My entry for Ian's Smart Boys In Glasses challenge.  While I did
research for this story and put some of it into the final product,
do not assume that I have therefore rendered it accurately. 
Pretend I used it as atmosphere and not as fact and we'll all be a
lot happier.


Pairing: Lance and Kevin
Words: kidnap; linguist; casualty; chase


There should, Kevin reflected, be shiny metal surfaces surrounding
him.  High tech equipment sealed behind glass and inaccessible
except by mysterious keypads with retinal scanners.

This, however, was government work.

He trod down the gray carpet, made a turn at a corridor with
institutional white walls, walked past an open room filled with
cubicles and turned into the windowed office of the man who'd
called him there.  All of the blinds were drawn.

Spy masters should exude a sense of presence.  Be commanding like
James Bond's M.  Be impressive, be men and women of depth, who had
inner reserves of character and honor and impeccable tailors.

Dick Baker was a middle-aged man, dark hair thinning in the middle,
wearing a tie with a white shirt.  The shirt had small, but
noticeable, food stains that his dry cleaner had obviously been
unable to remove.  Single, because he had more shirts hanging up in
their plastic bags on a hook behind the door that Kevin closed as
he entered, but not a workaholic either, judging by the game of
Solitaire on the screen of the computer.

But there was also a half-eaten lunch on the desk, which suggested
the opposite.

"Take a seat," Baker said.  Kevin did.  "A noted linguist, Dr.
James Bass, has been kidnapped.  We need you to get him back."

Right down to business.  No small talk.  "Why not the FBI?"

"We have reason to believe that he's already been transported out
of the country.  And," Baker said with a thin smile, "if it appears
that Dr. Bass cannot be retrieved, it may be necessary to make sure
that he becomes, say, a casualty of the situation.  A regrettable
tragedy, of course, but not all nation states are as civilized as
our own, blah, blah, blah.  You get the picture."

"I do.  What other information do you have for me?"

A file folder and a CD case were pushed over to him.

"Read the file here.  You don't get to take it with you.  There
only information you can take is what's on the CD and what's in
your head.  The CD has a sanitized version of his background report
which may help you in locating him.  This information is at the
highest levels of importance.  To put it into perspective, after
you read it, we'll shred it, burn the ashes, and then encase it in
concrete.  Or we would if we could.  But this goes beyond secret."

Kevin nodded.  The CD would tell him who Bass was, where he'd grown
up, who his friends were, what his habits were.  The usual
information that could prove invaluable in finding him, but was
useless otherwise.  There was a post-it note on the CD with the
password.  Kevin memorized it and then stuck it on the file folder
for disposal.  The CD password could be no more secret than the
data inside, and the practice eating notes had -- or should have --
passed out of protocol at the same time as the invention of poison. 
You could kill a man with the amount of lethal chemicals in the red
spots in a standard deck of playing cards.

He read through the folder, assimilating the data.  The facts were
that the government had had control of this Dr. Bass at a site in
Arizona.  The professor had been working on an undisclosed project
when he had failed to show up for work one morning.  When his
quarters on the Air Force base were checked, he was not there. 
General post reports had been cross-checked and it was believed
that an unknown person or persons had kidnapped the doctor and
drove out of the base under the guise of being two airmen who had
not, in fact, gone anywhere at the time in question.  Further
investigation was still being done into the method the unknown
subject or subjects had used to obtain access to the base and the
possible deeper involvement of the suspect airmen.  The
black-and-white security photos were indeterminate in establishing
distinguishing characteristics, although the photos suggested that
there was one subject, light-skinned, possibly Caucasian, of
average height with dark hair.  Details such as dark hair could be
easily invented, however, and the information was so vague as to be
useless.  Kevin assigned it a low relevance value.

"There's information missing," Kevin said.

"Is there?" Baker asked.

"You know there is.  Was Bass already working for the Air Force, or
was he involuntarily drafted?"

"Voluntary, of course.  As far as I know."

Kevin grunted.  Involuntary, then.  "There's also no mention of any
items being taken as well.  No missing data or artifacts.  So
either you've left those out or there's a reason why Bass was taken
instead of what he was working on."

"The source data," Baker suggested delicately, "resided at a
different location.  All of Dr. Bass' research, excluding that
which was unfortunately published publicly before he came to work
for us, was stored in the computer system, encrypted, and far less
accessible than Dr. Bass."

