Chapter 26

Agent DePietro was admitted to the Hospital San Rafael for two gunshot wounds to the abdomen. Her internal bleeding was stopped, but one of the rounds nicked her spine. James arrived at the hospital early the next morning, but by then it was already a near certainty that she would never walk again. He didn’t know what to say to her, and to be honest with himself, he was terrified as to what she might say to him. He paused outside her hospital room and considered turning back. There was plenty of work to be done; Agent Black had already used the key fob to locate the man’s car, then used its registration to find the apartment the other key had belonged to. A team was searching his apartment while the rest of the agents back at the office traced every friend, family member and acquaintance he ever had in hopes of further leads. James didn’t know whether or not the man was conscious yet, or if he was cooperating with the investigation, and he could easily argue that he wanted to be involved. But none of that was the right thing to do just then.

“Are you awake?” He spoke gently as he crossed the threshold into the room. He secretly hoped she wasn’t, then it wouldn’t be his cowardice keeping them from talking.

“I suppose… I’m on a lot of drugs,” her voice cracked. She didn’t turn her head away from the window as she spoke.

“Would you like me to come back another time?” James prodded.

“No… no, you’re fine. I’m sorry, I’m just…” She turned her head in his direction, her eyes welling with tears. James’ heart broke to see the strong, bitchy woman he was just learning to dislike humbled so dramatically. Anyone’s ego would be crushed to end up like this, but her fall from grace came from much higher than most.

“I’m… I’m sorry… I don’t even know your first name.” James realized out loud. She smiled as one of the tears fought its way free and crept down over her perfect cheek bone. She will still beautiful, through the runny makeup and swollen eyes.

“Elisa,” she whispered, her eyes trained on his, “you’re the only one to visit me.”

“It’s still early, I’m sure this place will be full of people coming to wish you well in no time, Elisa.” His eyes twinged with the need to cry with her.

“No it won’t. I’m out, James. You’re just too new at this to realize it,” she turned her head back and looked up at the ceiling, “none of them will come.” James knew she was right. As an agent, she was a valuable asset. As a crippled woman, she was nothing. James wondered what she’d do now. It’s not like there was an injured secret agent pension she could draw from, at least not one he knew of. He stepped closer to her bed and took her hand in his. She didn’t look at him, but she squeezed tightly and let a few more tears slip down her cheeks. James sat down in the chair and they remained silent for a while, holding hands and unsure of what to say. After a few minutes, the nurse came in and pressed a syringe into her IV. She smiled warmly at James as she removed it and checked the beeping machine to the left of the bed. When James glanced back down at Elisa, she was asleep. He stood up, still holding her hand, and leaned over the bed, resting a gentle kiss on her forehead, before letting go and walking out of the hospital. James never saw Agent Elisa DePietro again.

As he approached the black Mercedes he’d taken from the office, the new phone he’d been issued chirped from his jacket pocket. He removed it midstride and answered only with, “yes.” It was Agent Black.

“We’re moving fast. Get your clothes and be at the airport in an hour. Security terminal Bravo.” He hung up before James could respond. Good ol’ Deep Throat, James mused in his head, but with more frustration than humor. James sat in the driver’s seat of the car and closed his eyes, visions of the night before running through his head. There was no way he could have seen what happened to DePietro coming, but there had been a dozen things he could have done to change it if he had. If only he’d moved faster, or shot the man as he ran. If only he hadn’t made eye contact with the man Agent Black had killed in the restaurant. James knew it wasn’t his fault she’d ended up where she was, but that didn’t stop him from wishing he’d done something differently, anything at all. So many people were dead, so many lives were ruined, and somewhere in the middle of it all was James. Agent Black had called it the weight of the lives that were lost he carried around with him, keeping him sick to his stomach and on the verge of tears. She wasn’t dead, but the weight of the life she could have had was as present as any other, and James was beginning to wonder how much longer he could carry this load. Until the end, he thought to himself. I’ll carry it until the end.

James returned to this hotel room and pulled his private laptop out from the closet. Once it booted up and connected to the wireless internet, he logged into the e-mail account he had set up to communicate with Eve. There was still no response to his message. He considered that she’d forgotten the username or password, but couldn’t shake the fear that she’d simply moved on. He saved another draft message saying only, “moving again. Will contact soon,” before packing his things.

