"You said you'd come see the tulips with me, then vanished halfway through," the girl with long, jet-black hair complained.
"I suddenly spotted someone I knew. Hehe!"
"You know people even here? Was this one building aircraft carriers or selling nuclear fuel?"
"...This one was a respectable person. Really."
"I can't be bothered with you. Anyway, where did you get that mask? It looks pretty scary..."
Kael stared blankly as the young man and woman gradually disappeared into the sea of flowers beneath the setting sun.
Thinking of the agent now sprawled over the drinking table, foaming at the mouth, Karl felt that everything had been rather surreal.
He had merely sat there quietly, yet for some reason, the seemingly strong-willed agent's gaze had grown increasingly... "terrified" as he stared at that mask.
Then, a moment later, as though his psychological defenses had completely collapsed, he had confessed everything he knew with tears and snot streaming down his face, before the other man could even question him.
And the truth had left Karl utterly shocked!
As it turned out, the agent really did belong to America's intelligence agency. Neither his identity nor his service record had anything wrong with it.
But just over a month earlier, another agent claiming to be with the KGB had successfully turned him into a covert double agent. He had then received his first assignment: making contact with Karl.
Naive Karl was, after all, only a scientist. He had never imagined that the man was merely bluffing under the intelligence agency's banner.
In fact, even if Karl had questioned him, the agent could have kept stringing him along with excuses about classified missions and single-line contact. Inexperienced as he was, Karl could hardly call the Pentagon's customer service line to ask what was going on,