Episode 142 Previous Episode	Next Episode
“Remember, he is cunning, he is crafty. He is not just going to walk in here and say ‘Here I am!’” Captain Esteban Pasquale, Zorro: The Gay Blade “I mean, you know what it’s like to be there,” said the older black cop, walking up the stairs with his partner behind him. “They were shooting all over the place. They had machineguns or something, ‘cause these shots weren’t stopping.” He stopped at the top of the stairs and looked indifferently down the hall, all the way to the other stairwell. “And this stray bullet, it zips by my face by like an inch,” he said to his younger partner, the aristocratic-looking rookie staring wide-eyed at the story. “And it hits the car behind me and the glass shatters. I mean, just sprays all over the place.” He adjusted his belt around his broadening waist, and started down the hall. “And so I’m there, with three gang guys with me pinned down. My partner, he got shot and is bleeding bad, and I’ve got glass shrapnel lodged in the back of my neck.” He clicked on his flashlight, swinging it like thurible from one side of the dark hallway to the other. “What’d you do?” asked his partner as the senior cop leaned into the office. Inside, Everett was sitting at the computer, Ledger leaning over his right shoulder. Roland and Armand were against the back wall, while Sydney stood next to the door, looking back at the cops. From the computer came a steady stream of low static, reminiscent of a waterfall. The cop looked around the office and turned. “Well, I grabbed his gun and I did what my daughter told me to in a situation like that; I went all John Woo.” He laughed, his partner enthralled as they headed down the hall. Sydney waited for a moment until she heard them descending the stairs, then sighed. “Can I say again how much I think we’re pushing our luck by trusting this whole ‘Knightspeak’ thing?” “I think it’s kinda cool,” Roland said from the corner. Sydney looked back to Everett and Ledger. “Any progress?” “No,” Ledger said, staring at the screen. “God, there’s a lot of crap on here. The club manager had no system of record keeping.” “We learned that when we stole the flash drives,” Everett said, his eyes glowing in the light of the screen. He stopped and opened up a new folder, finding more musical files. “No,” he dismissed, moving on with his search. “Guys, this could take a little while.” “Why don’t you just search for any text documents?” Armand asked. “Be a good place to start.” Everett stopped for a moment and looked at Ledger. Ledger looked away. “We already tried that,” Everett said, opening up a search page, starting a broad search. “First thing, even.” “Right,” Roland and Armand said in unison. “Okay, let’s think here,” Sydney said, touching the top of her head, wincing in pain. “Alan was going to take hostages, in order to prove that the knights still had value to offer to the world.” Everett nodded, confirming. “But Dante said that there weren’t going to be civilians involved. That means that Alan is planning on taking military people hostage, or taking knights hostage.” “He was probably planning on taking Blue knights hostage,” Armand said. “I mean, I was never really that aware of, or concerned with, knights outside the US, but Alan seems to have had some dealings with them. So much so that they’ve been keeping tabs on him. I mean, they did have dossiers and stuff on all of his team.” “Maybe we should go ask Erik and Donovan about it,” Roland suggested. “Except that’s not what we’re looking for,” Everett said. He turned in the chair. “We’re looking for the addresses and locations of the other knight teams. We know Alan had distributed the teams, moving them into temporary housing of some type. We’ve got to find out where they are.” “I’m going to have to disagree,” Roland said. “Our first priority needs to be Alan and stopping his maniacal plan of world conquest or whatever. We can worry about his little girlfriends after we’ve stopped him. Odds are, once he’s stopped, they’ll go back to wherever they’re from.” The computer beeped and Ledger and Everett turned. Everett scrolled through the searched files and groaned. “Nothing.” “Oy, let me try something,” Roland said. Everett got up and gave him the chair. Roland sat down and looked over the keyboard. “Sydney, Armand, would guys go play lookout while I restart the computer?” As he spoke, the screen went blank. “Damn it, Roland,” Sydney griped, she and Armand running out. “What’re you doing?” Ledger asked. “We’re going to search the hard drive the fun way,” Roland said, entering into the mainframe’s basic operating system. He began to process whole blocks of raw information, Ledger and Everett behind him, somewhat astonished. After several moments, Roland grinned. “There we go,” he said, hitting a few keys. The computer screen slowly displayed the OS’s main boot-up screen. “Okay, what just happened and what did you do?” Everett asked as Roland restarted the music player, resuming the white noise. Sydney and Armand came back in. A folder opened on the screen and it displayed a host of deleted documents. Roland scrolled through them. “Here we go,” he said. Everett leaned in close. “These are deleted upload records.” “They’re what?” Ledger asked. “When you delete something on your computer, it isn’t erased,” Sydney explained, also looking at the files. “The computer just tags that information as being available to be written over. So if you have a song that you delete, technically it’s still on your hard drive for some time, until it gets written over by another file.” “That’s…mildly scary,” Armand observed, trying to see over Roland’s shoulder. “Most of these are corrupted and have already been written over,” Roland said. He smiled as one opened. “Others…” On the screen appeared a written document, mostly of gibberish. Everett scanned over it before smiling. “There’s an address.” “So?” Ledger asked. “It’s a starting point,” Sydney said. “Where is it?” “It’s on the other side of town, but you’re right: It’s a starting point.” He stood and looked at the others. “Okay, we’re at that point again where we have to decide how much further we’re going to take this. We can go to this address and see what we can find, or we can leave it to the police or another…” “Us,” the four other knights said in unison. “Okay,” Everett said proudly. He turned to the door. “Now, we’ve just got to figure out how to get out of a club that’s crawling with cops.” With his MP3 player dangling halfway out of his pocket and a speaker in each hand, Armand walked confidently into the club’s main hall. Inside, dozens of cops and nearly a hundred club goers stood around. Statements were taken, evidence was gathered, and speculation ran rampant. But as the five knights were preceded by the static, no one noticed them. Armand walked directly across the dance floor in front of everyone, not hesitating for a second. Behind him, Everett and Roland stayed close, both pensively looking at every cop that was within eyesight. Behind them, Sydney and Roland finished the group of five, Sydney apprehensive, while Roland walked with a giant grin and a confident strut. They reached the stairs and started up, pausing just slightly as several more cops came in through the front doors. Everett was about to panic, but the cops just parted innocently, paying no attention to it, both walking around the five. Sydney and Everett watched the cops head into the center of the club, their conversation unabated. They turned around to Armand, astonished. The youngest knight grinned and headed for the door. The car’s lights flashed and Everett opened the driver’s side door. He got in, the others piling in behind him. He shut the door and breathed out, his head falling to the steering wheel. “Good god,” he exclaimed. “That was so damn close.” “That? That was frickin’ awesome,” Roland said. “Good call, dude,” he added to Armand, bumping knuckles. “Where to now?” Sydney asked. “To the address,” he said. “Um, real quick, could we possibly stop somewhere?” Ledger spoke up. “Why?” “Well, we’ve got some injuries that could use at least some minor attention,” he answered. “I mean, as hot as I think Sydney looks with red streaks of blood in her hair, I think we should look to that pronto. But also…I’d like to buy a shirt.” “A shirt?” Everett said. “Dude, I’m down for it too,” Armand spoke up. “A shirt? What shirt?” Everett asked. “A red one,” Sydney said. She looked at him. “We’ve cut ties with the Blue knights. It’s time we got back into uniform.” Everett looked in his rearview mirror at the three in the back, then looked at Sydney. He couldn’t keep himself from grinning. “I think a quick ten-minute detour could be warranted, for black and red.” “For black and red,” the three in the back chimed in supportively.
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