4

“You’re telling me I was in a Russian prison?” Logan repeated, still not sure if this was true or a lie. “Why?”

“Supposedly you were Alexei Ivanov - the Russian equivalent of John Smith - who was convicted of a brutal triple murder outside Moscow. I don’t know if the whole story was a plant or if the Organization took an existing man and put you in his place, but they wanted you in that prison to get close to Vogel. At that time, I don’t think anyone knew the details of Overlord beyond Vogel. You were supposed to get his attention, and you did.”

He was almost afraid to ask. “How?”

“How do you think? You were attacked by some of the biggest guys in the prison - of course; you were new meat - and you sent them all to the medical ward for body casts. Even though they were brutal fights and you were usual covered in blood, you never seemed to have a scratch on you.”

“Huh. Wonder how that happened.”

“It’s a puzzler, isn’t it? You became the new badass of the cellblock, and there were rumors you were some kind of freak. And Vogel loved him some freaks.”

Logan grunted. That sounded like something the Organization would do - send him into the lion’s den and leave him to fend for himself amongst the predators until he could hit their target. “As soon as he saw my genes, he must have flipped.”

“He flipped when he took blood samples from you.  Your blood doesn’t go bad, you know.  You could leave it out and it wouldn’t start drying up or thickening; it would just stay as is, its own self-contained system, staying viable against the odds. You didn’t need to be a geneticist to know that wasn’t right.”

“Guess not.” He looked at his hand, trying to visualize the blood pulsing through his veins underneath the skin. He’d heard before that it had odd properties - Jean had once mentioned almost casually that he seemed to have his own blood type - but it was sort of creepy to think about.  'Wonder' blood.  Something that wanted to keep on going whether he wanted to or not. “Where did you come into this?”

“Vogel had an assistant named Vladimir Federov. Or at least he did, before I killed and replaced him.”

“Nice.”

“You knew it was me. I didn’t know how, but this was before we discovered you had a sense of smell more sensitive than a bloodhound’s. But you never gave me away. You just looked at me like you knew who I really was when Vogel wasn’t paying any attention. And then once, when I was closing up the lab after Vogel had left the room, you said, in English, “Goodnight, Mystique”. Major giveaway there, huh?”

He puzzled briefly over the change of nouns. “His lab was at the prison?”

“Not his main one, no. As soon as he discovered you were the freak of his dreams, he used all his pull in the politburo to arrange your transfer to a prison that only existed on paper. That was his main lab.”

Logan suddenly had a bad feeling he knew where this was going. “He used me as a guinea pig.”

“Of course he did. Where else was he going to find a subject as perfect as you?”

Yeah, his mutation made him the wet dream of mad scientists everywhere. But he started getting angry as he came to the realization how some of this must have played out. “You helped torture me, didn’t you?”

She had the decency to grimace as she looked away, avoiding his eyes. “I had no choice. I was his assistant, and I had to play the part. If it means anything at all, I hated doing it. I may not have liked you very much, but I hated torturing a fellow mutant for the sick pleasure of a demented normal.”

“So why didn’t you do anything about it?”

“For the same reason you just took it when you could’ve popped your claws and ended it all at any time. We were on a mission.”

Mission. Fuck, he hated that word. It excused a variety of monstrous things: “I was only following orders,”/”I had a mission to complete.” All easy bullshit that was used to justify a multitude of atrocities.

He flexed his hands restlessly, really wanting to ask her what the fuck she was thinking and how bad it got, but there was no way he could indulge in such an outburst in a hotel lobby around so many witnesses. They were on another “mission”, after all. Fuck.

“So what did he do to you?” Logan asked, as he hadn’t figured that out yet.

“What do you mean? I had to help him with his anti-mutant bullshit. Isn’t that bad enough?”

“For you?  No. Sorry darlin’, but it was something a lot worse than that.”

She looked back at him with narrowed eyes and a wicked scowl. “Why do you act like you’re so smart when everyone knows you’re not?”

That just made him smirk. Did she think that would hurt him? He had pretty thick skin, and he’d never claimed to be smart. Geniuses probably had stuff like memories, or at least knew why they knew certain things. “I’m a dumb shit in most things, but I’m smart where it counts. And I know someone hurtin’ me, normal or not, wouldn’t piss you off so much. So what did?”

