xp_logs | Man Of Stone: Intel (Reply)

Jake and Jubilee crack into 'acquire' a little more information, X-Force style.

Jubilee listened to the slightly tinny and muffled Russian coming over the speakers as she glanced over the various camera angles she'd been able to plant on Zakharov premises. It hadn't been easy, the old General was a stickler for security and his men were even more paranoid then a third world dictator's troops on 'Let's kill the bastards' day.

Still, Remy and his friends hadn't been training her for over a year to just sit around and twiddle her thumbs when things got difficult. She'd improvised and ended up not doing too badly, if she did say so herself.

"Do you even understand what they're saying?" Jubilee asked her companion, throwing a copy of the day's recordings into an encrypted folder and pushing it through to a secure server Doug had set up for just that purpose. It contained their own thoughts on what they were hearing and seeing, but Doug and the rest of the team would have the time and facilities to catch anything they missed.

Jake nodded, holding up one hand as he scribbled something down on a piece of paper. He'd gone old fashioned for this--he couldn't listen to Russian and type on an English keyboard, and so pencil and paper it was. Dropping the pencil, he pushed back from his chair and sighed.

"Don't get too excited. I'm pretty sure the laundry they're talking about is actually laundry."

"Unless we're wanting to dress up as washer women ala Toad of Toad Hall, I don't think that's going to help much," Jubilee noted dryly, rubbing the back of her neck to relieve the ache that had begun to take hold there. "Did you want anything? Was thinking I could go down to the corner and see if that coffee place is still open."

Foreign country nonwithstanding, sometimes there were certain things that were universal. Bad coffee being one of them, but it was caffeine, and that was what mattered.

He nodded, slumping in his chair. Zakharov's men were boring the shit out of him. "Next time don't bother bugging the limo driver, just the limo. God, if I have to listen to this guy talk all day I'm going to shoot myself. Blah blah blah blah blah."

"If the limo had been out in a crowd of people and able to be knocked over, I like, totally would have," Jubilee noted as she reached the door. "They don't even have bear claws here. What sort of uncivilised, ass end of the world place doesn't have bear claws?"

"The kind that has thick, heavy pastries with raisins instead. I'll take two." Jake rubbed a hand over his face. "And extra coffee. Please." Zakharov's driver was one of those guys who talked endlessly about nothing at all. It was enough to drive a man crazy.

"If they're open, sure. If they're not...well, we may just have to see what we can scrounge from local restaurants. Try not to get too excited by the conversation while I'm gone, dude." Jubilee said, exiting before Jake could respond.

***

"You're in luck, the place was open,"

Jubilee placed the bag of pastries in front of Jake, and two large styrofoam containers that steamed softly even in the semi-warm air of the safe house they were inhabiting, courtesy of one David North and his impeccable memory.

Jake was scribbling frantically, mostly translating as he went so that the words came out in a mix of English and phonetic Russian with the odd German word thrown in. He ignored the coffee in favor of continuing to scribble until the stream of Russian from the speakers stopped. "I take it back," he breathed as he slapped the pencil on the table. "Your limo driver wasn't totally worthless after all." He passed the sheet over for Jubilee to read and reached for the coffee like a drowning man.

She took the piece of paper and scanned it quickly, her Russian was almost non-existant although she'd been working on that, her German was non-existant but she got at least some of what he'd been writing down. "Krasnoe Dinamo program, that's the one Emma said the Professor was talking about."

"Get a man drunk and he'll feed you for hours," Jake muttered, gesturing at the increasingly loud boasting coming from the speakers. He dunked his thick, mealy cake into his coffee before taking a bite. "Believe it or not, but it sounds like he was in the program. I'm guessing not--more like he drove a guy who was in the program--but it's still something."

"Ahh, drunken babbling, helper to spies and shadowy types everywhere. Did we catch his name at all?" Jubilee asked, pulling a rickety chair closer as she pulled another page from under Jake's hand as he finished with it. "Might be something Bishop and Sofia can drag up on him if we've got an identity to start with."

"Dmitri Andreiovich. Talks about himself in the third person. A lot," Jake muttered in a distracted tone of voice. "Should be something they can dig up."

"What, like that guy from the WWE? What was his name? The Rock! Yeah, him. All totally 'The Rock blahblahblah' Although, he'd probably be a lot more fun to be taking out. I'll throw this up on the server with a flag for Doug to send it to Bish and Sofia, just keep giving me pages as you finish 'em," Jubilee replied, and then pulled herself and her chair back over to where her laptop sat.