Ninja Girl

For a third time in the same day, they found themselves up on the rooftop looking down over the Teller Communications building. This time, however, Anya had a surprise for him.

“A rope?” Nick asked. “Seriously?”

“And a grappling hook,” Anya said, holding the metal tip up for emphasis.

“You went and got that while I was sleeping?”

“Yes.”

Nick blinked, too shocked to fully know how to respond. “How… how? Did you steal it?”

“Well… I stole,” Anya said, and then held up a credit card.

It was Nick’s.

“You stole my card?” He could not believe his own eyes. He snatched the card out of her hand and stared at it, as if expecting it to vanish in a puff of logic. It stubbornly continued to exist. “Aw man, was it expensive?”

“Does it matter? Now you don’t have to jump again.”

Nick wasn’t sure if he should be angry about her stealing his card while he was sleeping, or happy that she thought about him enough to do it in the first place. He decided to settle on a slightly sarcastic: “So sweet of you to think of me.”

“Well it would attract too much attention if you were to splatter on the pavement.”

Nick winced. “Right, of course. What an inconvenience that would be for you.”

“I would mourn you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I would give five seconds to send you off with proper respects.”

“Gee, five whole seconds? Ya mean it? You sure know how to make a guy feel special.”

Anya held the rope and hook back up before him. “As I said, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to jump.”

“Yeah, not sure I’m with you on the whole rope and grapple thing. You want me to climb across now? You really think that’s better?”

“No, see, that’s why I got this, too,” she said, holding up a metal pipe.

“Yeah, I was wondering about that. Is that a weapon?”

“No. Well, I suppose you can use it as one, if you want. Look, it’s simple. I throw the grapple to hook onto that structure over there. Once it’s in place, I tie off the end of the rope on this building. You grab the pipe, hold it across the rope, and you just slide across. Very simple.”

Nick’s eyes went wide. “What?”

“What?”

“Are you being serious?”

“Of course. What’s wrong? There’s practically no strain, and it’s over very quickly. All you have to do is make sure not to let go of the pipe.”

Nick swallowed hard. “Right…”

“Remember the I.T. room? Just before we walked in, what did you say to me? ‘Trust me.’ Remember that? Well, I trusted you. Now it’s your turn. Trust me. This will work.”

“Considering how that situation turned out, I’m not sure that’s the most convincing argument you could use here. Especially considering that wasn’t a life or death situation.”

“Are you going to argue with everything I tell you to do?”

“Not everything,” Nick said quickly, “just, probably, half.” He smiled weakly but he caved under Anya’s look of disbelief. “Okay, three fourths. Okay, eighty percent. But the rest… the rest I will be gung-ho for.”

“Gung-ho?”

“Yeah. It means… I don’t know what it means. It means I’m all for it.”

“You say a lot of strange things.”

“You don’t believe in holding back, do you?”

“No.” Anya turned and began spinning the grapple through the air. Once she got a good speed going she threw it out. It sailed across the air into the dark night sky and then far off in the distance they could hear the metallic clanking of it landing on the parallel rooftop. Anya tugged on the rope, pulling until the hook caught. “See?” She said. “Easy.”

Nick nodded his head in appreciation. If nothing else, he was impressed that even shrouded in twilight as they were, the target out of range of a normal person’s sight, she was able to make the throw in one attempt.

Anya stepped over to a brick chimney and tied their end of the rope off around it. Next she held up the metal pipe, offering it to Nick.

“Let’s go,” she prompted.

Nick grimaced, stomach unsettled at the very thought of doing what she was suggesting, but he did have to admit that it sounded better than trying to jump again. Especially considering he now had proof that even his best jump was not enough to get him across the gap. He took the pipe and she led him to the edge of the roof.

“Just hold it like this,” she said, leading his arms up around either side of the rope. “Clamp your hands down. Hold on as tight as you can. Don’t let go of the pipe until you’ve cleared the ledge of the other roof. Oh, before you go, just to be on the safe side, maybe you should tell me the username and password you created.”

“Oh, that,” Nick said, thankful for the distraction and opportunity to turn away from the ledge. “Well I noticed all the usernames seemed to be first initial, last name, so I just made it ‘mmartinez.’ You know, like Mario Martinez.”

