Since Sylvie and Kylie, (or should i say jærve and hippie) met they’ve talked about Budapest. Of course when everyone asks what happened in Budapest, the question was dismissed and the subject was changed. Well, this is what happened in Budapest. Before we go on, I suppose its necessary to tell you that this didn’t even take place in Budapest.

One year prior, Sylvie Larson was discovered breaking into the Danish Embassy in Washington DC to steal files. Well, it was less breaking in, and more impersonating an official. Her mousey brown hair was tied in a neat bun, and she was rocking the pantsuit. Her id badge said she was Katja Lugvitsen, an ambassador. She was looking for information about a drug they were shipping from the US to Denmark. It was more of a freelance job, the FIR hadn’t ordered her to go. The FIR was gone. All of it was gone. The whole base was turned to rubble by the Danish government. But now wasn’t the time to be nostalgic. Her sidearm was hidden under her blazer, but when she reached up to show the guard her badge, the jacket must’ve shifted and made her weapon visible. The next thing she knew she was surrounded by two guards both with their weapons up. They must’ve been new, bless. They were disarmed in a matter of minutes, and Sylvie had them both lying on the ground. Then she took off towards the exit, unaware that the guards had called for backup. God, she missed comms. They usually told her if she was going the wrong way. Sadly, everyone in comms was presumed dead, so there was no getting them back.

An hour later Sylvie was in an interrogation room. She managed to waste their time, and make them annoyed. She was good at that. Then they asked some testy questions and Sylvie had to call for a lawyer. The guards led the now handcuffed girl to a cell, she didn’t mind the cells at the fbi. They were nicer than the ones in MI5. Still she was frustrated. She had messed up, gotten caught. Hopefully it would take them a while to find a defence lawyer fluent in danish. It took them an hour to even find a translator. So she had time. She had time to get out of dodge before they questioned her again. As she took her hair out of it’s bun and pulled out a couple pins, they were soon confiscated. “Have fun with those, won’t you!” Sylvie called as the guard walked away with all of her hair pins. She kicked the wall in frustration. Since plan a was scrapped, she’d have to go for plan b. She didn’t like plan b.

“Jeg er ikke overrasket- sorry.” Sylvie took a deep breath, and repeated what she said, this time in english, “I’m not surprised.” She glanced over at the other girl, who looked even younger than she, “It was amazing they didn’t think to confiscate the hair pins before my interrogation. When I was in Moscow, that was one of the first things they had taken from me. You ever been to Moscow?” The question was somewhat rhetorical, so she moved on, “I am new, sadly. The good thing, is that I won’t be here long enough to be old. I’m Sylvie.” She added last minute. She always did forget names. She had been on ops before where she didn’t know anyones name. “Look, I’m planning to get out of here. Whether you follow me or not, is fine. If I can get to a ham radio I might be able to get us back to Denmark. That is, if there’s anyone I can get across to.” She spoke in a deep whisper. Glancing up every other sentence to make sure a guard wasn’t watching. The surveillance camera in the corner was old, so there probably wasn’t audio. They wouldn’t be overheard. Now, getting onto plan b. She had learned about plan b when she had first started working for FIR. Her S.O had used it to get out of a sticky spot in Paris. It was painful, but necessary. “Listen, can you fake a medical emergency of any sort? Heart attack, anxiety attack, ghost attack, anything?”

Once Kylie screamed, Sylvie knew she didn’t have a lot of time. This was the hard part of plan b. And probably the most painful. But she had to get out of the cuffs. So, Sylvie broke her own thumb. It was her right hand thumb, because her right arm was basically useless anyways. All thanks to that bullet she took in Copenhagen. So, she was now left handed. The broken thumb hurt a bit, not as much as she thought though. The sound of it was a little nauseating, however. But now she was not restrained, and she had this cool new silver bracelet! Sylvie grabbed the id card from the guard and held it over the automated lock. The gate unlocked and Sylvie looked to Kylie before pocketing the guard’s ID. It was going to come in handy. Sylvie was impressed with Kylie, she was glad they gave her a cell mate that definitely wasn’t going to slow her down, and a cell mate with a shiv. “Let’s go.” She said, heading for the lockdown door. Immediately entered another guard. Sylvie had this one. She kicked the guard upside the head and quickly moved her left hand to steal the taser from him. In one swift movement she charged and fired it. The guard really wasn’t having a good day.

Sylvie was a no kill kind of gal. Unless it was necessary, which is why she carried a gun. That reminded her, she was weaponless. She took a moment to take the gun from the guard. .30 caliber pistol. “This is just like the one they confiscated from me!” she commented, it was clear that there were no guards coming, but they couldn’t waste time. “Do you know how to get out of here?”

