Mai Ferst Phon Call to Meee!

Musashi Sez:

Ibrahim’s wyf, Zaina, mai Moroccn fren, led me to the phon an verree kindlee held it up to mai eer fer me.

“Allo?” I sed in mai bestest French. This meen “hullo.”

“Allo, Octavian. Es Gatto. I am glad dat yu ar down frrom the treee dat yu werr up. Is that the Eenglish?”

“Yah, that’s gud Inglish. How ar you, Gatto? I’m glad yu manijd to get away from them Rushn soljers. Is Perro OK?”

“Ah, si, Perro es bueno. Sabaka also bueno. Wee arrr in Malaga, in Espanya. Sabaka, well, he ees dog, no? An dogs arrr, how yu say, ankshyus peeples, yu noe? So we—Perro an I—arrr theengking that yu might want to, perhaps, com to Malaga and talk to heem agayn. What yu theengk?”

“O mai,” sez I. “Hmmm. That migt be hard. But…Yu sez he migt has infermayshun I kin yooz to solv this big crysis thin?”

“Si, si! Perro say thees may go up to highest seerkulz of goovernemant! Eez verrrree crrrooshal, he theengks. I hav not noen Perro to ges rrrong on such theengs evvrrr.”

I sigd dramatiklee. “Wull, in that cays, if yu thingks it wull halp…”

“Octavyon, I am theenking thees may be, rrrr, qwyt beeeg.”

“OK, Gatto. In that cays, I chanj mai planz. I mayk stop in Malaga befor goin hom. Wher I find yu?”

“Has yu got pensil?”

“Huh,” sez me, lookin around. “Pensil, yah, but thumz no. Kin yu tells the address to mai frend heer? She writ if fer me.”

An that is how we caym to shift to Plan, um, B.

Deep Reflekshuns

Musashi Sez:

This partiklr blog wuzn’t spos’d to tayk so long. Then it did. Sorree. Go to yer littrboks befor yu reeds it. Kthxbai. M/8

Mom Says:

For Agent Octavian, stuck in the green, long-leaved top of a Moroccan date palm, the heat seemed intense. Back in Boston, such temperatures only trouble the natives at the height of summer, in August. With a fan here and there, and ice cubes in the water bowl, one can withstand the furnace-like blast, knowing that it won’t last more than a week, two at most. But now here he was, wrapped up in leaves and roasting like a pig at a luau. And there was nothing he could do. Cats are very good at UP, when it comes to trees; DOWN is quite another matter. And that’s when you are talking about NORMAL trees with NORMAL branches stuck out every so often, as opposed to this, this telephone pole with a hat on it!!!

Octavian panted. Then he thought, “Did M noe that somthin lik this migt happin to me? Is that whut she was figtin about wift Mom? So wher ar them egstra resorsis she promist?” Then he remembered the neat pack that Q had attached to his collar. What had Q said to him?

“In this small case that can hook to your harness, you’ll find a micro-fiber rope ladder and MHDO tablets for emergencies.”

Oh! thought Octavian, so as long as I got spit, I got water, even if I can’t climb his ladder.

Q had also said, “The spikey-looking thing is a Spaw: part spike, part straw. If you stick it into something that contains a liquid, you can suck the liquid out through it. Since you’ll be near the desert, it helps to be prepared.”

And Musashi, er Octavian (it was hard to concentrate in such heat) thought, “Well, palm treez has coconuts, an them hav lotsa liqwid! So Q’s not such a Fail! gy afteral. I jus pul out the Spaw an stik it in a coconut.”

Octavian fumbled with the pack, then pulled out the Spaw, which had a string attached to ease the grabbing of it. Then he looked around his very small green sanctuary. He had an idea that coconuts were almost as big as him, or at least about as big as his head, and sort of brown and furry. But the only brown—or for that matter non-green—thing around him was much smaller, and sort of sticky looking, with no fur at all.

Still Octavian was game. He pushed the Spaw into the first of the little, shriveled brown things. And sipped. What he got from it was goo, not, he reminded himself hurriedly, entirely unlike the Petromalt® that his mom made him eat to keep him from hacking up hairballs. He quite liked Petromalt®. This other stuff was…semi-liquid. That would have to be enough. He moved, slowly, cautiously among the leaves, sucking out the sap of one of these strange brown things, waiting as long as he could, and then attacking the next.

