The Athena Protocol

by Shamim Sarif

  As I listen, I feel an actual pain in my chest, but it’s not physical—it’s like what they call a heavy heart. When you know someone is right but you don’t want to believe it. For the first time since we arrived here, I can see things clearly. Because we care about these kidnapped girls, we have come to help a government that is too weak to deal with terrorist factions themselves, in a country too divided. Long term, they can’t fight a man like Ahmed; persistent, ruthless, arrogant. And maybe we can’t either. If we play by rules that criminals like him just ignore.

  I feel it bleeding back behind my eyes, the crimson, and it brings with it a sharp pain in my head. My skull feels like it’s bursting.

  Slowly, I stand up, away from the dead girl, and I pull my gun out of its holster. I turn it on Ahmed. I’m not rushing, but every movement is deliberate, impelled by something a little bit outside of me. Caitlin stares at me, her head shaking slightly.

  “No, that’s not the order.”

  But the sounds around me become grainy, disconnected. Ahmed’s eyes are smirking, and in my ears there is the white noise of pulsing blood. I look at Ahmed—handcuffed, defenseless—and I hesitate to pull the trigger. And that hesitation makes him smile, because he feels safe. An arrogant smile that splits open his mouth and shows pearly teeth. Then, I don’t think of anything except how easy it is to squeeze my index finger around the trigger, how smoothly the gun kicks back, and how quickly Ahmed slumps down, his chin on his chest.

  Suddenly, Caitlin is shouting, Hala is at the door, taking in the mess, and the gun is snatched from my hand. I am pushed against the wall.

  “Disarm her,” Caitlin commands.

  I don’t try to argue. I can’t think at all, so I obey. I place my hands up high on each side of my head and lean against the wall, while Hala uses her boot to push my feet wider apart. I feel Hala’s methodical hands moving along my sides, my back and my legs. My breathing is quick and ragged. Part of me can’t believe what I just did. I glance over my shoulder to look at Ahmed. It was a clean shot, of course, straight through his forehead. I stare at him. He was alive, and now he’s dead. How easy it was—how fast—for me to snuff out a life. It’s the first time I’ve ever done it, and, without warning, I feel sick. Bile rises in my throat, but I swallow it down with a dry heave. Taking a deep breath, I turn back to the wall and stand up tall. He raped these girls, and I just watched him kill one of them. So why should I care? And yet, somehow, I do.

  “Disarm complete,” says Hala, showing Caitlin an armful of weapons. My weapons.

  Hala’s eyes meet mine disapprovingly, and I pull a tiny jackknife out of my boot lining and pass it to her to prove she missed something. The petty, silent exchange with Hala gives me something else to think about for a second. But then the tiny piece of foil in my ear canal comes to life and a disembodied voice speaks sternly from thousands of miles away:

  “What just happened?”

  I bite my lower lip so hard that I taste blood. Caitlin touches the lapel camera on her clothes.

  “Peggy, it’s hard to explain—”

  “We’re hooked up to your cameras,” Peggy interrupts, echoing in my ear. “We can see he’s dead. Why?”

  Caitlin hesitates. She doesn’t want to be the one to state the obvious. To drop me in a pile of shit.

  “I took him out, Peggy,” I say, to save Caitlin the decision about how to reply.

  “Was he a threat?” asks another voice that I recognize as Kit’s. Despite the fact that she’s my mother—or maybe because she’s my mother—I immediately feel the impulse to annoy her.

  “Yeah, to humanity.”

  The voices in London go quiet, and I know that I’m in serious trouble.

  “Clean it up,” Peggy says into our ears, and Caitlin nods to Hala, who swings a backpack off her shoulders. Reaching in, she extracts a pack of white gel blocks that look like those detergent tablets you put into dishwashers. Moving fast, but without seeming to rush, Hala covers the room, placing the blocks in all the corners and beneath Ahmed’s body. Then she takes a tube from her bag and traces a line of gel between each tablet.

  “Be careful,” Caitlin tells her.

  With a slight push to my shoulder, Caitlin guides me toward the door. I move quickly. Outside, our chopper waits, unmarked, blades turning, the body of it small and black against the red baked earth. Caitlin follows me outside, and we both break into a jog, heading for the open door of the chopper. We climb inside and wait, tensely, for Hala to emerge. When she does, she’s running so fast she seems to blur in the glare of the sun.

