For my father, John M. Boats, whose love of smart action heroes inspired me to create my own.

CHAPTER 01 The Flash Op

Eight years before…

I hadn’t planned to jump off the roof of a three-story building.  That’s not the sort of thing you plan.  They say your life flashes before your eyes in moments like that, but mine didn’t.  There was no time for it.  The truth is, I barely had enough time to regret how I got there.

The evening began simply enough.  Another routine training exercise in the big city.  Four of us in a dark unmarked car, earpieces crackling with the faint sound of static, waiting for Control to code in and start the briefing.  A brisk November wind provided the only other sound, whistling past our car and blowing littered paper in swirls.  The sun was down, but the streetlamp on the corner was unlit.  In other parts of Philadelphia, pedestrians weaved their way home through rush hour traffic, but the sidewalks were empty in this part of town.  Criss-crossed and padlocked doors barred entry to the boarded-up shops.

I sat shotgun with a black leather toolkit at my feet.  Like my colleagues, I wore grays and blacks, a Smith and Wesson CS45 concealed inside a light jacket.  One deep breath, then another.  My hands curled into fists in my lap, and my toes twitched secretly in my shoes.

I was team leader tonight, but it was a team of Control’s choosing.  We were five months into intensive training at The Farm, and for some of us, graduation loomed near.  For the rest, perhaps a position at Langley as an analyst or a support person, but that was no one’s goal.

Battle sat behind the wheel, eyes closed, meditating.  That wasn’t his real name of course––no one here went by their real name.  “Sean” had been my choice from the short list of suggested names.  Battle must have hated all his choices and insisted on a nickname.  Tonight, he’d be the wheelman except for emergencies.  Marco and Donna sat in the backseat holding their own toolkits, and Donna’s rifle lay low in the seat between them.  She was our best sniper, and I was wondering whether long arms would be necessary for tonight’s “flash op” when the static finally crackled to life.

“Yankee, three, niner, zero.  Copy?” Control said.

“Bravo, two, eight, two …  go,”  I responded into my headset, and instantly the world came into focus.  I had a new problem to solve.

“You’ve all read the dossier on Biko Ojoola and his suspected terrorist cell.  We just intercepted a text message from him to an unknown recipient.  Message reads ‘I’m coming for it now.’  Recipient is geolocated.  Satnav feed incoming.”

Battle made a few taps and swipes on a tablet mounted on the dashboard, displaying a map of the northside of Philadelphia.  Location markers indicated the positions of Ojoola and the Recipient.  Battle pointed to a spot on the grid to indicate our position.

“Ojoola was spotted leaving his apartment 40 seconds ago, on foot.  Appears to be heading toward the Recipient.  Any action must be plausibly deniable.  Any termination must seem accidental.  Break out the oars and paddle.”

The others looked at me.  Control’s mention of “OARS” was an acronym:  Observe, Assess, Report, Subdue.  In this training exercise, it was my call whether and how we would carry these out.  One immediate observation, that I kept to myself, was that Battle found our position on the map too quickly.  That suggested he’d seen it before, and possibly practiced.  While this sort of thing would raise a red flag in a real, life-or-death situation, it was something I’d frequently noticed in other training exercises.  It merely gave away, to anyone observant enough, that he was in on it.  It wasn’t Battle who was being evaluated tonight.  I set that aside and called out the play.

“Battle – you drop off Marco a block behind Ojoola, and he’ll be the eye.  Marco, you’ll call it in if he talks to anyone, stops anywhere, or is involved in any dead drops.”  By the time I’d said this, Battle had already turned at the first intersection.  “Then drive me and Donna here,” I said, pointing to a parking structure across the street from the Recipient’s location.  “Donna will take a godspot position on the upper deck.”

Donna nodded as Battle announced he’d spotted Ojoola.  Seconds later, we reached Marco’s drop-off point.  Battle turned onto a side street less than a block behind Ojoola, slowing rapidly.  With practiced ease, Marco slipped out of the car fluidly, despite the car never fully stopping.  Battle put the pedal back down the moment his door closed.