Anya blinked. “O…kay. And the password?”

“Well, I wanted to keep it simple, so it’s just ‘lmartinez.’ Like Luis Martinez.”

“You say that in a way suggesting I’m supposed to have some idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah. You know. The Super Martinez Brothers?” Nick was met with a blank gaze. “The game? You don’t know Super Martinez Brothers? It’s a game about these two Hispanic handymen who get transported to a magical land where they have to save seven identical princesses from an evil dinosaur wizard…” his voice trailed off into nothing as he noticed the disturbed look Anya was giving him. “Hey, don’t look at me like that. This game comes from your country.”

“Yes, and made for Americans.”

Nick sighed, defeated. “Let’s just go.”

“Please,” Anya agreed.

Nick climbed back up on the ledge, hooked his arm around the rope, and grasped on tight to the pipe with both hands.

“Lean down like this,” Anya said, leading Nick to where he was hanging off the ledge awkwardly. “You don’t want to risk the force of a drop causing you to lose your grip. Oh, and one last thing.”

“Yes?” Nick prompted.

Anya leaned in close and whispered in his ear, “Try not to scream this time.”

And she pushed him.

Despite his desire to do as she had asked, a choked cry caught in his throat as he suddenly found himself falling out across the gap over the street. Luckily, it came out as little more than a quiet squeak that was unlikely to draw anyone’s attention.

Somehow sliding down the rope like this seemed even faster than the jump had been, perhaps because there had been no upward momentum at the start. In only a matter of seconds the rooftop came rushing up horrifyingly fast to meet him. Nick held on as long as he dared, then finally let go and slammed down to the roof. He landed and immediately started to roll.

This was not a roll like Anya’s had been that morning. This roll was not graceful or controlled. It was wild and sloppy. Nick bounced and jostled across the ground, spinning over and over until the sheer force of gravity finally brought him to a painful halt. Even once he finally came to a stop he still thought he was rolling, as his body had stopped but the inside of his head kept going. The world continued to swim dizzying circles around his head for the next couple of minutes. As the spinning finally slowed to a crawl he was able to make out a vague shape that could only be Anya standing above him.

“That… was… AWESOME!” He exclaimed. “Holy crap. I’ve never done something like that before in my life! I’ve never even been on a roller coaster. Well, that’s not true. I’ve been on one roller coaster. It was on a school trip and we were supposed to check in every two hours, but the wait in the line was two and a half hours. But me and my friends were like, ‘screw it,’ and we did it anyway. Funny thing is, I don’t even remember the roller coaster. All I really remember is how pissed off the teacher was as he was yelling at us for showing up to the check in time almost an hour late.”

Nick stopped talking and looked up at Anya. Not surprisingly, she was ignoring him. What did surprise Nick was the fact that she was rolling up the loose rope. She had apparently untied it from the other roof and then jumped across the gap with it.

“Woah, wait. What are you doing?”

Anya turned and gave him a look as if noticing Nick for the first time. “We can’t leave it stretched across the rooftops. Someone might notice it. What, you weren’t planning on climbing it back to the other roof were you?”

Nick looked from her to the roof they had just come from, and then back to her. “No, I guess not,” he grumbled.

“I’m pretty sure if I had asked you to do that, you would have said something like, ’oh, that’s like, a million feet in real people distance. How could you possibly expect me to do that?”

“Okay,” Nick said, pushing himself up to his feet, “that’s actually a pretty good impression of me, especially the waving your hands while you talk thing, so… I’m gonna let that slide. This time. But I think this means you’ve been spending a little too much time around me.”

“I can agree with that portion, yes.” Anya finished packing up the rope and stashed it into a nearby dark corner of the roof. “Suffice it to say, I do have an escape route for us. Several, actually, and some do include having to use the grapple. We can worry about that later. For now, let’s just get downstairs.”

“Right. Well, why I would hate to embarrass myself again by asking about lock picking, I’m assuming you have a way through this door?”

Anya nodded and drew one of her kunai. “It’s a simple wooden door, standard turn knob. No security, nothing to worry about.”

“No alarm?” Nick asked, surprised. “Really? You’re sure?”

“Yes, I checked for one when we were here earlier. Guess they didn’t feel the need, since the only roof access is coming up from the stairs inside.”

