by C R Martens
“How’s your flatshare?” Sophie asked, popping up behind Eve as she exited a class.
“Hi. It’s still small, but now we are back to just being the three of us,” Eve replied. “How is yours?”
“Quiet compared with halls,” she said. “I live in a cupboard or at least that’s what it feels like. I take it Ryan has gone home?”
“Yeah, it’s almost worse than halls. Except no prison guards.” Eve smiled. “And, yes, he’s gone home for good.”
“Yeah, glad we are rid of them. And I’m glad to hear about Ryan, he was a creep.” Sophie winked. “This is me. I want something to drink before my next class. What do you have?”
“Ah no more classes,” Eve lied. “Going to work. See you tomorrow?”
Eve had no reason to lie, other than she didn’t like everyone to know everything. She was very skilful at keeping her stories straight. But she wasn’t going to class as she should and she was only working once a week now that school was back on. She just wanted to be somewhere she didn’t know anyone – a place where she could get lost. She just wanted to find a place to sit undisturbed, a place to take pictures, somewhere she could watch people and imagine who they were and what they did. And do what she did best, read their faces and body language.
As she walked she started to feel as if she wasn’t walking alone. Granted there were other people around, but this person was walking in tune with Eve. Same speed, same rhythm. She walked for a while to confirm her suspicion. Eve turned the first corner she came to and stopped, facing the street she came from when he turned the corner. He stopped, clearly surprised that she all of sudden stood facing him. After a moment, he cleared his throat and walked past her, looking back at her a few times. Eve watched him until he turned another corner and disappeared. Then she walked back out into the street where she came from. Eve found a good spot in Jubilee Gardens; it was packed with tourists mostly, with the occasional businessman semi running through the crowded space. Eve wasn’t particularly lost there, she knew the place well, but the people where never the same and that was a comfort.
“You capture them quite well,” said a voice from behind Eve.
“Thank you,” Eve replied, slightly hesitant, scanning over her shoulder to see the woman behind her. She was beautiful and sophisticated with pale flawless skin.
“I’m impressed you spotted our tail earlier today,” she continued. “People rarely do.”
“So, I was being followed. Why?” Eve stopped what she was doing and turned around to face her apparent stalker. “And if I spotted your tail, then how did you know where I was?”
“Well, I have been doing this job for just a bit longer than he has,” the woman said. “In fact, I have been following you for a while now and you are intriguing. You seem to be one person to everyone close to you, but the fact is, you are something entirely different. Skilfully keeping everyone at arm’s length. But no one would notice because you seem open and engaging and that is not something you can teach someone to be.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” Eve replied with a slight smile. “You still haven’t told me who you are and why you were following me. I just got rid of one stalker, I don’t need another.”
“You are partly right. I know your past, but I am still trying to figure you out. You’re a puzzle, but I like puzzles,” the woman said. “Don’t worry, I’m not a stalker. Or at least not in that sense of the word.”
“You think I’m a puzzle. You still haven’t answered my questions.” Eve looked coolly at the woman. “You aren’t British Intelligence because I’m a foreign national and they only approach people born here. However, you are tailing people so you must be from an intelligence service.”
“And you are very perceptive,” said the woman smiling. “You are of course right, I’m not British Intelligence. I’m from the private sector.”
“Private?” Eve was puzzled by the situation. “I think you better get to the point or I’ll leave because this is getting tedious.”
“Well, isn’t it obvious?” She was still wearing her sunglasses and Eve didn’t trust people who hid their eyes. Eyes tell the truth. “Yes, I work in the private sector. And we want to recruit you.”
“For what? Baking, writing or banking?” Eve was getting annoyed and her flight mode from her childhood was starting to set in. “You still haven’t told me where you are from or what you are recruiting for.”
“I’m from FIA,” she said with an air of arrogance. Eve started to collect her things having had enough of her games.
“Right, I’m off.” Eve got up. “Is this supposed to intrigue me? Because it isn’t, I like facts and to get my information straight forward.”
