At one point in my tortured past I read virtually every how-to book about writing, including a lively tome from Brian Kiteley called The 3 A.M. Epiphany which was essentially a series of writing exercises designed to jump-start the engine of your creative mind. I hate writing in first-person but one notable exercise involved writing in first-person and trying to tell a story through description while using the word "I" as little as possible. What this exercise taught me was how minimal the difference between first- and third-person could be, if the narrative was handled a certain way.
It was an interesting, notable challenge, and I managed to write a very lengthy scene out of whole cloth for this one. I drew on the memory of a long-lost spy story that was accidentally deleted from my old computer when I was in my early twenties, a tale involving an American spy named Eric Stanush. That first story was lost to memory, and I never finished the suggested story that poked through from Kiteley's writing exercise, but the scene that grew out of it is below in full:
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| (Source: Wikimedia Commons, Informationsstand bannen an der Stater Gare, MMFE, CC BY SA 4.0) |
The eyebrows were thin and intelligent, the mouth was neither too small, too wide, too pursed, too judgmental or too gentle, it was fixed in a set of perfectly prepared mannerisms. Her eyes moved with a considerate grace, the kind that implied she had sailed through life without serious worry or tragedy striking too close to her, or if it had, she had merely pushed through it and moved on. Women with an inner strength were far more interesting. She had an inner strength, but only if she had managed to push on.
The tasking
message had very little information about her name, and normally names are not
very important except as labels, but her name had that extraordinary quality of
leaping out into the world full-blown: September Mannheim. Her name announced a hidden aristocracy, a
bloodline of landed wealth that had been nurtured, tucked away in Puget Sound
or upstate New York among the influential gentry of the eastern United
States. What kind of job did she
have? Photography? Travel writing? Something that didn’t require business attire
but could remain respectable. There was,
in fact, very little information about her family, only what was necessary to
accomplish the tasking. It was difficult to imagine what she had done to arouse the interests of the intelligence apparatus. But sometimes a contact as casual as bumping into a known terror financier at a busy airport would do the trick. Secondary and terciary contacts was the term, and she was in one of those two categories now.
She was
paying for something at the ticket window, not the ticket itself but a separate
transaction, maybe an upgrade to a bigger cabin on the train that would take
her from Luxembourg to Dusseldorf across the winding escarpments of a land cold
enough to make breathing painful when done outdoors long enough. Her route would last approximately seven
hours. Again she had that pleasantly
detached air in dealing with the clerk, who was a slightly hunched, very thin
man in his mid-forties and evidently malnourished from being a miser, or being
married to an uncaring wife, or possibly he was just too French. It was clear that his day had been brightened
simply by speaking to September. He even
seemed to joke with her, something he hadn’t done with any of the other
customers over the past two hours before she had arrived. She finally completed her business and
withdrew with a smile that beamed at the clerk briefly, then subsided when she
turned and pulled her leather and brass travel roller behind her. There was a skipping sound coming from one of
the wheels, indicating it was stuck or broken.
She was
evidently screening her potential seat carefully. Didn’t want to be too close to the tall,
nerdy Swede clicking on his laptop at the end of the row, but not too close to
the overly romantic couple who were possibly Finnish, and definitely far away
from the noisy Turkish family that traveled in no less than seven in the group,
jabbering and jostling each other with squat frames, quick arm movements, and
improper public scratching of body parts.
She finally settled on a relatively empty section in the middle of the
third row, well enough away from the busy front section but not far enough to
get stuck behind a crowd when her train came.
And it was
in that section where her most intriguing change occurred: her facial
expression. The niceties of personal
interaction faded away, no more smile, no more welcoming gestures. Her back and shoulders assumed a readied
angle, her chin jutted into high alert, and her eyes darkened. They were scanning now. Looking for someone. Someone who would be a problem.
She knew I
would be here. She was looking for me.
*
In the
world of international espionage, very few encounters result in bloodshed or
violence or multiple vehicles swooping down, raid-like, into a public
space. It’s more like playing chess,
where the players move according to expected rules and leave little room for
unchoreographed mayhem. September tilted
her head slightly and I raised my eyebrows, and in that moment, our first Hello
passed without a word.
I still had
to determine how this turnabout had occurred, and why I was suddenly the
objective of someone else’s tasking.