“Target acquired,” radioed in Marco.  “Negative contacts.”

Battle turned the next corner sharply and sped down a side street.  I couldn’t help but watch his eyes.  The map on the tablet rotated ninety degrees with every jarring turn of Battle’s wheel, yet he knew the city without ever taking a single glance at it.  Did he grow up here?  Does he have photographic memory?  A better explanation was that his briefing included my most likely strategies.  Was I being evaluated on my predictability?  As I mulled over the possibilities, he glanced over.

“Stop staring at me,” he said, eyebrows tensing.

We swerved into the unattended parking garage, stopping for a moment as I slid out of the car with my toolkit in hand.  The car continued up a parking ramp.  I might have a minute to think before Donna was set up.

“Battle, after you drop Donna, make sure the roof is clear and then swing back in support of Marco.”

I looked across the street and saw the Recipient’s three-story building.  It was over a hundred years old judging by the faded brick and crumbling mortar.  It stood like a ghost of prosperous times past.  Old Philly, once thriving, now forgotten.

The main floor of the Recipient’s building was a small hardware store, darkened, its sign flipped to “CLOSED.”  The second story was also dark, no details visible from the ground.  A black metal fire escape ran up one side of the building with a landing at each floor.  On the other side, an alleyway barely wide enough for a car separated it from the adjacent building.

A faint squeak of feedback accompanied Marco’s voice as he reported.  “Ojoola’s E.T.A. now 5 to 6 minutes.  Still no contacts.”

A faint glow came from the third-floor windows.  The Recipient was surely lurking up there, and I awaited confirmation from Donna.  I opened the toolkit and took out a keygun.  The metal fire doors at each fire escape landing should house standard deadbolt locks.  I chose the corresponding probe from the master set, and inserted it into the keygun barrel.  It clicked into place as Donna’s voice sounded in my earpiece.

“In position,” she said.  “Third floor is a single, large room.  I see one grey-haired man working at a table.  There’s some sort of electronic device.  That might be a brick of C-4.  It’s a bomb.  I only see one bomb, but my vision is partially obstructed.”

“What else is in the room?” I asked.  “Is he alone?”

“I see no other people.  Black handgun on worktable.  Filing cabinets.   Computer on a table in the background.  Wall full of hanging tools and electronics components.”

I pocketed an upload prong and a radio-controlled explosive primer from the toolkit.  Seeing no nearby pedestrians, and with still no sign of Ojoola, I darted across the street.  The old metal of the fire escape squeaked and groaned beneath my feet, as though begging me to turn back.

“What are you doing, Sean?”  Donna asked.

“Creating a diversion.  We need intel.”

I climbed to the second-floor landing, ignoring the stench of week-old garbage wafting from the dumpster below.  The fire door had the deadbolt I’d expected.  I inserted the keygun probe into the lock, and gently squeezed the trigger.  Nodules on the probe sprung out vertically within the keyhole, prodding the inner lock mechanism to learn the correct shape to take.  The faint clicking of the probe taking form was nearly inaudible.  In a few seconds, when the clicking stopped, I turned the handle of the keygun clockwise, and the lock opened.

I cracked the door a few inches, waited a beat, and then closed and relocked it.  I extracted the keygun and reset it while quickly climbing toward the third floor.

“He’s moving, Sean.  The Recipient.  He grabbed his gun and is moving to the side of the room.  I’m guessing toward stairs.”

“Good.  Keep telling me where he is.  Do you see anyone else?”

“Negative.  He’s alone.”  The tone of Donna’s voice told me she now understood the maneuver.  A lone bombmaker would respond to an intrusion himself.  If he’d had a guard nearby, out of view, then certainly the guard would react.  We now knew he was alone, and that the third floor was temporarily unoccupied.

The third-floor deadbolt popped as easily as the previous.  My pulse thundered in my ears as I hurried inside.  Spotting a small laptop computer, I inserted the upload prong into its USB port.  The prong was a DARPA innovation, needing only thirty seconds to upload the entire contents of the machine.  I left it to its work and turned toward the bombmaker’s table.

