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The problem with doing black ops for the CIA, Martin thinks, is that all his coworkers are sociopathic fuckheads.
It’s not that he hates his job. He doesn’t, he likes almost everything about it—the planning, the setup, the equipment, the travel opportunities (or some of them; he could have done without the three weeks in Siberia this last winter), and, of course, the kill.
He just wishes he didn’t have to make small talk with idiots like Svensen and Roberts at what passes for a water cooler three floors underground, in the land of code names and plausible deniability.
“I’m just saying, hollow-pointed are fucking overrated,” Svensen’s saying, jabbing a finger at Roberts’ chest.
“And I’m saying, get your fucking finger out of my fucking face or you’ll learn why my last eight targets don’t have anything to say about hollow-points.” Roberts has this monotone that challenges history teachers everywhere to match it, a flat and soporific delivery, even for death threats. The effect is a strange amalgamation of creepy and boring; Martin’s sick of hearing it now, but it fascinated him for the first six months or so.
“Well, let’s ask for a tie-breaker, then, as long as this debriefing is apparently never going to start,” Svensen says loudly, tipping his head back to talk at the ceiling. Behind the sights, Svensen’s the calmest motherfucker in the world, but everything else gets turned into a national fucking emergency.
“I don’t care what the verdict is, Svensen,” Roberts says. “I don’t care what you think about anything. I don’t care what Martin thinks about anything.”
“We don’t even need to ask,” Svensen says, grinning his most obnoxious grin. “Because obviously he’s going to prefer to shoot—”
“Shut the fuck up, Svensen,” Martin says, as Hart, who has no sense of humor at all, walks in and takes up position at the head of the conference room, glaring around at them all.
Martin prefers the ones with no sense of humor, though, because at least they don’t still think his fucking name is funny.
That night, Martin dreams about Debi. Again.
They’re at school, making out up against the lockers, Debi warm and curled around him, one leg between his, hard fingers gripping his neck. He lifts his head for a second to check for teachers, but the hallway’s stretching out on either side, empty.
“Hey, Martin,” Debi whispers to him, and he looks back down at her, her hair tumbling around her face, mascara weighting her eyelashes.
“What?”
“Martin,” she says, “Can you fly?” Her eyes are serious, telling him to consider, to answer with care or be mocked.
“I—” he starts, and then he’s blinking up into the dark, heart pounding.
“Blank,” says Hart, when Martin comes into his office. “Have a seat.”
“Yes, sir,” Martin says, and sits in the uncomfortable chair. It induces nervousness, puts Hart at an advantage, and leaves Martin with a numb ass at the end of every meeting. All part of the CIA package.
“Your term of service is up next month,” Hart says to him. “I have here,” he lays a hand on a small stack of paper, “the forms for re-enlistment. I have here,” another stack of paper, “an employee contract with the Central Intelligence Agency. I recommend switching over to working for us, although I understand there are certain advantages to technically being a member of the U.S. Army. Have you made a decision already?” Hard stare.
“No, sir, I have not,” Martin says.
“You have two weeks,” says Hart. “Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir,” says Martin.
Out in the hall, he takes a breath. He’s made a habit of never having any feelings about anything in Hart’s office, because it inevitably leads to a bad decision, sometimes more than one.
So, fine. He’s off-duty now. He’ll go get a cup of coffee somewhere where he can have all of the feelings he wants.
He ends up in a little coffee shop he’s walked past thousands of times before, drinks a surprisingly good cappuccino, and takes stock of his life.
He’s not married, he has no kids. He hasn’t spoken with any non-dead family members since he was eighteen. He has no friends. He has no pets, for God’s sake. He doesn’t have a life, not really, and he has no prospect of getting one anytime soon.
He thinks about it for just a second. Thinks about telling Hart where to shove his stacks of paper, about going back to Grosse Pointe and seeing his mom again, reconnecting with the human race in general, looking up Debi and asking if she’s seeing anybody—
The problem is, though—the problem is, he’s not thinking about knocking on her dad’s door to see if she’s still living there. In his head, he’s scaling her house and setting up surveillance, looking in her windows, getting her phone records and going through her mail. He’s thinking about how if he wanted, he could get Terry Rostand lined up for a headshot and lace Principal Baker’s green tea with strychnine.
