I Am the Mission

by Allen Zadoff

  The moon moves out from behind the clouds, and I can make out the great mass of the mountain in front of me. I see that I am near the perimeter, the open zone between the edge of the encampment and the forest on the other side. It looks like a clear shot into the forest, but that would be too easy.

  I pause at the edge of the perimeter and study the scene before me.

  The wind blows, picking up leaves from the forest and scattering them down into the open zone. I catch a glint of red off of one of the leaves.

  I pick up a handful of dirt from the ground below and rub my hands until it breaks up into fine particles. I move forward slowly, blowing dust in front of me as I go.

  That’s when I see them, quadruple red lines marking a an invisible laser perimeter. The lowest line is maybe seven inches off the ground, the rest spaced at eighteen-inch intervals above it. Too low to crawl under, too high to jump over. A system like this will link to a monitored computer hub somewhere inside a security building. In a forest setting, a regular laser perimeter would be riddled by false alarms—falling branches, animals, any number of things would break the beam and cause an alert. So this system must be sophisticated enough to screen out false positives, so if a raccoon runs across the line, it won’t trigger the alerts that will call out the sentries.

  I could take my chances and move through the beams low and fast, replicating the characteristics of an animal, but instead I blow another shower of dust, scope out the distance between the lowest two beams. If I do this right—

  I back up several steps and I leap between the beams, flattening my body so I pass through without triggering the perimeter alarms. I roll up from my leap, then dart into the forest without hesitating.

  I stop inside the tree line and listen. There are no guards, no shouts, no sound of a chase.

  I am clear.

  I move out now, zigzagging from tree to tree, not stopping until I know I am fully hidden by foliage. Then I pause to examine my surroundings, looking for the most viable path up the mountainside.

  As I climb, I think about the idea of a central electronic blocking apparatus radiating outward with repeaters placed in the forest around and above the camp. How high would those repeaters have to be in order to cap off all communication? At least as high as the tallest building, plus additional distance to overcome line of sight interference.

  Even though I can’t see them, I mentally note the height of the repeaters in the mountainside, and I move forward and up, working to ascend above them.

  I’ve made it no more than ten meters when I hear a crunch in the woods below me.

  I wait, listening.

  A twig snaps, the sound coming from behind and below me. It’s not an animal. The pattern of movement is human.

  Someone has followed me from the encampment. I don’t know who or how they’ve accomplished it, but I know.

  I am being tracked.

  I set off deeper into the woods, moving in a herky-jerky upward spiral, backing down and around my own tracks and making it as tough as possible on the person who is following me. An amateur will show himself quickly in a situation like this, either losing the track entirely or revealing himself without knowing it.

  But whoever this is, he is not fooled by the spiral maneuver. He moves when I move, and stops when I stop with only the barest overlap.

  I’m impressed. He’s good.

  But I’m better.

  When I start out again, I feign movement without going anywhere. I stay behind a tree, stepping in place, allowing my footsteps to get louder and softer, using different angles on the tree to bend the sound, drawing the person closer to me. A genius tracker might be able to discern what I’m doing, but anyone at a level below that will fall for it, eventually flushing himself out.

  Half a minute later I hear footsteps approaching, and I see the outline of a figure with a hoodie pulled tight around his head.

  He stops when he comes close, sensing something is amiss. This may not be the highest level of tracker, but he is close. He waits and he listens.

  I allow the tiniest sound to escape, no more than the whisper of fabric against bark like a pant leg brushing against the base of a tree. I want to draw him toward me, let him think that he has located me.

  I note caution in his steps as he changes position, circling back around and moving toward the source of the sound from a different angle, perhaps thinking he’s going to surprise me.

  It’s a good move. Just not good enough.

  I dart noiselessly to a nearby tree and I wait.

  I count down the steps until he’s on top of me. Three, two—

  The figure passes by, and I step out from behind and grab him, one hand around his chest, another at head level. I clamp down on his chest. I don’t mean to harm him, only take him down, neutralize any threat until I know who I’m dealing with. Then I will decide what comes next.

  As I press down, he tries to spin away, and I feel something soft across his chest. Surprisingly soft.

  A woman’s breasts.

  I release my grip too quickly, and the figure spins back toward me.

  “Let go of me!” Miranda says.

  I see her face now, an angry scowl outlined by the hoodie, red hair tucked out of sight.

  “You snuck up on me,” I say.

  “You broke curfew and got out of camp,” she says. “You’re lucky it’s only me who snuck up on you.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Following you,” she says.

  We stand facing each other in the middle of the woods. She’s right that she could have called the guards, raised an alarm, prevented me from getting this far.

  But she didn’t.

  I remember her warning to me in the back of the truck when we had a flat tire. Why did she help me then, and why now?

  She adjusts her jacket around her breasts.

  “Did I hurt you?” I say.

