The Secrets We Keep

by David Horne

  Curtis didn’t exactly look Chinese, but the Triads did business with countless foreign mercenaries, so he’d been impersonating a French “metal man” called Gabriel Boucher. Curtis’ Cantonese was rough around the edges enough without having to pretend to be a French man speaking Cantonese, so perhaps that had done it. Whatever it was, the result was the same. Curtis had been assigned to investigate Zhao Chang, a known Triad crime boss who operated in and out of Hong Kong. During what seemed like a routine arms deal, Chang’s men had grabbed Curtis, beat him, stuffed him into a car and put a black bag over his head.

  They’d driven around for what had seemed like hours, and then Curtis had been thrown into what he suspected was a warehouse for hours more. Finally, they’d gotten moving again and come to a stop somewhere in downtown Hong Kong.

  When the black bag had finally been taken off, Curtis found himself chained to a chair, in the middle of a dimly lit butcher shop in the Yao Tsim Mong district. Despite being dimly lit, the only light was focused directly on him, a fear-inducing technique that had been used for years. Curtis felt like laughing at this. His training at Cicada had been specifically designed to subject him to such inhumane methods of fear-mongering that a simple light overhead felt like a pathetic attempt to rattle him. Which, of course, it was.

  Curtis was suddenly very aware of the fact that he was surrounded. The butcher shop was dirty and grimy, and blood was staining the floor, which, again, he was sure was for his benefit. The light half-scalding his bruised eye from where someone had punched him with a knuckle duster, Curtis glanced up at the leather jacket-wearing thug on his right. One of Chang’s henchmen, for sure, although he was wearing a balaclava so Curtis couldn’t be certain which one.

  “Which one of you hit me in the eye?” Curtis asked in passable Cantonese. He wasn’t surprised when nobody answered, and the circle of thugs surrounding him stayed silent. It was another fear-inducing tactic, one that Curtis let run off of him like water.

  Suddenly, Curtis heard footsteps. Boots falling onto the concrete in the darkness, advancing toward him. He squinted, trying to make out who was approaching him, and then without warning, he felt a fist collide into his lower jaw, snapping his neck sharply to the right from the force of the impact. Pain spread through his jaw like electricity through a conduit, but on the bright side, Curtis was very impressed with himself at how he’d managed to master the instinct to swear in Chinese instead of English.

  The man who’d hit him, however, wasn’t impressed. “Oh please,” he said in remarkable English. “You can drop the act. It’s not fooling anybody.”

  Curtis decided, however, to keep the lie going. “Je ne parle pas Anglais, fou Chinois!”

  The man stepped closer, and Curtis saw who it was. He hadn’t recognized the voice, having never heard him speak English before, but now he certainly recognized the face of Zhao Chang, the Triad Grandmaster of Hong Kong.

  “Speak in French or Chinese one more time,” Chang said dangerously. “I don’t like being made a fool of, and if you press me, I’ll do something that I definitely won’t regret, but you might.”

  To emphasize his point, he reached for the table nearby, upon which were laid an assortment of butchering knives. He picked up a wicked-looking meat cleaver and twirled it in his hands. Curtis was doubtful that Chang would bring it to bear upon him; the man didn’t like getting his hands dirty.

  As if he’d read Curtis’ mind, Chang laughed. “Oh, I won’t cut you. Not personally, at least. But he will though,” he added, handing the cleaver to the knuckleduster-wearing thug on Curtis’ immediate right. The thug accepted the cleaver willingly, and Curtis could’ve sworn he saw him smile beneath the balaclava.

  “So,” Chang said comfortably. “Let’s start at the beginning. What’s your name?”

  Curtis paused before he answered. This was how a lot of agents’ covers were blown, by forcing them to succumb to peer pressure. Nine times out of ten, crime bosses didn’t have anything, any confirmation, and so they tried to scare their subordinates into confessing. Again, it was a strategy as old as time itself, and not one that Curtis had any desire to fall prey to.

  “Je m'appelle Gabriel,” Curtis said, somewhat hopefully.

  Chang scoffed and swore in Chinese. “Cut his Qiu off,” he murmured to his thug with the cleaver.

