by Deek Rhew
He sank into a deep depression, becoming despondent and listless. Years after joining the military, he had come full circle, arriving at the exact same place he had been when he used to drive his bike aimlessly in the deserted city streets. At least now he didn’t have to come home to his ex pushing him to get his life together so they could have a family. The thought of being tied down with the commitments of a father and husband filled Sam’s stomach with dread. She’d done him a favor by leaving him. He would only be able to screw up his own life instead of that of his wife and their two-point-five tax deductions.
But, free from domestic responsibility or not, his recent purchases had carved a considerable divot into his checking account. He had been so focused on getting back into the military he hadn’t started looking for work. Soon, Sam would be forced into taking some piss-ant job he hated or lose his apartment. But if he remained frugal, the money would last another six weeks.
He had spent another long day at the gym. Physical therapist or no physical therapist, he still worked out like a demon. So instead of searching the want ads, he popped a beer and plopped down on the couch, shoving the whole becoming-a-functioning-member-of-society problem aside as he flipped through TV channels.
His stomach gurgled, and from his lax position on the sofa, he could see into the kitchen. He had stocked it with enough supplies to film one of those celebrity cooking shows featuring an ill-mannered, short-tempered chef and his sorry lot of hopefuls. But thawing, chopping, and sautéing felt like an overwhelming undertaking. Besides, it didn’t seem worth the effort for just one person. Instead, he wandered into the unused space, opened his junk drawer, and rummaged through the slew of bright, various-colored take-out menus he had accumulated in the months since he and the military parted company.
Sam selected a blue one featuring happy shrimp and indecipherable Chinese characters on the front. He opened the menu for the dirty little restaurant up the street, and something fell out, flittering and tumbling end-over-end to the floor. He reached down to pick up the mysterious escapee, intending to toss it back into the drawer, then froze. Standing stock-still, hand grasping the drawer’s dull brass knob, he could have been a department store mannequin displaying the latest in worn hoodies and aging sweat pants.
Sam stared at the business card the silver-haired reaper had given him, and something substantial and ponderous inside him worked loose.
As if some maniacal puppeteer had taken residence in his skull, throwing switches and pulling levers to manipulate both his body and thoughts, he reached for the small black phone. He’d brought the device with him to place an order for kung pao chicken and fried rice. Instead, he typed in the ten digits from the card and tapped the little image of a handset. A hundred years of innovation and technological evolution designed the intricate circuits and relays that created the link between the phone pressed to his ear and the one carried by the steel-eyed man. Yet for all that advancement, when the call connected, Sam hesitated and fumbled the words like a butterfingered quarterback. “Yeah, this is...”
“Mr. Bradford,” the cool, authoritative voice on the other end of the line interrupted him. “I’m glad you called. Yes, the position is still available. When will you be able to pry yourself from your busy schedule and come meet with us?”
Weird, Chet said, it’s as if he was expecting you.
Eeriness filled his stomach, driving away the hunger that had been plaguing him just minutes before. He felt that thing inside him shift again. It—that thing he could neither see nor identify but which felt as black and jagged as a plummeting meteor—sat perched on the edge of a precipice. If it broke free, it would release a furious energy that would tear him and his life apart. When that happened, Sam had no idea what, if anything, would be left. Something more permanent and dire than the accident in college, joining the military, and getting shot in Afghanistan combined awaited him.
Hang up! Chet screamed. Hang up before it’s too late.
For once, Sam ignored his alter ego. “Tomorrow.”
“Fine. Tomorrow at oh eight hundred. Write this down.” Sam flipped over the little menu with the happy cartoon shrimp and indecipherable Chinese writing, grabbed a pen, and jotted the address down in the margin.
Sam started to say, “Okay, let me make sure I’ve got this,” but the line had gone dead. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. The serpent had returned.
* * *
Sam’s GPS led him to a small, nondescript office in a strip mall. The sign next to the door read, “International Relations.” He went in and gave his name to the receptionist—a young, pretty woman, professional to the point of being cold. The plate on her desk declared her name to be Claudia, and she told him they had been expecting him and to have a seat.
Three chairs and a small coffee table with ancient magazines adorned the tiny waiting area. Uninterested in the five-year-old copies of Field and Stream, Sam sat, staring at nothing. A hazy thought of whether he had gone insane drifted through his mind when he sensed someone watching him. Snapping back to reality, he looked up to see the icy steel eyes observing him from the doorway.
“Please follow me,” the silver-haired man instructed.
Sam hesitated, a feeling of being at a crossroads grasping him. The man had already disappeared down the hall. Sam glanced at the front door and then to the hallway, going back and forth as though watching a tennis match. He had been trained to evaluate a situation where lives were on the line and make snap judgments. Now, a severe case of indecision racked him, the feeling so intense he could almost hear the gears of his mind grinding, flailing from one choice to another.
Claudia cleared her throat. “He does not like being kept waiting. I suggest you decide.”