“Unless you’re a ninja,” Nick added.

“Or friends with a ninja,” Anya replied, motioning to Nick.

“Aw, does this mean we’re friends?”

“Don’t push your luck.” Anya grabbed the door handle and jabbed the knife under the plate. She jammed it in as far as she could get it and then wrapped both hands around the handle of her blade and pried. Within moments there came a snapping sound and the door knob popped right off and clattered noisily to the ground.

“Not very stealthy,” Nick admonished.

“Shut up,” Anya hissed back. “Let’s go.” They hurried down into the darkness. This late at night, the stairwell was only lit once per landing by a weak emergency light. Anya seemed to have no difficulty moving in the darkness, but Nick found himself having to clutch the handrail and measure each step. By the time he had reached the eleventh floor landing, Anya had already unlocked the door, checked the room beyond, and been standing there a couple minutes waiting for him.

“It’s about time,” she snapped.

They had already discussed what would be the best floor for them to tackle. They figured it would be best to stick to the upper floors. Since they did not know which, if any, of the top three floors held executive offices, they had surmised that their safest bet would be with a floor they already knew. What that meant, essentially, was the floor where they had run into Nick’s old coworker.

“I’m sorry,” Nick whispered sarcastically between deep breaths. “I’m not a bat. I don’t have night vision.”

Anya rolled her eyes but chose not to respond this time. Instead she opened the door and made her way into the room. Nick followed hot on her heels. They found an office around the back, out of sight of both the stairwell and the elevators in case they needed extra time to escape. Nick sat down at the desk and powered on the computer.

“Here goes nothing,” he said, and typed in the username and password he had created that morning. He pounded the enter key and they stood there eagerly awaiting a response.

The computer booted into the operating system.

Nick let out his breath in relief, surprising himself to discover he had been holding it at all.

“Does this mean that it’s working?” Anya asked.

“Yeah, it’s working,” Nick answered. “I’ll start digging for files.”

“Good. I’ll stand watch. Oh, and Nick? Try to hurry.”

She slipped out of the room like she was nothing more than another shadow on the walls. Nick stared at the space where she had been standing for a long moment, and then, as though waking from a dream, shook himself into action and turned back to the computer.

He quickly scanned through all the network drives he could find, which, as it turned out, was a lot. There were volumes upon volumes of information out there. Nick nervously drummed his fingers on the keyboard, realizing that there were simply too many files to sort through right at that moment. He was fairly certainly it would also be far too much to copy it all to a flash drive and sort it out later.

Out of desperation, he typed the word “Ryerson” into the keyword search. The file results were still in the low thousands, but the file sizes were by and large pretty small. Most of this would fit onto his thumb drive.

“Good enough,” he whispered to himself. He dug the drive out of his laptop bag, jammed it into the computer, and started the copy.

While he waited on the file transfer – which at the moment was telling him it would be five days, but the estimate was rapidly dropping down to something much more manageable – he opened another window. Just out of curiosity, he ran a second keyword search for “Anya.” This one turned up zero results. Nick tapped on the keyboard and frowned. Somehow that did not sit right with him. If they were experimenting on her, shouldn’t he have pulled up something from that search?

He considered doing a third search. For this one he wanted to search for the other ninja that Anya had mentioned, the one that she had helped take down. But what was his name? “Ko” something. Kokata? No, kokana? Coquettish? Probably not that last one.

“What are you doing here?”

The voice was so sudden, forceful, and unexpected that Nick nearly leaped out of his chair. He turned to the entrance of the room to see the silhouette of a man standing in the doorway. The man raised a flashlight to shine it straight in Nick’s face. Nick squinted and turned away, raising one arm to block part of the light.

“Holy crap! Where did you come from? You scared the hell out of me!”

“What are you doing here?” The stranger demanded again. He stepped into the room, closing in on Nick. “No one’s supposed to be here right now.”

“Oh, you know. Just, uh, igniting the late night petroleum.”

That paused the man in his steps for a moment. “What?” the man demanded, concern creeping into his voice. Nick could just make out the figure reaching for something at his belt. Possibly a gun, he thought, as he realized what his explanation might have sounded like to a stranger.

