Song: Poe - "Angry Johnny"
The fragrance of homemade marinara sauce hung in the air while I finished wiping down the counters of the now spotless kitchen. After asking if I could crash at her place for the next few days, Georgia chided me for asking in the first place before she slid her spare key to me and told me she'd be home by six.
Georgia Kaplan had been with the Bureau for nearly twenty years. She was one of the few people I trusted with my real name, as well as most of the details of my past. Her reputation was one of a fiercely protective hardass in the field and a loyal friend and mentor to her colleagues. I was someone lucky enough to see both, and it was because of that she was one of my closest friends.
After several months of hardly any contact, I was looking forward to catching up and talking to her about my thoughts of retirement. Barton might claim he was framing his concerns as a parent, but he was still my boss and it was his job to keep me on the payroll. Georgia had no such agenda. Now that Jackson was no longer a distraction, the issues that had been pushed to the back of my mind started to roam free. Aside from my possible career change, there was one other lingering concern.
The rogue shooter in Prague hadn't been captured or even identified, which troubled me. I wasn't wholly comfortable with someone targeting me still on the loose, but I could hardly turn down an opportunity to finally get closer to Gio Sardi. It could be argued, and it had been on several occasions, that I was obsessed with bringing the man down. Who could blame me? Thanks to him my parents were only a memory who missed every milestone behind and in front of me.
And that was all thanks to some shithead mobster. The same shithead mobster I vowed to kill and was no closer to finding five years after Felton promised me that joining the CIA would do just that. At the realization my thoughts were becoming increasingly bitter, I shook myself mentally. I really needed to get my head clear and talk to Georgia about my career path.
It probably sounded cool to the layperson to live the life as a secret agent. Go undercover, travel to exotic places, and sometimes kill people. Dream job, right? What could go wrong?
In a word, everything.
To say working for the CIA was stressful was a gross understatement. The job included working under the constant threat that any action or error could get someone seriously injured or killed. Testifying before Congress was no walk in the park but living with the guilt that someone else suffered or perished because of your fuck up was worse. Gregor Janus, the officer killed in Prague wasn't due to an error on my part, but it weighed on me.
Death was part of the job, but as a sniper I was more often the dealer than the savior. It sounded callous, but it all depended on the will of the person or committee who ordered me to pull the trigger. That wasn't to say everyone I saved was a good person or vice versa. Unfortunately, that was how the world worked.
The phone rang, bringing me out of my reverie. I picked up the receiver from the kitchen wall. "Kaplan residence."
"Hey, I should be there in about an hour," Georgia's cheerful voice beamed through the line. "Should I grab anything on the way for dinner?"
"Maybe some garlic bread?"
"I'll see what they have at the store. How are you doing?"
"Just a lot on my mind."
"Well, let's see what you, me, and a bottle of wine can get through after dinner. I'll see you soon."
I hung up the phone and thought of retirement as I stared out the kitchen window. I'd worked for the CIA for nearly five years but worked for both agencies as "The Asset", straddling the line between the FBI and the CIA, for a little over four. It didn't seem like a long time, and it wasn't based on most people's career paths. Most people, however, didn't have a continuous supply of deception, death and destruction as parts of their job.
How the hell did I wind up on such a strange path? According to Felton, I was made for it. The night my parents were killed I ran to his house after witnessing my father's murder. While he dealt with their estate and won legal custody of me in court, I immersed myself in my schoolwork to cope with the trauma and loss. Since nobody knew if I was still a target, he made it his mission to ensure I was able to defend myself. The first few years in his care were spent enrolled in martial arts training and countless self-defense classes.
Living with a CIA officer who knew plenty of people in law enforcement, I saw plenty of guns. It wasn't until I was eleven, however, that he took me to a shooting range for the first time. His expectations were low when he placed the pistol in my hand; I didn't even know how to load the damn thing. He'd simply motioned toward the target and told me to fire. Nobody expected that I'd empty the entire clip with deadly accuracy.