The bomb was a work of art.  It had a tetryl acid-based primer, common for C-4 munitions, and its wiring seemed deliberately complicated, involving multiple diodes and switches, and possibly a collapsing circuit.  It had not yet been activated.

“Recipient’s still on two.  I don’t think you have long, Sean.”

“Ojoola’s two minutes away, tops.  He’s on his phone now.  He’s double-timing it.”

I took the radio-controlled primer from my pocket, and carefully turned the C-4 brick over.  The tar-like smell of the plastique was unmistakable.  A heavy sweat chilled me, as though I were breaking a fever.  With effort, I inserted my primer and resculpted the brick bottom as smoothly as possible.  The right ultra-high frequency radio signal could now detonate the bomb at any time of our choosing.

At that moment, the “upload completed” light blinked on the prong.  I yanked it immediately.

“He’s coming back up, Sean!”

I hustled back to the fire door and closed it behind me.  I used the keygun to relock it.

“Ojoola’s 10 seconds away!  Don’t let him see you!”  Marco shouted.  The loud blast in my earpiece froze me for a moment, my shoulders tensing and hands shaking as my nerves jangled.  I looked down the fire escape and saw so sign of Ojoola, but Marco’s warning made it clear I’d never get to bottom without being seen.  The only choice was up.

I stepped up onto the fire escape railing and pulled myself up onto the edge of the roof.  I then crouched low behind the small border ledge surrounding the flat building top.  From behind cover, I watched Ojoola arrive.  He went straight for the fire escape.

I kept low, moving around the perimeter of the roof, to minimize the sound of my footfalls to anyone on the floor below.  The gravel atop the black tar roof crunched beneath my feet, and I worried Ojoola would hear the sound from the fire escape.  I hurried to the other side of the building and looked over the edge.  There was no fire escape, but the next building was only two stories tall and about ten feet away.

“Battle, pick up Marco.  Then pick me up on the other side of the adjacent building.  Then we’ll swing back for Donna and regroup.”

“Already got Marco,” Battle replied.  “What do you mean, the adjacent building?”

I stood on the edge, looking down, remembering my lessons on parkour rolls to break a fall.  The farther I jumped laterally, the better the landing angle would be for absorbing the impact with a shoulder roll.

I took one last deep breath and made the leap.  Donna blurted a curse in my ear as she watched, then muttered a silent prayer of gratitude when I landed the roll well and brushed myself off.

The Recipient’s building had no windows on this side, and Donna reported no opposition on its roof, so the getaway was assured.  I walked to the other side of the adjacent building and calmly descended its fire escape.

My guard remained up as my shoes reached the pavement.  Battle’s car was still incoming, so I kept to the alley.  I peeked around a corner of grimy brick and saw the same glow as before from the hardware store’s third floor, and no other lights.  A faint flickering above me, accompanied by a dull buzzing, indicated that the streetlights were finally switching on.

My mind churned with strategy.  The next logical step would be to follow Ojoola and the bombmaker as they left and react to any other new intel from intercepted communications.  I was still weighing options when Battle pulled up, with Marco riding shotgun and Donna already in the back.

Battle’s eyes fixed on mine, and his glare bored into me like a drill.  I climbed in the back and found my retrieved toolkit on the floor.  I buckled in, ready to talk about next plans, but before I could speak, a voice crackled in all our earpieces.

“Clean escape.  Op closed.  Return for debriefing.”

Donna’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly at the sound of the voice.  Marco spun around in his seat to look at us, and mouthed the words “was that…Crayburn?”  I slowly nodded and could only guess that my astonished expression matched his.

The voice belonged to Richard Crayburn, Deputy Director of Operations.  The car fell deathly silent.  Whatever we had just done, right or wrong, we did it in front of the DDO.

CHAPTER 02 The Unveiling

Still eight years ago…

Battle’s hands were angry fists strangling the steering wheel as he turned off Allegheny Avenue and drove toward the highway.  This time he looked at the navigational display a few times, and didn’t take off his earpiece like the rest of us.  I thought about putting mine back on to see if I was missing anything, but thought better of it.