  Curtis’ Chinese still wasn’t perfect, and he wasn’t 100% sure what Qiu meant, but he did know that it wasn’t good. “Okay, okay, okay! Be cool!” he exclaimed. “I’m sorry! No more French! Scout’s honor!”

  Curtis still held his reservations about whether or not Chang had any proof of his fraudulent identity as a French hitman, but he wasn’t willing to be euthanized for it! He liked to live on the wild side, but not that wild! He wasn’t crazy!

  Chang wound up and socked Curtis’ in the jaw again. This time, Curtis heard a sickening crunch. He panicked for a moment, thinking that Chang had knocked his teeth out or worse, broken his jaw, but when he righted himself in the chair, he saw Chang cradling his hand, indicative of a fractured knuckle. This thought brought him some amusement, which earned him a knee in the groin. Curtis groaned in agony as Chang stood over him, livid.

  “Your name!” he said, with as much contempt on the last word as it was physically possible for a human to produce. “Is Curtis Steven Holmes! A British intelligence operative! A spy! Do you deny it?”

  Curtis thought carefully before he answered. “If I do deny it, are you going to hit me again?”

  “Hit you?” Chang’s eyes popped. “You’ll be lucky if I don’t curb stomp you, you piece of shit spy!”

  “I have to say, your English is remarkable,” Curtis said.

  “The Triads have eyes and ears everywhere,” Chang said, with a hint of pride in his voice. “We have influence in multiple countries on every continent on this planet. We are everywhere. There are very few places on Earth where our hand cannot be felt, and ninety percent of those places are wastelands, barren of everything of value. You’d be surprised what we’re capable of, you limey.”

  “Limey,” Curtis couldn’t resist chuckling. “I must say, I haven’t heard that one in a while.”

  “I told you, spy,” Chang said, in a voice that threatened violence. “I dislike being made a fool of. So, please do keep laughing.”

  Curtis found that he had no smart answer for this, and so he held his silence.

  “So,” Chang said, with a certain amount of satisfaction that Curtis didn’t like. “I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks, huh? So. Our standard practice would be to kill you, painfully, and then bury you somewhere that the old gendarmes won’t find you. But I’m a nice guy, so I’m going to offer you another way out. You tell us who you work for and where we can find them. And then, well, we still kill you. But with a bullet in the head this time, as opposed to death by a thousand cuts.”

  Curtis winced at this. “I’m not liking any of those options, I must say.”

  “And I must say, you’re not in any kind of position to negotiate,” Chang said, gesturing loosely at all the armed thugs. “So, you can either die quickly and painlessly or in agony. The choice is totally up to you.”

  Curtis inhaled deeply. The whole “cyanide pill if you’re caught” thing wasn’t really a thing anymore in espionage either, that was just something that Hollywood had glorified for the Bond films. In the event that an agent’s cover was blown, the agency would much rather send in an extraction team to pull the agent out, as they understood a fundamental truth. Nine out of ten agents who were lost behind enemy lines would rather spill all manner of state secrets if they thought that it would spare their life. Agencies managed to mitigate the number of operatives such as this with highly colorful interrogation simulations, where they would simulate the threat of death to induce fear and desperation, thereby testing whose resolve would hold and whose would fail. But the best agents had learned to tell the difference between these simulations and the real deal by now.

  With the kno
wledge that a highly skilled extraction team was coming for you, there was no reason to be scared for your life. All you had to do was waste as much time as possible. Thankfully, the Triads had done most of the work for him, by waiting so long to interrogate him. A jet could make it from London to Hong Kong in a little over ten hours, but that was the worst-case scenario if there were no Cicada agents in the Eastern hemisphere, which was all kinds of unlikely.

  As soon as he’d been taken, Curtis had triggered his transponder unit, a tiny device that had been surgically implanted into his palm and, when activated, marked his current position on the Cicada Global Positioning Satellite and triggered his distress beacon. Any moment now, his help should be arriving.

  Curtis glanced up, and, through the balaclava, locked eyes with the cleaver-wielding thug that stood above him. Curtis was right, he was smiling underneath that mask! Curtis couldn’t resist making a face. “Really?” he exclaimed out loud.