The sun, far too slowly, moved past the place directly above him, to strike him instead at an angle. On the one hand he liked the heat; he was, after all, a solar-powered kittee, as all cats are. But on the other hand, his inability to drink was becoming a greater and greater burden. He faced the quandary of all those who wander in the wilderness: where is the line between squandering what you have too soon, and waiting so long that it cannot help you? He needed to still have some spit left for Q’s tablets to work for him.

Octavian waited. And waited.

Then he waited some more.

Finally, he thought that he had about as little spit as he had ever had in his life, so tremblingly he opened the first MHDO tablet and lipped it into his mouth. What happened next, he never described to anyone: not Jimbond or M, not even his mom, although we in the Narrator’s Guild must assume that he muttered in his sleep, or, presumably, we would not know about this at all. For Octavian had a vision, and his vision was this—

Musashi Sez:

Hey! I’m gettin the hang of this cliff-hangin thin! Huh!

QRS: Q Reellee Somthin…

Mom Says:

After sleeping as fast as he could on maps of Marrakesh, Morocco, North Africa and Spain, a French phrasebook and a narrow pamphlet entitled, “Things Cats Should Avoid Doing in an Islamic Country,” Agent Octavian was hurried into Q’s London lab.

“Mistr Q,” he said. “I gots a bon to pik wift yu about that LingwaTron—“

“Oh, yes, dear boy! A thousand apologies! We’re working on that. In fact, you get to try out the prototype LT 9001-K, and we’re including an extra battery for good measure.” Q gripped the lapels of his tweed jacket proudly while one white-coated young subordinate set a small pile of gadgets on the table where Octavian sat, and another slipped a black matte collar around his neck.

Despite himself, Musashi began to purr. “This mai nu camra collr?” (And you can tell he was distracted because he forgot to think of himself as Agent Octavian. As Jimbond would say, "It can happen to the best of us.")

“Indeed. We disabled the GPS function for you. In an emergency, you can re-enable it by typing in ‘Schroedinger’ on the keypad, but mind you spell it correctly. The paw-sized piece is the receiver for your human partner. With that you’ll be able to communicate, and you can send him the data you’ve downloaded.”

“Whut’s dada? Is that like som weerd old paintin styl? I thingk ther wuz somthin on that in the frayzbook I slept on.”

“Er, no. Data, with a T. Information, in this case, photographs.”

“O, rigt. Cors.”

In the wide space behind Q, several of these serious young men and women in white coats were running a projector that projected pictures of waterfalls, forests and beaches on the far white wall. Off to one side, a young woman looked at her clipboard and then at her watch.

“In this small case that can hook to your harness, you’ll find a micro-fiber rope ladder and MHDO tablets for emergencies.”

“Um, Q, mebbe yu din’t reeliz, but I am a kittee peeples. We don’t do ladders. An whut’s emaitchdeeo?”

“MonoHydroDiOxide. As long as you have the least bit of spit in your mouth, taking one of these tablets will give you a mouthful of water. It’s taken us decades to achieve.”

Octavian noticed that he said nothing about ladders, and assumed that poor Q was embarrassed, so he said nothing more about it. “What these othr thins?”

“The spikey-looking thing is a Spaw: part spike, part straw. If you stick it into something that contains a liquid, you can suck the liquid out through it. Since you’ll be near the desert, it helps to be prepared. The round black one—I’m particularly proud of this—is a TRUST-R, a Titanium-Reinforced, Ultra-thermal Sleeping Tire, with Rubber coating on the outside, to give it that abandoned, bald tire look. We figured that a sleeping-bag shaped object would be noticeable, but an old tire? Hardly.”

“OK! Collr, rope, tablits, paw and trustee. Got it!”

“Er, yes. Quite. Thank heavens I don’t have provide a sports car for you every time you go on a mission. I must say that 007 has no respect whatsoever for—“

Then the world exploded. Musashi leaped!

At least that’s what it felt like. Dizzy and terrified, Musashi opened one eye, and found himself clinging by his claws to the soft material that made up the ceiling. As the dust subsided, he saw that the white-coated woman was writing things down on her clipboard even as Q was yelling at her colleagues.

“Of all the ridiculous, irresponsible—“

“It’s just the timing mechanism—“

“Um, Q?”