“FIA is the Foreign Intelligence Agency,” the woman said, finally taking off her sunglasses. “We source information for the private sector and sometimes we help out governments retrieving vital information. We are the privatised version of British Intelligence.”
“And what do FIA want with me?” Eve was starting to get intrigued but she was trying to play it down.
“I think you could be a great asset to FIA,” she replied, “especially in intelligence recovery.”
“Spy-stuff then?” Eve was still standing as if she would leave at any second.
“In so few words.” The woman stood up and walked over to Eve. “This is my number, my personal number, for whenever you are ready to talk further about a career jump, away from prying ears and eyes. Then I’ll be able to explain everything a little more clearly.”
“I’m still at university, I’ve only just started my third year,” Eve said, looking the strange woman in the eyes. Eve hadn’t come across someone she couldn’t read, but this woman wasn’t easy to gage.
“We knew that before approaching you and it’s not a problem,” she said. “University is easy to work around. Call me when you have decided, but don’t think about it out loud, if you know what I mean.”
And then she walked off. Beautiful as she was, she walked completely unnoticed through the massive crowd of people. Eve stood watching her for as long as she could see her and then she looked down at the card in her hand. Harlow Dean. Eve definitely was intrigued.
***
“So, this is our last session,” he said with a smile, seeming quite content. “You can just continue where we left off.”
“Really?” Eve asked, puzzled. “Because I assumed that at some point we were going to talk about her.” He stopped in his thoughts, clearly astonished by her question.
“Um,” he started. “That is not something I have been instructed to do.”
“No? I thought that was the reason why I had to go see a psychologist,” she said. “I did, after all, leave in the middle of an assignment to get to her. And you yourself told me that’s why I had to have counselling. You had to gage my stability. So, I thought it’d be quite natural for us to broach that topic. My mentor dying was why I agreed to counselling in the first place, but not to worry, I realised around the third session that it wasn’t about her. No, it’s about me and I think that I’m being assessed for being a risk, which I’m not. Why am I under review?”
“I think we should just finish what we have started.” He wasn’t happy with her questioning his authority. He looked at the camera behind her by mistake. She knew he wasn’t the one making the decisions. FIA was collecting an advanced file on her – that had become apparent a while back, but why she still didn’t know. And though they hadn’t talked about Harlow, this was definitely related to her death.
“Fine. I was getting to her anyways,” Eve retorted, turning around and looking at the camera. “It only took three days to make the decision to call Harlow and it only took her one minute to set up a meeting that same evening. As exciting as my years at university had been, the thrill of London and meeting new people, life had settled into a routine. And, to me, routines are draining. That feeling would have probably come sooner hadn’t it been for Ryan. His torment and desire for me gave me in
some twisted way, excitement.
“I went about my day the same as usual, nothing out of place, nothing was odd, no one knew what I had just said yes to. Neither did I. That evening I went to The Grayson Hotel in Knightsbridge. It was a small luxurious hotel – it wasn’t a pompous hotel full of gold and opulence; it had an understated elegance perfect for understated meetings. I walked through the heavy front doors and into the front hall. A woman stood at the reception desk but before I reached her, an arm grabbed me by the shoulder, not hard but firm. I turned to see her, the woman from the other day. She suited the hotel – simple with understated elegance and completely shrouded in mystery. I still couldn’t get a read on her.
“‘This way.’ She pointed to a small room by the entrance. ‘I’m glad you decided to meet me. Please, have a seat.’
“She showed me into a small conference room. There was a long oval table with eight seats. The room was different from the rest of the hotel – it was masculine and dark. There was coffee and water for two so it was clear no one else was attending the meeting.
“‘Thank you.’ I sat down and I started to feel the nerves tingle in my body. ‘I am still unsure as to what this is all about. Even after googling FIA.’