  She puckers her lips. “It’s a sensitive area,” she says, “but I’ll live.”

  Her eyes track me in the darkness.

  “I heard you pass by me in the woods outside of camp,” she says. “How’d you get out?”

  “I walked.”

  “That’s impossible. You would have triggered an alarm.”

  I shrug. “You got out without a problem, didn’t you?”

  “I know how.”

  “Then I guess I got lucky,”

  “Twice in one night, huh?” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “First you grab a gun, then you get through a laser perimeter. You must be the luckiest guy in the world.”

  If she wanted to turn me in, she would have done it already. So I play it brazenly, showing her the arrogant side of Daniel Martin.

  I say, “Actually, I got lucky three times in one night.”

  “What’s the third?”

  “I’m in the woods with a cute girl.”

  That stops her short. But only for a second.

  She says, “You didn’t come out here for the hot singles scene. So why are you here?”

  Just then my iPhone chimes. She glances toward my pocket.

  “You’re trying to make a call!” she says, thinking she’s figured something out.

  Most operatives would be tempted to lie and cover their tracks in a situation like this, but I’ve learned that the truth is the most powerful tool I have.

  I take out the phone and hold it up. “You got me,” I say.

  I glance at the screen, hoping it’s a return text from Father, but it’s a simple reminder about a school assignment that’s due the next day. The iPhone has been preprogrammed with the data of the fictional student named Daniel Martin.

  “You know there’s no reception in camp,” she says, “so you snuck up here hoping to find a signal.”

  I see her putting it together. They’re used to playing strategy games in this camp, solving riddles. Maybe I can use that to my advantage.

  “You’re right. That’s why
I’m here,” I say. “But who am I calling?”

  “Let’s see,” she says, intrigued by the question. “You’re trying to make a call in the middle of the night, which is stupid. You sneak out of the compound to do it, risking getting thrown out. Also stupid. And you get caught, which is—”

  “Stupid,” I say.

  “Right. So I have to ask myself: What makes a guy do stupid things?”

  ”What’s the answer?”

  “A girl.”

  I laugh.

  “You have a girlfriend, don’t you?” she says.

  My laugh stops.

  A memory of my last mission pops into my head, Samara and I running through the rain in Central Park.

  I push it back down, burying it deep in my unconscious, where I will not have to deal with it.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” I say.

  The phone screen glows brightly in the dark of the forest.

  “You want to call someone pretty badly,” she says.

  There’s an edge to her voice now, anger creeping in where before there was only curiosity. I have to defuse it.

  “It’s not my girlfriend,” I say. “It’s my mother.”

  I see her body relax.

  “You’re a momma’s boy!” she says, finding her answer at last.

  Now I show the sensitive side of Daniel, allowing myself to be vulnerable in front of her.

  “My parents don’t know where I am,” I say. “I mean, I sent my dad a text earlier, but he’s notoriously unreliable when it comes to passing on info to my mom. That’s if he’s talking to her at all right now.”

  “But why call her in the middle of the night?”

  “She’ll be up. She’s a worrier.”

  “I wish my mom were a worrier,” she says.

  It’s a curious response.

  “She’s not?” I say.

  He body posture deflates, her voice dropping to a whisper.

  “No. She’s more like a traitor.”

  “What do you mean?” I say, shocked at her use of the word.

  “She left last year,” Miranda says.

  “Your parents got divorced?”

  She shakes her head.

  “She just fucking left,” she says. “Him. Us. This place. Our way of life. All of it. She packed her bags in the middle of the night and left without telling anyone.”

  I try to imagine a woman who would leave her husband and children without telling them. It could be a woman who is mentally unstable. It might be a woman who fell for another man and got lost in love and obsession. Or it could be something else, a woman so afraid for her life that she thought she had no choice but to run.

  It would be helpful to know which it was.

  “Why did she leave?” I say.

  “I don’t really know. We haven’t spoken since that night.”

  “Never?”

  “A postcard. That’s what I got. One postcard, no return address.”

  “That’s messed up.”

  “Completely.”

  “So you never found out why?”

  She shakes her head. Perhaps she knows more, but she seems unwilling to go there.

  Miranda is tough, a survivor. I appreciate that about her. And I sense that now is not the time to press her for more information.

  The screen on my phone goes to sleep, casting us back into darkness.

  “If you want to call your mom, you should,” Miranda says. “But don’t call from here.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re too close to the encampment. They monitor everything and they can triangulate the signal.”

  “Where should I call from?”

  “Follow me,” she says, and she starts up the mountain.

  SHE WALKS AHEAD OF ME, HER MOVEMENTS NEARLY SILENT.

  To walk through a forest quietly is extremely difficult. To move through a forest quietly while hiking up a mountain in the dark is nearly impossible. But she achieves it almost effortlessly, her body moving in patterns both trained and reflexive. It tells me worlds about who she is and the life she has led up until now.