  “Go, go, go!” Caitlin calls to the pilot.

  As she reaches the chopper, Hala ignores my outstretched hand but reaches for Caitlin’s; she pulls her inside as the helicopter lifts smoothly away and, below us, Ahmed’s building erupts in a roar of pure, cleansing flames.

  2

  AFTER THE CHOPPER, WE BOARD a private plane at a small airfield somewhere on the outskirts of the capital city. It’s a long flight, but I don’t sleep much. I’m dull-headed with exhaustion, but every time I fall asleep, I dream about Ahmed, so it’s better to stay awake after a while. Hala is out like a light, but Caitlin’s restless, at least until she goes for her pills. I feel her glance at me, but my eyes are mostly closed. I’m pretending to be asleep so she doesn’t feel like she has to talk to me about killing Ahmed and analyze me to death; but even so, she pops the foil on the pills while they are still inside her backpack, and then she goes to the bathroom to take them. She saw a lot of stuff on her tours in Iraq, not just the usual horrors of war, but abuse handed out to Iraqi prisoners by the US soldiers. She tried to blow the whistle, but they threatened her with a dishonorable discharge and she backed down. Personally, I think that’s why she takes the pills. Not that she can’t stand what happened, but that she can’t stand that she couldn’t change it. On top of that, her early life in Kentucky was like a bad country-and-western song. If she needs some help dealing with it all, so what? But she won’t admit to it. It’s funny when people need to pretend to themselves that they have their shit together. Caitlin reminds me of the Athena leaders that way. She’s older than Hala and me—late twenties—and sometimes she feels more like one of them than one of us.

  That gets me thinking about them, the women who are our bosses, the women who started Athena. The ones who recruited us, trained us, and who pay us to execute orders. You won’t find a more accomplished group of high achievers anywhere, and I’m pretty sure a couple of them have been in similar situations to the one we’re in now, though they never talk about it and it’s not on their résumés or Wikipedia pages. They’re all successful, driven, and disciplined in their own ways (even Kit). They didn’t get where they are by tolerating people who don’t listen, and I know that, one way or another, I’m in for it big-time when we land.

  Which is why I creep into the house at 2:00 a.m. even more quietly than usual. I really don’t want Kit to hear me. Most of the time it doesn’t bug me to live with my mother, but at moments like this I wish I had my own place. The house is big though—one of those old, white stucco homes in Notting Hill. Kit bought it fifteen years ago, when she was still a pretty well-known music star, and it’s probably the best investment she ever made. I avoid the front door entirely, because it always creaks and you can’t shut it without making the whole house shudder. Instead, I use a drainpipe and a wisteria branch to climb up to the window of my room. You can edge a little knife blade under the frame and lever it open. I drop my bag onto the wooden floor and slip inside.

  It smells like home. Like furniture polish and that expensive lemon room spray Kit likes, and like pasta sauce or something with tomatoes. My stomach grumbles with hunger, but going downstairs might wake up my mother, and that would mean a postmortem about Ahmed. I decide to risk a shower because I can’t stand the smell of dust and sweat any longer. And just in time, I’m in bed. About five minutes after I’m lying down in the dark, my bedroom door opens. Luckily, I’m turned on my side, away
from it. I keep my eyes closed and breathe softly and deeply. Kit stands there for ages, and I just wait, wondering if she ever bothered to check on me like this when I was younger. I don’t remember it, and maybe I would have been asleep anyway. But the truth is, Kit wasn’t home much when I was a kid. Her career took priority, and that meant a lot of touring.

  Finally, the door shuts. Pretending to sleep has made me drowsy. I drop off within minutes and wake up at seven the next morning—finding, with relief, that I’ve dreamed of nothing at all.

  I roll onto my back and look at the ceiling where a strip of sunlight ripples across the white paint. There is a pit of tension in the base of my stomach because there’s a meeting at Athena headquarters this morning, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be court-martialed. Or whatever you do to operatives who work for a private agency that nobody else knows exists. I think over where everyone is now. Hala and Caitlin will be home in their respective apartments, getting dressed, drinking coffee. Or mint tea, in Hala’s case. Li, one of the three cofounders—along with Kit and Peggy—is doubtless meditating in her spotless white living room, or on a conference call with her technology company in Shanghai.

