xp_logs | AKDM: Coda

Quentin is in custody, so Milan springs his new partner in crime.

Quentin Quire was not having the best day. The effects of the drugs that Milan had given him were gone, reducing his telepathy to touch-only, and even trying to use that was giving him a massive headache. The headache could also have been attributed to puking up things he wasn't even aware he'd eaten and having been slammed around inside a miniature tornado until he passed out.

Waking up in the custody of two officials from the American Consulate in Dubai was just an additional annoyance. They'd allowed him to make a phone call, but his lawyer (okay, it was his cousin's roommate who was in pre-law at Columbia) was off at Lake Havasu partying or something.

The men in suits (who probably weren't even cops but at least they weren't the Dubai authorities who probably still believed in things like dragging people behind camels or cutting their hands off in the town square) had been talking about criminal charges - not against the people who'd assaulted him, of course! - but against him, blaming him for the false fire alarm leading to vandalism, fraud, theft, and a series of fines and reparations for damage to the hotel. Adding insult to injury, the 'tournament' had been underground, and illegal, and they were telling him he was lucky not to get arrested for that. Instead, they were trying to say that he, Quentin Quire - Kid Omega, dammit! - had gone on some drug-fueled Ugly American rampage through the Malik Dubai hotel.

On top of everything, though, he had been fired when he was unceremoniously carted out of the hotel.

This was the lamest day ever.

It had taken Milan hours to find another hotel that had electronic locks that would listen to him, and then he'd had to break into the hotel's registration computer the hard way, adding himself to the guest list and 'paying' for it with one of the emergency credit card numbers he'd generated months ago. It would take weeks for the bank that hadn't really issued it to get back to the hotel.

And then he had to recover from double-dosing himself with the drug, and wait for it to wear off so he could take his real medication and lessen the eye-twitches and hand waving to just a mild eccentricity. And then he had to eat, because after all that, he didn't want to pass out in the middle of something that was very very dangerous and very scary. He took a double-dose of his anti-anxiety medication just in case.

After all that, it was almost a letdown that it was so easy to find out where Quentin was being held. He couldn't let his new friend sit in jail. Jail was horrible. He'd read all sorts of webpages and books on what happened to men in jail who couldn't fight back, and he was not going to let that happen to Quentin anymore than he'd been willing to let it happen to him.

But he couldn't get himself arrested or shot or punched trying to do it, so he had to do it in secret. He couldn't just walk in and pretend to be a police officer, because no one would ever believe that.

Getting into the networks of the US Consulate, and the FBI and the local law enforcement was much harder than just finding out where Quentin was. He had to change the fingerprints to someone else's and setup a delayed program to edit Quentin's name out of the system after a few weeks, a tiny virus that would just eat the information and then close the holes behind it.

But none of that would get Quentin out of the lock-up on it's own.

Quentin's day continued getting worse as he had to sit through more and more talks with Consulate officials, with words like 'extradition' and 'international incident' being bandied about. One black-suited toadie even had the gall to tell him that he wasn't a "person of interest" and that they could just as easily give him back over to the Dubai authorities.

That thought actually shut Quentin up for a few hours, so it was a relief of sorts when they came and brought in a no-neck bruiser that identified himself as a US Marshal. They took Quentin's passport and all his documentation and put them in a diplomatic pouch, then handcuffed him - handcuffed him! Kid Omega! - to the microcephalic government stooge and put him in a car for the airport, to be flown back to the United States to face charges there.

Total bullshit, Quentin told himself as the car pulled out onto one of Dubai's megahighways.

By the time the network he was tapping into registered that a US Marshal had taken custody of Quire, Quentin Grant, Milan had gone through an entire case of Gatorade mixed with Mountain Dew, and eaten an entire double entree of lemon chicken, and he was starting to feel like maybe throwing up was a good idea because the caffeine was starting to wear off. He didn't want to use the drug until he had to, but staying awake and keeping connected the whole time was absolutely necessary. He understood Murphy's law, as soon as he did anything more than get up to use the bathroom, he would be too late to do anything. Even using the bathroom was dubious, and he'd held out as long as he could.

But once the necessary gem of information crossed his screen, he was wide-awake, and taking a dose of the drug through the inhaler. It burned away the fatigue and nausea, and he stood up, finally able to leave the computer and communicate with it in the way he he much preferred to.