After seeing how much thought she had invested in seating herself, I
left the London Times morning edition on my bench and walked over to sit next
to her. As I approached, she beamed her
window-clerk charm at me in full shine.
It was quite an effect, and it told me that I was dealing with a top
professional, not some honey-pot shake-and-baker straight off a two-week
orientation for a one-off job. She had
done this before and was quite clear about doing it again.
She said,
“I was wondering if you’d made it. The
snow drifts are already shutting down some of the smaller roads.”
The syntax
of her words and the cadence of her diction were giving away nothing. Where before I deduced Puget Sound and
aristocracy, there was the low hiss of static.
Instead of a clear image of who she seemed to be, I was getting white
noise. So much in the community depended
on knowing who you were dealing with that her overall vagueness was now making
me nervous. Was she physically fit? Was she just a handler or an operator? She was piled under that heavy coat, but her
hands looked strong, and she wore a black watch that displayed 24-hour military
time. “I got here two hours ago,” was my
reply.
“Early bird
gets the worm. Or, I guess you thought
you were getting a worm. Surprise,” she
said.
“September
Mannheim?”
“Not
really.”
“Did you
choose the name?”
“I did, in
fact!”
The lilt of
her words suggested mockery, which I suppose was deserved if I had been
duped. “So what’s the package?” I asked.
The package
was the parlance for the objective. It
could be a physical thing, a suitcase bomb or a stool sample from Putin. More commonly, they were encrypted USB thumb
drives with all kinds of data on them.
It sounded boring, but a couple of years ago some wiley Czech nationalists
had started engineering their thumb drives with a dab of C-4. If the decryption handshake didn’t occur as
programmed, boom. There went your head.
She leaned
in and said, “You’re the package.”
I glanced
at her. She raised her eyebrows now, nodding. “Sucks, right?” She was changing again, this chameleon, now
dropping into the head of a college junior studying abroad. She was letting me know I would not figure
her out. She was good.
But I had
other problems now. In our world, when a
person becomes a package, it is either eliminated or taken into custody. There were no police officers or other
gendarmes at the station’s turnstiles or loitering outside, which were bad
tidings. It meant there would be no
official grab, no government somewhere claiming a crime and making headlines
and sending me home in a public furor.
It meant that if I was taken into custody, it was for rendition. Completely under the table, totally black
bag. People in rendition just
disappeared. Some died.
* * *
I belonged
to a CTU (counter-terrorist unit) of which the Company has many, but one with
lesser credentials where my official US passport lists my real name: Eric
Stanush. In our trade, September –
whatever her real name – was a couple of paygrades higher than me. I knew this because I had figured out I was the package now, and that meant my handlers would never send someone after me who was limited to using their actual name. She was a Tier 3 operative, the highest covert category that existed.
What we are
trained to do when a job goes sideways is very simple: get up and start
walking. Be cool, be calm, don’t
panic. But keep moving, the farther
away, the better. So I got up and made
it as far as the front doors when I heard a “Sir!” And my training has taught me better, it is
supposed to, but I choked at the last moment.
Her voice called out and made me stop and turn around, a fish caught
in her hook.
“Is this
your wallet? I think you dropped it.”
“No, thank
you.”
And that was all I could say without attracting more attention. I walked quickly, but it was too late.
Security
clearances, contrary to Hollywood bullshit, don’t occur with a snap of the
fingers. Credit checks, recent
associations, purchase histories, communication patterns, online transactions –
it is all vetted and reviewed by specialized units. It can take at least six months, usually
longer. The point being, everyone who
was in our of work was already in the system, and that system could be accessed
in a number of ways. The photographic
evidence was usually purged and all anyone saw were facts and figures.Which meant that the grab team or the kill team, whoever had been contracted to box me in, had just been signaled by September to go active. They had not known who to look for until now. A man sitting next to September and striking up a conversation could be anyone. But her act of finding me and attempting to hand me pocket litter, be it a wallet, a set of keys, a map, was bona fide tradecraft that marked me.
Meaning they were moving, moving without me seeing them. The training kicked in: stay away from sudden corners, find the longest lines of sight and travel along them, look for storefront windows or parked cars, reflective surfaces that would let you see behind you without obvious turning. And, in the process of evasion, try to find an ideal route to pull away and escape.
The main entrances and exits were likely covered, so that walking through those would be tantamount to dropping right into their box. And this station was not near a city center, it was near the edge of an older part of the city.