Sam took one last look at the door, glanced at Claudia who still watched him, and got up. In a daze he took one step, then another, following the path down the darkened hallway and into a future unknown.
16
At the end of the corridor, Sam trailed the silver-eyed man into a utilitarian room with stark white walls, a plain, pattern-free tiled floor, and harsh florescent lights. A long, simple table with a single chair sat square in the center of the space, a neat stack of papers the only thing on its plain brown surface.
At military attention against the far wall stood four stern-looking men and one woman. They wore navy-and-gray, starched wool uniforms, second cousin to the Marine Dress Blues he used for ceremonies and other formal occasions. Sam didn’t recognize either the clothes or, save for the small American flags on their shoulders, the insignias that adorned them.
The silent sentinels stared straight ahead yet seemed to be watching him at the same time. He knew how to do that, look without moving his eyes. He’d done it a thousand times.
Like the day he handed Sam the business card, the steel-eyed man wore an impeccably-tailored black suit. In comparison to everyone else, Sam felt slovenly in his jeans and hoodie.
“Please, sit,” the man instructed.
Sam paused, reconsidering his decision. “What is this?”
The man arched one silver eyebrow and indicated toward the stiff wooden chair.
Sam sat as a heavy foreboding settled in. The situation seemed foreign yet somehow familiar. As the man handed him a slip of paper and a pen, his apprehension slipped away, replaced with something akin to coming home. The transition from one extreme feeling to the other flowed without so much as a pause. In no way could he articulate or reason how he knew this organization or recognized these people. By signing the document, he would become a mere cog in something much larger and more important than himself.
The document appeared to be a standard non-disclosure agreement. But as his eyes traveled down the tightly scripted page, words like “treason” and “unlawful disclosure” and “federal imprisonment” made him hesitate. This was anything but standard. At the bottom, a bold line waited for his signature. Under it, an ominous sentence demanded his attentio
n: “I understand and agree to the rules, regulations, and penalties outlined in this document and renounce my right to private representation for infractions, voluntary or involuntary, of said rules and regulations.”
His eyes widened. Ummm…holy shit, Chet said.
No shit, Sam replied. These guys are serious. Sam touched the pen to the line.
Are you sure you want to do that? Chet asked, but the words had barely been uttered before Sam scribbled his commitment across the bottom of the page.
Triggered by Sam’s compliance, one of the men stepped forward and placed a simple electronic tablet in front of him—the screen illuminated only by a single empty square. “Place your hand here,” the soldier said.
Sam laid his hand on the small LED screen, and a bar of light quickly traveled from one end to the other.
The soldier took both the tablet and the signed document and left the room.
No one else moved, but a sudden tension that hadn’t been there a minute before filled the air. A feeling identical to the one he’d had before the RPG sailed from a cratered clothing boutique in Afghanistan, ending his military career and leading him to here, gripped him.
Given there were six people in it, the room remained eerie in its silence. The perfect line of soldiers, with the conspicuous, empty slot of the man who’d taken the document, continued to stare straight ahead. He couldn’t even see these concrete sentries breathe. The steel-eyed man remained standing at the table, not watching the doorway, not watching anything. After several uncomfortable minutes, the soldier returned and resumed his position in line.
The man in the black suit slid another document in front of Sam, the words “Loyalty Agreement” printed at the top of the page.
“Please sign this.”
“I don’t even know what I’m agreeing to,” Sam objected.
“Come now, Mr. Bradford. Surely you have this figured out.”
Sam just stared at him. Two could play at the quiet game.
The man sighed. “We are a branch of the military used to find people deemed a threat to our nation and its people and take appropriate actions to deal with them.”
“What branch exactly is this? I don’t recognize the uniforms.” Sam looked again at the soldiers.
“No, you won’t because we don’t technically exist. There are no line items for Congress to approve. No oversight committees. No laws governing our actions. We are self-contained, self-funded, and tasked with an impossible job which is far too important for bureaucratic meddling. This is an elite group, and you have been extended a one-time invitation. The question is: are you smart enough to accept?”
Sam stared into the unwavering cold eyes. He glanced at the soldiers who were not looking at him but watching his every move and then returned his gaze to the document. “Loyalty Agreement” screamed at him from the page.
I don’t think…Chet began too late. Without reading it, Sam signed his name on the bottom line.
That thing he’d felt shifting towards the precipice since the evening before fell over the edge, plummeting to depths unknown, and Sam went with it.
Signing the document threw the switch on a fantastic but frightening machine. The female and two of the male soldiers turned and marched from the room. The remaining men stepped forward. One of them said, “Mr. Bradford, please come with us.”
Confused, Sam looked at the steel-eyed man. “I don’t understand. What’s happening?”
“Think of it as boot camp. These gentlemen will escort you to your barracks where you will be issued a uniform and standard supplies. Dr. Wilks, our in-house physician, will perform a full medical evaluation. Provided you pass, your training begins at oh six hundred tomorrow.”
“I can’t just drop everything. I have an apartment, bills to pay, things to wrap up. I have a life.”