A half hour later, James was back at the airport he’d arrived in only a few days prior. He had his luggage, though he’d traded one unsalvageable suit for the two nips of vodka the hotel staff had restocked in his mini-fridge. The gate opened as he pulled up to it with the Mercedes. Either it had a sensor or there was someone controlling it that he couldn’t see, both seemed equally possible, and he pulled through and parked it alongside the two others that were already there. The door to the hangar opened just ahead of him and as he got out of the car, he could make out Agent Black holding it open. He didn’t want to keep him waiting, so he trotted over in a reasonable facsimile of a jog and stepped through. On the other side of the door was a private jet with the door open and two men carrying bags up the stairs into the plane.

“Where are we going?” James asked Agent Black.

“New York. Bring your bags over here and they’ll get them onboard.” He replied between sips of coffee in a paper cup. James returned to the car, grabbed his bags and left the keys on the front seat for the next driver.

Once they were in the air, Agent Black briefed James on what they’d found in the man’s apartment: sufficient equipment to make believable Canadian passports, as well as the remains of a few failed attempts combined with the plane ticket James had found on the man had been enough to warrant putting New York on “high alert” though exactly what “high alert” entailed was beyond James. A search of the computer’s web history and e-mails indicated that the man was to meet another contact in New York on the subway that night. Their hurry suddenly made a lot of sense.

“We’ve already got boots on the ground in the subway, but only a handful,” Agent Black transitioned into explaining the plan for New York, “We don’t want to let our presence be known and spook ‘em.” James nodded, recognizing that there was little his limited experience could provide the planning of the operation. Instead, he leaned back into the plush leather of his chair and looked out the window. They were only an hour or so into what he figured would probably be a six hour flight; he had plenty of time to day dream.

“I know that look, James. There’s nothing you could have done.” Agent Black consoled him.

“How many times can one person hear that before it stops being true?” James asked out the window. His eyes glazed over a bit as his mind drifted like a row boat, lost in a sea of death and destruction he should have prevented.

“Agent DePietro worked for the agency, she got the same training that you did, the same warnings. She knew exactly what she was getting into,” he continued despite James’ clear disinterest in feeling better.

“Knowing it could happen doesn’t make it all right when it does,” James looked at Agent Black angrily, disgusted that he could be so nonchalant about the woman they’d shared a table with just the night before, “How do you expect this all to end for you?”

“I know exactly how it ends, James. I’ve been in the game long enough to see the world for what it really is. I see death every day, and every time I’m there, every life I watch end brings it closer. You see what happened to DePietro like it was some kind of tragedy… I just see it for what it really is.” Agent Black leaned back into his own chair now, a smug look on his face.

“And what’s that?” James was glaring at the older man now.

“An inevitability, James. All of our stories end sooner or later.” Agent Black busied his hands opening a new pack of cigarettes. James looked back out the window, registering his words. He hated to admit that there was a logic to what Black had to say. “The question is, how do you expect this all to end for you?” James looked back at the man, surprised by the question. He had, of course, considered in passing that he could die in this line of work, but it had never really seemed like a real concern.

“If I ended up like DePietro…” James started.

“You’d be damned lucky,” Agent Black interrupted as he lit his Marlboro, “she got out alive. That’s better than most. You think about that.” James wondered if the old man was right. How many men in James’ position went on to raise families, work boring office jobs and visit their in-laws on the weekends? James stood up from his seat and walked back toward the small kitchenette in the cabin of the plane. He opened one of the latched cupboards to find a stock of nips and sodas not unlike the one in his hotel room. He grabbed two small bottles of Absolut and a can of Canada Dry ginger ale and placed them on the counter in front of him.

“You making a drink?” Agent Black called over to him, “There any scotch in there?”

“Coming right up,” James half muttered as he pulled two more small bottles out of the small refrigerator. He poured their contents into a plastic cup, then proceeded to mix his own.

“You know what your problem is?” Agent Black spoke as he took the cup of scotch from James, “You still think in terms of words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and ‘fair.’ Those things aren’t real… they’re worse than that; they’re a bunch of made up crap.”

“Blowing up a cruise ship was wrong, shooting DePietro was wrong,” James began to list but Agent Black put his hand up to stop him as he took a long sip of his drink.

“Says who? Of course we think it’s wrong, they were our people that were killed.” Agent Black spoke after a satisfied exhale.

“So what then? You’re commiserating with the enemy?” James’ glare had returned, but the vodka had softened it.

“Such a simple world view,” Agent Black spoke into his scotch as though it too was a part of this conversation, and that it was in agreement with him, “did you know chimps go to war?”

“Excuse me?” James was a bit surprised by the change in topic.