“The midnight oil,” he quickly explained. “I’m burning the midnight oil. You know how bosses are. Always demanding that impossible deadline. You’re not gonna ask me to explain to him that the reason I didn’t have this report done is because I was evicted from the building?” By now, Nick’s eyes had adjusted enough to make out that the approaching man was a security guard. In his left hand he held his flashlight, in his right hand he held a spray bottle.

“Is that pepper spray?”

The man raised the spray bottle higher, pointed directly at Nick. “We’re not allowed to carry guns,” he admitted, some embarrassment clear in his voice. “But I promise you, this will hurt like hell if you’re hit with it. Get those hands up. Up, I said!”

Begrudgingly Nick raised his hands above his head. Where the hell is Anya? He wondered to himself.

The guard raised his left hand to his shoulder and squeezed the radio sitting there. “This is Thornley. I’m up on eleven. We’ve got an intruder on a computer. Possibly others in the building.”

“Copy, Thornley. Sending backup.”

Thornley turned back to Nick and steadied the pepper spray canister on him. “All right, now, get up slowly and come around from behind the desk.”

Nick groaned, “Come on, man.”

“Do it!”

Nick sighed and stood up, but froze half way out of his seat. Behind Thornley, a second figure had appeared in the room. An arm wrapped around the man’s neck and suddenly he was flipping through the air to land face first on the floor. There was a thud, followed by a groan, and the man stopped moving.

“Where the hell have you been?” Nick demanded.

“Another one came up the elevator. I took him out but not before this one got to you. They know we’re here.”

“No kidding.”

“We need to go. Now!”

“Wait,” Nick said, “We can’t. The files are still copying. I just need…” he checked his screen, “…five more minutes!”

Anya growled. “We don’t have five minutes.”

“They’re not allowed to carry guns,” Nick said, motioning to the prone man lying on the floor. “You’re telling me you don’t think you can take a handful of security guards?”

“I’m not worried about the security guards,” she snapped. “I’m worried about who will be following after the security guards. We need to get out of here before Ryerson gets here.”

“I just need four minutes now. No, three. Come on. There’ll be no point to this entire day if we don’t get this information.”

Anya’s lips pulled into an angry sneer, but she didn’t argue. She stepped into the hall and checked both directions. “There’s a second set of stairs on this side we didn’t know about. That’s where this guy came through. I’ll try and clear the way. Just… finish what you’re doing and meet me on the roof. The very second that you can.”

“Yes, mother,” Nick grumbled under his breath. He sat back down in the chair and waited for the transfer to finish. Anya disappeared back down the hallway. He sat there, knees bouncing impatiently as the seconds ticked by, the bar on the screen inching forward at the most minute of a crawl. Finally, it finished and Nick yanked the drive out of the computer. He rose to leave, and then on a whim decided to go ahead and shut down the computer. It wasn’t much, but he hoped it might cover his tracks long enough to buy them some time.

He ran out into the hall in the direction of the second stairwell Anya had mentioned. Before he got more than a few steps the door ahead of him burst open and three guards spilled out.

“Stop right there!” the lead one shouted.

Nick’s expression dropped to one of horror and he pointed dramatically behind them. “Ninja!” he cried. Without waiting to see if his ploy worked, he turned and ran back to the first staircase.

He burst through the door and took the steps two or even three at a time. Even Anya might have been impressed with him in that moment. He lost some momentum with each flight he went up, but it was still only a matter of minutes before he burst through the door to the rooftop and was back outside. He stopped immediately and doubled over to lean on his knees as he tried to catch his breath.

He was so exhausted it took him a couple minutes to realize he was not alone. The thundering in his ear drums that he thought was simply the pounding of his heart beat turned out to actually be coming from the blades of a helicopter. He straightened, still panting, to notice the helicopter hovering just off the roof, while a number of armed guards stood around it, rifles aimed straight at him.

“Oh,” said Nick idiotically. He turned to run back for the stairwell, but someone blocked his way.

It was a woman, tall and lean. She wore a tight - very tight - white camo bodysuit and her chin length hair was so blond it looked almost silver.

“Hello there,” she said warmly, a thick British accent detectable even in the short sentence.

“Uh, hi,” said Nick.

There was a flash of movement from the lady, and something that felt like a rock smashed into the side of his head. He spun a complete pirouette and then crashed down into a darkness as perfect as ever existed.