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Nick, Jay, and Emerald had finally boarded the Kraken and were searching for the control room of the ship. They eventually came upon a large room, packed with monitoring equipment being operated by several muscular men dressed as pirates. One man walked around the room and occasionally glanced at the screens being watched by his subordinates.

Nick and Jay stood on one side of the doorway, while Emerald stood on the other, as they peered into the room to observe the surroundings before deciding on a further plan of action.

Suddenly, one of the machines beeped, and the pirate sitting behind it typed feverishly for a few seconds. “SHIP HO!” he screamed.

“Will you please stop talking like that while we’re on the ship?” the head pirate said, hitting the other one over the head. “You sound like an idiot.”

“Sorry, sir,” the other pirate said sheepishly, clearing his throat. “There’s a ship approximately half a mile away, sir. It’s not a cruise ship, but I really think you should take a look at this one.”

“Is that a… ferret on their flag?!” the head pirate exclaimed, getting as close to the screen as he could to view the flag flying from the topmost mast of the ship.

“That’s what it looks like…” the other pirate replied, typing and clicking again until the ship was in better view on a bigger screen mounted on the far end of the room. All of the pirates in the room were now looking at the larger screen. “It looks like it’s loaded with some pretty sophisticated weapons.”

The head pirate nodded. “A ship like that could really help our operation.”

“Aye,” another pirate said, “and a ship that fine should be flyin’ the Jolly Roger!” He scoffed. “The captain of that ship must be one landlubbin’, barnacle-brained sea monkey to be sailin’ under a ferret flag.”

The head pirate put his head in his hand and sighed, annoyed, once again, with the pirate-speak. He walked closer to the big screen and kept his gaze on the ship being watched. “You, you, and you – alert the rest of the crew that we’re preparing to board another ship, but make sure they don’t load any torpedoes. This one’s for keeps.”

The pirates who were pointed to simply nodded and left to alert their crewmates, while the others remained behind to continue their surveillance. Jay, Emerald, and Nick immediately moved away from the doors and pretended to be walking by as the pirates approached them.

“Hey, you three!” one of the pirates called, as the agents began to walk in the opposite direction. “Gear up, we’re going topside to raid another ship.” Jay, Emerald, and Nick nodded and turned around again, walking around the corner and waiting until the pirates were out of sight.

“You heard them, we’re going topside…” Jay said, as they once again stood outside the surveillance room door.

“Finally, something to do besides sitting around…” Emerald said.

Ten minutes later, they were standing among the crowd of pirates, waiting for the Kraken to dock alongside their target ship. The pirates had armed themselves with swords, antique pistols, and bayonets. The Kraken jolted slightly as the tentacles attached to the side of the ship and propelled them upwards until the mouth of the Kraken was level with the top deck. Emerald looked out one of the large windows and saw the words THE JOLLY TWITCHES painted in black lettering.

The door opened with a quiet, mechanical hiss, and the pirates stepped out, ready to scare and raid the tourists they thought were on board.

What they found were about two dozen men, also dressed as pirates, also angry, and also ready to fight. The pirates drew their swords and raised their pistols, screaming as they charged at the ship’s crew, who also pulled out weapons and screamed as they fought.

Nick, Jay, and Emerald, figuring they should probably do something to at least look like they fit in with one side or the other, joined the fight and swung at, hit, kicked, and stabbed anyone who came at them.

As Nick punched a pirate in the face, he realized he recognized some of the men he was knocking out. He grabbed one of them by the collar and lifted him up off his feet. “Hey, I know you! Didn’t we sing a musical number together at Disney World a few months ago?”

The scrawny man nodded, and Nick threw him overboard, before charging at another pirate and kicking him in the stomach.

“Carter!” Emerald shouted, as she knocked one of the pirates over the head with his own pistol. “Quit socializing with the pirates!”

“But I’m setting up a blind date for you, Em!” Nick replied as he ducked, letting two pirates collide with each other as they tried to charge at him at the same time. The scrawny pirate had given Nick all the confirmation he needed to know that the ship they were on was being operated by FANS.


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Meanwhile, Dr. Rough watched the scene from his place on the upper deck at the stern of the ship. He grinned, his eye twitching with excitement, while he watched his minions fight the very pirates he’d been planning to capture.

