Chapter Fifteen: Gerard
The nine agents parachuted from the plane down onto the ship, managing to take the night watchmen completely by surprise. Gerard took out one of them with a well-placed karate chop to the back of the neck, the man’s body crumpling to the floor immediately. Elena chose to keep her distance, taking out one of the other guards with a tranquilizer gun and stowing him behind a series of barrels to keep him out of sight. She flashed a thumb up to Gerard once she was done, the two of them moving towards the staircase that would lead down into the depths of the sizable ship. They were supposed to meet up with Armando and Germain and go into the ship together, but so far, they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of either of them.
“Where are they?” Gerard demanded impatiently, pulling his pocket watch from the pocket of his suit and glancing at the time. “They’ve got two minutes before we are supposed to be making our way down into the room where the treasure is being held. I hear that Dubois spends most of his time sitting with the treasure with a few of his right-hand men, so once we get through the few guards that he might have posted around the ship the hard part will be over if you ask me.”
“Or maybe the hardest part will only just be starting,” she suggested, her blue eyes darting back and forth to keep track of their surroundings. “Dubois is the final boss here, Gerard. We shouldn’t be taking him lightly, no matter what.”
“I agree. Underestimating someone as dangerous as he is would be a mistake on our part. One that could prove to be fatal,” he said, the sound of footsteps behind them causing the two of them to turn just in time to see Armando and Germain appear. “Took you two long enough.”
“We had a bit of unexpected trouble when we first landed. Turns out that a few of the watchmen were positioned at the place where we landed, and they all had guns. Dispatching all of them without letting one let off a gunshot is a lot harder than you would think. So, forgive us for being just a little late,” Armando said, his hands moving to straighten his slightly ruffled suit jacket.
“We figured that making sure no one sounded the alarm ahead of time was a little more important,” Germain added, the slim Frenchman pulling his revolver from his holster and motioning towards the stairwell. “Who do we want to go in first?”
“I think that I should go first, with Elena behind me. Germain, you follow Elena and make sure to offer her assistance should she need it. Armando, since you have the best eyesight here, I figure you will make the best lookout, so bring up the rear for us, would you?” Gerard said, glancing at each of them and turn and waiting for them to nod before continuing. “Alright, let’s go. Try to make as little noise as possible.”
The four agents began to make their way down into the ship, endeavoring to make as little noise as possible. Gerard had been on ships kind of like this one before, but it seemed unusually large for a ship designed to transport treasure. It reminded him more of an oversized yacht than it did a transport ship, the fact that the rooms they passed by were storage rooms rather than bedrooms serving as the only distinguishing characteristic to let one know that they were on a transport ship. Their footsteps were soft on the wooden floors, though Gerard was beginning to wish that they had padded their shoes before they came. All it would take would be the smallest noise to alert the guards of their presence, and in his experience, shoes were often the causes of such noises.
He could hear Elena breathing gently behind him, her gun now held firmly but loosely in her hand. They moved slowly, creeping from doorway to doorway as they approached a sizable door at the end of the hallway. Gerard had to bite back a curse at the sight of two guards with automatic rifles standing in front of the door that would lead into where the treasure was, suddenly grateful for the gloom of the ship, the sporadic lighting playing to their advantage. He turned back to face them, throwing up his hand for them to stop moving. He gestured toward Germain, then pointed with his thumb toward the two guards. The Frenchman was the one who had the most practice with getting past armed guards, and it seemed that his skills were going to be needed once more.
He slipped past Gerard and Elena, the Frenchman putting on one of his best smiles as he allowed himself to move into the light. The scarce lighting of the corridor made it so that the two guards couldn’t see him until he was only a foot or so away from them, the slim man seeming to materialize out of the darkness without warning. The guards opened their mouths to exclaim something, but Germain was already moving. His pistol glinted in the light as he leveled it at each of the guards and pulled the trigger twice, each shot striking one of the guards right in the middle of their foreheads. They dropped to the ground like sacks of potato, blood beginning to pool onto the wooden floor of the ship. Germain turned to look back at them and motioned for them to approach, already moving to retrieve the rifles from the floor where they had been dropped.
Gerard took one of the rifles while Armando grabbed the other, Germain moving the bodies of the guards out of the way of the door. “This is where things are probably going to get hectic. Are you guys ready?” he asked, wiping his hands clean on one of the dead guards’ shirts.
“As ready as I can be,” Elena muttered, gazing toward the door hesitantly.
“Alright, let’s do this. Make sure you stay close to one another. The last thing we want to do is get separated or allow one of us to get captured,” Gerard said, seamlessly taking the role of a leader like he was born to do it.
Armando and Germain took up positions on either side of the door as Gerard pulled the door open, the heavy metal door making a large amount of noise as it swung open. He charged inside with Elena directly behind him. He kept his gun leveled in front of him as he and his fellow agents filed into the room, the group of four finding themselves facing a group of only nine people. It only took a moment for him to recognize Dubois, who was sitting in the center of the room on a heavy crate, a large golden goblet held tightly in his right hand. “Ah, well will you look what we have here? Looks like a couple of rats have gotten onto our ship,” Dubois said, his Louisiana accent coming across thickly in his voice.
“The only rat that I can see around here is you, Dubois. This treasure doesn’t belong to you,” Gerard said petulantly, the barrel of his rifle pointing directly at the Louisiana gangster.
“It does now,” Dubois said with a laugh, snapping his fingers. The sound echoed loudly around the room, the eight men guarding him all pulling guns from their own inner pockets. “Unless, of course, you do-gooders are going to try and take it from me.”
“I’m afraid that is exactly what we intend to do,” Germain said, his natural French accent coming across heavily in his nervousness. “Our employer believes that these items can do far more good in the hands of the public rather than those of a private collector, especially a criminal as heinous as you are.”
“It takes a criminal to know a criminal. What are ya’ll doing that makes you better than me? You are spies, correct? Does that not mean that you are constantly wading through morally ambiguous waters for the sake of money? We are not so different when you really think about it. Why don’t we work together? There is plenty of treasure here to go around,” he said, his one good eye twinkling mischievously. “How much is your boss paying you? I’m sure that I could offer you a better deal.”
“Is that right? Because I should say, we have been offered a pretty good deal already,” Armando piped up, taking a step forward with his gun pointed toward one of Dubois’ henchmen. “All we have to do is get the treasure to our employer, and in exchange, he will make sure that we can all live comfortably for the rest of our lives. It would be pretty hard for you to top that offer.”
“I guess this is the part of our meeting where negotiations break down,” Dubois said, sighing gently as he rose from his seat, revealing the rifle that he had been concealing with his body up until now. “Unfortunately, it seems like the four of you are slightly outnumbered.”
“Looks can be deceiving, Dubois,” Armando said with a grin right as the roof above Dubois and his men exploded, pieces of the wooden deck raining down from above as the other agents’ zip lined down into the room.
Dubois and his men were taken completely by surprise, the few shots that they managed to get off thankfully missing Gerard and Elena, the bullets whizzing past only a hair’s breadth away. Dubois tried to level his gun at Elena, but Gerard was squeezing his trigger before the gangster could even raise his arm. Dubois dropped like a stone, the few of his men who hadn’t been killed throwing down their weapons in surrender.
“Bad move,” Gerard said softly. “Aiming a gun at my woman is a death sentence.”