by Gabi Moore
“You buying breakfast?”
He nodded, and leaned over toward the window to check out the view. I followed his eyes, and took a look out of the window myself. The view was gloomier than it had been even a few minutes ago. The weather was temperamental, and strange.
“I’ve never spent much time on the northern coast,” I said.
He nodded, not feeling the need to explore that topic any further. I don’t mind the lack of response, too much but after an entire day and night of silence, I’m ready for some conversation — even if it is one sided.
“In New York, they similar weather I guess, but for some reason I feel like the climate is a bit more harsh.”
“This part of the Maine coast is insulated by a series of islands that stretch out from here all the way to Nova Scotia. The insulated effect actually ends up buffeting storm clouds around from place to place. As a result, the storms lose their power along the coastline. Along the New York coast, there’s a bit of cover along the north end of the state, but usually, you’re either hit, or you’re not.”
I knew the water would be cold this time of year, but I was astounded that there was no snow around these parts. I supposed that Aden was right, and that while it was cold, we were too close to the ocean for anything to stick. The water was cold enough to give anyone hypothermia, I was certain of that. It also seemed like the frost from the morning was a daily fixture.
Thoughts about the weather continued until a plate of hot food landed in front of my face.
“I’m so hungry,” I said, just staring at the food, and wondering if I could manage to fit all of it inside of me.
I imagined I could.
While I was busy focused on the food, Aden opened up the laptop and got to work. He positioned the thing in such a way that I couldn’t possibly take a close enough look at what it was he was doing. I did notice that he seemed to know what he was doing.
“For a hermit, you sure seem to know your way around the computer.”
He remained silent. Focused.
His fingers were typing at a brilliant speed, and his eyes were focused intently on the screen in front of him. Egg dangled from my lips, before I scooped it eagerly into my mouth. I let him be, and focused on my food. I wasn’t going to get anything out of him, and there was no reason to let my food go to waste.
After I had finished and was beginning to work on my second cup of coffee, he spoke.
“CONTEK, huh?”
I nearly spit in my coffee.
“How did you know?”
“Lorin Corale, CEO of CONTEK reported missing four days ago. Company transferred ownership to Ryan Sclari. Sclari joined Corale’s company through a merger of convenience six months ago, and just in time it seems.”
I held my head down, and let out a burst of air.
“You’ve got a hell of a memory.”
“Only really need to hear a name once, in order to remember. Just so happens that the Internet managed to tell me more than you were willing to; which is too bad.”
He looked up at me then, and pushed the laptop to the side. His food was still warm, I’m sure, and he decided now was a good enough time to eat. Placing the food in his mouth, he chewed, swallowed, and let out an appreciative groan.
“The grease, it’s amazing. Wild game has its own kind of grease, but I like coming into town here eery now and then, just for the purpose of indulging myself in this kind of food. It’s decadent.”
“When was the last time you were here.”
“I don’t remember, but it hasn’t changed much.”
I tried to ignore him, but he stared at me while he ate. The experience was unnerving, but I understood what he was trying to tell me.
“You want me to come clean?”
“That would make my life easier,” he replied, still chewing a mouthful of huevos rancheros.
He turned to the laptop again, typed in some more information, and then smiled while drinking his coffee.
“That was fast.”
“What?”
“I’ve got an old hacker friend who worked with me back in the day. He responded to my email real quick. Got some interesting things to say about your buddy Ryan.”
My eyes flashed open wide, as I wondered exactly how much information this man was able to deduce from a basic intuitive inquiry.
“You must have had a lot of this stuff worked out in your head before we even got here,” I accused.
He only shrugged.
“The only thing that surprises me anymore is that people aren’t more honest from the start — though, that could be a failing in my social paradigm. Some element of hope that I keep looking for, and will never experience.”
He concluded that scathing evaluation of my character with a sip of coffee, a raised brow, and direct eye contact. He was watching me for my response. Looking to see if I would flinch, or break, or show any signs of remorse at all. I couldn’t keep his gaze, and found myself turning away involuntarily.
“I suppose we found the reason why you holed yourself up in a cabin, then.”
He nodded, admitting that he had no taste for humanity, and that this was just another example of how humanity was below his expectations. I wanted to curse at him — to say, “fuck your expectations” - but I couldn’t find a flaw in his argument.
Everything would have been easier, had I just come out with the truth from the onset. Instead, I had kept all of those details to myself, supposedly believing that he wouldn’t be able to put the pieces together himself.
“I misjudged you,” I said, plainly.
He shook his head, not accepting this statement whatsoever.
“No,” he said and set his coffee cup down. “That’s called a lie of omission, and you’re going to do it again, because that’s what people do — they lie.”