Although it looked as though his plan was out of sorts because of this new development, he couldn’t have been more satisfied with it. Now his faithful minions would subdue the pirates, and he could not only take over their ship, but imprison them in his servitude.


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Nick looked up at the poop deck, where there stood a short, yet fearsome man.

Dr. Rough.

His presence meant FANS had come to try to get in on this plan. FANS... That meant Drums was there. Nick’s jaw set in determination. He now knew his next move.

He had to find Drums.


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In the midst of the mayhem, Agent Jay looked up. He looked past the crew of aspiring pirates who had swarmed the deck, brandishing swords, daggers, and cutlasses. He looked through the legions of FANS minions who had engaged the former in novice swordplay with weapons of their own. He looked beyond it all, and his eyes fixed upon the man who was swaggering down from the poop deck.

The high heels of the man’s meticulously-polished boots clacked loudly against the wooden steps, making him appear taller than Jay knew he really was. He wore a flamboyant waistcoat made of purple velvet and a wide-brimmed hat adorned with an oversized plume, which flopped in front of his face as he walked.

The face beneath the hat was familiar to Jay. It was the face that had stared up at him from the pages of the FANS file Nick had recovered in Antarctica, the face of a man who called himself Dr. Rough. But Jay had known it before that, just as he had known the man by his given name: Howard Dorough.

He’d gone by Howie back then, back when he’d tried to pass off his ever-present eye twitch as a charming wink before the ladies, and his only other nickname had been “Sweet D.” Said ladies would have laughed at the suggestion that there was anything “rough” about their Sweet D.

But now Jay looked into that face and saw nothing sweet about it. The dark eyes blazed, the left one twitching with ferocity. The smile was a twisted sneer. Jay had heard about K’s and Carter’s encounter with Dr. Rough at Disney World, and now, coming face to face with the man for the first time in more than six years, he could see that they had been right about his madness.

He felt the sudden compulsion to turn and walk in the other direction, to lose himself in the pirate brawl and leave “Dr. Rough” for someone else to duel. But he knew he couldn’t turn away. There was going to be a fight, and the fight was his. He knew Howie’s strengths, his weaknesses, better than anyone else on the ship. Someone had to stop him. And whether he wanted it to be or not, that someone had to be him.

Adjusting the three-cornered hat atop his head, Jay squared his bearded jaw and stepped forward rather than back. Louder than the shouts of those running amok around him, louder than the metallic clinging of swords or the thump of his own boots against the deck, he swore he could hear his own heart, hammering against his ribs.

Howie hadn’t spotted him coming yet, had no idea he was even there, and Jay quickened his pace, hoping he could catch his newfound nemesis off-guard on the steps and corner him to the upper deck. There, perhaps, he could negotiate a quick surrender, before someone got filleted with a sword.

Weaving vigilantly through pairs of dueling swashbucklers, Jay came to a halt in front of Howie, just as he’d reached the bottom stair and was about to step down to the deck. Jay saw his boot hesitate in mid-air as he paused in surprise, the recognition dawning. With Jay’s feet planted firmly on deck and Howie’s a step above, they were virtually the same height, and their eyes met levelly.

Jay stared into the familiar brown eyes, refusing to blink. Howie didn’t have that option; flustered, his left eye started to spasm worse than ever. And still Jay stared, his eyes boring into the other’s, his heart pounding in his throat now, his mind racing as it recapped all of the crimes this man had committed and all of the times he’d eluded capture. The takeover of Disney World. The theft of the giant laser in Antarctica. The hypnosis scheme at Global Idol. The transformation of Drums. In a way, he was even responsible for the death of JC.

The last realization made Jay want to grab him by the throat, collar him against the deck railing, and scream at him, “Why? Why?!”

But he didn’t scream. When he did speak, his voice was amazingly flat and calm, calmer than he felt. He said only, “Hey, Howie.”

Howie tipped his large hat in a sarcastic mockery of etiquette. Jay saw the blood vessel pulsing visibly in his forehead, but his reply was just as flat, just as cold.

“AJ.”

A grim smile flickered at the corners of Jay’s lips. No one called him “AJ” these days; even his initials had been shortened to a single syllable. But there had been a time when he’d insisted on it.


