Silent Assassin

by Leo J. Maloney

  “I’m fine,” he said, his slightly wavering voice betraying the fact that he wasn’t quite. “Just not crazy about heights, that’s all.”

  “I think we’ve found out who’s the girl of the group,” said Diesel. Rogue flipped him the bird.

  “So,” said Barrett, after everyone had a chance to put on their wings. “If you old ladies are done with your chatting, how about we go try these babies out?”

  “Yaaahooo!” came Spartan’s voice over the earpiece as Morgan adjusted his oxygen mask and pulled down his helmet. Beneath his feet, the aircraft rumbled. The wind blew bitterly cold from the open back of the plane. Spartan had dropped out the back, left behind due to the sudden massive resistance on her wings, and become invisible in her glider against the black backdrop of the night.

  “You’re enjoying this way too much,” said Bishop, who had also already dropped from the plane. His chuckling, near giggling voice betrayed the fact that he was loving it every bit as much as she was.

  Morgan edged up excitedly to the opening at the back of the plane, holding on tight to the straps overhead. Morgan turned on his night vision, and found the two gliders, now specks in the distance. Looking back into the plane, Morgan noticed that Rogue was hanging back nervously. Morgan motioned for him to come along without saying anything, so that the others wouldn’t hear through the wireless. Rogue inched his way into position, so that both were right on the edge, holding on to the straps to keep them from flying off, with the vast expanse opening up behind them.

  “What’s the holdup back there?” asked Barrett. Morgan waved her off. Then he motioned for Rogue to come closer. He inched nervously toward Morgan, and leaned in as if to hear a secret.

  “Sorry, Rogue,” he said, and pushed him backwards.

  “Cobra, you bastaaaaaard!” he yelled as he fell into the sea of darkness, which Morgan saw as green in his night vision. Through the comm, Morgan heard him grunting as Rogue struggled to control the glider, which was twisting this way and that in the air. It took several seconds, but Rogue managed to gain control of it. Then, after a few moments, he said, “Hey, this is amazing! It’s the best goddamn thing I’ve ever done!”

  Morgan smiled to himself. Then he let himself fall backwards.

  He tumbled through the air, powerful G-forces yanking him back and forth. He didn’t know which way was up, and for a moment he thought he would hurl the plain oatmeal he’d had before leaving home. But with a few yanks of the glider, he managed to control the wings, and managed to stabilize himself.

  “Nice moves, Cobra,” said Spartan. “Graceful as an albatross.”

  And then, he was flying. The feeling of soaring through the air on wings was incredible. He was a raptor, a falcon riding the wind. He tested what happened when he moved around, trying turns and experimenting with angling up to slow down and speeding up by pointing downwards. He was beginning to forget himself when a dark shape crossed in front of him like a rocket. He swerved hard, missing it by what seemed like inches, but given the relative speeds must have been at least a few feet.

  “Come on, I’ll race you,” said Spartan gleefully. It was her glider that had passed him, and now she was turning barrel rolls right in front of him.

  She pulled up and buzzed him again, and this time he didn’t have time to swerve. She missed him by no more than two feet.

  “Are you crazy?” he yelled. But he was loving it. He maneuvered as best he could to get behind her and do the same to her, but she was too fast for him. She was a natural, with strong instincts for the thing. Every time he thought he had the upper hand, she would evade him.

  After a few minutes of playing like this, she seemed to pull away and get some distance between them. Morgan turned his glider so that he could see her, and noticed that they were moving toward each other, fast. She must have noticed too, but she didn’t correct her course.

  So, it’s a game of chicken, then?

  Morgan held firm, not turning away. The gliders moved astonishingly fast, covering the speed of a couple of hundred yards in a few seconds. They came within moments of collision before both pulled sharply sideways at the last minute. Morgan heard Spartan’s uproarious laughter through the comm, and couldn’t help laughing himself.

  This started a game of aerial tag between them, a chase back and forth. They would try to get one behind the other, and come as close as possible without colliding. Before long, they were locked in another game of chicken.

  “You’d better pull back,” she said.

  “Why don’t you pull back?” he retorted.

  She dove in harder, but Morgan was damned if he would let her win. He made the decision within himself that he would not pull away. Too late, he realized that they were both too stubborn and neither was going to swerve. Rather than hit her head-on, Morgan twisted sideways. Her glider clipped his wing with a loud ugly scrape, and a large chunk of carbon fiber flew down into the gloom. Morgan began to spin out of control, everything turning into a blur, falling, falling straight down. He felt like he was going to puke.

  There was a whoosh, and a hard yank on Morgan’s armpits, and he was suddenly right side up. He had reached the minimum altitude, and his parachute had self-deployed. He got his bearings and was trying to keep the nausea down when he saw a glider fly past at a safe distance in front of him from left to right.

  “See you at the base, Cobra!” Spartan taunted through the comm. He couldn’t help chuckling even as he slowly drifted toward the ground, watching the four remaining gliders, which quickly moved far enough away to become no more than dots against the lightening sky.