He sniffed, and I stayed quiet — sullen, almost at the end of my cup of coffee. I was resentful that there was no more of it, as I would have liked something to hide my face from the insightful glare coming at me from across the table. Without a response from me, he continued forward in his examination.
“What’s more, is that it’s obvious why you lied as well,” he began. “I can’t determine the exact reason, but I will tell you this much - just because you and I fucked doesn’t mean shit, do you understand?”
I was taken aback, and to my surprise, felt a bit of anger toward him.
“How can you be so callous?”
“This research just reaffirms that you’ve been using me ever since you were conscious. As soon as you figured out that I was someone who could help you out of a tight situation, you pushed that agenda. I picked you up in the very beginning, and I don’t regret that. I also don’t regret having sex with you; it was a good one, and I hadn’t had a solid fuck in a while.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Way to backhand the compliment,” I muttered.
“When you lie like that and someone is trying to help you, it is a signifier that you are attempting to take control of a situation. Given your history, and no doubt previous relationship interests, I have to say that you probably can’t help yourself by this point.”
Suddenly, I was embarrassed.
I looked over my left shoulder, and saw that the waitress had approached us without my awareness. She smiled, politely, at my recognition of her presence, and then dutifully filled the small, white, ceramic mugs with coffee. She removed the plate, and then addressed Aden directly.
“Will that be all for you?”
He looked up and smiled at her. He was completely comfortable transitioning between telling me how shitty of a person I was, and thanking her for her hospitality. There was a fondness and love in his eyes that he hadn't shared with me. I hate to say it, but I was jealous.
“We’ll take a check,” he said, without directing any malice toward her whatsoever.
She smiled, and then walked away, leaving him to ream me once more with his uncomfortably accurate insight.
“You were saying,” I asked, trying to be more brave than I was actually feeling.
“I was saying that it’s likely in my mind that you and Sclari had some kind of relationship that ended up going bad. Which means that you were partially responsible for whatever went wrong there.”
His eyes returned to the computer screen, and he began to read once more, while finishing the remainder of his breakfast.
“Yep. That should do it,” he said after he had finished chewing.
“What?”
“That email from my friend. Got some info on Sclari that you’d probably be interested in seeing.”
He turned the computer toward me, so I could read what was on the screen.
“Where did you get this stuff?”
“I’m part of an off-the-record paramilitary organization. We're an informal group. I see the list-serve as an informal union. We all have a highly developed skill set, and spent our careers being manipulated like chess pieces. At a certain point, self-organization was inevitable.”
His tone was low now, and direct.
“I want you to take a good look at that information, and keep it in mind as we move forward.”
I paused, confused, and unsure about how to respond.
“If you think I’m such a worthless, piece of shit, then why move forward with me at all?”
Because if Sclari knows enough about me, to where he can fuck with my lifestyle, then you don’t want to know what else he’s capable of. Whatever deal you had with him has resulted in him getting a hell of a lot more power than when he left the service twelve years ago.
Reading through the documents, I could see the disgraced history of Ryan. He had been involved in a near endless list of black projects. The real problems had to do with a series of alleged betrayals. His lack of loyalty ultimately resulted in the deaths of five members of his previous organization.
“Incredible, the number of things you can do when there is no oversight for your own behavior, besides yourself. As unfortunate as it seems, the ethical concept of the invisibility ring is true. The type of person you are when nobody’s looking is the most true judge of your character. Everything else is a facade.”
He took the laptop from me before I could finish reading, and then smiled.
“I’ve found it’s not useful to wonder about what type of person other people are going to be any longer. I’d rather focus on myself, since I can’t control what you, or anyone else chooses to do with their life.”
With that, he walked over to the counter, and smiled at the waitress once more. The laptop was set down on the counter, and he pulled out a wad of cash from his jacket pocket.
“Thanks so much for your service. I’d like to buy this off of you, if you don’t mind,” he smiled.
“Understood, I’ll transfer over administrative privileges to you right away.”
The woman turned to the laptop, opened it up and then entered a few pieces of crucial information.
“Enter your new password,” she instructed, turning the laptop toward him. He did so, and then she spoke again, transferring the piece of tech to his name with remarkable ease.
“Let me get you the carrying case.”
She walked in the back for a moment, leaving the cash on the counter. After a word with the chef, she came out with a slick backpack that would have no problem fitting both the computer, and a few other choice items.
She walked back toward the counter, and loaded the laptop into the bag. Then, without counting, she placed the entire sum of money Aden had brought out from his jacket into the envelope, and sealed it.
There was a moment or two more of exchanges, as she processed the bill for our breakfast. Then, I watched as the woman walked around the counter to give Aden a hug. The two held one another for a long series of moments, and I realized why he had chosen this place. His comfort with the waitress had likely been the reason he spoke so candidly during our breakfast.