The scenery became more familiar on the highway.  A mirage of city lights from across the Schuylkill shimmered upon its wind-blown ripples.  I’d seen this many times on the way home from graduate classes at Drexel.  Tonight’s flash op had taken place in a part of Philly I’d never seen before.  We were leaving as quickly as we’d come.  The hardware store we’d used was clearly a legitimate business during the day, but it was a front.  The Company owned a number of buildings scattered throughout the area.  The space above the store might have been a safehouse once.  Or a data collection center.  Or an interrogation room.

I settled back into my seat and looked down at my hands.  I had been subconsciously picking at the dead skin of my thumb cuticles.  I slid my hands under my thighs to stop it, and glanced around to make sure no one had noticed.   Marco unwrapped a piece of nicotine gum that I could smell from the backseat.  Donna stared listlessly out her window.  I caught Battle eyeing me in the rear-view mirror.

“This is all on you, hotshot,” he said, before breaking off his stare to focus on the road.  “Let’s see you explain your way outta this one.”

I looked over at Donna.  Her expression drooped as she looked down and away.  For the briefest moment, her lips pursed and her eyebrows raised momentarily above the bridge of her nose.  Microexpressions revealing feelings of sadness and fear.  She was afraid for me.  And Battle was irritated with me and doing his best to act enraged to the point of violence.  I’d seen his act too many times to be fooled.  But it was clear they knew something I didn’t, and that was worrisome.

A half-hour passed before we arrived at The Farm.  We drove through a metal gate which slid shut behind us.  The main building loomed in our headlights.  It had once been a wide Amish-style barn, built long ago and later fortified, and still appeared as such from a distance.  Inside was a two-level open-design set of offices, communications stations, and classrooms.  The rest of our indoor training took place in the “Meat Locker,” a long warehouse fifty yards beyond the dormitories, so named because it had once been used for slaughtering livestock.

Groups of people walked into the main building as we parked.  Dimly visible in the background, and well beyond sight of the road, the shooting ranges and obstacle courses were obscured by darkness.  The tactical driving course and the demolition pit used for munitions lay empty and quiet.

The main building provided the only light nearby, and we all walked toward it.  The quartermaster stood inside the door, collecting our weapons and tools as we entered single-file.  I stepped inside and looked up, the starry night replaced by the sturdy timbers of a sloped roof.  A single ceiling-mounted floodlight shown down on our group of trainees sitting among several rows of wooden folding chairs.  They faced a projector screen and a lectern.

I was the last of my group to reach the chairs.  Control was handing out debriefing packets.  As I approached, hand held out, he stepped around me to hand packets to the three remaining trainees behind me.  Two of them were Ojoola and the Recipient, but the third I didn’t recognize.  The third man took his folder and started toward the chairs, but then spun around quickly and stepped up to me, poking me in the chest with his folder.

“I studied my role for days, and you didn’t even get to me,” he said.  “Tell me something, genius…who do you think hired these guys?”  He slapped the folder against his leg as he turned and skulked toward his seat.

Control’s hand clamped down gently on my shoulder, and I jumped slightly.

“This way, Sean.”  He steered me toward one of the closed, private rooms.  I didn’t bother glancing back at the trainee class in their chairs.  I knew the drill.  I had messed up, and my dressing down would be the initial part of the debriefing.  Not a one of us had managed to avoid this room the whole six months.

I stepped into the soundproofed room, and Control closed the door as he followed.  He walked over to the front desk, where his Mont Blanc pen and clipboard were at the ready, and the usual camera fixed on my isolated seat was already recording, probably already displaying me on the screen before the class.  But this time we weren’t alone.   DDO Crayburn was already seated next to the camera, arms crossed, nostrils flared.

“Let’s begin with what you did right,” Control said.    

“I feel good about Donna as the godspot in that high position.”  I said, and thought a bit more as Control scribbled on his clipboard, and Crayburn glared at me, unfazed.  “Assigning a teammate to the eye position feels right, though I wonder if I should have switched Battle and Marco’s roles.”

Control nodded, still scribbling.  “They’re both capable, hard to say.  On limited information, you should just go with your gut.  Use your judgment.”