Kevin took 'source data' to mean that the subject of said research
was separate from the research itself.  Source document or source
person?  If the subject of the research was, say, the equivalent of
the Rosetta stone, then that would explain the need for a linguist. 
Possibly a person, although that left the question of why the
government would need to find a civilian to translate for them.  If
the subject spoke an obscure dialect, it was a near guarantee that
they could find someone of their own who could do the job, and if
it was a previously unknown language, the question arose of how the
government had decided that the person's information was valuable
enough to learn the lingo.

"Research on what?" he asked.

"I'm afraid I can't divulge that information.  Even Dr. Bass is
unaware of the significance of his research."

"But the extent of his research determines who would have known
about him, who might have taken him and therefore, what they may
have done with him."

"Assume that anyone with access to the doctor's initial research --
which was publicly published -- could have known of this.  Any
nation would want what he knows if they could not access the source
material.  And they cannot.  Security on that is tighter now
than it was before.  As to what they would do with him -- they'd
want to get everything they can out of him, of course, but it's
likely that they would also want him kept alive as Dr. Bass is the
only person we're aware of who is currently capable of doing what
he's done.  We hope to have our own people duplicate his successes
shortly, but they're going from his work.  He's the only one who
knows what he knows and how he did it, which makes him capable of
reproducing those successes for someone else or of training others
to do what he's done.  It's vital that this not happen.  Both his
knowledge and his cooperation would be valuable to his kidnappers
and we want them to have access to neither."

"Understood."

Baker nodded to him and Kevin showed himself to the door.

From a certain standpoint, he liked this case.  It was challenging
-- he had only a vague idea of where Bass might have been taken. 
And then there was the puzzle of what Bass had been working on. 
Kevin would be better off if he never found out.  It might be one
of the reasons he'd been chosen; he was easier to lose.  There
would be no messy explanations if he disappeared.

But he wouldn't have gotten to where he was now if he did only what
was good and safe.

Questions began prioritizing themselves in his head.  What were
Bass' last professional publications before he'd vanished under the
governmental veil of secrecy?  They should contain some clue as to
the direction of Bass' studies and what might have caused the
government to take an interest in him.  At the least, they should
give him an idea of how the man thought.

Had Bass been kidnapped by a company or a nation state?  Baker
seemed to think it was the latter, which would greatly increase the
search area, but lower the number of ways Bass could have been
shipped out of the country.  Kevin was betting on water as the
method of transportation.  It was possible that they'd never left
the country, or had gone through Canada or Mexico, but he thought
not.  Planes were out of the question with the additional
anti-terrorism restrictions.

That was a helluva lot of assumptions.  However, Baker hadn't given
him much to go on.  The most viable plan to proceed on seemed to be
to wait and see where Bass -- or his research -- popped up,
infiltrate the security systems, terminate Bass, destroy whatever
information could be destroyed, and exfiltrate.  It fulfilled the
mission parameters and, unlike the job of tracking Bass, it was
doable.

But people didn't hire him for 'doable'.  They hired him for
'impossible'.

Kevin went through Bass' last published articles until the
terminology swam in his head.  Morphemes and phonemes and their
relevance to etymology -- it meant nothing to him.  He didn't have
time to get anyone to explain it to him either.  The trail was
getting colder every hour -- which meant that the temperatures
would soon be best measured in Kelvin.

The publications Bass subscribed to and sent articles into were
significant to scholars worldwide, and would be commonly found in
any institute of higher learning with a linguistics department.  No
help there.

It was down to trained instincts -- which were really the same as
well-paid guesses.

Kevin used his and set out for California to check the movements of
the giant oceangoing barges that transported cars from Japan to the
United States.  Such vessels had tight schedules, short turnaround
times and the inspection of the outgoing -- and presumably empty --
ships was frequently a matter of marking off a box on a clipboard. 
Assuming the timing was right, it could be a relatively simple
matter to stash Bass onboard.

In the air, Kevin calculated the time it would take to transport
someone from Arizona to California.  He assumed that the unsub
would obey the speed limits, as being stopped could be fatal to
their plans.  He set up a chart of times for travel to each port
city, although the most logical choice would be Long Beach. 
Approximately 400 miles gave him a travel time of about six and a
half hours.  Kevin was headed there, or rather to LAX.  What he
needed was to match the actual departure time of ships leaving Long
Beach -- not the scheduled time -- with the probable arrival time
of a vehicle driven non-stop from Arizona.  When he found a match,
he could then intercept the ship at its next port-of-call. 
Hopefully, before Bass was off-loaded.

The greatest difficulty with all of this was that he was
unmistakably foreign with his height and appearance.  He could not,
under any circumstances, be mistaken for a native, and he was not
an expert in Asian languages.  He spoke, for instance, only a few
words of Japanese, although he recognized more.