“‘We don’t like attention,” she said with a smile. ‘If we get attention online or in the media we haven’t done our job well. Now, this is just a preliminary interview, there will be tests, both physical and mental, before it’s decided if you are a fit with FIA.’
“‘Okay.’ I was calm. She had that effect on people.
“‘Who do you aspire to be like or look up to?’ Harlow asked.
“‘I don’t know,’ I answered. The truth was I didn’t know what to answer. I had never had a role model to look up to in my life. ‘I don’t think I could say there is any such person in my life.’
“‘No?’ Harlow took notes.
“‘How did you know I could be a potential candidate?’ I asked. I had been wondering this ever since our first meeting.
“‘You recalled I said I had been following you for a while,’ she started. ‘Well, I didn’t set out to find you. It just happened. The first time I saw you I was at a pub and so were you and you dumped your abusive boyfriend over the phone quite calmly only to put on an entirely different face for your friends. I saw your raw talent and potential. Then two days later chance would lead you into the same bar I was in again. I noticed you from the moment you walked into Bar Bar Cocktail Lounge. Not because I sat facing the entrance, but because the man I was engaged in conversation with lost his focus. Something I am not used to. So, after I had acquired what I needed from him, I stayed and watched you. You didn’t buy one drink for yourself that night. And the three men who did, they all left with three different stories of whom they had met. And you didn’t think twice about it, it was like you enjoyed being someone else. So, I decided I had to find out more about you.’
“‘I could just be a pathological liar,’ I replied, thinking back to that night. ‘How did you know he was abusive?’
“‘Hence the reason I had to find out more.’ Harlow smiled. ‘You were a gut feeling I had to pursue, so to speak. I didn’t know that at the time, but I do thorough research and I wasn’t hard to see the signs of abuse.’
“‘The grass is always greener on the other side,’ I said quietly, smiling. I didn’t like being found out. I wasn’t used to that. I felt guilty for playing with the truth, but I couldn’t stand being in my own head 24 hours a day, so pretending to be something else was my self-medication. ‘I like pretending. It’s a sort of escapism for me, but I suppose you know that now you have vetted me.’
“For the next few hours I sat listening intensely and answered questions thoughtfully. Harlow had a talent for spotting new recruits, apparently. A week after our first meeting, I had my first test at FIA. This was just the beginning of a very long application process with several interviews and tests. They knew everything about me even before I spoke. By the time they were done, I felt like an open book. I had never been an open book – I relished my privacy. If I had to choose between sharing something personal or telling a white lie, I would always choose the white lie. They checked out everything in my past and what they didn’t find out, I freely told them. Weeks of tests memorising conversations, applying myself to every little detail. Even when drunk, downing vodka for work purposes and then performing a memory efficiency test afterwards wasn’t the worst thing, even if everything had to be done with pinpoint accuracy. A good spy doesn’t talk too much, they listen carefully and observe – these were the only words that I kept in mind through the entire training period. Observe – listen – memorise – report. The words were drilled into my mind. A powerful memory is key to staying alive, especially when operating under multiple aliases, all with their own background stories, passports and credit cards. I already knew three languages: Danish, English and French. Now I was adding Russian to that list. When the psychological aspect of the test was finished, the physical test came and it wasn’t just about being fit and healthy but also about endurance and pain tolerance. This was when I started to feel the pressure at university. Juggling my training at FIA and studying full-time at university was a test in itself. I had started to neglect friends again and ignore calls from my mum. It was difficult to explain my bruises at times, but that’s when my newly-acquired acting skills came in handy. My clumsy persona was born. However, most of the time, it was just easier to not see people, to hide away.