  CHAPTER 14

  Andover, January 3

  Morgan got home in the late morning, physically fatigued but mentally energized. The flight had been deliriously exhilarating, and while he had mostly come down from the high, it had put him in a state of relaxed alertness. He walked from the garage into the kitchen feeling ravenous, not having eaten for many hours. As he tossed strawberries and papaya into the blender cup, he spotted Alex reclining on the sofa, reading a book.

  He still hadn’t gotten a chance to speak with her since he’d come back from Hungary, and since he had told Jenny that he was back in the game. He had kept everything from Alex before. But before, she had been too young and perhaps too innocent to hear. She had still been his little girl. Now, he felt compelled to let her know what was going on. And he figured he might as well tell her now. He ran the blender and poured the result into a cup. He then moved into the living room and sat across from his daughter.

  “Hey, Dad,” she said, without looking up from her books.

  “Hey, honey. What are you up to?”

  “Just unwinding,” she said with a light yawn. She put her book down on the coffee table and sat up. “You look a bit tired”

  “I guess I am.” There was a moment of tranquil silence between them, and then Morgan said, “Alex, I need to tell you something.”

  She stiffened, looking concerned. “What’s up, Dad?”

  “Well, the truth is,” he said, shifting in his seat, “I haven’t been honest with you about what I’ve been doing.”

  “Is this about the spy thing?” she broke in. “Because I already know about that. Mom told me.”

  “Oh,” he said. He wasn’t expecting that. He’d thought she would have far more of a reaction.

  “I’m kind of relieved, actually. You’ve been kind of AWOL lately, coming home in the middle of the night and all that. You could be doing a lot worse than going out and fighting bad guys.”

  “I guess that’s true,” he chuckled, relaxing against the sofa and taking a sip from his glass. “Well, I was prepared to have to explain myself to you. I had all this stuff I was going to say to justify myself. . . .”

  “You can still say it if you’d like,” she said with a gentle grin.

  He laughed. “No, that’s fine. But I guess . . . is there anything else you want to know? I’ll tell you if I can.”

  “Well,” she sai
d, leaning forward, “is it the CIA?”

  He shook his head.

  “Who is it?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “I guess you can’t tell me many details, huh? Like who it is and what you’re involved in? Are you working on the . . . stuff that’s going on right now? The attacks?”

  “I can’t really tell you that either.”

  “I hope so,” she said, with a suddenly steely-cold glint in her eye. “I hope you get them and make them pay. They deserve it.” Morgan was taken aback by her reaction. She had always been a gentle soul, opposed to all violence, aggression, and revenge, always ready to believe the best of everyone. “I guess I shouldn’t have offered, huh?” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “Turns out there isn’t much I can tell you after all.”

  “Well . . .” she began.

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe there’s something you can tell me,” she said, like she’d had something in mind.

  “Maybe there is,” he said.

  “I’ve been wondering . . . how do you manage to do it?” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Lie,” she said. “And lie well, all the time, even to the people closest to you.” A thing like that could have easily sounded accusatory, a rhetorical question born of resentment and betrayal. But if he’d read her tone correctly, she wasn’t angry. She was—seemed, anyway—genuinely curious.

  “Well,” he said, hesitantly. He was about to be as frank as he’d ever been with her, so he thought he’d better make damn certain. “Are you sure you want me to talk about this?”

  “That’s why I asked,” she said.

  He leaned back, resting his head casually against his fist, and took a deep breath. “The first thing you have to remember is that I had training. Lying was part of my job. Part of who I had to be. We had professional actors and former conmen coaching us when we were training. We learned how to convince anyone of anything.”

  “But it can’t be just a matter of—technique,” she said. “I mean, you have to sustain it for so long, so completely. . . . There has to be more to it.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “There is. It’s—well, it’s a constant struggle, to begin with. The truth is always fighting to come out, and if you let it, it will. For the untrained, it’ll come out in overt ways—nervous laughter, flatness in your voice, unnatural or exaggerated tones.... But even if you can stop it from showing in the obvious ways, the truth can betray you in the tiniest of details, in ways you don’t expect—tics and small gestures and involuntary reactions.”

  “That’s if you don’t trip up outright,” Alex cut in. Her eyes were bright and sharp with interest, and she was leaning slightly forward as she spoke.

  “Right. Forget your story or get caught in a contradiction, and you’re toast. It doesn’t make it any easier that humans are natural lie detectors. And the more and longer you lie, the more likely it is that you’ll let something slip.”

  “So how do you do it?” she asked.

  “You have to remember and practice a couple things,” he said. “First, change as little as possible. The fewer details you have to keep straight, the smaller the chance you’ll screw up in a way that gets you killed or captured. That goes for stuff like your birthplace to what your spouse is like to . . . your children. For prolonged undercover assignments, we even used our real first names.”

  “Really? How come?”

  “Imagine you’re sitting in a public space and someone yells out your name. What do you do?”

  He could tell she saw immediately where he was going with this. “Turn to look.”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “But obviously I’m not going to do that if I’m trying to hide who I am.”

  “You think you have more control over yourself than you actually do. You’re naturally conditioned to look when someone calls you. No matter how much you try, you can’t erase that completely. And it’s not just your name. It’s telling the truth. That’s your first instinct, and it’s hard to suppress completely and consistently in the easiest of circumstances. Perfect control is extremely difficult. Even if you have just a small reaction, it can be enough to betray you when the stakes are highest.”

