I Am the Mission

by Allen Zadoff

  The tall man has been distracted by his partner’s body on the ground. He’s kneeling down to check him for a pulse.

  That is a mistake.

  I rush him, covering the distance across the lawn in less than two seconds. By the time he looks up, the spade is already in motion. The back of the blade whacks him across the bridge of his nose. I hear a sickening crunch and blood spurts.

  As he falls back, he brings up his gun to fire at me, but I step on the barrel with a free foot and the bullet goes wide. He is fast, his other arm reaching for a knife in his belt. I hear a noise inside the house then, a third man reacting to the rifle shot.

  There can be no hesitation. Before the tall man can get to his knife, I swing the spade into the side of his skull, hitting him hard enough to take him out for the duration.

  I fling myself against the house, waiting for the next man.

  He is smarter, which is to say more cautious. He pokes the barrel of his rifle through the door first—slowly, hesitantly. A gunshot and two bodies on the ground are enough to give him pause, and the rifle barrel starts to recede back through the door.

  I do not let it happen.

  I grab the barrel, yanking it hard enough that the man holding it comes flying out the door, trapped by the rifle strap around his shoulder.

  I think I have him, when he reaches up and hits a quick release on the strap, falling back into the house and tripping me at the same time, taking me down with him. The spade catches in the door frame and slips through my hands.

  Now the fight is up close and personal, the two of us wrestling for dominance on the floor of the house. He is brutal, his muscles thick, his ability to use elbow and knee superb.

  I take some punishment. But I do not flinch. Not until a young girl’s scream freezes both of us in place.

  It is no more than a split second of distraction, but it is enough for me to get the upper hand, using a knee at his throat and a twisting motion to snap his neck.

  I leap up, grabbing the spade as I go, and I throw myself inside the door.

  There is a fourth man.

  He has found the side door of the house and slipped out without my hearing him.

  He’s found more than just a door.

  He’s found the couple’s daughter.

  She is about nine years old, in jeans and a yellow tank. The collar of the tank has little white flowers on it. Above the collar is a hand. A man’s hand.

  Around her throat.

  In the other hand, he holds a semiautomatic pistol.

  This is the girl the wife mentioned to me. She is an innocent civilian, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, an unlucky witness to events that have nothing to do with her.

  I should not care about this girl, but I do not want her harmed. I’ll have to work around her.

  Then I make a mistake. I look in her eyes.

  They are wide and dark brown, fear contracting the pupils. I don’t see a stranger, a witness, or a civilian.

  I see someone’s daughter.

  The man watches my face as I look at the girl. He is a professional. He knows I am weak now.

  He glances around, noting his partners splayed on the ground around the yard and in the rear doorway.

  He nods to me, almost like he’s congratulating me for doing a good job, for making it this far.

  This far but no farther. Because it’s payback time.

  He clamps his hand harder on the girl’s throat, and she starts to cough, an involuntary reaction to strangulation.

  I put down the spade.

  I put up my hands up in a nonthreatening manner, and I walk forward. He smiles. His grip lessens but does not release.

  He takes the gun from her head and aims it at mine.

  It’s a bit of a cowboy move, this aiming at someone head. It’s designed to create fear, and at that much it is effective. But it’s not a great shooting strategy.

  Heads are small. Heads move in space. Heads can distract from the things bodies are doing.

  My head does not move. I keep it still as I walk toward him, allowing him to think he has me. In a sense he does. He holds a girl by the throat, he holds a gun in his hand, and I am unarmed.

  But there is an expectation here, an unspoken one that not even a trained soldier like him is aware of. I’m about to risk my life on it.

  The expectation is that I’m going to stop walking.

  It’s hard enough to walk toward a loaded gun, but if you do it, if you’re ordered to do it, it’s a foregone conclusion that you will get close to the gun and stop at least five feet away.

  Nobody walks closer to a gun.

  Nobody who is not fearless.

  Nobody but me.

  When I hit the point where a normal person would stop, I speed up. Three quick steps that take him entirely by surprise.

  I use the heels of both hands as weapons, a lightning strike to the sides of his temples like I’m crashing a cymbal. The skull is designed to protect the brain from injury, but a forceful impact will cause the brain to collide with solid bone. If I’m able to create sufficient impact, I will temporarily short out the brain’s electrical system.

  I strike hard and fast, and I see his eyes roll up into his head as his grip releases on the girl’s neck.

  But not before the gun fires.

  Into the air and over my shoulder.

  In the extra second I’ve earned, I grab the girl away from him.

  “Run and hide behind the toolshed,” I tell her, and I turn and attack, not allowing the man’s brain time to come back online.

  I flip him over on his back, and I grab the rifle from around his shoulder.

  He winces like I’m going to shoot him, but I don’t shoot him. I turn the gun upside down and hold the barrel so the blunt stock is pressing into his throat.

  I push down, slowly crushing his windpipe.

  “Why are you here?” I say.

