Far From Ordinary

by M James Murray

  Could it be that he had shot Dimitri so many times on purpose?

  His last moments would have been filled with pain and terror.

  Dick wondered if these next few minutes were going to be his last.

  Adrian opened up the passenger door.

  “Let’s go old boy. No, you need to undo your seatbelt. Just push the button. Yes, like that, just a bit harder. Good. Now stand up.”

  Dick stood on legs that felt stiff and weary. His head hurt from the car accident. His eye throbbed from his strip club brawl. He felt old.

  “Up the steps now, my boy.”

  He couldn’t for the life of him figure out why they would want to kill him inside a plane. He closed his eyes and waited for the end. Around him, the big cargo jet engines hummed at higher and higher frequencies.

  And then, just like that, they were in the air. And Dick was, as far as he could tell, alive.

  He felt the weariness of the past few days wash over him.

  He woke up to see Adrian sitting across from him. He had changed out of his blood-spattered clothes into casual wear which suited him – a crisp black tee-shirt and a pair of blue jeans.

  “You’re probably asking why right now,” he said. Dick didn’t respond, but his pale blue watery eyes nodded.

  “I am asking why as well my boy!” His smile never reached his eyes. “I did it for your sake; I’ll have you know.”

  Dick wanted to say how he would have never wanted something like that to happen on his behalf, but he couldn’t seem to form the words.

  “You see, Dimitri wasn’t quite right in the head. Prone to fits of anger and violence. He was becoming more and more unhinged. Perhaps not apparent to you, but I have known him for a long time.”

  “You’ve known him so long. And you shot him.”

  “I did. And I’m not the least bit remorseful, my boy. I have killed hundreds of people throughout my life.” His eyes narrowed, “I’ve lost count of how many, to be honest.”

  His face was wolfish.

  Predatory.

  “But, every one of them was with purpose,” Adrian said. “In my line of work, it is a necessary evil. I do detest it, but it is necessary nonetheless.”

  He wasn’t boasting about it, as far as Dick could tell. He was merely stating a fact. Dick had seen the James Bond movies. License to kill and all of that. How many people had Bond killed over the years? He felt the rumble of the jet engines through his bones and shivered.

  But those weren’t real. The people who Bond killed in the movie were just actors given lines by screenwriters and directors. They weren’t blood and sinew and hopes and dreams like Dimitri. He assumed that Dimitri had had hopes and dreams anyways. Blood and tendon and bone for sure, though. Of that he was positive. He’d seen them all spilling out on the ground.

  “Are you going to kill me?” Dick asked.

  Never ask questions that you don’t want the answer to, he heard his Mama’s voice in his ear.

  Adrian looked at him with a mask of carefully constructed wonder.

  “Of course not my boy! Why would you consider that?”

  Dick thought again of the demonic death face of Dimitri.

  “No reason.”

  “Rest assured; there was no further recourse than to dispose of Dimitri. Remember, our mission is one that cannot fail. Dimitri had become a liability to the task, more detrimental than useful. As he became more and more unhinged, he became more unpredictable.

  His outburst at that gentlemen’s establishment was the breaking point, my boy. It could have easily led to the wrong people finding us.”

  Dick remembered Dimitri’s breath, how it had always smelled of vodka. He remembered the hate in his eyes as well. He felt the big welt over his eyes and gasped when he touched the bruises.

  More than anything he wanted to believe the words which Adrian was saying.

  “I don’t want to end up like him,” Dick said.

  “Nor do I my boy. You have done us a great favor. Because of your involvement, we have succeeded. That requires a celebration! Not a single soul on this planet should mourn Dimitri. He doesn’t deserve such a magnanimous and novel fate. Don’t you agree?”

  Adrian was smiling; his brown eyes calm and laser-focused on Dick.

  “…Yes, of course.” Dick tried to smile but couldn’t manage more than a pitiful half smirk. He understood what Adrian was saying, he thought, but his heart was still heavy.

  “Then let us celebrate and toast to successes and new friendships!” Adrian pulled a bottle from his bag.

  New friendships. Dick liked the sound of that. Dick took a deep breath to calm his nerves and ran his hands through his coarse brown hair.

  It had been easy for him to compartmentalize the car crash where he’d seen Adrian shoot the pursuing vehicle with mechanical precision. Brown and Nieminen had been the bad guys after all, right?

  Dimitri had been an ally. Or, so Dick had thought. Who could forget the was that Dimitri had looked at him, though, his small, beady eyes filled with an unintelligent rage.

  Dick shuddered and looked over at the British operative, who was smoothing his mustache and opening the bottle of rum, removing the cork with a pop.