He noticed her leg was twitching, and she crossed them again, now aimed the other way. She shifted, pointed away from him, and from body language alone he knew she wasn’t going to tell him.

Instead of waiting for an answer that wouldn’t come, he asked, “Why didn’t you just kill Vogel as soon as you knew what Overlord was?” That was her M.O. after all - there was no difference to Mystique between a sneeze or killing someone. She could do both just as easily, and they bothered her just the same....or not at all.

“Because it wasn’t that easy to find out. This asshole was totally paranoid, to the point where even being his assistant didn’t guarantee me access. He wrote notes in a kind of code, and worked on Overlord alone.  It seems he once had a colleague steal his research, so now he treated it like it was gold.”

Clearly, Vogel's paranoia continued to this day.  It explained a lot about him. It also might make him a slightly harder target, although really it just meant they might have to kill more people - and that was probably Mystique’s aim. What’s a few more dead bodyguards, especially if they’re only mobsters?  He just knew he never should have gotten involved in this.

They sat in tense silence for several moments, and since he knew Mystique wasn’t going to answer his questions about her, he started reading the Montreal newspaper. He noticed her looking at him out of the corner of his eye, and finally he muttered, “What?”

“So you read French too?  You’re so Canadian.”

Using the paper as cover, he flipped her the bird, and it made her laugh.

This was the assignment from hell, waiting with Mystique in a posh hotel lobby. It was awful to think he’d rather be crouched in some cold, muddy woods, waiting for hours in the wet, chill silence, than here, but it was true. He was such a curmudgeon.

Finally, after an interminable amount of time, black suited thugs started filing into the lobby, doing a brief perimeter sweep before hustling their charge straight into the elevator. Once again, it was impossible to see him through the wall of men, but as Logan parsed the scents, separating out the familiar chemical elements, he caught a hint of … something familiar. He couldn’t place it, but he didn’t like it.

Mystique must have deciphered the look on his face. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

“I think so, yeah.”

She stood up, but he grabbed her arm and yanked her back down. “No, not yet.”

She ripped her arm out of his grasp and gave him a lethal scowl. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

He glanced at the elevator, and asked, “I think it stopped at the eighth floor, didn’t it?”

Although still clearly pissed off, her eyes cut towards the elevator, where a few of the Russian mob guys still loitered, in no hurry to go and do whatever the hell they had to do next. Maybe force some teenagers smuggled in from the Ukraine to become sex slaves - the Russian mob did a lot of sex trafficking, didn’t they? It was becoming more profitable than drugs for them, which was totally fucking sad. What was even more pathetic was the growing market for sex slaves. “Yeah, I think so. Let’s go up there and end this.”

“Did you see how many of the mob guys went with him?”

Her eyes narrowed, and her irises briefly flared yellow. “Come on, old man, you’ve taken out entire battalions single handedly. Getting scared in your old age?”

“Bullets, sweetheart. Yeah, they ain’t gonna hurt me much, but they could hurt you, and anyone else on the floor with Vogel, or above or below, since bullets are known for their ricochets. Then there’s the little matter of how fast the cops will respond to shots fired in a good hotel. This ain’t Chinatown.”

“So you’re scared of cops now.”

“No, but shouldn’t you be, Miss Number One on the FBI’s Most Wanted List?”

She scoffed dismissively, but looked away. “They can’t catch me or hold me.”

“Doesn’t matter. As soon as word gets out where you are, you’re up shit creek and you know it. We don’t rush this. You have the guest list, right? Let’s look it over and see if we can figure out which room he’s in, and let’s surveil him. We'll find out where he has this toxin - there’s no fucking way he’s keeping it with him - and who’s coming out to buy it.”

Finally she looked back at him, a small smile starting to creep across her face. “Nail them all, you mean?  Wow, old man, I guess I underestimated you. I thought you’d become domesticated.”

“I ain’t sayin’ we kill them all. I say we find out who we’re dealing with. And if we can find out along the way who’s financing this fuckhead, even better.”