  He eyes dart from side to side, hoping one of his partners has revived. He doesn’t know I’ve removed that possibility.

  “It’s just you,” I say. “There’s no help coming.”

  He refuses to speak. I press the gun stock harder into the soft structures beneath his neck. He starts to choke, and I back off the pressure the tiniest bit.

  “Who sent you?” I say.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  I press harder, feel the beginning of tissues giving way in his throat.

  “Who?”

  “Freelance,” he says. “We’re just a freelance team.”

  “For who?”

  “Different employers, different assignments.”

  “Are you military?”

  “Ex.”

  “You’re not affiliated?”

  “We’re affiliated with whoever pays us.”

  I imagine the life he must lead. A former soldier, once loyal to a cause, who now sells his services to whoever pays the rent.

  For a moment, I pity this man. Even though he came to kill me and he would have willingly allowed a girl to become collateral damage.

  I pity him. Maybe that’s why I decide to let him live.

  But the moment I lift the gun stock from his throat, he is in motion, elbows dug into the ground to propel him up toward me, legs moving into striking position.

  I swing the rifle in a pendulum motion, hitting him in the head hard enough to rattle him.

  But he is resilient. It does not stop him.

  He was a good soldier. I can see that now.

  Before he turned, before he became this other thing. He must have been very good in his day.

  Not now.

  Now he reaches for his pistol on the ground, the one that has fallen but remains within arm’s length.

  I wanted to save this man’s life, but he’s given me no choice.

  I bring the stock down into his head.

  Once. Again. A third time.

  His hand was reaching for the gun. Now it twitches and stops moving.

  Poli
ce sirens in the distance. That means the parents made it to safety. From the sound of the sirens, I’ve got four to six minutes to finish here.

  I step away from the dead man, glance across the backyard at the bodies scattered there. I don’t have to take a breath. I’ve been breathing all along, evenly and calmly, even as I’ve defeated these four men.

  I lean over the body of the man I’ve just killed, checking his pockets. I find something at chest level.

  An iPhone.

  I swipe the phone. For just a moment, I expect The Program’s secure apps suite to pop up, but that’s ridiculous.

  Why would The Program send a team to kill me? Especially a team like this, unaffiliated and crude in its tactics.

  The Program is smarter than that.

  But I can’t dwell on this now. I check the iPhone log for recent calls. It’s amazing how many operatives will not pause to wipe their phone clean before embarking on a mission. It’s arrogant and foolish at the same time, but on some level it’s understandable. Almost nobody heads into a mission thinking they’re going to fail, and remembering that even in failure, they must protect their organization.

  But this man was good. He cleared his phone’s memory before he arrived. There’s no information for me to find.

  I reach to put the phone back in his pocket, and I feel something hard against my knuckle. I probe the pocket. It’s empty.

  I tap the outside of the pocket, and I feel it, a small hard object.

  I reach in and tear the pocket lining. I find a tiny black micro SDHC card. A secure digital high-capacity memory device.

  I slip it into my own pocket.

  I hear soft footsteps in the grass behind me.

  I spin around, ready to strike.

  It’s the daughter. She’s looking at me, her eyes wide.

  Moving slowly, I place the rifle on the ground. I step in front of the ex-soldier’s body, blocking her sight line because I don’t want her to get scared and scream.

  She doesn’t scream.

  “You’re just a boy,” she says. “How did you do those things?”

  She watched me kill a man. She should be terrified, not asking questions.

  I forget how resilient kids are. This girl in particular. She’s her mother’s daughter.

  I move closer to her, my voice gentle.

  “You have to go to the neighbor’s house. Your parents are there,” I say.

  “Where?”

  “Four doors down. A green house. Do you know it?”

  “Ms. Weiss.”

  “Go there now and wait for the police.”

  “What about you?”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  I lead her through the bodies, blocking her view as best I can. I open the gate and when I’m sure it’s clear, I let her out, watching as she runs down the street to safety.

  The police sirens are close now. I hear the screech of tires as they turn the corner onto the block.

  I glance out to the street. Neighbors are grouping now, emboldened by the sound of the police on their way.

  I move in the opposite direction, passing quickly through several backyards until I come out at a street a ways down from the house.

  I walk slowly so as not to attract attention. I’m thinking like this freelance team might have thought, where they would stage for this assault, how they would move toward the house, how close they would have to be to get away after they were done. I’m looking for a particular kind of vehicle, something generic enough to go unnoticed yet parked in a way that shows me it’s not from the neighborhood. I pass a few likely suspects, check them briefly, but all of them look lived-in. While it’s possible these guys stole a car, it’s doubtful. Not for an operation like this, where they needed to get loud and then get away unseen.

  I find it a quarter mile away on the side of the road, a Chevy Silverado, parked at a slight angle as if it were stopped too quickly. I pass by and note the truck is completely empty inside, not even a coffee cup in the holder.

  I kneel down as if to tie my shoe and reach into the front driver’s-side wheel well. My hands close around a key fob.