“You must be Alexander. Do you go by Alex?”

The guy asking was pretty dorky-looking. His polo shirt was patterned with bright, vertical stripes. He had a poofy haircut and a goofy smile that showed lots of teeth. Big teeth. But the smile was warm, and he seemed friendly. So AJ smiled back.

“Only if you’re my mom. Call me AJ.”

The guy chuckled. “Sounds familiar. I’ll always be ‘Howard’ to my parents and their friends. Howie to everyone else. It’s nice to meet you, AJ.”

He winked as he shook AJ’s hand.


Looking at him now, Jay shook his head. It was hard to believe he was addressing the same person. “Man, what are you doing, Howie? First you’re prancing around Disney World dressed up like Jafar, and now you’re a pirate? What’s the deal, dude?”

Howie was not fazed. “I should have known your organization would be here. Dressed as pirates also, I see.” His dark eyes flickered disdainfully up and down AJ’s costume.

“You know what they say.” Jay shrugged. “Great minds...”

The other recoiled, twitching. “Great minds?” His eyes bulged from their sockets, and so did the vein in his forehead. “Great minds? You dare insult my intelligence by suggesting that my mind is merely of the same caliber of greatness as yours?”

“I do apologize.” Jay’s voice was dripping with the flat sarcasm now. “So, do you always talk like that now, or is it just the fancy costume?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to appreciate the eloquence of the English language. You were never an intellectual.” His voice was as condescending as Jay’s was sarcastic. “But as you and your organization shall soon learn, brains conquer brawn.”

Jay smirked. “How come you keep calling it ‘your organization,’ huh? Why can’t you say its name? Are you afraid to say it or something? Does it hurt to say ‘Himitsu Takana’?”

The dark eyes blazed more fiercely. A flush crept up the neck. The vein throbbed.

Jay knew he’d hit a nerve.


“Hi-mi-tsu Ta-ka-na?” AJ squinted at the seal on the document in front of him, sounding out the name aloud. “You ever heard of this?”

“Sounds Japanese,” was Howie’s insightful answer.

“Well, thanks, Captain Obvious, that helps a lot,” snickered AJ.

Howie slid the paper closer to him, frowning. “Where did you get this?”

“The mail. The envelope actually said ‘For Your Eyes Only,’ like it’s real top secret stuff or something.” He laughed at the thought.

“And so you’re showing me?” Howie joined in laughing. “What if it’s like a test? What if there’s, like, a hidden camera or something rigged up in here to spy on you? ‘Smile, you’re on Candid Camera… aaaand you just failed.’”

“Aww, c’mon, D, I thought we didn’t have secrets.” AJ offered a big, cheesy smile, batting his eyelashes. “So seriously, you don’t know anything about this Himitsu Takana place?”

“Never heard of it. Did you actually read the letter? What does it say?”

“Not a whole lot. It sounds like some sort of secret society, and whoever signed this – he just signed it with a K, by the way, very secretive – wrote that he thinks I’ve got what it takes to be in it and wants me to consider applying. There’s an application enclosed. Sounds like a scam, doesn’t it?”

Howie shrugged. “Probably, but who knows? Did you look it up on the internet? They’ve got to have a homepage or something, don’t they? Most organizations do these days.”

“Nada. There’s nothing. I put it into WebCrawler, and all I got was all this Japanese anime stuff.” He snickered. “There were, like, a couple pages with the actual words ‘Himitsu Takana’ put together, but neither of them would load.”

“Probably because they don’t want to be found, if it’s really this top secret thing. Sounds kind of interesting. Maybe you should check it out.”

AJ shrugged. “Maybe.”


He jumped back out of the way as Howie, now “Dr. Rough,” drew his sword, temporarily forgetting he had one of his own sheathed against his thigh. He was used to his gun, but he had to admit, a gun wouldn’t do much good against a large saber swinging at his neck. Jay ducked, yanked his own sword out of its sheath, and raised it just in time to block Dr. Rough’s second strike.

“Brains may top brawn when you’re out to make it snow in Orlando,” he shouted, forcing Dr. Rough to step backwards and up as he got in a jab of his own. “But brawn’s what counts in a swordfight, mate!” He dodged Howie’s return swing and got in another of his own, causing his opponent to jump up another step.