After that, my after-school activities changed from gymnastics and scouting to more advanced self-defense classes, weapons training, and other activities designed to teach me how to defend myself and survive extreme circumstances. I was too young to join any ROTC program, but Felton saw to it that several of my instructors were former military members familiar with the curriculum. By the age of sixteen, both the Army and Marines were clamoring for me to enlist as soon as I was old enough.
I chose the Marines and left for basic training barely three months after receiving my doctorate. Felton boasted to anyone who would listen that I chose the Corps because they were the best of the best, but the truth was I sought the physically and mentally grueling training as an escape. No longer able to lose myself in schoolwork to cope, I buried myself in the severity of basic training.
After my first sharpshooting assessment, I was fast tracked into Scout Sniper School. On the first day my drill sergeant told me my spot in the class was bought and paid for by Felton and that my days of buying favors and easy rewards was over. With a shrug, I told him I wasn't in the business of easy and when I graduated in the top five, he'd owe me an apology. I never said I wasn't an arrogant pain in the ass at times.
For the next thirteen weeks, I envisioned the faceless assholes who killed my family. Every order bellowed was taken without question or complaint. All that mattered was becoming the best sniper that grouchy old bastard ever saw. After a damn near perfect score on my final exam, an endurance test performed in the dead of night, I graduated at the top of my class.
The cranky bastard pulled me aside after the ceremony and not only apologized, he shared a picture of himself at his own graduation and told me I'd blown all his records out of the water. He wished me luck, ordered me to stay safe during my deployment, and told me not to lose my humanity. At the time I didn't give that last bit of advice much thought. I'd spent three months training to view a target as nothing more than something to be eliminated. Awash with the emotional high of victory, I headed to Iraq.
Within a week, his words became a desperate quest to find even the tiniest shred of humanity. No stories, lectures or courses prepared me for the hell of a war zone. The friendships forged within my platoon were a godsend, helping all of us to cope with what we saw and experienced daily. However, the voice of my moral compass that screamed about the brutality we committed in the name of our country never quieted.
I took the cynical approach and reminded myself I was nothing more than a pawn in a bigger picture, a means to an end. People with more stars on their uniforms and zeros in their paychecks sat in a room and decided where to send their pawns to perform the job the military complex trained us to do. It was cold comfort on those nights spent watching for insurgents hell bent on killing us, but it provided enough perspective when the chaos of the life made it damn near impossible to focus on anything else.
I was recovering from an IED attack when Felton strolled into my hospital room in Germany and told me I was coming home. Within two years I had training certificates from both the CIA and FBI. I'd barely gotten home from my Bureau graduation ceremony when leaders of both agencies met in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, also known as a SCIF, to sign a top-secret agreement. From that day forward, I was known as the Asset.
According to Felton, the idea of one agent switching between the two organizations hadn't been new. A few years earlier, a former Army sniper was recruited and completed the training. Caught up in a bureaucratic pissing contest, he remained an official CIA employee who completed a handful of missions for the Bureau while on unpaid vacations. The rest of the man's story was nothing more than rumor since everyone refused to speak of him.
The story most often told wreaked of cliché; he got too involved in a case and fell for a mobster's daughter. Drugs, gambling, and debt followed, of course, as well as a horrible night where he the daughter was killed, and he was almost outed as an agent. Forced into multiple stints in rehab, he was later fired. The details always varied depending on the storyteller, but he served as a failed experiment and everyone went back to the drawing board.
The Asset program that recruited me came with an exhaustive list of rules and protocols. No tattoos, piercings, or identifying marks. After every mission, foreign or domestic, a minimum of two weeks was required as a "cool down" period. My location was always known by at least one member of both agencies, including during my forced vacations. And if all of that wasn't enough to make it the funnest job ever, I had to randomly pee in a cup and submit to regular psych evaluations every few months.
