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Why did it always seem to be pubs lately?
Harry had not come in here looking for a fight. It was intended to be a simple meeting with a contact who had some information relevant to a skirmish in the Middle East they'd been looking into. The contact was a journalist, supposedly harmless... But someone had missed something. It was an ambush.
This time, it had been someone else who'd locked the doors to the pub. One moment, Harry was sitting at a table with the contact, halfway through a Guinness. The next, a man from the bar had gotten up and locked the door, and then all three men from the bar were coming at him.
The fight might have been quicker a year ago, before he'd been shot in the head. Before occasional hallucinations of butterflies in the middle of fights. But his coordination had gotten better in the past couple of months. He'd been working on it. He hadn't even had to shoot anyone. Just hand-to-hand combat paired with a few stun darts from the umbrella. Blood was even kept to a minimum. But by the time it was over, all four men were knocked out in various states of bruised, bloody, and broken on the floor of the bar.
At some point during the fight he'd also shot a stun dart out of his watch to hit the bartender just before he'd called the police. He hadn't even noticed the young man sitting at a booth in the back, not until it was all over. So after hitting the unconscious bartender with another dart from his watch, this time set to "amnesia," he turned his attention to him.
"I'm terribly sorry," he said.
Harry had not come in here looking for a fight. It was intended to be a simple meeting with a contact who had some information relevant to a skirmish in the Middle East they'd been looking into. The contact was a journalist, supposedly harmless... But someone had missed something. It was an ambush.
This time, it had been someone else who'd locked the doors to the pub. One moment, Harry was sitting at a table with the contact, halfway through a Guinness. The next, a man from the bar had gotten up and locked the door, and then all three men from the bar were coming at him.
The fight might have been quicker a year ago, before he'd been shot in the head. Before occasional hallucinations of butterflies in the middle of fights. But his coordination had gotten better in the past couple of months. He'd been working on it. He hadn't even had to shoot anyone. Just hand-to-hand combat paired with a few stun darts from the umbrella. Blood was even kept to a minimum. But by the time it was over, all four men were knocked out in various states of bruised, bloody, and broken on the floor of the bar.
At some point during the fight he'd also shot a stun dart out of his watch to hit the bartender just before he'd called the police. He hadn't even noticed the young man sitting at a booth in the back, not until it was all over. So after hitting the unconscious bartender with another dart from his watch, this time set to "amnesia," he turned his attention to him.
"I'm terribly sorry," he said.