The waitress’s head rested on his chest for a moment, and he patted her on the back in consolation. The two held on for a moment longer, as if coming to terms with their immanent separation. I watched while they parted ways. Aden grabbed the bag, and slung it easily over his shoulder, and then turned toward the door without another word to the woman.
“C’mon,” he said, not even bothering to look at me.
He had intentionally only showed me a screenshot of the document he had actually received. There was no way for me to know where he got that information from. I couldn't know much more information he had access to through whatever source he had connected to during our breakfast.
I began to feel uneasy, as the odds were no longer in my favor. I got up from the table, and thought about his assessment of my character. He believed that my entire conscious relationship with him had been nothing more than a power play.
He was right… I thought.
The dynamics of our power play had just shifted and in a direction that I wasn’t entirely comfortable. What’s worse is that he was fully aware of the exchange. I thought about trying to tell him a conceding lie. Something which gave him just a bit more information, but there was something about the whole experience that unsettled me.
As my face hit the cold, misty air outside of the cafe, I couldn’t help but remember how he had anticipated that I would lie to him again. I also couldn’t help but think about the way he had held onto that woman by the counter. The two of them looked so sincere, and it had been far too long since I had experienced any kind of love with that level of sincerity.
The jealousy inside of me only grew.
I decided to give up and just go along for the ride. There was nothing I could do to stop him anyway, and if I gave him misinformation, I knew it would only come back to haunt me. Still, if he knew everything, I wasn’t sure he would bother to stick around.
All I could do was hold on tight, and hope that when the time for action came, I would be ready — any other path forward seemed like failure.
Chapter 15 - Aden
Charlie Hent was a squirrelly older guy, so it was no surprise to me that he responded to my email as fast as he did. Of the entire group that we once had, he was the most interested in maintaining a sense of connection between each of us.
The problem you often run into with a group of ‘lone wolf’ types is that you end up not having enough group cohesion to sustain you. There were a few of us who worked alone for the most part, but occasionally, you would meet another agent on the field. Sometimes, the results of that encounter were mutually beneficial. Other times, the encounters were something that ended up changing your life forever.
Every player on the field was one at the top of their game. You weren’t hired onto the agency if you were sub-par. Less than pinnacle ability meant you were a liability for whomever was involved. Every player was important to court, regardless if they were partners or patrons.
Charlie was into the techie scene before anyone else. If you let him, he’d talk your ear off about the old days. He had spent the majority of his professional life in technologically induced isolation.
We worked together on a few critical missions in the past. The ties that came from those experiences formed a bond that neither of us would forget any time soon. I hadn’t spoken to him in a long time, but that sort of thing never bothered Charlie. When you wanted to talk, he was happy enough to do so. When you wanted to be left alone — well, he was particularly adept at perceiving boundaries of any sort.
In the security world, that perception is critical for daily operations. On an interpersonal basis — that perception is the golden difference between a pest, and confidant.
Initially, I thought we were going to have to go all the way to NYC in order to take care of this problem. As it turns out, we still might, but Charlie had some ready-made intel on the whole operation. He said his curiosity came as a result of the fact that Sclari’s is now the biggest name in Para-Military operations.
Sclari didn’t exactly do his best to m
ake friends while he was a field agent. He was notorious for his divisive tactics, and relentless pursuit of power. The strange thing about those who seek power is that more often than not, they find it. One might think that there should be more pre-requisites for the level of achievement that Sclari had achieved. The belief that there are pre-requisites for achievement is a mistake. The achievements themselves are merely milestones in a long path of directed focus. There has been no better application of the phrase ’Will to Power’, that I can think of, than Ryan Sclari.
When you’re interested in lording over the public, you have little choice but to appear within the public eye to some extent. While Sclari shielded his private life, much of the work that CONTEK was doing needed to be made public by virtue of its scale of grandiosity. The media wasn’t able to get information on the type of projects that were underway. Regardless, their interest served as a signal to those who had the ability to access that information.
Charlie had been keeping tabs on them ever since news of the merger had been announced in ll of the major business publications. In order to be a snoop, you don’t need to have eyes in the back of your head. All you really need to do is be perceptive to what’s going on around you, and be able to use reasoning in conjunction with a bit of intuitive guesswork.
I suppose the ability to track down assets and financial records had a bit of a place in the whole arrangement.
Charlie gave me the address of a property in the area that was by all conventional means, ‘unlisted’, in terms of who managed it, and what it was used for. However, the property had been receiving utilities and traffic for some months, and belonged to a subsidiary of CONTEK.
Given that Lorin’s abandonment took place up in the rural mountains of Maine, it would be convenient if there were some sort of nearby base. Given that was their involvement in the area, it would make sense that the base would have served as a holding facility, as well as a bunker of sorts. The men that I killed would have needed a place to keep their gear, and regroup.