“Chimpanzees. They have tribes and they go to war with other tribes over things like hunting grounds.” Agent Black elaborated, but didn’t explain why he’d brought them up.

“I thought humans were the only animals that waged war?” James decided to bite at the old man’s conversational fishing line.

“That’s just hippie bullshit they put on bumper stickers. In the real world, chimps fight over resources just like we do: food, sex, power. Ya know, sometimes they’ll even eat the babies of the defeated tribe in front of them as a show of dominance. They end bloodlines to make sure their young won’t have to fight the same fight again.” He took another sip of his scotch.

“And we’re just like chimps?” James was beginning to see where this was going.

“Oh, we’re different,” he snubbed out his cigarette, “we’ve been blessed with self-delusion. See, when cavemen started forming tribes, they acted just like the chimps: killing each other for land, raping other tribe’s women, I bet some of them even ate the young of their competitors.”

“But then we changed, we evolved,” James interjected.

“No… we didn’t. See, humans have been around for two hundred thousand years or so, but our idea of civilization has only existed for about ten thousand. What does that tell you?”

“That we’ve come pretty far in a short amount of time?”

“That for the vast majority of human history we hunted, gathered and murdered for the safety and well-being of our tribe. Chimps don’t worry that killing another tribe’s young is wrong and neither did we for the vast majority of our race’s existence. Right and wrong is a modern myth, like civilized society and Bigfoot.”

“Society is a myth?” James cracked a smile at such an inane accusation.

“Civilized society is the best kind of lie. It keeps us following traffic laws and helps us feel a moral outrage when another tribe fails to adhere to the rules we made up, but it does something else too.”

“And what’s that?” James was interested to hear where this was all going.

“It helps us build more lies. Lies like the idea that humanity is somehow different, somehow better than the rest of the animals. Civilized society only works so long as there are people like you and me, lurking in the shadows, living in the wild where humanity is only what it really is: tribes competing for resources and power.” The old man leaned forward and looked into James’ eyes with intensity.

“So this is the true nature of things? All these people dying, all these lives ruined, and you think this is normal?” James was growing offended by Agent Black’s philosophy.

“It is the true nature of things… the sooner you figure that out, the easier this all becomes.” He leaned back into his chair and finished off his scotch. James decided not to prod him any further, and instead returned to looking out the window. He had intended to simply forget about the conversation, but something about it stuck with him. In some ways, James wondered if Agent Black was right. Maybe this kill or be killed world of highly trained operatives and stakes too high to comprehend wasn’t so unusual. Maybe these men and women who lied for a living were the only ones truly being honest with themselves. Something inside him had wanted to kill the man that shot DePietro. It made James a bit sick to his stomach, but he realized that there was a part of him that agreed with the cynical old bastard.

“Agent Black’s not your name,” he finally interrupted the silence by announcing an all but obvious observation that James made when the older agent had dubbed him “Agent White” in front of the police.

“I never said it was,” the man didn’t bother to look in James’ direction when he replied.

“So what is it?” James really wanted to know.

“What does it matter?” The man exhaled slowly as he spoke, eyeing his empty cup and seemingly judging whether or not it was worth standing to get a refill.

“I’d like to know what to call you,” James offered what seemed like a good enough reason.

“Black’ll do fine.” He sighed with closed eyes. James took that to mean the conversation was over. That was fine enough with him. James leaned his head on the side of the plane, his view out the window but his mind somewhere else. It had only been a week or so since he’d seen Eve; he wasn’t totally sure of the date, but chances were good that it was already Christmas. He wondered if she was spending it alone on Roatan or if she returned to the States. He wondered if she was spending it with her boyfriend, cuddled up on the couch and thinking of ways to not think about him. He also wondered which would be better.

In that moment, high above the Atlantic Ocean with an un-named assassin and an empty glass, James decided that the world wasn’t what Agent Black said it was. Eve was his proof. She was everything he saw worth saving in the world: naïve, intelligent and beautiful. James was somewhere amidst the twilight of his career in espionage, he decided, and if she would have him, Eve would be the dawn of a new life. If she hadn’t decided to move on, if she still wanted to be with him, James would trade his tailored suits and PP9 in for blue jeans and date nights. Even if Black was right, even if that world was just a false construct of society’s communal imagination, even if the world needed men and women like them to pull triggers and smile in the face of tragedy, James wouldn’t be one of them. Not so long as there were people like Eve in the world. James could learn to be a lover and leave the fight behind him. James could be a normal man again.