  I hear footsteps outside my door. Kit knocks softly and puts her head in.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” she says.

  “I tried not to wake you.”

  She nods. She doesn’t mention that she checked on me. She steps into the room, and I sort of sit up in the bed. She is fully dressed—skinny black jeans and cowboy boots—and in one hand she has a cup of green tea. There’s always an air of glamour about Kit, which is in no way diminished by her working-class accent. She makes everything look easy, and always moves with grace. If she wasn’t famous or you’d never heard of her, you’d still turn to look when she walks into a room. I can’t work out if it’s something that you pick up when you become a star or if it’s why you become a star to begin with. She sits down on the edge of my bed and just sort of examines me for a few seconds. Is she looking at me, her daughter, and seeing a killer? I look down and swallow. Which spurs her into speech.

  “I know you probably want to talk,” she starts.

  Yeah, right.

  “But I think it’s better if we wait till I meet with Peggy and Li.”

  I nod.

  “I’m going to get a coffee,” Kit says. “Want to come?”

  I shake my head, feeling miserable. So we can sit and make small talk about the weather while I wait for the Athena ax to fall? I think not.

  “Well, there’s bread downstairs. Have an egg. For protein.”

  I still can’t get my head around the way Kit has turned into the mother of the year, but only since I left to join the Program, which was when I was fifteen. And it’s continued since she brought me back, to join Athena. She’s always after me to eat eggs, finish my vegetables, and wear warm clothes. Where was she when I was six years old and actually needed that stuff?

  It’s as if she can read my stubborn defiance, even though I haven’t said a word. She gets up and leaves, and as soon as the door clicks shut, I reach for the TV remote and flick on the news. I lie back in my bed and watch the end of a report on a gun attack in Los Angeles. The next item is a reporter outside the Houses of Parliament bringing us all up to speed on some boring piece of legislation. My eyes start to close again, lulled by that peculiar pattern of speech that all news people seem to have. And then I hear the word Cameroon. The African country we’ve just returned from. I scramble to the end of the bed and turn up the volume. The studio newsreader hands over to Jake Graham, who is reporting from outside the Cameroon High Commission in London. He’s well-known, Jake. Lean and rumpled, with hair that always looks a bit overdue for a cut. A good journalist, one of the earnest ones, a real crusader type out there in the trenches. I’m not thrilled he’s been given this story.

  “It’s a happy ending for the young women who were kidnapped by religious militants three months ago,” Jake explains on air. “The daring rescue ended with the assassination of militia leader Ahmed Dawood.”

  I watch, dry-mouthed, as Jake squints into the camera and the sun.

  “The United States and major European governments say they were not involved in what looks like a lean, almost vigilante-style operation. And so the question remains—how did this happen?”

  Jake looks out from the screen directly into my eyes.

  I’m tense. I didn’t expect this—and I can imagine that Li, who’s all over everything that gets onto every news channel, will be freaking out, especially about that “vigilante” comment. My only hope is that somehow it will all blow over. Nobody here had ever heard of Cameroon before the kidnappings, and they’d forgotten all about those captured girls till this morning. Don’t tell me they’re going to give a toss by tomorrow.

  Irritable, I head to the bathroom to get ready. But I avoid looking at myself in the mirror. I just can’t. It’s like I’m not the same person today as I was yesterday. Before Ahmed. Which is just the kind of revealing psychological detail the Athena therapist would love. Maybe I’ll save it to tell her, and make her day, since those sessions bore me to tears most of the time. Quickly, I get dressed. In the light of day, away from the chaos of the mission, I feel guilty about taking a life when I wasn’t being threatened. But then I remind myself whose life it was. Ahmed kidnapped and abused those girls, so didn’t he have it coming? The thought is not as reassuring as I’d like it to be. I grab my backpack and head out.