“Overrated!” Dr. Rough retorted, as Jay’s sword splintered the banister. “Brawn gets you-” He thrust his own saber down. “… nowhere if you don’t-” Metal clanged as Jay’s sword met his. “… think-” Cling! “… about what you’re doing!” Clank!

“And brains!” Jay shouted back, driving his sword toward Dr. Rough with force, “are worthless-” Clash! “… when you’re completely fucked-” Clonk! “… in the head!”

Clang! The two blades met again, and behind them, the former friends glared at each other with mutinous eyes. Finally, Dr. Rough could hold Jay back no longer, and he stumbled, scrambling up the rest of the steps in a sort of crab walk before Jay’s blade could come down on him again.

Jay pursued him back up onto the poop deck, and there, with room for fancy footwork, their duel intensified. “HimTak is fucked!” screamed Dr. Rough, swinging his sword wildly. “My organization shall bring yours down! You haven’t been able to stop me yet! Tell Agent K he’ll live just long enough to regret the day he let Dr. Rough get away!”

Cloing! Their swords crossed, bracing each other with equal force, and through the X-shape of the two blades, Jay stared at his old friend in disbelief. “So that’s really it, isn’t it? That’s what this is all about? Revenge on HimTak for turning you down?”

A fleeting expression passed over Howie’s face, almost too quickly to be noticed, but Jay did. He’d seen that look before.


They sat in a nondescript room with the other hopefuls, waiting. Aside from Howie, AJ knew no one by name, only by the numbers on their shirts. He felt like he was at an audition, one of the many he’d gone to for the theater end of his double major. Would someone come out to read off a list of numbers that had earned callbacks?

No, he quickly realized. This was not like an audition. An audition was public; often times, you performed your number or read your scene in front of everyone else who was auditioning, and you learned whether or not you’d been cast in front of everyone else, too. This process had been completely different. Very private. Very secretive.

It had started with a phone call, nearly a month after he had submitted his application to the enigmatic organization known as Himitsu Takana. He had Howie to thank for that; AJ had been hesitant, but his friend had insisted that he apply. “You’ll never know what kind of opportunities you may have missed out on if you don’t apply,” Howie had wisely pointed out.

AJ’s careless reply had been, “I will if you will.”

The phone call four weeks later had been to set up a phone interview, and Howie had received one as well. They had both passed the preliminary background and reference checks, and they went on to ace their phone interviews. AJ knew they had because, two weeks after that, he and Howie were each sent a ticket in the mail. A plane ticket. A ticket to Las Vegas. The ticket had come with a letter, explaining that they were to fly to Vegas for a three-day screening session which would include a face-to-face interview. They were to tell no one their purpose in going, and if they did, the deal was off.

Now, on the third day in Las Vegas, they waited to see what, exactly, the deal was. AJ felt a little indignant about the whole shebang by now. Over the last three days, he’d learned virtually nothing about Himitsu Takana, while they had learned everything there was to know about him. He’d been put through two interviews, a written exam, a physical, a psychological evaluation, a polygraph test, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to find he was being tested now, observed via hidden camera to see how he handled the stress of waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

He and Howie kept waiting as, one by one, the other candidates were called by number into a small room hidden behind a closed door. Though half the people in the room had been led away by now, none of them had returned. AJ didn’t think they were going to. There must have been another way out of the small room.

And indeed, there was. AJ turned out to be the last one called from the otherwise empty waiting room into the small conference room, and when he finally entered it, he saw that there were not just one, but two more closed doors, one on each side. The person who had called him here, a dark-haired, surprisingly young-looking man, who had identified himself only as “Agent K,” invited AJ to sit down across the table from him. When they stood up again, barely ten minutes later, he shook AJ’s hand and directed him to go through the door to his left. “Tell the others I’ll be in to talk to the whole group in a few minutes,” Agent K added, as AJ reached for the doorknob.

On the other side of the door, AJ found yet another room in which people waited. This time, it was only a small fraction of the number who had been with him in the first room. Looking around, he felt a jolt in his stomach when he realized Howie was not among them. Disappointment neutralized the exhilarated feeling he’d gotten when the man called K had offered him a position with Himitsu Takana (“conditional, of course, upon your completion of our rigorous training program,” he’d added before any words of excitement or gratitude could spill from AJ’s lips). AJ knew what had happened. The others in this room, like him, had been given the opportunity to stay. The rest of the candidates had passed through the other door in rejection. Howie, who had gone in before him, had to be among them.