Crayburn snorted, eyes never leaving me, one corner of his lips dipping low for a moment.  Disdain.  He unfolded his arms and leaned in, slapping the table.  “Judgment?!  Now let’s talk about where you fucked up!”  He stood up quickly, kicking his chair backward in the same motion.

I felt, for a moment, like I was in a surrealist painting.  Maybe a Picasso, where people had two eyes on the same side of their head and the background didn’t make sense.  I couldn’t speak.  Why was Crayburn even here?  And why was he so angry about one training exercise?  He turned his gaze at Control for a moment, and I thought I noticed the slightest nod.

“I didn’t follow the money,” I said.  “It’s always about the money.”

“No shit you didn’t follow the money,” Crayburn said, leaning back in.  “Tell me, genius, who do you think hired those guys?!”

I glanced at Control for a moment, wondering if I was hearing what I thought I was hearing.  He’d been only a few feet away when the third man had said the same thing to me, almost verbatim.  He looked down and away for a moment, his pen hand rising up to wipe the corner of his mouth with his wrist.  He knew that I knew.

My shaming had been planned from the start, coordinated by a number of people, probably including Battle, and I could only guess who else.  The clues had been there, but their miscue as to who was to deliver the “genius” line was the mistake that laid all others bare.  Had the deck been stacked the whole time?  Was my failure part of the plan?  The entire plan?  All I could think to do was to play their game, just a bit wiser than the moment before.

“My plan was to have Donna watch Ojoola and the bombmaker.  We were going to regroup at her position and await further comm-intel to try to determine their motives and plans.”

“You set off a silent alarm.  Deliberately!  You think they’re gonna just go on with their original plan after that?”

“Yes, because it would seem like a false alarm, and everything else would seem normal.”

“Because everyone always reacts logically, right?  That’s your judgment, is it?”  Crayburn threw his hands up, like a lawyer playing for a jury.  He turned to Control, pointed to him, and then pointed to me.  “Fix this,” he said, and then stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

I watched DDO Crayburn leave and turned back to see Control stepping over to the camera and flipping a switch.  The red LED disappeared, indicating the camera was off.  Control walked around the table, clipboard in hand, and grabbed a folding chair.  He brought it over and sat next to me.  He sighed deeply, eyes forward, before turning to face me.

I looked down at his clipboard, and saw it contained my personnel folder.  My birthname appeared at the top in block letters: VALE, THOMAS JAY.  I looked upon my true name with a sense of dread.

“This is just between us now,” he said.  “Can I call you Thomas?”

“Thom,” I said, and I couldn’t help a nervous chuckle.  “Nice to meet you, sir.”

“Bill,” he said, and he shook my hand.  “You know, in the olden days, this is the point where I’d offer you a cigarette.”

He started flipping through my file, as though he needed to examine it one last time.  The top sheet spelled out my vitals.  Six-foot-two, two hundred ten pounds, no eyeglasses or distinguishing marks, et cetera.  Page two summarized my marksmanship scores, martial arts progress, language proficiencies, and various other tradecraft scores and ratings.

Control already knew it backwards and forwards, but he flipped through the file a little more anyway.  I felt grateful for the delay.  It gave me time to process.

 It was over.

I’d worked so hard to qualify for the clandestine services, and it wasn’t going to happen.  My chest felt weighed down by an anvil, and yet I felt a sense of relief.  Months of tension left my face, and its release triggered tears to fall from the corners of my eyes.  I slumped in my seat as I wiped my face dry with a sleeve.

“Breathe,” he reminded me.

An unseen force within me propelled me to my feet.  I paced back and forth, eyes on the floor, counting my steps.  Eventually, I just leaned back against a wall and waited for the discussion that I knew had to happen.  The discussion I had hoped would never happen.

“We know, Thom.  We know.”

“How?”

“A lot of things.  Your slightly awkward gait, for example.  You know, the funny thing is, when you’re training or on an assignment, you’re smooth as silk.  You read people like books and react to them as though you’re really in tune with them.  But the second you go off-duty, that gait comes right back.  Your face goes expressionless, and you barely react to anything.  You don’t make eye contact with people.”