  The blonde man took a deep swig, and then passed the bottle to Dick.

  “Hey, this is really good!”

  “It better be, my boy. It is worth enough. This is Rhum Clement 1952. The bottle itself is valued at over one thousand dollars.”

  Dick Mitey didn’t drink alcohol very often – his mama had ingrained that in him early enough by telling him stories about his alcoholic father, but even she used to have a glass of merlot with dinner now and then.

  Dick himself enjoyed the occasional glass of coke with whiskey, but even that was diluted to the point where he couldn’t taste any of the alcohol.

  This rum, on the other hand, almost tasted like candy. It was sweet and lingered on the tongue nicely as though it was begging you to have some more.

  They shared the bottle back and forth until it was mostly empty. Adrian was in a festive mood, sharing stories from his time in the United Kingdom Special Forces in his young adulthood and making Dick laugh with hilarious anecdotes that he swore were true.

  “It wasn’t until the third train stop that he’d realized that he’d left all his knickers behind,” he laughed musically. “And it was only because his wife called every stop to tell them to pass the message along.”

  So every time the train stopped an attendant would come through. “Nigel, are you knickers clean?” Haha!”

  That had made Dick laugh. The alcohol had dulled his sensibilities. He was almost starting to feel normal. All the memories of Dimitri’s brains spread across the cold concrete floor of the warehouse were gone, banished to the back of his mind.

  “It’s a storied tradition for me,” Adrian said some hours later, draining the last of the rum, “to finish every successful mission with a bottle of Rhum Clement 1952.”

  “Doesn’t that get expensive over time, though?” Dick wondered how much someone like Adrian made. It seemed rude to ask, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “That’s the best bloody part! It’s expensed out. My fees always include a bottle of Clement.” He laughed, but then he looked down and smiled sadly. “It always reminds me of my brothers in arms. Those that weren’t so lucky as I. I may have helped my fair share of folks find their way to the next world, but I’ll never forget them.”

  He placed the bottle down on the studded metal floor with a clink. The engine’s omnipresent roar filled the silence in the cabin.

  “Well,” he said after a long spell, “Let’s not dwell on that old boy.”

  He stroked his blonde mustache and smiled, and Dick could almost see him will all his emotions away. There was no trace of sadness in his voice or his face any longer.

  “Life must have been difficult for you growing up, Dick Mitey.”

  Dick could feel how rosy his cheeks were from the rum. He doubted that he’
d ever been this drunk before.

  “I wish that I had been named anything else. I would have taken Angus any day of the week. I’m Scottish on my mother’s side, I think.”

  Adrian didn’t say anything and waited for Dick to continue. The massive engines of the plane roared around them.

  “People would bully me. Because of how I look, or my name or twenty other things that I don’t even know about. It never seemed fair to me, that people would just judge others based on things so small and simple that aren’t under their control. They think I’m not smart enough to notice. And maybe I’m not all the time, but I can tell.”

  Dick squirmed in his seat. He felt uncomfortable but also, looking into Adrian’s eyes, he didn’t feel judged for who he was.

  “Why not start over? Change cities, change your name. It’s possible to do, my boy.”

  Dick considered this for a long moment before answering. He’d had the same conversation with himself just the day before.

  Back then he’d been shamed by Delilah and the large bouncer in the strip club. He had wanted nothing more than to run and put his head in the sand and forget that any of this had ever happened.

  He sighed. He knew the answer – he’d known it all along even, although he often wished that things could be different.

  “Because it’s still me, you know? I could run away, but I’d know that it would all be the same. Same person, different city. Same mean people. They’re everywhere, you know. Changing my name won’t do anything.” Dick looked at his reflection in the dark window of the plane. “I’d still have these stupid ears and this stupid nose.” He looked at Adrian. “I’d still look like I was just released from the hospital for some disease or something.”

  The roar of the engines filled the silence in the cabin once again.

  “People like you have everything. Everything, you know? People like me, well, we should all just stay home.” Dick wiped a tear away from his face. He’d been crying, and he hadn’t even realized it.

  “Perhaps so, Dick Mitey,” Adrian started slowly, “perhaps so. But, you know, how you think dictates the result. You’ve spent your whole life thinking you were mediocre. Are you surprised that you are? Sometimes, my boy, it’s not the hand that you were dealt that matters. It’s how you play the cards.”

  Dick wasn’t sure that Adrian’s answer helped at all. People never truly understand how each other feel. How could you? Everybody experiences different things, and those things shape how you view life.

  It was all well and good for Adrian to say something like that, but they were just words. They didn’t have meaning. They didn’t shield him from the cruel words of other people.

  The same things that drew Dick to Adrian – his effortless charisma, his way with words and his commanding presence were the exact things which prevented him from understanding how Dick felt.