Because it’s not just that he likes his job. It’s that the job keeps him from stabbing the mailman when his packages are late. And espresso and introspection aren’t going to change that.
And frankly, he’s not pining for a wife and kids and a picket fence. If he could live his non-life without having to work with emotionless scum, he’d even be happy doing it. But that’s a thing that he’s never going to be able to avoid, because it’s assholes all the way up the food chain on this one.
He doesn’t dream that night, or the next, but Thursday night, he wakes up from a dream about him and Debi curled up on her bed, whispering to each other.
He can’t remember anything they were saying, and he misses her, suddenly, so much his chest hurts. He can see her, face serious, stretched out next to him in her room, reaching out a finger to touch the bridge of his nose. A strong nose, she said once. Aquiline.
What’s that mean, he said back, watery? Sinuous? My nose is trying to slide off my face?
Nose like an eagle, she said. Aquila. Aquilinus. You’ve got a beak, are you ready to fly away?
Always, he’d said, seriously. Truthfully.
It would just be great, he thinks, if he knew someone he could have a conversation with. They wouldn’t have to spin him around and around and tell him to picture himself perched on the tip of the great pyramid, or listen with their entire body when he said three words, five words, a sentence about his fucking fucked-up genetic donors, but—somebody who doesn’t think interesting is the same as having to do with me.
So it’s probably good he’s decided he can’t go back to Grosse Pointe, after all, because he remembers how high school was, and once he goes past Debi, the field gets pretty thin.
He just—fucking—misses her. He rolls onto his back and breathes. Thinks about gun specs until he can sleep again.
When he wakes up, though, he’s feeling better. And he thinks he might have a plan.
He takes a look at his finances first. There are a lot of expenditures that are taken care of for him, in his current position. Weapons, ammunition, travel, accommodations, fake identities—he has to work out a budget.
His favorite gun, he realizes, technically belongs to the US government. Fuck.
He has contacts. Not so many here in the States, where mostly his contacts are his bosses and his coworkers, but in places where he’s worked, he’s met people, paid them, worked with them, pretended to work for them. Some of them still think of him as an ally. Some of them never knew he worked for the CIA in the first place.
He gets an assignment in Peru while he’s working through it all. While he’s there, he talks to some people, makes vague statements about his future availability, stops by in Paraguay on his way back to explore a possible future business opportunity.
It looks good.
The finances, he thinks, are workable. The biggest expenses are going to be up front, and if he has to he can take out a loan—he has a couple of identities who could take out a loan, if it came to that. But if he can get a job or two right off the bat, he could make it work. The prices people are charging these days, he could definitely make it work.
Though, he’s starting to realize, he really hates budgeting. Maybe he needs an accountant.
He’s going to need office space. Fuck.
He has his conversation with Hart on the absolute last possible day.
“You’ve been weaseling,” says Hart when he comes in. “You’re staying with the Army, then? We won’t have to pay you, at least.”
“No, sir,” says Martin, and has a moment of pure, beautiful realization that after today, he’s never going to have to call anybody sir ever again in his entire life.
Unless he’s undercover. But somehow, undercover doesn’t hold quite the same emotional weight. It says something profound, he thinks, about the reality of the national construct in his own head, but he’ll have time to think about that after he’s no longer a cog in its constructed workings, because right now Hart is saying, “Then what the hell are you doing? You aren’t joining up with us, you’d have been in before now and you’d have a real different look on your face.”
“I’m going freelance,” Martin says, and finds himself thoroughly enjoying the look of dawning rage on Hart’s face. “I’m joining the private sector. I decided to embrace capitalism.”
He’s never once spoken candidly to Hart, and it’s liberating as all hell. Once upon a time, he remembers, he had hopes, dreams, and aspirations. When he was sixteen, he would’ve shot his own foot off before calling anybody sir.