  The tube is crowded. It’s hard to believe that it was only yesterday morning when I was faced with miles of land and nobody in sight. I shift slightly, turning my head away from the smell of shampoo mixed with early-morning perspiration that always fills the underground train in summer. My stop marks the very beginning of the City, as in the City of London—the part where most of the major financial corporations and some of the tech companies are based.

  I push my way out with the tide of commuters and stick to the left-hand side on the endless escalator, taking it two steps at a time, leaving behind the underworld of crowded tunnels and warm rushes of fetid wind. With a swipe of my travel card over the automated machines, I am out and breathing the morning air within seconds. The breeze from the river carries a faint tinge of exhaust fumes. As I walk to the office, I turn to look at the gray water, sparkling in the unfamiliar sun, and the bridges and the buildings that rise, gleaming, above them. Never in a million years would I have imagined coming to an office here. These buildings, the people rushing to work, have always felt so corporate. But here I am—though hardly a nine-to-fiver, I suppose.

  I walk past my place of work, keeping to the other side of the street. The building is a sleek, rising tower with chrome letters six feet high: CHEN TECHNOLOGIES. CT is a real company—or group of companies—and a powerhouse in the technology world, started by Li Chen in Shanghai, and now spreading globally. Turns out it’s also the perfect, legitimate company to hide our much smaller, unsanctioned organization. As I pass the massive front doors of the building, Li herself arrives in a black Tesla. Which is cool enough that passing traffic slows down a bit to look. Her driver stops precisely by the entrance, and the car doors rise up vertically. Li doesn’t like to waste those minutes between arrival and reaching her desk, so her assistant, Thomas, always meets her as she pulls up, and briefs her on the day to come. Thomas is also one of the few people she trusts to know about Athena. Meanwhile, legitimate technology employees flow past her and into the building, a wide stream of faded jeans, backpacks, and paper coffee cups. As if Li is Moses or something, the stream parts to let her walk through in her tailored suit and designer shoes. I continue on, past the office, then cross the road, turn left into a small back street, and then left again into an alleyway that winds back to the rear of the building.

  We joke that this is the tradesman’s entrance. Li can come in through the main door—the building has her name on the front and houses eight hundred of her employees. Kit and Peggy get driven in through the u
nderground garage, to a private entrance and a secure lift that takes them directly up to the Athena floor. But the rest of us come in this way. A quiet back alley that leads to a plain metal garage door, operated using a hidden fingerprint pad down low near the ground where no one would think to look. When I touch my index finger to the pad, the door stays resolutely closed, and for a moment I hesitate. Have they actually locked me out for what I did? I wipe my hand on my jeans because it’s sweaty, try it again—and the door slides up.

  Inside is a garage and another door at the back, which leads nowhere, and then a door to the right, which is the one we use. A tap on an unmarked metal plate with an innocuous-looking credit card gets me through that, and into our elevator. There are no buttons in here, only a screen. I step up to it, hold still, and wait for my iris to be scanned. The pale-blue light slips over my eye and confirms it belongs to me. The screen then displays a menu of bland choices, none of which would make sense to anyone—things like Option 1 (which goes to the main Athena floor, where the operations room is, and where Kit, Li, and Peggy have their offices) and Option 2—the tech cave. I can’t remember why we call it the tech cave, because it’s not underground. Maybe because Amber, who’s in charge of it, guards it like a bear. . . . It has a great view over the city, but the windows are one-way only—we can see out, but from the outside it looks like mirrored glass. It’s where all our weapons, passports, spare clothes, and body armor are kept under lock and key by Amber—and her beloved new technology is also tested out on this floor, somewhere.

  I use my eye like a mouse—moving the screen cursor over to Option 1 and then blinking twice to choose it. Apparently, it’s unbreakable security. Finally, the elevator starts to move up. And as it does, I feel my stomach drop to the bottom of my shoes.

  By shooting Ahmed, I compromised the secrecy of Athena, and I know that secrecy is the one thing we cannot survive without. To the outside world, Athena does not exist. We’re not some black-ops division of British Intelligence or a CIA experiment. What Peggy, Kit, and Li have done is start something that nobody sanctions. The upside is, they don’t report to anyone, and they don’t get tied up in red tape. The downside is obvious. We’d all end up in jail if anyone figured out what we’re up to. So I know I’ve really messed up.