“Actually you can. All those trivialities are being taken care of as we speak. Your apartment and transportation are being secured; loose ends such as credit cards and utilities are being handled. These things will be turned back over to you in time, but there are procedures we must follow. So, for now, do not concern yourself with them. Please follow these gentlemen. You have a busy schedule.”
“I don’t even know your name.” Everything moved too fast. “How will I contact you if I need you?”
“My job as your recruiter is complete. Since this is the last time we will speak, you do not need to know my name. Our organization is highly compartmentalized, a structure that has helped keep it intact when other such institutions have collapsed. Please do not ask questions. You will be provided with information as it pertains to you but nothing more. Congratulations and good luck to you, Mr. Bradford.” He strode from the room.
Perplexed, Sam allowed himself to be led away.
The next day, he began a regimen that made his days with the physical therapist look like a Sunday morning yoga class. When allowed to leave, his legs quaked, and he dripped with sweat.
After a quick lunch, his real classes began.
First on the agenda: a series of investigative lectures. From the time his physical training ended, he studied the subtleties of finding people who did not want to be found. The lecture topic: Learning to look for details and clues, seeking people out and discovering what new identities they had given themselves. Tools existed, of course—high tech search engines, cameras, and so forth—but his weapons of choice, reasoning and intuition, could not be purchased. In these lessons, he excelled. Sam’s methodology allowed him to track his quarry using the scantest of details, following one piece of evidence after the other.
Next, he began the core of the curriculum, a class taught by Dr. Wergent, a short, stubby man who looked like a turn-of-the-century British professor. Heavily bearded but thin up top, Dr. Wergent wore pants too big even for his rotund stature and had a propensity for professor jackets with big patches on the elbows.
The professor’s groundbreaking hypothesis on the underlying motivations of human interaction had caused a row in the mental health world as specialists debated his controversial theorems. He had been on the verge of either phenomenal success or absolute career implosion when he had been hired by The Agency.
“We think we are individuals,” Dr. Wergent began during Sam’s first class, “and in many ways we are, but deep down we are all the same. We have needs, generally react the same way in a given situation, and can be manipulated and controlled if you know what switches to throw and buttons to push. I have spent my life’s work trying to understand the elemental components of human interaction and have come up with what I call The 122 Rules of Psychology.
“No one is immune to these rules; no one is exempt. But the trick”—he raised a thick finger to emphasize the point—“is knowing how to apply the Rules to get the desired result.”
The doctor had half a dozen specialists to assist him, all of them authorities in one part or another of the doctor’s edicts. Sam worked hard, memorizing large swaths of information, practicing scenarios, evaluating the results, and trying different courses of action. They taught him objectivity and how to keep his emotions from dictating his actions or affecting his decisions. Then he graduated from the classroom and began actual field training.
The Agency designed these lessons to be realistic and prepare him for life as a solo agent. Others in his class found remaining objective and distant difficult, and as the weeks went by, more and more of his classmates failed and left the program. But Sam breezed through the classes. He already possessed the most important qualities: He could compartmentalize his emotions and keep a huge number of details organized on his mental bookshelf.
His first real-world practice assignment had been to find a married, church-going, middle-school teacher named Lorraine Dexter. She had assumed an alias and created a new life in her early twenties to escape from an abusive man who had, on multiple occasions, almost killed her. She never revealed her past to her new husband and had been selected as the target f
or Sam to sharpen and hone his new skills.
The instructors gave Sam a few details of the mark’s life and a vague description. Sam tracked her down in record time then befriended the family, spending time with both the husband and children and seducing the teacher. As their sexual depravity deepened, they met at different hotels and spent one poignant night in Lorraine’s own bed while her husband slept down the hall—the couple’s fight a product of Sam’s manipulation.
After Sam broke it off, Lorraine might have survived the ordeal with nothing more than a few guilty feelings, but the lesson continued, testing his fortitude. He had next been instructed to send an anonymous email with details of her past life and pictures of her in the act of sexual deviance. The images, sent to both her current and ex-husbands as well as the school board, did not show Sam’s face, only hers. Sam performed this act of betrayal with neither the joy malice brings to the deranged nor the feelings of remorse experienced by those whose actions can be controlled by guilt and reason. He observed with clinical detachment the destruction of her life by scandal and divorce.
After passing this test, his next task had been even more complex. He manipulated a gay man, Theodore Madel, who worked at a bank into transferring funds from large customer accounts to a Swiss account provided by Sam. Believing he had a chance at a romantic relationship, Theodore covered the tracks of his theft like a mother wolf guards the location of her den, weaving an intricate trail under brush, doubling back over fallen trees and sinewy streams. Only the most determined could follow the path of his complex deception.
But the camouflage only bought time. The banker, a great numbers manipulator, could not eliminate the paper trail. When the ribbon and wrapping paper fell off via a thorough audit, the betrayal would be exposed. Sam had convinced Theodore to steal a car and meet for a secret rendezvous, after which the two of them would slip out of the country together.