And now that he’s twenty-three, he’s finished with sir and he’s too well-trained to shoot his foot off. It’s both heady and satisfying.
He anticipates the freakout that’s waiting for him on the first day of a life free of obligations to the CIA and lines up a small job in the Netherlands. He goes straight from cleaning out his locker—“Don’t know how I’m going to get used to all that blank space where you used to be,” Svensen snickers, effectively deleting any regret Martin might have had about leaving—to the airport.
It’s just a simple target, no need to make it look like anything other than assassination, not anybody high-powered, no bodyguards or anything. But there aren’t a lot of native Dutch professionals floating around, so they sprang for the plane fare and they’re paying him enough for a month of office space.
“Nice doing business with you,” he says to the anonymous voice over the phone when it’s done, practicing his customer relations. “I think we have the potential for a long and mutually satisfying relationship, here.”
“We’ll contact you if we have further need of your services,” says the voice—noticeable Flemish accent, sounds like an older man, maybe sixties or above—and the line goes dead.
“That went well,” Martin decides, and goes to catch his plane to California. He has office space to rent.
He starts out with some basic reconnaissance, getting a couple of walkthroughs—a wide-open, well-lit ground floor with hardwood floors and a parking lot, half of the thirty-fifth floor in a steel-and-glass monument to infrastructure—and extracting basic features and perks from the patter he’s given. He figures he’ll put some thought into it over his next job, a nice little industrial-espionage payback to be carried out in Newark.
He tracks the target for a day to get a sense of his schedule, then sets himself up in an empty office across the street, very simple and classic, and catches him on the way out for his morning coffee. It’s clean and neat; the target slumps down into a hedge and nobody even notices right away.
He’s stepped back from the window and is about to put his gun away—not his favorite model, but it was his personal property and not the CIA’s, and he doesn’t want to drop too much capital on shiny new weapons until he has his budget finalized, although what with this job and the noises they’re making down in South America, he’s not doing badly at all—when the door opens behind him.
He has his handgun pointed at the woman before he has a chance to have any thoughts, which is a shame because, thinking about it, it’s a stupid fucking thing to do. This is an office building in New Jersey, not a war zone, and if he’d just pretended to be packing up some repair equipment, she’d probably have bought it and let him leave.
As it is, she’s frozen, framed in the doorway in her shoulder-padded pantsuit, her eyes widening, her mouth half-opened, and he’s going to have to decide whether to kill her or let her scream.
He hesitates. And somehow, instead of screaming, she says in a breathy whisper, “Is that a real gun?”
His instinct is to lie, but really, what the hell would that accomplish? “Yes, it is,” he says, and lowers it, very slowly.
Her eyes flicker down to his half-disassembled rifle. “Is that a real gun?” she asks.
“Yes, it is,” he says again, and decides to just holster his handgun and finish putting it away. If she decides to scream after all, he doesn’t want to have to leave the pieces here.
“Marcella?” comes a strident male voice from outside the door. “Marcella, what the hell is taking you so—oh.” A man’s head pokes around the door, just as Martin’s slipping the last piece into place. “What—”
“Sorry, sir,” says Marcella, as Martin’s hand slips inside his jacket—Jesus fuck, is he going to have to kill two extra people? Or just escape; neither of them are armed, and he didn’t bring a grappling hook or anything, but it shouldn’t be too hard to just charge past them and get out of the building before the police arrive—“The building was letting Mr. Leitner here take some photographs from this window, but he’s, um,” her voice is wavering, but it firms up and she continues, “he’s just finishing up, so we should still be able to put Dan in here for the afternoon.”
“Oh,” says the man, frowning down at Martin. “Photography, huh?” He peers past him through the window. “Never thought our view was anything to look at, myself.”
“You have to catch it when the light’s right,” Martin assures him, snapping the rifle case shut. “Late morning’s best, this time of year.”
“Late morning, huh?” The man leans forward to look, frowning some more.
“I’ll just see Mr. Leitner out, okay?” Marcella says, her voice overly strident. “And then go get Dan some—pens, and, and a stapler.”