  “Okay,” said Alex. “So that’s the first one. What’s the second?”

  “Have total, complete commitment to what you’re doing. Never question the lie as you’re living it. If you have any doubt about your purpose, about the rightness of the lie, the truth’s going to get the best of you.”

  “But didn’t you always teach me to question everything? I know that’s how you live your own life too. How do you square that with believing in something completely?”

  Sharp. Morgan smiled despite himself. “Yes. There’s a time for questioning, always. But eventually you have to have the confidence to commit to something and see it through—and sometimes, that means lying. But the thing they don’t tell you is that, above all things, it’s lonely. Not being able to share who you really are with the people you love—it’s not easy. Even if, say, most of what your family knows about you is absolutely true, they still don’t know the complete picture. They never know you, not as totally as they would when you’re a normal person, someone without these kinds of secrets. So, along with the other difficulties, you need to know that this is what you’re up against as well. It’s a life of secrecy, even from the people you love the most.”

  Alex hunched down, frowning, her chin resting against both her hands, and Morgan could practically hear the gears in her head grinding. She finally spoke.

  “I wonder if I could do it if I tried.”

  “I wonder if you could,” he echoed. “It’s not easy.”

  “I didn’t think it was,” she said, staring into the distance.

  “Why do you want to know all this?” he asked. Perhaps she’s coming around to my perspective a little too much.

  She was jolted out of her thoughts and took just a little too long to respond. “Oh, no reason,” she said, with affected nonchalance. “Just curious.”

  He looked at her with his head cocked, but kept to himself the thought, You’ll have to learn to do better than that.

  CHAPTER 15

  Boston, January 5

  Diana Bloch locked the door to her office behind her and walked slowly and deliberately, perfectly balanced on high-heeled shoes, around her no-frills metal and glass desk. It was, as usual, empty except for a laptop computer. Paperwork? She had none. She kept whatever she could stored in her brain rather than on paper or electronically—the only way, really, to keep anything secret. The rest was hidden between layers of encryption in her hard drive.

  She sat down, closed her eyes, and lay back in her chair; it hardly made a sound as it reclined. Goddamn, this is comfortable. Her one luxury, the thing she would not do without. She opened her eyes and stared blankly at the ceiling, and her brief respite was over. She looked down through the glass into the empty war room, dimly lit, just a round pool of light in the middle of the table, by which the chairs cast long shadows. Worries and responsibilities flooded back through well-worn trenches in her mind. It was overwhelming, and it was all she could do just to keep her head above water. You will figure it out, she told herself. You always do. This is just another crisis, and like all crises, you will weather it. But even she hardly believed it anymore.

  She heard the footsteps on the metal stairs first, and then, through the glass, she saw them coming up. They still knocked the same way: first three times, faint and hesitant, then a loud and persistent knock by another hand. Sighing, Bloch said, “Come in!” The door opened, and standing there was Lincoln Shepard, breathless, with Karen O’Neal standing behind him.

  “Boss,” he said, still at the door. “I think I got something.”

  “You mean we got something,” said Karen O’Neal, elbowing her way into the office. O’Neal was their resident data analyst. Petite, lean, and half-Vietnamese, she’d been one of the wunderkinder of Wall Stre
et quants—that is, quantitative analysts, people who did in-depth financial data analysis and came up with complex schemes to make a killing in the markets. O’Neal had been a little too creative and outside the box, though she would still insist that it was all perfectly legal. However, the SEC had disagreed. Bloch had offered her a deal similar to the one that she had offered Shepard. O’Neal had been a little more reluctant than Shepard, but it hadn’t taken long for her to come around.

  “Anyway, it’s this program I’m perfecting,” said Shepard. “Based on Karen’s financial analysis.”

  “He’s more like a scribe, really,” said O’Neal. “For my brilliant ideas.”

  “I don’t care who’s the genius behind this,” Bloch said impatiently. “Just tell me what you found!”

  “Well, you see,” O’Neal began excitedly, looking at Shepard then back at Bloch, “everything’s being tracked these days. Well, not everything, we’re actually quite far from the theoretical limit to how much data we can gather—” She picked up either on Bloch’s impatient stare or on Shepard’s elbowing. “Anyway, we have all this information available to us. Just terabytes of raw data. I’m talking tons. Everything from economic indicators to website page views to changes in weather. But data, by itself, doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s just a bunch of numbers on a page.”

  “And that’s where—” began Shepard.

  “Shut up and let me finish,” said O’Neal. “So we have all this data, but what do we do with it? Well, that’s where quantitative analysis comes in. Me. So, analyzing information—it’s all about finding connections, right? Specifically, those connections that no one has seen before. Those that no one has ever imagined even existed. Like how once someone thought to look at all the satellite pictures of cows, they found out that they all face either north or south when they eat. Or when they looked the length of a man’s index finger and found out that it has a connection to how aggressive he is. That kind of stuff. But the problem with that is that you have to imagine the connection before you test for it.” She was speaking so fast she was nearly panting by this point.