  Adrian checked his watch.

  “It would be best to get some more rest now my boy if you can. We’re still about five hours away. You’ll want to refresh yourself for our meeting with Abelard.”

  With that, Adrian walked away, moved a few crates to make a bed and went to sleep.

  “Who the hell is Abelard?” He asked himself.

  He wondered if he wanted to know.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sarah Nieminen sat down in a comfy office chair in the small CIA bureau in Houston, Texas and massaged her aching muscles.

  “You’re a long way from home now, Yooper,” she said to herself.

  Yoopers were residents of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Sarah had tried for years to break herself of all things related to her hometown. That ridiculous way of speech, for instance. Yoopers possessed unique accents which were heavily influenced by the Finnish population which had settled there.

  She’d broken herself of that years ago, around the time when she severed all connections to her hometown.

  Her father was a Yooper at heart. It would have caused him to fly into a rage if he ever discovered that she lost touch with her roots, which was fine by her.

  They had finally released her from the hospital after a long talk with the doctor and a commitment to go back in a few days for a check-up. Sarah made the promise with a light heart, knowing that she wouldn’t go back.

  Not for a check-up, anyway. Connor Browne was still in the hospital in stable condition. She hadn’t breathed a sigh of relief quite yet though – Connor’s worse days might be behind him, but there was still a long road to recovery in front of him.

  She’d visited him briefly before she had left, and had been pleasantly surprised to find him awake and responsive.

  “It’s nothing,” he barked in his gruff baritone, his massive, muscular frame spilling out the edges of the hospital bed. “I’ll be running marathons by the end of the week, I’m sure.”

  Sarah had shared a laugh with him; she was worried that she might cry if she didn’t.

  She found herself back at work now despite doctor’s orders to take some time off. The aches from the crash were still there; she felt them every time she moved. But, like most dedicated agents, she knew that some things were more important than doctor’s orders.

  The way she saw it she was either going to drive herself crazy at home or come to work and make a difference.

  She knew that some of her peers were blaming her for Browne’s injuries. They all knew the risks associated with the CIA, but she’d heard the whispers. If she’d been a better driver, or, if she’d let Connor drive then there wouldn’t have been a crash at all.

  Just a commendation for a job well done and valuable bragging rights over Rico and Walker. Suspects acquired and in custody.

  The tone at work had been much more subdued than usual. Mo Al-Azhar had come to check on her, as she knew he would, but that was all. Sarah felt alienated and alone in the boys club of the CIA.

  But, to their credit, to a person, none of them told her to go home. They knew. And they weren’t going to get in her way.

  So she had scoured databases looking for anything which would give her a lead to go on. The blonde man had proven to be an enigma and the other, Dimitri Khuldov, had disappeared off the map. She deduced that he must have entered the country with a fake passport.

  She made a mental note to cross-reference the blurry face picture she’d been able to pull from a traffic camera with the records that the border service kept. She wasn’t expecting much, but there was always the possibility of a slip-up on the part of her target.

  The techs at the field office could work magic, given enough time and resources after all.

  The real enigma was that of Dick Mitey. It wasn’t that he appeared to be a ghost in the system like his blonde friend, it was that he seemed to be completely and utterly normal. For the most part, of course.

  He’d lived in Houston his entire time, had never left the country and had a pristine record, barring a few traffic tickets. Sarah had looked for hours to find some connection which would tie Dick to a criminal organization, or any other country.

  Even a search of his apartment had yielded nothing out of the ordinary. No television, sparsely stocked cupboards, a lot of comic books.

  All of the things they had found screamed towards a bachelor without a lot of money living alone. None of it even hinted towards possible criminal connections.

  So far she’d found nothing on Dick Mitey, and was on the verge of banging her head on the console over and over again.

  Sarah thought back to that fateful evening. Could that anonymous tip have come from Khuldov? But that made no sense – why sneak into the country to spoil your own op?

  She had the autopsy report from the first victim on her desk. Jane Dempsey. It had revealed foul play– traces of poisonous cyanide were in her system.

  She wasn’t their intended target. She wasn’t supposed to die.

  She might have fucked up, but Walker and Rico royally shit the bed on this one. They should have seen that, anticipated that the assassination wasn’t com
ing a gun but from a pill.

  Once the server had completed the background check, Sarah would have some more detail.

  One small saving grace was that the media hadn’t put two and two together yet. To them, it was just a story, and the socialite was much more interesting to them than a mysterious German man.

  Sarah shook her head.

  “He leaves the party early, and we get a phone call not even a few hours later about a large man dead in the sewers,” she narrowed her eyes.