More Than the X Can See

Chapter 25

“You’re part of ZTC?” Logan asked with raised eyebrows. Angel sensed some of the tension leaving his body. Logan snorted and told Nathan, “Fury thinks we’re already on ta somethin’ or else he wouldn’t ‘ve sent his best men ta follow us around all day.”

“Maybe we were bored,” John said with a small smile playing about his lips.

“Humph,” Nathan snorted with a shake of his head. He picked up his menu and started looking at it.

Following his lead, the rest of the men began perusing their menus.

Angel could tell that both of the X-men had relaxed upon learning who the three men were, but she didn’t have a clue what ZTC stood for. “What does ZTC stand for?” she asked John.

John’s menu dipped down and he said, “Zero Tolerance Company.”

“What does that mean?” she asked, still in the dark.

Logan laid his arm on the back of Angel’s chair and whispered into her ear, “ZTC is SHIELD’s Black Ops.”

The rumbling bass of his gravely voice and the warmth of his breath in her ear brought back memories from earlier that morning and she gasped and shuddered as a delicious shiver rode down her spine to pool warmly between her legs.

“What did you tell her?” John asked with surprise as he watched her face turn crimson.

Logan smirked and watched Angel’s face, “I just have that effect on women.”

Steve and Luke tried to muffle their laughter while John said, with a disbelieving smile, “Yeah, riiiiight.”

A moist wave of scent crashed over Logan and the cloying smell of sweet oranges assaulted his nose. “Damn, Darlin’,” he said gruffly, pulling away and fighting his own sexual response, “thought you hated the military.” He looked at her disconcertedly. Between her liberal Berkley background and the reaction he’d received from her in the sewers in White Plains when he’d tried to order her about, he thought she’d have an entirely different reaction.

Nathan looked up from his menu and glanced around the table taking in the amused faces of the SHIELD agents, Angel’s blush and Logan’s uncertainty. Charles had briefed him on Angel’s background and attitude towards the armed forces, but at the time he had quickly dismissed it since his plans didn’t involve anyone except for Warren, Logan, Angel and himself.

“I don’t,” she replied defensively. “Just … don’t get so close.”

Logan’s face was torn between amused interest, frustration and resignation as he, on the one hand, had the urge to explore her reactions to his presence and, on the other, knew that they neither were in the place nor had they the time. Her having gone into sexual heat was a mixed blessing. She’d want him, but they had to wait and, while waiting, Hank could arrive with some miracle cure and she’d go out of heat and no longer want to continue their sexual relationship. It would relieve him of some of the stress of his position as her guardian and caregiver, but the sex was probably the only perk of the job.

He sighed and considered moving his chair down, but knew that with her scanning ability it would be pointless so he didn’t bother and went back to reading his menu.

After watching their exchange, John turned to ask Nathan, “Will she follow orders?” He knew she was green, but if she hated the military she could be more trouble than she was worth and he’d advise his superiors to ship her back to New York.

Nathan focused his gaze on Angel. He knew her file inside and out with the comments Logan, Charles and Hank had added. He weighed the information against the brief time he was able to judge her personality himself before he replied, “She’ll react like any recruit who hasn’t been properly trained or seen action.”

“Didn’t she get a psych-eval?”

“She’s with us,” Logan broke in, “that speaks for itself.”

“Bullshit,” John replied, frustrated that he wasn’t getting straight answers from the X-men. He’d read the file SHIELD had given him on her. Most of it had been information that was public record. Her lesbian parents, education and later employment within the Stanford and Berkley school system, membership in AIDS and Gay Rights organizations, registered as a Democrat. He’d had a suspicion she would be a liberal, but hearing that she hated the military combined with her appearance of long, loose flowing hair and sundress just screamed Hippie. “What makes her so special that the two of you are willing to drag a bohemian flower child into this?”

“Not here and not now,” Nathan replied with a glare, his own ire up. He wasn’t being defensive on Angel’s behalf. He resented uninformed SHIELD agents questioning his strategy when where and how Angel’s abilities were used was his concern.

Angel broke the tension in the air by saying quietly, “I hope everyone has made their lunch choice because our waiter is on his way up with our drinks.” John’s comment wasn’t lost on her. Someone had given him enough information that he believed her to be ‘a bohemian flower child’. Obviously, he’d read something about her background. All of them probably had. It was a distinct disadvantage having no knowledge of what made them tick, but at least she had an ability which could level the playing field. She could read their bodies like books.