With the benefit of the diluted Kick, he was able to get the identity of the Marshal and the number to his cell phone, and the make and model of car that had been provided for him. Better yet, he was able to take control over the security cameras outside the jail, relooping what they sent to the guards while he walked past the parked car.

It didn't matter that the US Marshal drove the car around to a sally port for prisoner transport. He had a connection already, and cars were so easy to control when they had remote entry and ignition. All he had to do was shut it off.

Renting a car of his own was child's play. A quick connection to the company's web reservation system, and he had a reservation for one of his travel identities, again paid with the false credit card number. This was getting fake-expensive, Milan thought to himself, laughing.

He kept his hands on the steering wheel even though he didn't really need to. No sense in getting pulled over for reckless driving. He didn't even really need to follow the US Marshal's car, all he had to do was know approximately where it was, and that was easy when he knew the cell phone number and carrier, and could track it via a the GPS triangulation built into nearly every cell phone and a comfortable little hack into the carrier's systems.

Once the US Marshal's car pulled off the highway onto an exit, it was all too simple for Milan to just shut it down entirely.

Quentin yelped as the car suddenly swerved out of control, slamming into a stanchion and going from sixty to zero in less than a second. He felt his seat belt clench up on him almost a second before the impact, however - while the driver and the Marshal he was handcuffed to both slammed forward as if their restraining belts and the airbag weren't even engaged.

Suddenly flushed with adrenaline, Quentin reached out and grabbed the Marshal's face. "Unlock the handcuffs. Unlock them now. Now. NOW."

Fumbling fingers worked the key in the lock, and as soon as the cuff fell from Quentin's wrist, he reached into the Marshal's coat and retrieved his passport and wallet. He was tempted to take the Marshal's pistol and - no, he was many things, but he wasn't a killer.

Yet.

Instead, he opened the door and dizzily stepped out into the hot sun, shielding his eyes from the bright light.

Milan had nearly slammed his own car into the side of the road when the connection to the other car broke. He hadn't' considered that shutting it down would break his connection to it. But it didn't matter, he regained control of his own vehicle fast enough to avoid everything except a few passing cars blaring their horns at him.

He had only been a few hundred feet back from the exit, and he arrived at the crashed vehicle in time to see Quentin get out of the car. He came to a stop only long enough to open a door and yell "Get in!" at his new friend, not even giving Quentin enough time to do more than realize who was talking to him and scramble into the car before pulling away from the accident with screeching tires.

"Milan?" Quentin squeaked, barely realizing that he'd been sprung from government custody in something like ten seconds. "Holy... holy shit, man. That was awesome! I mean, they were all 'you have the right to remain silent' and then 'boom! crash!' and then you're all 'come with me if you want to live' and whoa... head rush..."

The young telepath put a hand to his forehead and leaned back, closing his eyes. A few moments passed, and then he groaned. "Oh fuck, now I'm a fugitive on the run. What the hell am I going to do?"

Having an actual conversation with a real person while he was trying to control a machine as complicated as a car was a lot harder than Milan had expected. In the end, to get anything said that didn't start with a 5-second series of stutters, he had to resort to driving the boring, regular way. Which he hated. It was so slow and cumbersome and inefficient.

"You are going to lay low and stay quiet until my virus gets your name out of the systems." he said. "And then I will get you a new passport and IDs with a new name, because I do not think John Henry Forge or Doug Ramsey are going to not keep an eye on us. They are not stupid, even if they are jerks."

"Lay low and hide from the law?" Quentin asked, simultaneously impressed and somewhat frightened by how comparatively capable Milan seemed all of a sudden. Thinking about it for a while, he smiled and leaned back into the seat, watching the scenery pass by. "Hell yeah. All Butch-and-Sundance style. Except without the whole gunfight with the Bolivian Army part."

"We are not holding up any banks or blowing them up with dynamite." If Milan's attention hadn't been mostly on driving the car without the benefit of his mutant power, he'd have been more concerned at the comparison. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died at the end of that movie, he was sure if it. "But I can think of many ways that your telepathic power will be very useful to find things out and to also make sure we have places to live and food to eat. Also to rent better cars than this one, because I think I may have damaged it's transmission accidentally when I crashed the car you were riding in."

Quentin just kept smiling. New identities, moving around the world undetected - even Charles Xavier wouldn't be able to track him down. He was finally going to be free. Free enough to achieve everything he knew he was meant to.

"We're going to be the best team ever."