He was right.  I couldn’t keep up the act all the time.  It was exhausting.  Years of calculating my way through social situations and stepping up my game when duty demanded it.  Since high school, I’d been living half of my life on red alert.  You can’t live like that all the time.  No one can.  And here I was in a program where they’re always watching, always analyzing.

“And look at your fingers, Thom.”

I didn’t have to look.  My fingers had numerous tiny cuts on them, particularly near the thumbnails, where I had nervously picked at them in moments where I had a lot on my mind but no physical stimulation.

“I believe that’s called stimming, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

He paused a moment, measuring the silence, and then, finally, dropped the bomb.

“How long have you known you’re autistic?”

When I didn’t answer immediately, he began flipping through my file again.  Even from a distance, upside down, I recognized many of the documents.  A birth certificate, my college transcripts from St. Bonaventure, a thick packet with what looked like my family tree on the cover page, undoubtedly full of cross-referenced and annotated interviews taken discreetly during my background check.

“Thomas Jay Vale, of Kill Buck, NY.  High-school graduate at sixteen.  I don’t suppose the schools in a small town, back then, would know how to deal with you.  Then four years at SBU, math and physics, nothing but praise from your professors.  Research fellowship to Drexel.  And a year ago you turned twenty-one and applied.  That’s when we noticed you, and we were intrigued….”

“I was never officially diagnosed,” I interrupted.  “But I’ve known since junior high school.  They used to call it ‘high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome,’ but now it’s just ASD.”

“You’re on the spectrum,” he nodded.  “And now you’ve been officially diagnosed, though of course these records are classified.  You know, there’s nothing about it in your medical history.  Nothing at all except a few interviews with your family.  I can’t show them to you, but…I’ll just say that most of them mentioned you were quirky and weird, and kept to yourself.  Some of them said you were the smartest person they’d ever met, and the rest … spoke unkindly.”

“I don’t talk to my family much.”

“Good for you.”

I walked back over to Control and turned my chair so I could sit facing him.

“What finally gave it away, sir?”

“Donna.”  He sat up, and his hand rose slightly as he adjusted himself, palm up at a right angle to the forearm.  A gestural emblem, suggesting he wanted me to stay back.  He was about to level with me, and he knew I wouldn’t like it.  I reclined back in my chair and crossed my arms, a distancing emblem calculated to put him at ease.

“Part of her training.  I ordered her to seduce you, five weekends ago.  I’m sure you remember the evening.  Her report mentioned the difficulties she had.  How hyper-sensitive you were to touch at first.  How she overcame your shyness.  And how dulled your sense of touch was after a hot shower, how long it took afterward to build you back up for…performance.”

I nodded and grinned.  “She didn’t seem to mind.”

“Well, it was your sensory issues that made us re-examine your behavior.  You like warm baths and take a lot of them.  That’s unusual for a guy.  Comforting behavior, right?  Calms you and dulls your sense of touch.  Helps you maintain emotional control.  That’s when it started to come together.  But I have to say, I’m damned impressed it took us this long to notice.  You have a remarkable act.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But I hope you understand the position this puts us in.  There are certain aspects of fieldwork, of being a targeting officer.  You’ve merely been approximating them.  And there are deficiencies in your behavior, and physicality.  Thom, I’m sorry.”

That last word hung in the air and echoed in my head.  The last year of my life flashed before me in a stream of images.  Hand-to-hand.  Marksmanship.  Improvisational acting.  Asset collection.  Infil/exfil ops and targeting.  Class after class, op after op, and always at least average for my class, often well above average.  None of it mattered.

“What’s going to happen to me, sir?”

Control tossed the clipboard onto a neighboring table.  He leaned in and lowered his voice a bit.

“That’s the thing, Thom.  We don’t know.  Crayburn and I agree this isn’t the place for you.  In his mind, because of your academic background, the default would be to make you an analyst.  But between you and me, you’re way too damned good at tradecraft to just hang like a spider in some corner of Langley.  And the way you see things, the way you think, it’s not just different.  It’s valuably different.  For instance…why did you open the second-floor fire door tonight?”