Luck was with him.  Luck and thorough research.  Long Beach's
commercial departures were available through the WWW.  Three
vessels had left during the critical time period.  Of those, one
sailing had been on time, one sailing had been an hour late, and
the last had been six hours late.  Six hours was a nearly unheard
of delay, especially for the type of vessel in question, an MVE, a
car carrier.  Still, he double-checked the facts.  The on-time
vessel was the Hyundai Ace, also an MVE, which had started its
voyage in Bangkok, made its way through several Asian ports, then
arrived in Long Beach.  It was continuing along the coast to
Oakland and Seattle before returning along the same circuitous
route to Thailand.  It would not arrive at its final destination
for a month.  The second, the hour late vessel, was Mitsui OSK
Lines' Alpha Express.  It was sailing direct to Yokohama and had a
number of slight discrepancies about it.  For one, it was
Panamanian flagged, but that didn't mean much as all three vessels
were.  For another, it was sailing out of a berth that, as far as
he could tell, did not exist.  And, finally, the ship class, TPD,
was erroneous.  The designation also simply did not exist.  Perhaps
it was merely a rare or seldom-used designation.  The T prefix did
suggest that it was a tanker, but still.  There were enough small
items wrong that the ship looked like a prime suspect.  The last,
the one that had been delayed and could have been delayed solely to
take onboard a last minute unbooked passenger, was the New Nada, an
MVE belonging to Toyota.  It had come from Japan by way of
Portland, Oregon, and was heading back to Tokyo.  Its information
checked out all along the board.  The company, Toyota Logistics
Services, was in charge of the berth in question, 82 on pier B, and
the berth in question had the roll-on/roll-off capability necessary
to drive vehicles on and off the ship.

The problem was that both the Alpha Express and the New Nada were
scheduled to arrive in Japan on the same date.  He had to choose
which to meet.

Kevin chose the New Nada.

He had his quarry.  There were only a few problems with catching up
to the ship.  Valued as he might be by the government for having a
knack for solving troublesome problems for them, he had no official
status that would be useful to him.  He had contacts, but not of
the variety that would allow him to do a James Bond style HALO
insertion onto the empty ship.  Hell, Kevin didn't even go for the
'Richardson.  Kevin Richardson.' jokes.  Risks with no return were
not his style.

The journey by sea from Long Beach to Japan was three weeks long. 
Given the headstart the captor had, this left just enough time for
Kevin to fly to Japan and get into place.  Baker would have already
exhausted the normal channels before turning to Kevin, which
partially accounted for the delay, although Baker had almost
delayed too long.  There was still, however, a problem facing Kevin
with the situation now.  That being the assumption that the unsub
had no recourse to James Bondish tactics and could not have removed
his cargo already.  While the ship would have to arrive in Tokyo on
time, and could not change its destination without disrupting so
many schedules that people would notice, there were such things as
helicopters.  And other resources.  Once the ship docked, the
search would become much more needle-in-a-haystack than it already
was.  Which was one reason Kevin was betting on Bass still being on
board when the ship reached its destination -- anonymity beat speed
every time, and if Bass' disappearance could be accomplished
tracelessly, then the U.S. government would have no hope of ever
finding him to get him back.  Which argued for Bass being aboard
the Hyundai Ace, except that Kevin wasn't going to second-guess
himself.

Kevin was on a flight to Tokyo as soon as one could be arranged.

He met the ship in Japan.  Discreetly, of course.  As discreet as
any hulking gaijin could be in that country.

He was looking for signs either of Dr. Bass being led or driven out
of the ship.  With the latter possibility in mind, he'd obtained a
car.  A bicycle would be better for following someone through the
crowded traffic, but he was entirely too remarkable to do so.  He
would be noticed.  The car would let him blend in a little,
although he might lose the unsub if he ever appeared.

He was rewarded for his forethought and patience when a car, driven
by a dark-haired Asian man debarked from the ship.  There was a
passenger in the front seat, slumped as though very tired or
drugged.  His hair was blonde.

Kevin followed the car.

As he'd expected, they got stuck in the city traffic.  It was not
out of the realm of possibility that the other vehicle could be
headed to an airfield, private or public.  It was also not out of
the realm of possibility that they could be headed for a
destination somewhere near by.  Japan was a contender in the list
of suspects both for companies and the government, the two being
nearly synonymous in Japan.  The government might not be exactly
the same as the companies, but the government did what it was told
to do.  Americans complained about how Big Business ran their
country; the Japanese lived the reality.

