I Am the Mission

by Allen Zadoff

  The machine clicks and whirs as the scanner passes over me from head to toe, one full scan. I prepare to get up, when Dr. Acosta says, “Just another minute, please.”

  The scanner passes up my body again, this time stopping at chest level.

  I feel a surge of warmth in the area beneath the scar on my chest. It’s followed by a wave of dizziness.

  “I’m feeling a little light-headed,” I say.

  “We took a lot of blood earlier,” Dr. Acosta says. “It’s not out of the ordinary.”

  The sensation of heat beneath my scar increases almost to the point of being painful, and then suddenly it’s gone.

  “Better now?” Dr. Acosta says through the speaker.

  “Much,” I say.

  “A few more seconds—”

  The machine whirs to a stop, the assembly moving up over my head and away from my body.

  I take a deep breath and glance through the window.

  Father is gone.

  “We’re done,” Dr. Acosta says.

  I rub the area over my scar.

  “Can I get my lollipop now?” I say.

  “Darn, we ran out,” Dr. Acosta says. “I promise I’ll get you one next time.”

  “I’m very disappointed, Doc.”

  “Life is filled with disappointment,” she says. “Rest there for a few moments and someone will be in to get you.”

  I WAIT FOR THE RESULTS IN A NEARBY EXAMINATION ROOM.

  Twenty minutes go by before Dr. Acosta comes in. She seems more energetic than before, her hair freshly combed, her cheeks ruddy with blush.

  “Excellent news,” she says. “You’re approved for assignment.”

  “Anything I need to be concerned about?”

  “Father will tell you everything you need to know.”

  “Father’s not a doctor,” I say.

  I turn on the charm, giving her a warm smile. My intuition is telling me I need to see the results of the scan. My hand unconsciously rises to my chest, my finger probing the scar there. I purposefully put my hand back by my side.

  “He’s not a doctor,” Acosta says, “but rest assured he understands the information I share with him.”

  “I have no doubt,” I say. “But I’m thinking a peek at the results would be helpful. I’m a raw data man.”

  She studies me for a long moment.

  “A peek at the results isn’t possible,” she says. “But there’s something else we should do before you go.”

  She begins to unbutton her lab coat. It takes a moment to understand what I’m seeing. Then she unbuttons the top button of her blouse and there’s no doubt of what I’m seeing.

  “Is this part of the physical?” I say.

  “In a manner of speaking. Let’s just say it’s a component of my professional duties.”

  “Father’s idea?”

  She shakes her head. “Mother thought you needed some R&R.”

  She undoes the remaining buttons of her blouse, revealing a pink lace push-up bra beneath.

  “Nice of Mother to think of me.”

  “Forget about Mother,” she says. “You’ve got more interesting things to focus on.”

  A hint of perfume rises from her cleavage as she reaches for me.

  We kiss. Her lips are soft and warm, wet with some gloss she must have applied before she came back into the room. I think about what’s going to happen, the pleasure and possibility of it.

  Then I think of something else.

  I put a hand on her shoulder to stop her.

  “What’s wrong?” she says.

  My last mission is in my head. The things that happened in New York.

  “I can’t,” I say.

  “Can’t?”

  “I don’t want to. Not now.”

  She searches my eyes for meaning, but I don’t show her any. After a moment she steps back. I suspect this will be included in her report. Mother and Father will wonder about it, but I’ll deal with that when the time comes.

  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the sentiment,” I say.

  “There’s no sentiment here. This is strictly professional, which incidentally doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”

  She hesitates for a moment, perhaps giving me another chance. I don’t take it.

  She sighs, tucking in her blouse as she walks to the door.

  “Maybe another time,” she says.

  “I wouldn’t rule it out,” I say.

  She smiles at me and I smile back. I consider changing my mind, but I don’t. Better to focus on the mission at hand. Everything is easier when I’m on assignment.

  She turns before going out. “Good luck with everything,” she says.

  “I don’t need luck.”

  “I know you don’t,” she says. “But it’s what normal people say to each other.”

  I’m not a normal person.

  That’s what I think, but I don’t say it.

  She opens the door to find Father waiting. She nods once, hands him my medical chart, and continues on her way. Father comes into the room and closes the door behind him.

  “Did you enjoy your visit to the doctor?” he says.

  “I was too distracted to enjoy it.”

  He looks at me, concerned.

  “The assignment,” I say. “I’d like to get started as soon as possible.”

  “I can understand that,” he says.

  “You saw my test results?”

  “All positive. Dr. Acosta has cleared you for assignment.”

  I pick up my shirt, but before I can put it on, Father steps forward to examine the knife scar on my pec. “This has healed nicely,” he says.

  I glance at the scar. I think of Samara asking about it before we made love in New York.

  “It’s an identifier,” I say to Father. “A vulnerability.”

  “We’ve thought about that.”

  “I’d like it gone.”

  Father nods. “We’ll schedule a plastic surgery in the near future. We’ll cover it up forever.”