Her boss stares out the window another second, and then straightens. “Dan’s going to need more than some goddamn pens, Marcella, get him a fax machine and—oh, there’s a phone already in here. Just—set it up, will you?”
“Yes, sir,” says Marcella, and smiles a forced-looking smile until the man disappears out the door with a vague nod in Martin’s direction. She peers out after him, and after a second, breathes out, shoulders slumping. “Whew.”
“Whew?” Martin asks, standing up with the rifle in hand. “Usually people I meet while I’m working have different things to say than whew. Often louder things.”
Marcella shrugs once, a jerky motion of one shoulder, looking at the case in Martin’s hand. “You should probably get out of the building,” she says seriously, lifting her eyes to meet Martin’s. “Or did you already—” she makes a hand gesture.
“Oh, yeah,” Martin says, “it’s done. There should be—” Sirens start in the distance. “That’s probably them now. I should go.”
“I’ll walk you out,” Marcella says, and holds the door open for him.
He should say no, take a stairwell, use his predetermined exit route and disappear. But he somehow ends up walking beside Marcella instead, over to the elevator, pressing the G button with her standing next to him.
“So are you local?” she asks after a minute.
“Oh, no,” he says. “I work out west. Or, I do now.”
“You just moved?” she asks, leaning in a little. “How is it? I’m so sick of Jersey, I could just—do you live in California?”
“Yeah, I don’t have an apartment just yet,” he says, which is true. “Or an office, actually. I was looking at buildings before I came out here, but I haven’t made a decision.”
“I didn’t realize—people like you—worked out of offices,” she says, looking struck.
“Gotta have someplace to keep the paperwork, right?” he says, trying a smile. “I’m going to have to think of a name to put on the door, something like Pacific Shipping Incorporated or—something.”
“Try putting global in the name somewhere,” she advises. “That’s what the marketing people are always saying. And rent someplace you won’t hate sitting in for days,” she adds, as the elevator doors ding open.
“Good point,” he says, taking another look around this building. He spent an hour casing it earlier today, and another half-hour waiting for the target to hit the street, and he’s just noticing now how gray it is.
“Anyway,” she says, as they approach the doors. “Good luck settling in out west. Maybe get a place with a lot of windows.”
“I’m not big on windows,” he says. “Thanks for the save with your boss.”
“Anytime,” she says, and he checks the street, left and right, and steps outside.
Martin has a flight scheduled for that evening, but he doesn’t have anywhere he absolutely needs to be once he gets back to California, so after sitting in his rental car and thinking about it for forty-five minutes, he reschedules for the next day and waits for Marcella to get off work.
She comes out of the building at five-thirty-six, stalking over to her car, giving it what looks like a preemptive kick before she gets inside. It coughs a little before it starts, but it pulls out of the lot all right, and Martin follows her down the road to a little family grocery, where she pulls in.
He watches her buy tomatoes, whole mushrooms, linguini, and parmesan in a block, holds the door for another customer coming in and steps out ahead of her. He’s about to go right for his car when he hears her say, “Excuse me,” and looks back, keeping the brim of his hat low.
The guy coming in has bumped into her and knocked her tomatoes to the ground, and as Martin watches, she muscles him back to the produce section—visible, fortunately, through the glass wall of the storefront—carefully selects three new tomatoes, and hauls him over to the checkout, where he pays for them.
When she comes out the front, Martin’s hat is off. She stops short when she sees him, keeping a firm hold on her groceries. “Oh, it’s you,” she says.
“Hi,” Martin says, smiling. “I was wondering if you wanted a job.”
Despite being three thousand miles away for the first several days of the process, by the time Marcella arrives in California, she’s lined up an office that she pronounces acceptable to her on a walkthrough. It’s open, pleasant, and it has windows but not too many windows. “Don’t get too attached to it,” he warns her. “We might have to move if something comes up.”
“Change is good,” she tells him seriously.
“I agree,” he says. “You know, I’m thinking about getting a cat.”