When the traffic appeared irreparably snarled -- no one had moved
for two light changes -- Kevin got an idea.  He was only three cars
back from the unsub.  It was a stupid idea.  Ridiculous even.  If
he took the risk and failed, the enemy would know he was there and
what he looked like.  On the other hand, if he pulled it off, it
was genius embodied.

He got out of the car, leaving it there in the middle of the street
and stalked down between the cars.  He got to the one he wanted and
tried the handle to the passenger side door.  It didn't open.  He
smashed the window, reached inside, unlocked the automatic lock,
opened the door and pulled the passenger out.

It only took a few seconds.  The cheap glass had broken quickly and
the passenger had not been cuffed to the door.  The blonde man was
sagging into Kevin even as the driver reacted.

Kevin yanked the passenger up -- he wasn't even sure if it was Bass
or not, but this wasn't exactly the best time to stop and exchange
pleasantries.  He got his arm under the other man's and took off,
weaving between the cars with their drivers all staring at him and
the bicyclists veering around him.  All the while, he was conscious
of the target he'd just painted on his back.  And he made a big
target.

He saw the commuters cuing for the train and threw them in that
direction, a trail of grumbles and glances following him.

With a wall of people and a literal wall between himself and the
driver of the car, Kevin risked taking a moment to find out who
he'd just kidnapped.  He pushed the dozy -- obviously drugged --
man against the wall.

Kevin was relieved.  It was Bass.  He looked different without the
gold-rimmed glasses he'd been wearing in the photos Kevin had
memorized and his general appearance was considerably disheveled,
but it was him.  That took a lot of the uncertainty out of things.

"Who're you?" Bass asked thickly.

Kevin was already looking around, scanning the crowd.  No one had
run in or otherwise tried to push their way to the head of the
queue.  They might even have lost their pursuit, but Kevin doubted
it.  Either the driver had called for backup, set up an ambush --
or he was even smarter than that and done both while entering the
queue like any other commuter.  Kevin had little idea what the
driver had looked like.  He would not be able to pick him out of
the crowd, and he could be upon them, disabling Kevin without Kevin
ever having recognized him.  Profanity didn't even begin to cover
the situation his impulse had gotten him into.

"Who am I?" Kevin asked.  "The guy who's here to clean up this
mess."

"American.  Raised in Kentucky.  Did your higher education in New
England."

Kevin raised his eyebrows.  "Impressive."

"It's my life."

"Yeah.  It's gonna be.  C'mon."  Kevin pulled at Bass.

"Where're we going?"

"Doesn't matter.  Away from the people who want to kidnap you."

"Someplace safe?"

"If possible," Kevin said enigmatically.  He could kill Bass now
and still satisfy his mission, but he wasn't so immune to the value
of human life to kill the man because they might get caught. 
No, that was sloppy work.  Fatalistic.  Assuming he couldn't
succeed.  Kevin knew he could.

"Who're you kidnapping me for, or are you looking for a less public
venue in which to execute me?"

Kevin didn't take his eyes off the crowd as he herded Bass toward
the tracks.  "U.S. government."

The tide of people swayed toward the train coming in and Bass was
torn from his hands.

Kevin fought toward him, only to see another man -- and Kevin fixed
his face firmly in his head -- grab Bass and move him toward the
train.  Whatever he said or did had the professor walking stiffly,
but quickly, toward it.  Kevin swore.

The outbound wave of passengers pushed him back, and Bass and his
kidnapper were aboard the train and the train was leaving before he
could board.

Hell.  Now what?

Kevin read more Japanese than he spoke, which wasn't much.  He
found a map of the train system and started trying to figure out
where would be the most likely place for the 'passengers' to
debark.

****

Five hours later, Kevin conceded defeat on the issue of trains. 
His quarry had escaped him.  He returned to the airport where he'd
stashed his bag and got out his laptop, going online to scout out
a new line of approach.

There was a message waiting for him in his email.  From
rbaker@ios.doi.gov.  The text was short.  "Get to embassy soonest."

Kevin was puzzled.  He hadn't even updated Baker on his progress. 
So how had the man known?  Or was it just a lucky guess that he'd
be in a foreign country by now and Baker wanted to talk to him?

In either case, Kevin had lost Bass.  Baker might have leads.

Kevin presented himself at the American embassy and, after giving
his name to the guards on duty, was immediately shown inside. 
Baker definitely knew Kevin was in Japan then.  Curiouser and
curiouser.