“Next time you do such a—“

“Um, Q? Halp? Halp! HALP! MMMRRROW!”

Q and his helpers looked up.

“Oh, my dear boy. I am mortified. A thousan—“

“Jus getz me down, Q, an mebbe I won’t tell Jimbond to trash yer nex 7 cars. K?”

Mai Breefin Continyooz (A Lot)

Musashi Sez:

I doesn’t noe why they callz it a breefin, cuz it almost nevr partiklr breef. I thingk it ogt to be calld a longin. So this is yer littr boks warnin. Kthxbai.

Mom Says:

When Musashi finally awoke, it was Jimbond who continued his briefing. Jimbond had a big white cast on his shooting arm and looked tired and annoyed.

“Well, you’re a heavy sleeper, Eight. Didn’t you nap on the plane?”

“I wuz wae too egsytid about comin bak.”

“Just what you get for ignoring martinis. How far did M get with you before you swooned from exhaustion?”

“Huh. Yu ar so amyoozin. M said that this Spannish piggee in Morocco had found out som stuff an so she wants to send me to a prizzin. That don’t sound gud!”

“I think M has forgotten how little experience you have. Oh well. Necessity is a mother! First of all, PyG stands for Perro y Gatto, Dog and Cat, their highly unoriginal code names. They are informers. They are not spies, simply information gatherers. And this time they may have gathered a piece of information that could have world-shattering consequences.”

“Mor shattrin than that monee-washin in Licktenshtyn?”

“Much. You see, they have a business, bringing food and medicine from the prisoners’ friends and families to the prisoners. Moroccan prisons are horrible, overcrowded and dirty, without much food. So the prisoners depend on outsiders to help them get the basics.”

“But if they’r in prizzin, then they’r bad gyz, rigt?”

“Some are the worst of humanity. Some were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most are in between. You’ve never been imprisoned, so you can’t—“

“I livd in a caje at the aminal hospittul fer a monft, aftr the hoomin peeples found me an Larree and Curlee in a box in Roxberree.”

Jimbond blinked. “Ah, yes. Well, the situation in America is much better than in other places, particularly if you are a cat, I suspect. Anyway, these prisoners tell Perro and Gatto their relatives’ addresses and the relatives feed Perro and Gatto in return for their sneaking food and other things into the prison. There and in the homes, PyG hear things that they pass on to us here in London.”

“Did M tell yu she had som laydee giv me pointee shotz?”

“Eight, focus! Most of the time, PyG only talk to humans, but last week they met a dog who sneaks in to see his human, a Russian national imprisoned on a minor drug charge. The Russian dog, Sabaka, thinks his human is dying. He also seems to believe that his human was part of an international conspiracy of some proportions.”

“Lik a spy?”

“Er, similar. We don’t know. Sabaka spoke to PyG because he assumed that they were Spanish. He doesn’t trust the British—which makes M think the conspiracy may be aimed at the United Kingdom instead of the United States. He asked them if they could find a CIA agent. Sabaka hopes to trade the information on the conspiracy for diplomatic pressure to get his human out of the prison. If his human is indeed dying, and he may well be, we may not have much time.”

“Rigt! We gots to find the CIA!”

“Er, no. There are questions about the Moroccan CIA operatives. And as for the CIA in the rest of North Africa and through the Middle East, they are far too busy worrying about terrorism to consider a possibly nonexistent conspiracy. And in any case, the Americans tend to ignore the four-legged operatives. A few years ago, we had a squirrel liasing with them—they fed him espresso, as a joke. The poor bloke had a heart attack, nearly didn’t make it. M has been cautious letting Mysiz work with them ever since then.”

“I see sqwirls somtimz, at hom, out the windo.”

“Er, yes, well done. Eight, you are going to meet Sabaka. You will pretend to be CIA, promise diplomatic action, up to a point, and try to get the information from him and pass it on to us.”

“An yu’ll halp his hoomin?”

“We will extract him from prison, yes. Your job should be very simple. You will have a human contact in Marrakech, the city you are heading to. His name is Ibrahim. He will meet you at the airport and facilitate your meeting with PyG. You will report back to him and he will send your reports on to us. Questions?”

“Yah. Yu got anee toona? I hasn’t eaten sins about mebbe jus befor Ireland.”

Musashi Sez:

Whut? I wus hongree! This spyin is hard werk!