Death In Situ: Writing Exercise

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:

             When she reached the train station at Luxembourg City, all I knew about her optics and movement was what type of coat she was wearing and when her train would leave.  She had one of those shabby, puffy numbers that people tend to see on hippie twenty-something adventurers hiking across Switzerland, or permanently parking their lives in Amsterdam where they were turning on, tuning in and dropping out en masse.  Her hair was sandy blonde, straight, short and loose around her face.  But it was all about her face.  The face didn't line up with the clothes.

(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.