John, Steve, Luke and the rest of Zero Tolerance Company were members of SHIELD, a military entity controlled by the United Nations. The U. N. had originally created SHIELD during the cold war of the 1960’s to monitor the so-called ‘Cold War’ between the American and Russian superpowers and it remained to deal with international terrorism and global threats. SHIELD technology was state of the art. Rumors said that SHIELD actually had contact with Extraterrestrials and special organizations that provided them with technology superior to any nation on earth. As a necessity, SHIELD personnel were made up of top professionals from across the globe.

She could intuit from what Logan had said that the SHIELD agents sitting across the table from her were the best of the best, the military cream of the crop, and the legally most dangerous, not to mention deadliest, men she’d ever meet. She wondered if author Ian Flemming had been thinking of the men of SHIELD when he wrote the James Bond novels. Visions of the various actors who had portrayed the debonair spy flitted through her mind. All of them had been tall, dark and dangerous just like the men on the other side of the table from her. She shook her head with a smile and picked up the menu, tall, dark and dangerous—yes, but not nearly as handsome. Instead of concentrating on the menu in front of her, her senses began to pick up the subtleties of her companions. Logan’s muscular body was solid and familiar next to her and Nathan was a bigger mass of well-toned flesh and metal mere inches from her own. Already intimately familiar with them she moved her attention to the agents.

She’d already memorized John’s body earlier, but she did note that he was about ten years older than the other two, closer to forty versus their late twenties, early thirties. He had the leathery look of an old Mexican farmer who spent all his days out in the fields. He worked for his muscles and they clung tight to his bones giving him a wiry appearance. His hair such a dark brown it was almost black blended into thick sideburns and formed a dark frame beneath his light colored cowboy hat. She could tell he’d been up earlier than the others, he already had the hint of a five o’clock shadow on his cheeks.

Luke crossed his legs under the table and her attention was drawn to him. Inside his black nikes, he had widely spaced toes and thick calluses on the pads of his feet telling her that as a boy he’d often spent time without shoes. His body wasn’t overly muscular, but well defined like a swimmer’s body. His exposed skin was a light mahogany and she wondered if it was the same color all over his body. Short, dark black hair with a blue glint fell in a feathered cut away from his face. His chiseled nose, high cheekbones and brown, slightly almond shaped eyes spoke to her of a Northwestern Native American background, Alaska or Washington State. Reminding herself that SHIELD was international she added Western Canadian to the list.

Steve flipped his menu down onto the table, leaned back in his chair and looked around the room. His blue eyes caught her hazel ones for a few seconds before he gave her a closed mouth smile that never reached his eyes. He wasn’t as darkly tanned as either Luke or John probably because of skin tone, but he did have a barely discernable dusting of freckles across his cheeks and bridge of his nose. The mature dimple in his chin looked almost out of place. He looked ‘Middle America’. Bible Belt. Farm Belt. ‘A good ole boy’. She could envision a stalk of hay sticking out from the corner of his smiling mouth. His grown out crew cut barely reached his ears, but she was able to tell that his brown hair was the type that, if allowed, would streak lighter in the summer and then darken back to it’s original shade by the end of winter. His shoulders and chest were more developed than the rest of his body, not in a bodybuilder muscle amassing way, but more like whatever he did on a regular basis required upper body strength.

All the men surrounding her had scars in their muscle tissue and small nicks or healed calcifications along their bones. The form fitting metal on Logan’s skeleton, although providing shelter from the damage made by sharp edged weapons and most bullets, didn’t stop them from breaking and she could detect the multiple healed cracks that laced his bones within the rigid adamantium.

The large amounts of metal within Logan and Nathan’s bodies had become familiar and, to a point, almost comforting. The many anomalies, metal and synthetic, placed in various locations on the agents seemed discordant in comparison. Although each appeared to be different, their metal belt buckles hid steel knives within their patterns which only a three dimensional x-ray would detect. The eagle pendant and nylon cord hidden inside Luke’s shirt was in actuality another artfully designed, small utility knife and possibly a garrote. Their obvious location a small surprise. The palm size notebook inside Steve’s chest pocket was what it appeared to be, but the pen with a small amount of ink reservoir was actually a small plastic gun. John had metal dental work that could come out of his mouth. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she knew it wasn’t a bridge or dentures. There were other items hidden in their clothing, but she wasn’t sure of their purpose. John had removed his wire and none of them had an obvious gun, but, remembering SHIELD’s technological advantage, that didn’t mean that something she couldn’t identify wasn’t some sort of communication device or a weapon.