  “Yes, really,” Chang said. “But I’m not a patient man, Holmes. Make your choice. Or I make it for you.”

  Curtis took in another deep breath. “Well then, it doesn’t take a genius. I’m going to have to go for the slow and agonizing one, please.”

  Chang looked shocked at this, and for a moment, he didn’t speak. Almost like he was processing what he’d just heard. Finally, his expression changed from mild surprise to one of grim determination. “Very well, then. So unwise.”

  He murmured something to his thug in Cantonese, something too quick and too quiet for Curtis to hear. Then the thug raised the cleaver overhead, seemingly about to bring it down on Curtis. At the last second, however, the thug twisted savagely and slammed his bronze-clad knuckles right into Chang’s face. Curtis heard the unmistakable sound of the bridge of Chang’s nose crunching under the force of the blow, and a split-second later, the man himself screamed in agony, even as he went down. The rest of the thugs were far too slow to react, especially after another one of them drew a pistol from his shoulder harness and began aiming his shots at them.

  Curtis felt like laughing out loud. He could recognize the fighting moves and marksmanship of intelligence agents a mile away, even while they were dressed as Chang’s henchmen. A moment later, the thugs were all lying on the floor, either knocked out or too incapacitated to stand and fight. The first agent dropped the meat clever onto the floor with a clang, and the second holstered his pistol. They both pulled their masks off.

  One was bald, and serious-faced, with a tiny scar under his lip that looked suspiciously like the mark one might get if they’d been stapled. Curtis didn’t recognize him at all, but the other agent was a different story. He was lean and fair-haired, his blond locks barely contrasting against his tanned skin. As he turned to make eye contact with Curtis, he smirked a smug smirk. “Well now, Holmes,” he said in a Midwestern, Chicago accent. “This is quite the pickle you’ve got yourself into, now, isn’t it? Or as I believe they say in your country, quite the gherkin that you’ve got yourself into!”

  Curtis made a face. “Nobody from England says that.”

  “Really? Oh, well that’s disappointing,” the man said, in a deflated voice.

  Curtis rolled his eyes. “So, this is the part where you tell me what took you so long?”

  The blond man made a face. “I’m fine, thanks for asking!”

  The bald man looked a tad confused at the brazen conversation that was going on in the room. “Agent Holmes,” he said, all businesslike. “I’m Agent Milwaukee, this is Chief Agent Wisconsin, we’re here on behalf of Columbus to extract you.”

  Curtis rolled his eyes at this. Wisconsin and Milwaukee were just codenames, it was the protocol for Columbus’ best fifty agents to have an honorary codename for one of the American States. Curtis at least took some comfort from the fact that, while he had expected Cicada agents, at least the US was sending two of their best. Curtis had never met Milwaukee, but he was all too familiar with the blond man. His name was Hartley Erose, and they had developed a close bond during the two years that Curtis had been in basic training at Columbus before he’d transferred back to England.

  Leaving Columbus had been one of the hardest things that Curtis had ever done, not because of the opportunity of becoming one of America’s elites, but because it had meant leaving Hartley. But after his mother’s death, both Curtis and his father needed each other. Hartley was his best friend, more than that in fact, but his father had raised him. His father was family after all.

  Hartley and Curtis had seen each other since, albeit fleetingly, as they had partnered up on missions and run into each other by chance a few times, which happened a lot more than one would think in the field of espionage.

  Curtis smiled at Hartley’s quip. “It’s good to see you, Hart.”

  “And it’s so easy to see you, Curtis,” Hartley's hip fired. “Have you put on weight since last we saw each other?”

  Even Milwaukee laughed at that one, and Curtis got the sense that the guy didn’t do a whole lot of laughing. Even Curtis had to admit, there wasn’t a lot of laughing opportunities in the field of specialized intelligence and espionage, which was the precise reason why his personal philosophical ethos was to take his laughs where he could get them, because he didn’t know where his next one was coming from.

  “Ha-ha, very funny,” Curtis rolled his eyes, although he was heartily amused. “Can you get these chains off of me and I’ll be happy to listen to your wisecracks later?”

  “You heard the man,” Hartley motioned to Milwaukee, who immediately began to pick the padlock securing the chains to the chair.