  “Good.”

  “But not now. Now we need you back in the field.”

  “That’s what I need, too,” I say.

  “Then it’s time to begin,” he says.

  Father walks over to an IV infusion pump, the kind commonly found in any hospital. What happens next is not common. He opens a camouflaged plastic port on the side of the device and out telescopes a small antenna. He then programs a code into the pump. I hear an electronic click and a blue light begins pulsing in the center of the device.

  “What’s it doing?” I ask.

  “We call it an MSRR—mobile safe room relay. Mobile because we can camouflage it inside other devices and move it as needed. A safe room because all signals into or out of this room are now blocked. It uses active noise control technology to feedback on whatever sound is generated in the room, effectively canceling it out. We are, for all intents and purposes, in a comms black hole.”

  No comms means no communications of any kind.

  “This would be great for the bathroom,” I say. “Total privacy.”

  “Haven’t used it for that,” Father says with a smile, “but thanks for the suggestion.”

  He takes an iPad out of his bag and puts it on the counter in front of us.

  He says, “While the MSRR blocks all external signals, it also provides us with secure digital-satellite uplink.”

  “Why do we need all this?” I say.

  “Because we’re going to finish your briefing now,” Father says.

  “We?”

  Father performs a special finger gesture on the surface of the iPad, a version of the gesture I use on my iPhones. All of our digital devices in The Program have covert operating systems that run parallel to the system on the surface.

  A moment later a window opens on the iPad screen.

  It’s Mother.

  She’s sitting in an office somewhere. She looks at me on the screen, a digital earpiece glowing on the side of
her head.

  My back stiffens, my body automatically shifting to attention, the posture of a soldier in front of his superior.

  “Your father tells me you are well,” Mother says.

  “I am,” I say.

  “I was worried when we didn’t hear from you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “It won’t happen again.”

  “You are so valuable to us,” Mother says. “To me.”

  Valuable. Possessions are valuable, not people. But I understand what Mother means. I am a soldier, an asset to The Program. And in her own way, I believe Mother cares about me. After all, she took me under her wing and trained me to become the person I am today. She gave my life a new purpose after my father was killed.

  The part we have never discussed: It was likely she who ordered the killing in the first place.

  “Father brought you up to speed?” Mother says.

  “In part,” I say.

  Mother’s image is replaced by a series of photos on the screen. I see a tall, intense man with a shaved head, first in a series of military service photos, later as an older man in what appear to be surveillance photos taken from a distance with a telephoto lens.

  “This is Eugene Moore,” Mother says.

  “We don’t have many recent photos,” Father adds. “Moore has become ever more paranoid and isolationist over time. He rarely leaves Camp Liberty.”

  Next I see photos of a young man and woman. The boy has closely cropped brown hair, the girl long red hair and freckles with a beautiful tomboy quality. I note familiar facial characteristics in both of them.

  “Moore has two children,” Father says. “A son named Lee who is your age, and a girl name Miranda. She’s a year younger.”

  Mother’s image returns to the screen.

  “Moore is the target, correct?” I say.

  “That’s right,” Father says.

  “And which of his kids is the mark?” I say.

  My assignments have two components. First there is the mark, someone my own age who I get close to and who leads me inside. Then there is the target, the one I am assigned to terminate.

  “There is no mark,” Mother says.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We’re sending you at him directly,” Father says.

  The images of Moore and his family disappear from the iPad screen, replaced by shots of a large brick building surrounded by a parking lot.

  Mother says, “Moore holds a recruiting event several times a year in different towns throughout New Hampshire. Parents and kids apply from all over the United States to get an audience with him. You’ll be at his next event.”

  “Am I going to fill out an application?” I say.

  “You already have,” Mother says. “We took care of it. But unfortunately it’s not that easy. Moore selects candidates from the crowd who he wants to meet after the event. Just because you’re there doesn’t mean you get an audience with him.”

  “How does he decide who to meet?” I say.

  “He claims to have a sixth sense,” Father says. “He believes he can feel whether a young person is a proper candidate or not.”

  “How can I make myself feel like a candidate if I don’t know what he’s looking for?”

  Mother’s image appears on the iPad. “We think you already feel like a candidate,” she says.

  “What does that mean?” I say, willing my voice to remain steady.

  Father steps toward me. “She’s talking about your recent issues. The things that caused you to drop off the grid.”

  I had issues during my last mission that caused me to question my orders for the first time. I deviated from my assignment, thinking I knew better than Mother and Father. Only later did I find out that The Program had been right all along, and I had been wrong.

  I meet Mother’s eyes on the iPad screen. “Those issues have been dealt with. I told Father that I just need to keep working.”

  “He told me about your conversation,” Mother says. “But the fact remains you know what it feels like to have doubts now. We need you to access that part of yourself.”

  I sit very still and take slow breaths.

  For a moment, I wonder if this is another test, the entire scenario constructed as a way of gauging my loyalty.