“Distancing myself from my family came easy. Being in another country, studying full time at university and training at FIA all helped me to separate myself from them. It was easy with my family. Painfully easy. I had kept my mum in the dark about a lot of things for many years, so this really wasn’t that different from what I had always been doing. She just thought I had a lot on my plate between Uni and work (work being an office assistant at a job I had quit). She didn’t ask any questions, she didn’t want to add to the pressure. My friends were a different story though. They needed a more convincing lie than work and university regarding my ‘new’ absence from their lives. After all, they were working and studying too. When I had been with Ryan, they knew he was the problem. As he grew more obsessive they saw me retreat into myself and disappear, but now they couldn’t see what was keeping me away, which led to a lot of questions. But I managed to convince them that my absence from the party life was because I had upped my hours at work. I was the last to enter the lecture hall and I was the first to leave. If I saw them pursue me, I walked briskly and took lots of turns. I used my newfound skills on my friends. My escape seemed complete, I had disappeared, I only had myself to think about and somehow that felt like an immense relief.
“The final test at FIA was only a week before my final exam at university, which wasn’t ideal. I, along with three other recruits, was taken overseas to a remote location. We were dropped off by helicopter at a remote mountain location. I couldn’t tell exactly where we were, only that it had to be somewhere in the south of the South American continent. I only knew the general direction we flew in and for how many hours and we had to change from a long-haul flight to a helicopter while blindfolded.
“We stood there looking at each other as the helicopter left, each of us with our compact backpack and a map with a red dot 65 km away and the words ‘The helicopter leaves in two days’. That’s when doomsday happened and we had to react and follow the instructions given to us in the helicopter. This wasn’t going to be a soul-finding trek through the beautiful and chilling mountain landscape, this was going to be a fight for our lives. When everything was over, I was the only one standing at the extraction point. I never saw the other three recruits again.
“It’s been four years, a broken wrist, a broken rib, several stiches, two gunshot wounds and a general feeling of mental collapse since I start here at FIA. To say it hasn’t been gruelling would be a lie. I didn’t just perform interrogations, I was the subject of several. What I had before my tra
ining was charisma, an ability to adapt myself to any situation and I could keep my stories straight and lie with an expressionless face. I could get what I wanted when I needed it. What training did was hone all of these skills, refine them. They tore me apart only to build me back up to their specifications. But let’s not forget the most important thing I can do, I can tell if you’re lying,” Eve told him, a statement that made him swallow his spit.
“Harlow didn’t influence me during my training. She stayed away from me, adhering to the regulations of the firm. Only once I had graduated did she start mentoring me. She was my mentor and friend and I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her so of course I dropped everything I was doing to get to her, but I didn’t do that haphazardly, I made sure the case didn’t get compromised. I also mourned for her, I still do. But that’s normal behaviour, isn’t it?”
Harlow was the only connection Eve had to her past self; she had known who Eve was and accepted who she had become. Losing her was like losing that last bit of Eve’s past.
“Ah, yes it is,” he said, stumped by her question. Probably because he wasn’t paying attention. “But now you’re getting off topic again. I am not here to review your relationship with your mentor. I am not even here to help you in your time of grief. I am just here to get your full story.”
“You say that, but I think I might as well be talking to the camera,” Eve said. She was starting to feel hopeless. If they wanted to suppress her they might just have found the right way to do so. To drown her in her own history. She hated being in her own head and they were forcing her to wade around in it.
“Please continue,” he said passively, “with your story.”
“My full story, you say. Right. My first assignments were easy, a bit of eavesdropping and tailing a few targets, data collecting. Going through someone else’s trash. I had no idea that soon I would wish that that was all I did, a bit of fact collecting. I got my first big assignment that winter, a little more than six months after I had graduated from FIA’s training and, soon after, university. He was Italian, I spent a solid month just doing research on him and his family. Everything I could get my hands on. There was research going back decades on his family, research gathered by different agencies – Italian, British and Interpol. He was tall and very handsome so I knew I didn’t have to fake being attracted to him. His name was Francesco, he was the son of an international crime syndicate boss whose main income came from human trafficking. Francesco was the eldest son and the heir to the throne, but he was also a playboy and a big risk factor for the family as he had the habit of causing unwanted attention and had a drugs problem. He was arrogant and controlling, I suspect because he craved the same power his father had.
