You'll Be Caught

19. friends help each other, epilog

Five months later

Phill

I take a sip from my blue plastic flask. I can immediately taste my favorite drink: "Powerade Blue berries" in my mouth. It's a warm Friday morning and I have just come out of the gym. I am on my way walking to the police department and I'll soon be there. Wayne couldn't make it to the gym 'cause he was planning some new weapons and Magret and Freya were looking for new missions for us. We were a team now. Me, Wayne, Magret and Freya and we got well along. We always had good time together and we solved the missions better together too. Summer had already come and it brought lots of problems and work for us too. Teenagers fighting drunk in the backstreets and everything else like that. We worked as police officers when there was nothing special to do for agents. I liked to work as an agent more 'cause I liked traveling and secret special cases.

I opened the police department's front door (for maybe the 10 000th time) and the familiar smell caught my nose. It was a mix of cleansing gel that the cleaners used here, the smell of the leather from all the chairs and sofas and the smell of the building. I couldn't say what it was like but it was the same smell that it had always been. I walked the stairs up to the eleventh floor. That's where my, Wayne's, Magret's and also Freya's new working rooms were. My room was first on the aisle. I left my hoodie there and checked my mails. Nothing more interesting than junk mail from Hollister, Tommy Hilfiger and Nike. I had blocked them for sending mail to me but they had figured a way to get around it. Arghhh.

I locked my room and went to look if Magret and Freya had found something useful. Magret's room was the next and then came Freya's room. Wayne had always been far away from our rooms at the far end of the aisle. Lonely Wayne, though he liked it himself. I saw Freya and Magret through the glass wall and I knocked on the door. Freya came to open it but she didn't look as happy as usually. "Hi", she said quickly and moved her eyes back to the TV after closing the door. Wayne was in the room too and they were all staring at the TV. "Shouldn't you be looking for the missions, not TV?" I asked them confused. "Shhhh, watch the news!" Freya asked me to do. I turned my eyes to the TV. It was about the Italian police department. Somebody had send them a memory card and when they'd tried to look what's in there, it had hacked their computers down. "How stupid can they be? Haven't they learned from the earlier case when the memory card put the whole fuel factory down?" I wondered out loud. "It seems like they haven't",Wayne said. "When did this happen?" I asked. "It was three days ago", Magret said and continued," but they first tried to hide it from news reporters that the bad reputation wouldn't spread. That's why it's in the news just today." I nodded for understanding. "So what does this mean in practice?" I still asked 'cause I didn't want to bother my brain. Freya answered: "The virus was obviously so clever that it can take almost two months to get the computers work again." I thought: "Oh shit." Wayne added: "The worst thing is that they're firing a huge amount of their staff 'cause they're suspecting everyone." I realized: "Molly and Freddy can lose their jobs. Not good." Freya shook her head and repeated: "Not good at all."

Freya

3pm. We had an hour's lunch break and we headed to the police department's cantine. I loved the food they served and so did everybody else. Today we had taco-Friday. It would sound better if it was taco-Thursday or taco-Tuesday. There were taco shells and salad, sliced tomatoes, beans and olives. I always drank water 'cause it was the only beverage that I hadn't heard anything negative about. Phill didn't care about what he drank. He took almost always Coca-Cola or Fanta. I think I was the only one to notice what everybody drank so I stopped thinking about it. What a waste of time.

We sat around a circle modelled table. Just when I was going to take the first bite of my taco and taste the perfect taste of it, somebody knocked on my shoulder. I turned around and I saw Molly! Freddy had already sat down to the table and he was catching our attention. Molly took a chair from another table and I made room for her next to me and between me and Magret. I had started to think of the reason why they were here and it wasn't hard to guess that they had got fired after what happened at the Italian police. But why were they here?