The Model Spy

Chapter 1 - Three Strikes

They didn't usually go so far away. The West Coast was their specialty. Their cases weren't normally so serious, either. They shadowed the governor on his visit to San Francisco and my mom helped catch a man stalking that reality star and her famous sisters. It was the little jobs that got passed down to my parents, when the people back in Langley were too busy with terrorists and cyber attacks and internal scandals involving covert love affairs with reporters.

I had been my parents' sidekick for as long as I could remember. By the time I was three, I knew not to ever tell anyone what my parents really did. When I was ten, my dad was already teaching me the proper way to use a stun gun and Taser. For my sixteenth birthday, I didn't get a car, but I got a suitcase of customized gadgets, like miniscule cameras and fake IDs and wireless hearing devises.

I didn't so much as earn the job as inherit it. That was what happened when your parents were coveted agents during the final years of the Cold War. Had my dad been a dentist and my mom a bank teller, or something normal and lackluster like that, I don't think the CIA would have ever wanted me. But if my parents did have different jobs, I don't even think the CIA would have been a probable career opportunity in the first place.

You see, I wasn't exactly spy material.

My parents learned all too quickly that they could give up on their dreams of the Porter Family being a triple threat to terrorists and bad guys all around the world. I inherited my mom's eyes and my dad's nose, but somewhere in the gene pool, I had missed out on the freaky-smart intelligence and physical strength. All of my parents' talents got lost in a void somewhere, probably along with those eight inches I hadn't grown since fourth grade. I was clumsy and awkward and I could barely listen to a lecture in school, let alone directions on how to calmly deactivate a bomb in a time of crisis.

So I was a decoy. I was the third-wheel on a twisted date. I tagged along on all of my parents missions because no one anticipated two spies travelling around with their kid. Like our last mission, when a chemist put poison in a northern California town's water system. I came along as the decoy. No one expected anything out of the ordinary when a family of three went on a vacation to a small lake. I was the lookout when they broke into government offices. I was the person giving signals to the police waiting to make an arrest. I was the cute, short, girl who looked about eleven years old that possible suspects never thought twice about giving information too.

Ironically, it was me who made my parents look normal, because I looked normal. Too bad I didn't feel normal.

When the call from Langley ordered my parents to Rio, it was a big surprise. My parents hadn't worked in conjunction with the big branch since I was born. The timing since their last mission with Langley probably isn't a coincidence. I knew from an early age that I was the reason they weren't getting the big jobs. I was a security threat in many ways. Those big shots in Virginia probably worried one mistake on my end could singlehandedly bring down the entire United States' intelligence network. And I didn't blame them.

So it wasn't that big of a surprise when Langley asked but one thing of my parents: not to bring me.

That request almost shut the whole job down. My parents couldn't think of doing a job without me. In a weird way, our missions had become family traditions, almost like family vacations. Our missions were messy and there was fighting and sometimes one of us almost died. But after all that, we always did it all over again.

But what Langley didn't know was that they were helping me succeed in my own private mission. I wanted to stay home. Maybe if I stayed home and stayed in school for more than a few days, I could really be the girl I had before always pretended to be. I didn't know what it was like to hang out with friends on a Friday night or eat dinner in a diner after a football game or skip school with girls to go to the beach. I couldn't talk on the phone without it being tapped by the government and every single date I had ever managed to go on usually ended early because my dad followed us in a dark SUV with tinted windows. Just in case, he always said. Like he was afraid the boy I had been out with was the son of a mob member or something. I mean, that did happen once. But nevertheless, it's embarrassing.