  “I’m guessing that you two know each other or something?” Milwaukee inquired.

  “Or something,” Hartley shrugged.

  “He’s the one that Miami is always criticizing?” Milwaukee asked.

  Hartley merely rolled his eyes at this, but Curtis laughed out loud. “That guy still hasn’t made it to Founding Agent yet? He’s still Agent Miami?”

  Hartley stifled a laugh. “It’s actually really difficult for a Technical Analyst to make it to Founding Agent, Curtis. The Founders are almost exclusively field agents.”

  “And how does he feel about his little brother succeeding where he failed?” Curtis asked, trying and failing to keep the smirk off of his face.

  Hartley made a face. “Be nice, Curtis.”

  Growing up, Curtis hadn’t had a lot of people that he trusted. He’d been the middle child of five siblings, but they hadn’t had an especially close relationship, given that their ages were so far apart. And, of course, there was that whole thing about born into a broken home, that would give anybody trust issues. And it’s not as though his parents had lived in neighboring cities, or an hour away from each other. With a father that lived in London and a mother that lived in Virginia, there were times—more often than not—when Curtis felt as though he bridged the three-thousand-mile gap between the people he most loved in the world.

  And that was not a position that a young child wanted to find himself in. He often felt as though he was being torn apart; as though his parents were tearing at him, each to aggravate the other. And over time, this had turned into caution and then later, downright suspicion of his own parents. At first, Curtis had felt guilty for suspecting his own parents of not having his best interests at heart, but that shrewdness had done wonders for his intelligence and problem-solving skills.

  After his mother had contracted lung cancer, his Dad had allowed him to come out to Virginia and live with her, and it was while out in the US that he’d made the decision to become a soldier, after playing countless hours of Call of Duty and thinking “how hard could it be?”. Instead of joining the Marines, he’d been redirected to the Columbus Secret Service Agency, and that was where he’d met Hartley - the person who taught him how to trust again.

  Curtis couldn’t explain what it was, exactly, but there was something about Hartley; something that made you just inherently want to trust him, befriend him. He was likable? But t
here was more to it than that.

  Whatever it was, there was nobody on the planet that Curtis would rather see kick down a door and pull him to safety. Suddenly, as if someone had read Curtis’ mind, there was a bang at the door. Hartley swore under his breath. “I thought you said these were the only hostiles in the building, Milwaukee!”

  “I thought they were!” Milwaukee hissed back.

  Curtis’ heart rate accelerated at this. “Hurry up and get me out of these chains!”

  Hartley was already going for his pistol again. He drew it smoothly from his shoulder holster and checked the magazine. Curtis recognized the model - a Beretta M9, the old standard sidearm for the US Armed Forces. It was a pretty old weapon, but when it comes to firearms, the words “old” and “reliable” tend to go hand in hand. The AK-47 was a living, eternal testament to this fact.

  More banging at the door, and now Curtis could hear voices shouting in Cantonese. Milwaukee was working on picking the lock, but it was a process that Curtis knew good and well that you couldn’t rush. If you did, you’d end up doing more harm than good, by jamming the lock shut, or worse, breaking your picking tools off inside it.

  “This should hold them,” Hartley said. He put his last three rounds into the door, blowing three holes in it. There was the sound of bodies slumping to the floor and shouts of surprise and shock. Hartley hit the magazine release catch on the pistol, let the empty magazine slide to the floor, and then replaced it with a full one, ripping back the cocking slide. “Milwaukee!” he shouted. “Take the back way! Put him in the car outside!”

  “I can’t bring the chair as well!” Milwaukee complained. Suddenly, however, Curtis felt the chains loosen. “Got it!” Milwaukee shouted.

  Curtis stood up rapidly, and the chains slid to the floor just as a burst of machine-gun fire ripped the wooden door to shreds. Curtis darted forward and grabbed Zhao Chang’s limp body, unconscious from the epic punch he’d received from Milwaukee. He felt inside Chang’s jacket and felt the familiar shape of a pistol there too. Curtis drew it out and used his left hand to hoist Chang’s body up, securing him in place with a half-Nelson grip. Using his right hand, he placed the muzzle of the gun against Chang’s temple.