While it wasn't forbidden, friendships and relationships with people outside of the intelligence community were heavily discouraged. That meant very few friends and you could forget about having any kind of normal love life. The few dates I had been on during my lifetime had been hellish thanks to Felton and his background checks. Jackson had been the only one I'd managed to keep under the radar. The secrecy was fun in the beginning, but it still made for too many risks and too few rewards. All parts a life I wasn't sure I wanted to live anymore.
My train of thought was once again interrupted by the ringing of the kitchen phone. Thinking it was Georgia, I smiled and grabbed the receiver. "Larissa Donovan!" a loud voice snarled before I could answer.
"Felton Lynch," I shot back, lowering my voice to mimic his angry tone.
"Barton Kane just called and had some interesting information for me. About your retirement."
"Well, that's news to me since I'm not retiring."
"How was your afternoon with Officer Michaels? Anything I should know about there?"
I clenched my jaws and bit back my first response. "Actually, he told me about some of his adventures in Russia. Not so sure you really want to hear how the rest of our time together was spent."
He let out a long sigh. "Lissa, talk to me. Are you really thinking about it?"
"I'm about to head to Portland and babysit some professor, for god's sake! Does that sound like I'm retiring? I simply mentioned it in passing to Barton and he had a complete shit fit."
"Promise me you won't make any rash decisions."
"Promise me you'll leave Jackson alone," I answered.
"Fine. I just need to know we'll talk once you know what you want to do."
"Like I said, it was an offhanded comment. I joke about shooting you at least once a week and I haven't. Not yet anyway. If and when I decide I want to retire, we'll talk."
"All right," he finally relented. "I probably could've handled this better. His call just caught me off guard. You know I want to keep you safe, so I don't like the idea of you going off the grid to hunt these bastards by yourself at all."
At the sound of the front door opening, I saw Georgia enter with a grocery bag in her hand. Thank god. "Okay, Felton, I gotta go. Dinner is ready."
"Tell Georgia I said hi," he replied, pausing. "Safe travels."
"Always."
I stared at the phone in my hand after the line clicked, thrown by his behavior, or more accurately, that he acted human for a few moments. Felton was an emotional block of ice and hearing actual emotion from him was worrisome. All concern was erased in the next second, however, when I was pulled into a tight hug.
"So nice to see you again," she greeted.
"It's been too long! How's the family?"
"Regina has her own practice in San Francisco and is doing well." Her daughter was a child psychologist.
"And David?"
"He's doing what he calls 'freelance work' while his friend finishes school. When she graduates next year, they're starting a consulting company together. I'm sure it will do well, but I wish he'd find something reliable in the meantime."
"Sadly, we kids are terrible at doing what you guys want us to do," I joked. "I was officially on Felton's shit list until just before you got here."
She pursed her lips as she opened a bottle of wine and poured us each a glass. Since she didn't work with him, her exposure had been limited the occasional nod in passing or the stories she'd heard from me. After a first sip, she lowered her glass and smiled.
"Something tells me I really want to hear the story of what you did to annoy the great Felton Lynch."
After dinner she grabbed another bottle and we moved to her living room and ridiculously comfortable couch. For the next hour, she sat in silence and let me vent about Felton, question my decision to dump Jackson, and my list of reasons for considering retirement. She expressed no judgement. Instead, she proposed certain scenarios and asked how I felt about them. After a day of emotional twists and turns, it felt good. By the time we drank our last glasses I wasn't much closer to a decision, but the conversation had given me some much-needed clarity.
Afterward, she excused herself to call her husband who was at their main house in San Diego. I headed upstairs to the guest room, pausing to look at the pictures that hung on the wall. I smiled as I gazed at the history of the Kaplan family, their large, joyful smiles stared back at me in pictures that captured so many moments in time over the years.
I studied the pictures, wondering if I could ever have a family of my own someday. I knew I could never have a family in my current life. Hell, I didn't even have a permanent home. Would my life ever be safe enough for a family? A dull sadness followed almost as soon as the question passed through my mind. Had I been hell bent on revenge for so long that I missed my chance for a family and a life in the ordinary world? I sighed and headed to the guest room to finish packing for my next, and possibly final, mission.