  I was right. It’s the truck they came in.

  It’s standard operating procedure to leave the keys with the vehicle. You don’t let someone carry the keys if you’re not sure all of you will make it back. You leave the keys with the vehicle, thereby allowing an escape under any circumstances.

  Before I get in, I put my hand on the hood.

  The metal is cool to the touch, about the same temperature as the outside air.

  Depending on climate and usage, it can take an engine two hours or more to cool down after being driven. If these men followed me from the camp, they would have parked here less than half an hour ago. The engine block would still be warm.

  But a cool engine means they were already here, waiting for me.

  Which means they knew where I would be.

  I open the truck door and get in. At first examination, the truck is empty, the seats clean, the change tray empty.

  Inside the glove compartment I find a legal registration and insurance in the name of a generic fleet-leasing company.

  I reach down into the space between the seats, and I find a black knife with a three-inch retractable blade.

  I don’t like knives, but I slide it into my pocket just the same. I may need it.

  I fire up the engine. I drive out of the neighborhood at normal speed, avoiding the police cars rushing past me into the neighborhood.

  I need to find someplace where I can think for a while, sort through the things that have happened to me in the last twenty-four hours without worrying about my safety.

  I need someplace large and public. Someplace busy on a Sunday afternoon.

  THE MALL OF NEW HAMPSHIRE.

  I drive into a three-quarters-full parking lot, find a corner space with a view of both the mall and the parking lot entrances, and back the truck into it. I keep the engine running for a full ten minutes as I wait, scanning the parking lot and monitoring all traffic coming into and out of the mall. There are no tails, no suspicious vehicles or foot traffic, only a mall security patrol in a small electric cart moving in a lazy arc at five miles per hour around the perimeter of the mall.

  None of it has anything to do with me.

  I turn the engine off and lean back into the seat, the tension bleeding off from my body for the first time in hours.

  I pull out my iPhone. There’s no use trying to call Mother or Father again, but maybe there’s another way to get a message through.

  I put the phone in secure mode and open the Instagram app. I lean out the window and take a photo of a trash can. In the description I write, “What a mess!” then I geotag the photo, not to the mall but to the neighborhood where the safe house was located. Under normal circumstances, I could upload this to a monitored Tumblr blog, and it would trigger an investigation by The Program as well as an immediate call to my phone to check up on me.

  But now the photo will not upload, a progress wheel perpetually spinning on the screen. I check the phone and see that I have reception, but it doesn’t matter.

  Every means of contacting The Program has been blocked.

  Why?

  I run through the facts.

  First I lost communication with Father and Mother, now with The Program as a whole.

  The safe house was gone and sanitized.

  Finally I was attacked by a freelance team, waiting for me at the location of the safe house. The team may or may not have known who I was, but they knew enough to be there, waiting.

  None of it makes sense.

  I back up and go through the list again, this time starting with the disappearance of the dead Program soldier.

  There’s something I’m not understanding, some critical fact that is missing.

  I need more data if I’m going to make an informed deduction.

  But how can I get it?

  I am trained as a solo agent, a sold
ier alone in the world, my only links to Father, Mother, and The Program assets they can access.

  With those links severed, there is no help for me.

  Not Program help, at least.

  There was only one time during a mission that I breached protocol and sought help outside The Program.

  It was from a boy a few years younger than me.

  His name was Howard.

  I STOP AT A BEST BUY INSIDE THE MALL.

  I buy a new iPhone for cash, set up an account under an assumed named and e-mail address. I have credit cards under a dozen names, the numbers memorized in a sequence algorithm that exists only in my memory. These numbers are anonymized, even within The Program, a firewall to protect against the one-in-a-million-chance scenario where The Program’s data is breached.

  I type in the memorized credit card number and security code, and I wait as the wheel spins in the prompt box.

  A moment later, the card is accepted.

  I take the phone to an isolated section of the mall. I find a bench and I sit down.

  I send a text to a special number, a throwaway phone I purchased for Howard from an electronics shop in New York City.

  My text is a simple, prearranged message: CAN’T SEE YOU NOW. CALL YOU LATER.

  If Howard remembers the protocol, he will write down the number from this text message, destroy the first throwaway phone, then call me from a second phone that has never been used before. It should take no more than two minutes.

  That’s if he remembers, if he hasn’t lost courage in the weeks since I’ve left New York, and if nothing bad has happened to him because of the secrets he learned after meeting me.

  It takes ninety seconds for my new iPhone to vibrate.

  “Howard?” I say.

  “Holy shit,” Howard says. “It’s really you.”

  “It’s me.”

  “Holy shit holy shit holy shit,” he says.

  “Nice to talk to you, too,” I say.

  “Are you kidding? It’s great to talk to you. It’s incredible. I thought you would forget about me.”

  I remember the first time I saw Howard in the cluster group at an Upper West Side private school in Manhattan. He was pale, curly haired, and excessively sweaty, never participating in the social life of the school but watching everything from the sidelines.