“It’s the mob.”

“Is it?  Why?  What do the mob need with a geneticist?”

She glanced down at the expensive floor and scratched the side of her neck, thinking about it.  For the first time?  This was not like her at all - she was completely off her game. Yeah, she was a psycho bitch, but she always did her homework. What had Vogel done to her? Had he discovered she wasn’t really Vladimir Federov and hurt her?  “He might function as an underground doctor for them.”

“He might, but I doubt it. That's a waste of his specialty.” The rest of the lingering mobsters split into three groups: some went up in the elevator, another group started going up the stairs (used only for emergencies and by staff, but a good place to hide if you were, say, an assassin), and the rest left the hotel, perhaps to engage in a final perimeter sweep.

Logan folded up the newspapers and returned them to the glass topped, low slung table in front of the sofa, Mystique studying him curiously all the while. “What?” he finally asked, mildly irritated.

“You have a hunch,” she said. “Share.”

“How d’ya know that?”

“You went away in your eyes, and you smirked slightly. Giveaways, old man.”

That was fair enough. He thought he had a better poker face than that, but then again, he wasn’t used to having his mouth and jaw line so exposed. “I don’t have a hunch, not really. Just a … feeling.”

“What kind of feeling?”

“The only kind I have,” he sighed. “Bad.”

But that probably was true about this whole damn thing.

****

They found a café closer to the grittier side of town, and Mystique got a laptop and plugged in the flash drive so they could go over the guest files. He had no idea where she got the laptop, but it didn’t smell like blood, so he took that as an encouraging sign.  She’d also changed her appearance to that of a rather average looking Asian male, perhaps to fit the population demographic around here better, or maybe just because she could.

While she worked, he took a moment to call Faith and tell her what was going on. Although Mystique made a noise that could only be interpreted as an allusion to him being “pussy whipped”, the truth was he was doing it for her sake: Faith had said if she didn’t hear from him within a few hours, she’d assume Mystique double crossed him and left him to die somewhere, forcing her to hunt down her blue ass and beat it to pulp for hurting her man. Which actually made him feel a little warm and fuzzy.

He stood far enough away from Mystique that she couldn’t eavesdrop, but he kept her and the laptop monitor in sight. He gave Faith the briefest summary of what Mystique had told him about him and Vogel. “Do you believe it?” Faith wondered.

He thought about it for a moment. “It’s plausible. It definitely sounds like something the Organization would do.”

“Yeah, well, punching kittens sounds like something they would do, but it doesn’t mean they did. Mystique’s gotta know that as much as we do.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Is there any way we can get info that will either support or refute her story?”

“You got Marc’s number? If there’s anything to be found, he’ll find it.”

“How does he find this shit out?”

“Got me. I don’t ask, mainly ‘cause I don’t want to be a knowing accessory to somethin’.”

“Smart.”

Logan noticed, through the smoked glass of the café’s front window, one of the Russian mob guys getting into a mild verbal argument with another guy outside the deli across the street. They were actually close to the Russian part of town, so he wasn’t surprised to see some on the street - a lot of these mob guys probably lived around here. “We’re prob’ly gonna do some recon, so I’ll check in with you in a couple of hours.”

“Hey - why can’t I come along?  You’re acing me out here.”

“Well, they’re not likely to notice me or Mystique following them, but a hot chick?  Oh yeah.”

“You did that on purpose, dammit. You had to throw in a compliment that I can’t argue with.”

“I’m a sneaky bastard.”

The argument had grown slightly louder, and Logan looked out the window just in time to see the Russian mobster grab the guy by the arm and suddenly lift him up in the air and throw him down on the top of a parked Mitsubishi. The windows exploded as the roof collapsed, making the car crumple like a tin can around his body due to the force used. The mobster walked away, working out a crick in his neck, as the guy with the car wrapped around him just laid there, most likely dead, every bone in his body broken.

“Holy shit,” the café counter guy blurted. “Did you just see that?”

They both had. He and Mystique shared a knowing, concerned look. They’d just confirmed that the Russian mafia had mutants working for them, and they were guarding Vogel.

Son of a bitch.