“Like he said.  To set off the silent alarm.”

Control smiled.  “You’ve never been there before.  There were no external signs of an alarm system.  You didn’t have time to peer into any windows, and you wouldn’t have seen anything if you had, I made certain of that beforehand.  Donna didn’t scope anything.”  He paused for emphasis.  “How did you know?”

“I couldn’t be certain, sir.  But it was clearly a legitimate business, and still operating in a neighborhood like that.”

“Go on.”

“It was closed and had no bars on the windows or lockable gate in front of the main door, like most of the other businesses within several blocks.  Alarm system, then.”

Control smiled wider and chuckled.  He reached over and patted me hard on the shoulder as he got up, and I stood up with him.

“That’s what I’m talking about, Thom.  Observation.  Tactics.  Where you fall short in predicting other people, you excel at seeing everything else.  I’ve been talking to some colleagues in the Pentagon.  War gaming.  Simulations.  Data mining.  Resource allocation problems.  Game theory.”

“If I wanted to do math, I’d go back to Drexel and do math!”

“Maybe you can do it all.  You know what I like best about my job?  The few rules I have––they bend easily when I need them to.  And I don’t think you belong in a moldy old room in the basement of the Pentagon, either.”

He pulled out a blank piece of memo paper, wrote an address on it, and handed it to me.

“There’s a car outside.  The quartermaster put all your personals in it, and the driver will take you back to your apartment.  Take a few days to come down from this.  And then Monday morning, 9am, come see me at this address.”

“Your office?”

“Pancake joint, you’ll love it.  Never plan your future on an empty stomach.”

He walked me out of the room.  The other recruits had already cleared out and the building was empty and dark.  He clapped me once more on the back as I pushed open the door, but once I stepped outside, I was alone.  My car and driver were forty paces ahead, taillights glowing, exhaust puffing in stagnant air.

In the pure darkness, I looked up and could just make out the faint glow of the Milky Way.  Ursa Major.  Cassiopeia.  My favorite constellation, Orion, hung front-and-center in the Fall night sky.  Every star from my childhood memories were there, watching me.  Every one of them, as always, hanging exactly where they belonged.  I wondered how they must feel.

CHAPTER 03 Sunday Morning Coming Down

Still eight years ago…

The next thirty-six hours passed in a blur.  I might have slept, but it wasn’t really sleep.  I know for a fact that I didn’t eat or open the blinds in my apartment.  Call me to the witness stand, make me swear any oath you want, and I’ll testify I have no idea what the weather was like that Saturday.

Sunday morning, the sun stung my eyes on my walk to campus.  My Drexel hoodie covered all but the brim of my ballcap.  My favorite food truck was parked right where I needed it to be, and I ravaged two of the best cheesesteaks this side of Campo’s.

And then I just kept walking.  Past the trainyard.  Over the Market Street Bridge.  Past the Mütter Museum, City Hall, and a dozen historic sites.  Edgar Allan Poe’s house was closed for lunch hour, or I might have popped in for the free tour.  A strange urge filled me, telling me to see everything one last time.  But that was silly––I wasn’t going anywhere.

Five intense months of training for international espionage.  Before that, a year of part-time language, culture, and general fitness training.  But I wasn’t going anywhere.  Nowhere except back to my graduate studies at Drexel, to study more applied math, write a dissertation, and end up just another college professor.  Either that or take a big pay cut and ride a cubicle at a three-letter agency, analyzing all the things I’d rather be doing.

I kicked a stray stone a block down from the Liberty Bell Center and felt relieved when it narrowly missed a parked car.  I looked around as the big bell slowly came into view, cordoned off from the tourists and selfie-takers.  It looked about the same as when my family had come on vacation, a dozen years before.  I smiled at the memory of Mom badgering a passerby until he finally agreed to take our family photo.