The mystery was solved when he was shown into a library sort of
room and left alone with its occupant.  The other man was reading
a book and sipping tea.

"Ah!" Bass said, looking up.  "It's the Kentuckian."  The professor
was considerably more coherent than he had been before.

"You!  How did you get here?"

Bass smiled at him.  "Simplicity itself.  I walked."

Kevin frowned.  "I meant, how did you get away from the guy who
grabbed you?  Did you get his gun away from him?  Slip away in the
crowd?"

Bass' smile turned patronizing.  "Nothing of the sort.  The man who
kidnapped me did not appear to speak Japanese.  His accent was
definitely Chinese.  Or if he did speak Japanese, he certainly
didn't do it well enough.  Or with any understanding of Japanese
culture.  In the crowded confines of the train, I merely whispered
to a young lady that the man next to me was taking liberties with
my person and I would be much obliged if she would assist me as it
would be so embarrassing for me to deal with it."

Kevin blinked.  "You got a girl to distract him for you?"

"More or less, yes."

Kevin wondered if it were too late to strangle the professor.

Bass' eyes glinted with amusement.  "In this culture, it's
commonplace for such things to happen," he said with the air of
someone delivering a lecture.  "It's not enough to know a language
to speak it -- to do so well, you also need to understand its
underlying assumptions.  In this case, I merely applied this
knowledge.  The young lady was very sympathetic to my desire to not
lose face by reacting to a homosexual molestation and reacted as I
had asked her to do, as though the villain had forced his
attentions upon her instead.  In short, she grabbed his hand as the
train was pulling into a station and began shrieking, 'Pervert!'. 
In Japanese, of course.  In the ensuing tumult -- expressed in the
Japanese manner, naturally -- I was able to extricate myself and
make my way here.  Once I explained matters to the kind gentleman
guarding the gates, they were quite happy to locate you and send
you here."  He frowned.  "It was all too easy, actually.  With all
the spy movies I've seen, I half-expected to be pursued.  I had
thought of presenting myself at the Canadian embassy instead to sow
confusion among the enemy, but it occurred to me that simpler was
better and so I came here."

"You," Kevin said slowly, "are a lunatic and lucky to be alive at
all."

"But no one ever offered harm to my person."

Kevin gritted his teeth against the response welling up inside him,
but the words came out anyway.  "That could change."

"I don't see why it should.  After all, I'm in a place of safety
now."  Bass looked considering.  "Of course, one would have thought
that a military base was also a safe place.  Should I perhaps be
inquiring into your credentials?"

As Kevin didn't have any, he'd prefer to avoid that.  "Trust
me.  I'm who I say I am."

"But that is precisely what someone who was lying would say.  It is
true, however, that my former kidnapper's conversation consisted
more of 'Shut up or I'll make you'."

"I wonder why."

Bass gave him a cool smile.  "I don't know.  I would have thought
that talking was what they wanted me for to begin with."

"Well, I don't want to hear anything you have to say.  I have no
interest in any secrets you might know."

"Ah, but that's the interesting part," Bass said.  "I don't
know anything.  What I can infer is fascinating--"

Kevin wondered idly if shooting Bass was still an option.  He cut
the professor off.  "I don't want to know.  I don't want to know
anything about this.  The only thing I want is to get you back to
where you came from."

Bass folded his hands.  "All right."

Kevin eyed him suspiciously.  "You won't say anything?"

"Well--"

"Never mind.  I'm going to see about travel arrangements for
getting you back to the States.  Stay right there."

Bass nodded.

Kevin retreated.  There was something he found creepy about the
professor's geniality and enthusiasm in the face of an ordeal that
would make a normal person apprehensive and cautious.  Kevin
himself felt the normal reactions, but had learned how to respond
to the feelings and the experiences causing them in more
constructive was.  But Bass?  Wrong.  Very wrong.

When he came back into the room, Dr. Bass was sitting right where
Kevin had left him.  He had abandoned his book and was folding thin
sheets of paper into origami.

Kevin shook his head.

Bass gave him yet another smile.  "They seemed appropriate under
the circumstances."

Kevin tried very hard not to look at them.  "Dr. Bass, we don't
have time for this.  We need to get you back to the United States."

"Yes.  I understand."  He set the folded paper down on the nearby
table.  "Time is of the essence."

Kevin motioned for the professor to precede him.  Origami.  Was
there anything the man didn't do well?  And what the hell had this
whole wild goose chase been all about?

He'd probably never know.

Behind them, the antenna that had been folded around a tiny paper
person's head fell off, and landed on the tea saucer.