“Yeah, but finding their car would be hard, it wastes time. Government official cars, well, they have trackers, so we can’t steal them. Unless you can somehow disable them. Shouldn’t be too hard.” Sylvie thought for a moment going through her options. Then she noticed the box on one of the guards desks. She rushed up to it and rummaged around, her gun wasn’t in there, but she did find her hairpins and her fake id badge. If it fooled people once, it could fool them again. Sylvie pocketed the hair pin, knowing she’d need them later. She might have to make another fashionable bun or something, you never know. “Ok, this is going to require a lot of lying and pretending. Can you fake a danish accent? Just in case, you might have to talk. Now, here’s the plan. We’ll go down to the car park, and convince the guards there that I’m escorting you to a danish prison, so we’ll obviously need one of their cars. You know how to get to the car park, don’t you? And you’ll need to fit your hand on the other half of these handcuffs, you hands look smaller than mine, so it should work. And if we come into any trouble, you know what to do.” It had been a while since Sylvie was making the plans. Usually it was her S.O that got to decide what happened. But Sylvie was okay at making plans. At least, making plans that she had gone through before, in another country, on another continent. That didn’t matter though. It would work again. People always listened to women in pantsuits.

Sylvie smiled at Kylie’s comment about the curse words, giving her some basic vulgarities to get her by. “Danish is a hard language, but considering it took them over an hour to get a translator for my interrogation, you’ll probably be fine spewing out gibberish.” She nodded as she was handed the whip. She took a moment to examine it, before adding it to her belt loop. Hopefully nobody would take notice to it, after all, whips aren’t the most common of weapons nowadays. “You ready?” She asked, smoothing her hair before reaching for the doorknob. Sylvie didn’t wait for an answer.

Sylvie was used to situations like these. Where she had to blend in and not raise any alarms. But she wasn’t used to taking point. Although she was acting like she knew what she was doing, she was a bundle of nerves. Today had been her first assignment (well it wasn’t really assigned, but that didn’t matter) since FIR had been shut down. And, as we all know, it didn’t go as she had planned. She used to have a supervising officer, a S.O., who would tell her what to do and when to do it. Freja. She was like Sylvie’s mother. They often went undercover as a mother daughter team, so that might’ve had something to do with it. Freja would know what to do in this situation. But she wasn’t here. She was killed in the bombing of the headquarters. So Sylvie was on her own. It often helped to ask herself ‘what would Freja do?’ and then go with that. So, Sylvie was doing what Freja would do.

They walked down a brightly lit hallway, passing no doorways or windows. “How do we get to the elevators from here?” Sylvie asked quietly, glancing towards the ceiling for cameras. She had forgotten about those. Suddenly, the situation seemed much more complicated. How many other variables had she forgotten about?

Sylvie considered this for a moment, “Define plan.” She said, losing her cool composure for half a second and glancing over to her new friend. Then she went back to the stoic look she was so accustomed to showing. Heavily guarded wasn’t good. Heavily guarded meant she would need a lot more than one person to help her. The same curse words that she taught Kylie were rolling through her head, along with german and english curse words.

The two of them came along the elevator, which was flanked by two very muscular men with very menacing looks and were both equipped with quite large guns. Sylvie remembered Freja talking about how in ‘the good old days’ guards had smaller guns and less experience. But ever since the world started to fall apart, people decided that bigger guns and beefier guys would fix the problem. Sylvie longed for the good old days. There was another man guarding the door. This one was much scrawnier, and had what looked like a fake weapon.

When Sylvie and Kylie neared the men, she did a quick examination of the two bigger ones. Guy on the right looked late 40’s, looked like he was getting close to be transferred to a desk job. He had a wedding band, although that wasn’t important. He looked at the two girls with a sort of boredom. The other guy was younger, early 30’s, peak physical condition. No wedding band and an itchy trigger finger. When the two of them came closer he stood up straighter, with a determined look. Sylvie had to make a choice on to who she was going to talk to. She chose the older man. Despite probably being more experienced, his eyesight was probably poorer, and he didn’t seem to view Sylvie and Kylie as a threat.

“Good day, I am Katja Lugvitsen, Ambassador to Danmark.” Sylvie said, holding up her ID badge for a five second count and then pulling it quickly away. “I am transporting prisoner number 3165 back to the Danish Embassy where she will then be moved back to Danmark. We need to access the garage where a car should be waiting for us.” Sylvie spoke quickly, and with authority. She didn’t break eye contact with the guard, nor did she show any change in expression. She was Katja Lugvitsen, this was her job. There was no reason to show any interest in anything else but her task. And she had everything under control.