I thought about Dad, the ex-Marine, with his hand on my older brother’s shoulder as he talked about patriotism and serving our country.  He never touched my shoulder like that.  He barely said a word to me two years ago when he drove me to Philadelphia to help me move in.  I hadn’t seen him since.  I’d never told him about being a CIA recruit, so at least I didn’t have to tell him I’d failed.

I noticed a man in sunglasses and a thin jacket walking in front of the Liberty Bell and watched him for a few seconds.  He seemed to look around at everyone and everything but the bell itself.  The jacket was a little too large in the shoulders for him.  I looked down at his shoes and noticed the hems of his pantlegs sagged almost completely over them, but less so on the left ankle.

Shoulder holster.  Ankle holster for a right-handed shooter.  Undercover cop or fed.

I glanced around and noted all the sightlines before I even realized I was doing it.  I wondered for a moment if he was walking a standard post or if he was there expecting some specific trouble.  And then I thought better of it and just turned around.

None of my business.  Not anymore.  I wasn’t going anywhere.

I ducked into the next seedy bar I saw, which didn’t take long.  It was a dark and narrow recess, as though dug out of the side of its building.  It was lit by TV screens, bare lightbulbs over the bar, and willpower.  It was empty except for one bartender and a couple tables of twenty-something guys in ballcaps.

I pulled my hood down and sat on a loose barstool.  The bartender came over and I double-taked.  She looked exactly like Donna.  Same height, same skin tone, similar face.  Only the hair was different––long African-beaded braids rather than Donna’s closely-cropped style.

“What’d’ya need?” she said.

 My mind wandered back to a passionate evening.  At the Farm, we were effectively sequestered from the outside world.  On off weekends it was common, if not expected, for recruits to make the most of their R&R together.  Drinking, gambling, and lots of adventurous sex.  I myself hadn’t partaken often, but the memory of my ice cube raising goose bumps on Donna’s quivering skin leapt to mind.  What do I need, she asked?

“How about a Citywide?”

“One special.  Anything to eat?”

I shook my head, and she turned away for a minute.  The bar mirror gave me a view of the table behind me.  Their table chatter had picked up, and the loudest of the group was looking my way.  I scanned them quickly looking for signs of concealed weapons and estimated their heights and weights.  I was stronger and at least four inches taller than any of them. 

“Hey, you!  You’re blocking our view!”

I pictured the guys at the table in my mind, but

didn’t look at them.  There were six televisions in the bar, all showing the Eagles game, and I wasn’t blocking any of them.  The waitress was still at the other end of the bar.

“Hey, twinkletoes!  I’m talking to you!” the mouth of the group said, and the others laughed.

Stupid locals.  Mr. Mouth was building up his confidence.  Any moment now, he’d be coming over to prove himself in front of his stupid friends.  I slid forward in my chair an inch, subtly shifting to ready myself for quick movement.  I kept my head down as the barkeep returned and set a shot of Jim Beam and a can of PBR in front of me.

“Thanks,” I said, pulling out a twenty and a five.  “Actually, three more, please, and keep the change.”

“Four total?”

I whispered, “They’re for the table behind me.”

In the mirror, I saw Mr. Mouth getting up.  One of his laughing friends gave him a swat on the back as he headed my way, rolling up his sleeves.

He never saw my punch coming.  I barely saw it coming.  My spinning roundhouse drove his nose back into his skull and his body back into his friends.  It was one-quarter training and three-quarters hatred of the dozens of bullies I’d known all my life.  His friends pushed him back onto his feet just in time to get a face full of barstool as I brought it down on him.  He collapsed into a pile at their feet, fragments of wicker and wood clattering around him.

“Anyone else?!  Plenty of stools left!”

I didn’t give them a chance to answer.  I turned and sped out the door, wanting to put as much distance as I could between me and the fool who picked the wrong guy on the wrong day.

I walked as quickly as I could, looking back over my shoulder, until I was a block away and sure I wasn’t being followed.

I’d just gone from zero to sixty in two seconds, and it felt good.  Too good.  I wasn’t going anywhere, but there was no going back, either.  I pulled the slip of paper Control gave me out of my back pocket and looked at the address.

Tomorrow morning.  I’d be there.  No going back now.