piano and watching the effortless dance of Bianca's long fingers along the keys.
"I'd probably be six feet under if I wasn't at least okay with them. You play that thing pretty well."