Taking another look around the room, he realized that everyone in it was watching him, expectantly. They were all still waiting, waiting to find out more about what they had gotten themselves into. He had no more answers than any of them. All he could say was, “K said he’d be in here in a few minutes.” Then, noticing a second door off to his right, he added, “I’m gonna find a john – guess the damn nerves got to my bladder.” He offered an impish grin to the room, earned a few chuckles in response, and slipped through the other door.

Just as he had hoped, he found himself in a hallway. He looked around, not for the men’s room, but for clues to his friend’s whereabouts. Where had Howie and the others gone? Were they already on their way home? He suspected not. And his suspicions proved to be correct.

His answers came quickly, when a door down the hall opened, and people he recognized from the first waiting room began to filter out. Some walked briskly, seeming eager to leave. Others trudged slowly, heads down in disappointment. If Howie was still in the building, he had to be with this group.

AJ waited, and sure enough, there came his friend, the last one out of the room. He hesitated a moment, then, seeing no sign of K, hurried forward up the hall, hissing, “Howie! Yo, D!”

Howie turned, his left eye twitching the way it did when he was nervous or flustered. He didn’t smile, hardly reacted to AJ’s presence at all.

“It’s a no, huh?” AJ asked, touching Howie’s shoulder in sympathy.

Howie didn’t speak. He shook his head once, a short jerk to the side that could have passed as merely a spasm, a tic.

“I’m sorry, man,” AJ offered. “I got offered something… I’m not really sure what it entails yet, but I’m gonna stick around long enough to at least find out. Who knows if it’ll be worth it or not.” He shrugged, trying to play it off as nothing, to make Howie feel better. He hadn’t realized how much his friend had wanted this, but the wounded look on his face was one AJ would never forget.

“Where are you headed?” he asked next.

Howie’s response was short. “Home.”

AJ nodded, patting his friend’s shoulder again. “I’ll catch up with you there then.”

But when AJ finally made it home to Orlando, some weeks later, Howie was nowhere to be found.


It had been six years since then. Six years since AJ McLean had joined Himitsu Takana, and Howie Dorough had all but disappeared from the face of the earth. As Jay had risen through the ranks of HimTak, he had used his pull as a double-0 agent to search for his old friend, but with no results. Over time, it had become clear that Howie simply didn’t want to be found.

To Jay, he’d been something like an old, favorite t-shirt that has fallen from its hanger and gotten lost at the back of the closet. Jay had known he still existed, somewhere, but eventually, he’d stopped looking for him, and then he’d stopped thinking about him altogether. Howie Dorough had become a memory, a memory stowed away in the far reaches of AJ’s mind, a memory which resurfaced only from time to time.

Until he’d seen Howie’s photo in the FANS file some three months ago, Jay hadn’t thought of his old friend in ages. It was as if he had died, and the stages of grief had long since passed. But now, seeing that familiar, pained look flicker across the face of his adversary, Jay knew that Howie wasn’t dead, wasn’t even missing. He was still there, hidden deep inside the armor of Dr. Rough.

“Look, D,” he said, “no offense, but what we’re doing here is ridiculous. Let’s just… let’s just talk about this. Call your men off, and we’ll go somewhere and talk, just you and me. We can work through this. I’m… I’ve got some pull at HimTak now, some authority. I bet we can work out some kind of deal. Whaddya say?”

For a brief few seconds, Dr. Rough’s eyes had slid out of focus, faraway in reflection. Jay suspected that he, too, had been reliving memories, memories which, for him, were painful. Then, suddenly, his dark eyes sharpened again and ignited with fresh hatred and rage.

“Never!” he howled, whipping his saber up and across. The gleaming blade nearly missed Jay’s midsection as it slashed the air. “My minions and I will never bargain with the likes of Himitsu Takana!”

And so the duel went on, and, unwillingly, Jay defended himself against the ruthless sword strokes of a man who had once been his best friend and now acted as his worst enemy.


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