The elevator opened on their floor and they could hear the slight rattle as a trolley rolled over the edge onto solid ground. Angel detected six sets of silverware, three carafes of coffee, six mugs, two pitchers of water, seven glasses, one filled with ice, and an unopened soda can. When the young waiter pushed the trolley through the doorway, it was obvious he was also of Middle Eastern descent, but not related to the host or his brother further below in the gift shop. He wore black pants, a white long sleeved shirt and a hip hugging black half apron with large pockets. A red badge with black block lettering said his name was Mohammed.

“My name is Mo and I’ll be your waiter today,” Mohammed said congenially as he walked around the table placing the items from his trolley onto the table. His voice held no hint of an accent revealing his local origins. After receiving their orders and retrieving their menus, he asked, “Is there anything else I can get you?” At their negative responses, he gave them one last smile, placed the menus on the empty trolley and pushed it out of the room and back to the elevator.

“Well, that—” Steve began, but Nathan cut him off with a raised hand while he stared intently at Angel.

Angel, making sure Mo actually entered the elevator without any stops or strange motions, felt, more than actually saw, Nathan’s gaze. She ignored him until the elevator started moving and then she said, “He’s gone and he didn’t seem to make any obvious motions to either the stairs or the security camera. He didn’t bring in any listening devices or cameras either.”

She reached up with her fingers and massaged her temples. “The guy with the gun went back to his car, but it hasn’t left the alley. The one with the camera walked around the restaurant downstairs and eventually sat down after the Host talked to him. I think he’s already ordered something.” She sighed heavily, grabbed her soda, popped the tab and poured it into the ice filled glass. “I’d say he was looking for us, but,” she shrugged her shoulders, “I’m not a mind reader so I don’t know what the man said to him. I still need to get to the other side of the building to gather the data I need on that side of the top floors.”

She noticed the gathering of laborers on the fifth floor as groups of men ascended from the fourth or descended from the sixth floors. They all seemed to be headed towards one location, a large suite of rooms on the fifth floor. The upper three floors were littered with various hammers, drills, saws, and paint cans, construction, or in this instance, renovation tools. The men themselves carried knives of different shapes and sizes along with the occasional handgun.

“And the renovators upstairs aren’t your everyday construction workers either,” she added looking up at the ceiling, “but I guess you already knew that.”

She knew she was revealing hints about her abilities without talking to Logan or Nathan first, but she didn’t care. Secrecy be damned! She was tired of trying to monitor everything. And, in some way, she wanted to show John that she wasn’t the ‘bohemian flower child’ he thought and prove herself as an intelligent woman with an invaluable skill. They still had no idea about her other mutations or those that she had recently acquired from the debacle in White Plains. She wasn’t sure about military ranks, but she considered they had to be high enough that it didn’t matter if she let a few clues slip.

“I didn’t know, but I suspected,” Nathan replied to her comment about the workers on the upper floors. “You thought the Punk had a rifle in his car,” Nathan stated, using the term he had coined for their gun toting tail.

“Yeah,” Angel nodded as she stuck her straw into her glass.

“Sniper?” Logan asked.

The agents listened and watched the X-men avidly. It had been the second time Nathan had waited until Angel had given the green light to conversation and identified if there were any spy devices being used in their vicinity instead of relying upon Logan’s superior hearing and sense of smell. It told them that her ability must be superior to his for detection purposes. They’d absorbed the information Angel had rattled off about the waiter arriving and leaving plus the detail on people within and without the building, which was remarkable given her comment that she hadn’t learned the information through telepathic means. They were already curious about the reason for her inclusion on this mission and the subtle hints she was dropping whetted their appetite to learn more about this new X-woman.

“Possibility,” Nathan replied, “but I’d expect more discretion if he was a professional.”

“We’re missing something? Or someone?” Logan asked.

Nathan eyed Angel, “If they were in her range, she tell us.”

“Hell, yeah,” Angel said, letting the straw slip from her lips. “I don’t want to get shot.”

“Check the rooftops,” Nathan ordered, “and any open windows.”

She sighed, crossed her eyes at him briefly in a childish display of pique before shutting them. Head bowed as if in silent prayer, she scanned the buildings surrounding them, trying to find people and metal bars, which would indicate rifle barrels. Her scanning ability was getting the workout of a lifetime and she was beginning to wish she had never left New York. On second thought, wish she’d never left Berkley!