  It also tells me that she doesn’t know how to hide her skill set from me. This is the difference between a soldier and an operative. A soldier is a soldier all the time, but an operative is myriad things, each of them adjusted to time, place, and situation.

  This girl is a natural, but naturals need to be developed to become operatives. This camp has taken her only so far. I wonder what she could become with the proper guidance.

  A troubling memory comes to me. It’s a memory of Mike and me in gym class years ago. It was before he killed my parents, before I knew about The Program.

  We were doing a basketball rotation, and the coach had us doing wind sprints on the court—free throw line and back, midcourt line and back, full court and back, each with a 180-degree turn to develop our flexibility and speed. Mike ran next to me, matching me move for move.

  When we were walking back to the locker room after, he turned to me.

  “I saw you out there,” he said. “You’ve got natural skills.”

  “Nah, I’m too short for basketball,” I said. I was only twelve, and I hadn’t hit my growth spurt yet.

  “Not just for basketball. In general,” Mike said.

  The comment passed without my thinking much about it.

  That was almost five years ago, but I think about it now as I walk behind Miranda.

  I am assessing skills, just like Mike did. In his case, he was secretly recruiting a new operative.

  But what am I doing?

  I am keeping myself safe. No more than that.

  I push the memory away.

  As I move behind Miranda, I make sure I do not give away my own skills. I step on fallen branches from time to time, brush against dry leaves, take two steps when only one is needed. I may have made it out of the encampment and snared Miranda during a tracking maneuver, but I can muddy her impressions of me now, lead her to think that luck played a greater role in my success than it did.

  We walk without speaking for several minutes until we crest the top of the ridge. She comes to a stop. I hear the sounds of a river flowing nearby.

  “This is the place. It’s safe here,” she says.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they’ve never caught me.”

  She reaches into her pocket and comes out with something small and black. I can’t see what it is until she turns it on and her face is lit by the glow of her own iPhone.

  “You’re allowed to have a phone?”

  She shakes her head.

  “No one knows,” she says. “And it has to stay that way.”

  “Who would I tell?”

  “Wrong question.”

  “What’s the right question?”

  “Who would believe you?” she says.

  A warning. For a moment, her face looks ghostly in the screen’s light.

  “Who do you call from up here?” I say.

  “There’s nobody to call. I read the news, look at YouTube. I want to see what’s going on in the real world.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  “Why? You thought I was a good girl?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Then what are you?”

  She looks away from me, stares into the woods.

  “Complicated.”

  It’s quiet now, the evening punctured only by the call of night birds and the distant sound of running water.

  “Is that a river I hear?” I ask.

  She nods. “Liberty survives because of that river. It leads down into camp. We use it as our water supply.”

  “What about in the other direction? Where does it go?”

  “I’ve never followed it there.”

  She presses something on her phone.

  “I’m going to read the paper,” she says. “Why don’t you make your call? We don’t want your mommy to worry about you.”

&nbs
p; “Hey, I’m a momma’s boy, just like you said. I’ve got no shame about it.”

  “Eventually you have to leave the nest.”

  I gesture toward her phone. “Is that what you’re doing? Breaking your father’s rules?”

  “We’re not talking about me right now. I notice you have a brilliant way of turning conversations around.”

  “Maybe I’m uncomfortable talking about myself,” I say.

  “So it’s a defense mechanism?”

  “One of many.”

  “What do you have to defend yourself against?”

  I point to the world around us, mirroring Lee’s line from earlier:

  “Enemies,” I say.

  She stares at me.

  “You’re an interesting person, Daniel.”

  “I’m interesting now, and you hardly know me. Imagine what I’m going to be like in a few days.”

  “I hope you make it a few days,” she says with a devious smile.

  I wink and turn my back to her. I’m planning to be here only as long as it takes to finish the job. That’s why it’s critical that I talk to Father.

  I use the unique finger gesture to open the alternative operating system on my iPhone.

  The phone instantly goes into secure mode, giving me access to a suite of security apps unimaginable to the average user. I open the Poker app, arrange a hand of cards that represents Mother’s phone number.

  If Father isn’t answering the temporary public number, I’ll dial into the permanent secure number that guarantees a nearly instantaneous connection with Mother.

  I glance over my shoulder at Miranda. She’s turned her back to me, giving me privacy.

  I listen in the digital silence, waiting for the inevitable click of a line opening and Mother’s voice answering. Any time of day or night, anywhere I call from, she is there. This has been true over two years and across multiple missions.

  It’s not true tonight.

  There is only silence.

  First I check the cellular signal. Four bars. Full reception.

  Then I back track, closing the app and reopening it. I rearrange the poker hand, checking to make sure the cards are in the proper order by number and suit.

  Again, I wait for the connection, and again nothing happens.

  I turn off my phone.

  “Did you speak to her?” Miranda asks.