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “You want me to have doubts again?”

  “Not exactly,” Mother says. “We want Daniel Martin to have doubts.”

  “Who is Daniel Martin?”

  “That’s your identity for this mission,” Father says.

  A different mission, a different name. That’s how it always is.

  Mother continues, “Moore will be looking for young people who are confused and questioning the status quo. Disorganized minds he can mold to his purpose. You need to appear to be one of those kids.”

  I think about what this means, the mental confusion I have to embody to seem like a viable candidate to Moore.

  “You want me to get recruited,” I say. “That’s the mission.”

  Father nods.

  “So I’ll get into camp and take him down from the inside.”

  “Absolutely not,” Father says. “We can’t have you at Camp Liberty. It’s too dangerous.”

  “There’s a total communications blackout at the camp,” Mother says. “It’s in a valley surrounded by mountains. They have high-tech electronic signal blocking. Nothing gets in or out, person or communication, unless Moore allows it. If you were to go in, we would have no way to help you.”

  “You can’t send a drone over?”

  “Homeland Security tried. Two drones fell out of the sky. Moore has the technical sophistication to counter them.”

  That’s when I understand what happened before me, the reason I’m receiving this assignment.

  “The soldier—” I say. “He got inside.”

  “And then we lost contact with him,” Father says.

  Mother’s face hardens into a mask of anger and disappointment.

  Father looks away from the iPad.

  I don’t blame him. I hope I never see a look like that directed at me.

  I watch the blue light pulsing on the MSRR. I think of the dead soldier, the things that might have happened to him alone and unable to communicate with The Program.

  “This is a mission brief,” Mother says, her voice steady. “Not a memorial.”

  Father snaps back to attention, and so do I.

  Mother says, “We need you to get an audience with Moore so you can take him out at the event.”

  “In public?”

  “In public but invisible,” Father says. “Your specialty.”

  I consider the variables. The amount of time to learn Moore’s world, to get into character, to acquaint myself with the facility where he will be appearing and run multiple entry and exit scenarios, escape plans, and contingencies.

  “When is the next recruiting event?” I ask Father.

  He looks from Mother to me but doesn’t answer.

  “When am I going in?” I say.

  “Tonight,” Mother says.

  I’M LEFT ALONE TO CHANGE INTO A FRESH SET OF CLOTHES.

  I’m given a surgical mask, then I’m taken down through the hospital like a regular patient and wheeled out through discharge by an orderly. After that I’m transported by ambulance to a residential neighborhood in a suburb of Manchester.

  The driver stops across the street from a Cumberland Farms convenience store and without a word hands me a slip of paper. I get out of the ambulance, and he drives away.

  On the piece of paper is a number: 578.

  I look at the house nearest me. It’s number 62.

  An ambulance in a residential neighborhood invites attention, so I’m guessing they dropped me off a ways from my location.

  I start walking. I make my posture casual like that of a kid in the neighborhood coming home late from school on a Friday night.

  After several blocks, the houses become sparse and the road
dead-ends in a cul-de-sac with only a few homes, each hidden behind tall bushes. The mailbox identifies the house at the very end as number 578.

  I walk down a pathway and come to a white-and-yellow house set back from the road with a silver Ford Escape in the driveway. I try the front door and find it unlocked. I go inside.

  “How was school?” Father calls from the kitchen as if we’ve shared this moment together a thousand times.

  “Great,” I say as if I’m not surprised to find Father here, and I shut the door behind me.

  I hear an unusual sound from the door, something like an air lock being sealed.

  “We can talk for real now,” Father says, his head popping through the door of the kitchen before disappearing again.

  I look around the living room. On the surface, this appears to be like any other suburban house. Small details of family life are everywhere, from portraits on the mantel above the fireplace to a green blanket thrown casually across the back of the sofa.

  I hear the clatter of dishes from the kitchen. I walk in to find the table is filled with good food: chicken, burgers, salad, fresh bread. Father is pouring a glass of juice.

  “It’s a surprise to see you in the field,” I say.

  Father never comes on assignment with me. He’s always nearby, monitoring the situation from afar, sending in cleaning teams or accessing digital resources on my behalf.

  “We’ve got a different setup this time out,” Father says. “For expediency’s sake, I’m driving you in and picking you up after.”

  Father on an assignment with me. I think about what that might mean. It could represent a lack of trust, a belief that I need to be monitored more closely. It could be the opposite, a sense that I am trustworthy, so much so that Father is willing to put his life in my hands.

  Or perhaps there’s a simpler explanation. I am a valuable asset that needs protecting.

  I look at the table covered with food. “You’re so involved on this mission you made me dinner?”

  “Are you kidding? Whole Foods.”

  He puts down an empty plate.

  “Sit and eat,” he says. He glances at his watch. “We have three hours before we go mission ready. There’s a lot to do before then.”

  I CONSUME ENOUGH CALORIES FOR TWELVE HOURS OF HIGH-ENERGY WORK.