by Loki Renard
“It’s true enough,” she cries as Tom sits on the floor and pulls her into his arms, practically cradling her like a baby. This isn’t the typical way to hold an interrogation, but it’s an interrogation nonetheless. I need to know what the truth is, and I need it now. No more lies.
“Mary, enough,” I growl. “We don’t have time for hysterics. Calm down and talk to me.”
“Easy,” Tom says, raising a brow.
“They were right. She’s not a little girl, she’s…”
“I don’t care what she is, she’s my little girl,” Tom rumbles back at me. “And we have a minute for her to calm down in.”
I get up and start pacing. Time really is of the essence. If everything that agent just told me was true, then we are capital F fucked.
Tom is doing a decent job of calming her down. A better job than I would. I only know one way to deal with spies. My training is telling me to tie her back in a chair and not stop questioning her until I’m sure she’s stopped lying, but I don’t want to treat Mary that way, and thankfully Tom wouldn’t let me anyway. She’s lucky she has both of us, because I’m at war with myself right now.
“Is it true? You’re a spy?” I repeat the question when she’s composed enough to talk. “Shall we call you Ekaterina now?”
“No,” she says through her tears. “I’m Mary to you. I want to be Mary to me too.”
Right now, I don’t care what her damn name is. I want to know what’s going on.
“I was raised here. My parents were Russian,” she admits, her words spilling out in a fast tumbling confession. “They raised me as a sort of sleeper agent. I didn’t want to be, but you don’t really get a choice.”
So she is a spy. And has been one her entire life. I have been fucking a goddamn Russian spy.
“And Chile?”
“They wanted me to infiltrate that hospital posing as a college kid on holiday, but I guess the Germans had a better idea of who I was than the US did. Because I got caught. So yeah, technically I’m a spy and a traitor and everything else they called me. But you’re right. I’m not a very good one.”
I take a sharp breath. This is just as bad as I thought. “Not being a very good spy isn’t a defense against treason.”
She wipes her eyes and I see her old composure return as she pulls away from Tom and stands up on her own two feet. She lifts her chin, bravely and tells me exactly what I don’t want to hear.
“I know. I’m sorry. You should turn me in. Let me go to jail here. It’s better than what the Germans or Russians would do to me. And you might get to keep some of your career, or at least not end up in prison too.”
She deserves to go to jail. Everything I fight for, everything I uphold is completely turned upside down simply by her existence. I love her more than anything, but the right thing to do is to turn her ass in, just like she says.
“It was really nice,” she says, tears filling her eyes. “It was nice being loved. It was nice feeling like I had a life, even just for a few weeks. Thank you. I won’t forget it.”
Is this a manipulation? Is it another lie? I want to believe her, but she’s never told me a damn thing I needed to know and she’s only telling me this now because her hand was forced. How many other secrets has she been keeping from me?
“You’re not going to jail,” Tom says.
I can’t agree. She might be going to prison for a very long time. I can’t really see a way out of it. It wasn’t just the Chile mission. She also got an embed position in Afghanistan. How much information was she funneling to the Russians then? And did she attack that guy in the village just to get out? How much of what she’s done is deliberate, and how much is just a scared girl trying to survive? I don’t know, and that bothers me.
“I am,” she says. “Because I have to.”
“Why?”
She looks from him to me. “Because you won’t ever know how sorry I really am until you see that I’m prepared to take the consequences of my actions. Report me, Ken. Take me in and turn me over. You know you have to.”
“Stay here,” I grind out. I need space to think and I have work to do. “And I do really mean stay fucking here. If I find you’ve put so much as a finger outside, you’ll be in a black site before you know it.”
“Jesus, Ken,” Tom swears, getting to his feet. “Go easy on her.”
I can’t go easy on her. I don’t have that luxury. “You go easy on her,” I say. “And enjoy it. Be glad one of us can.”
MARY
I don’t blame Ken for hating me. I’m literally the very thing he has spent his life fighting. He must think everything I ever said and did with him was a lie. I can’t stop crying, even though I know my tears are mostly ones of self-pity. I feel sorry for myself, sorry for what I’ve lost. Sorry that the past I never wanted has caught up with me and ruined absolutely everything.
What happened today is what I’ve been afraid of since I got back to California. I never reported back to my handlers after I got to Afghanistan. I wanted to drop off the grid. I wanted to die, in one way or another. But then Ken found me and then he sent me here and now I have something to live for.
It’s not the Russians who have come for me either. And it’s not actually the Germans. They look German, they sound German, but they are not affiliated in any real sense. They are a splinter from the gates of hell and they came here to reclaim me.
When they walked through that door, I felt as though my heart stopped. I recognized them instantly, not by their faces, but by their bearing. Those agents are cold, hard men with no souls whatsoever. It was like seeing the devil and his demons file in to take me away.
But Ken stood up for me in the short term, anyway, and I’ll forever be grateful for that. I’d rather serve my inevitable sentence in a US prison. As bad as things might get there, they’re nothing on what was done to me before and what would be done to me again.
“Don’t worry,” Tom says. He’s trying to be reassuring. It’s not working. I can feel his arms around me, but they don’t feel as real as they used to. My mind is already shifting from a mode where I can be safe and secure and feel affection, to one where the only thing that matters is being numb.
“Can you stop, please?”
“Can I stop what?” Tom quirks a brow at me.
“Stop trying to make this better. I’m a fucking Russian spy. You should be reacting like Ken is. You should hate me.”
“Why?”
“Because I lied to you.”
He looks at me steadily. “Did you?”
“I mean, I didn’t tell you who I really am. I didn’t tell you why I really ended up in that hospital, or why I was in Afghanistan.”
“I didn’t ask you any of those things.”
“So you don’t mind being lied to by omission?”
“I knew you were in trouble, Mary. It’s been written all over you from the moment we met. And you did try to warn me. You offered to leave a half-dozen times, always saying you were more trouble than you were worth. You told me what I needed to know, even if you think you didn’t.”
I can’t believe him. I can’t believe he doesn’t hate me. I almost can’t stand how good he is. It makes me want to ugly cry, but I have to try to compose myself. Just like Ken said. Now is not the time for crying.
“You should hate me,” I repeat.
“Nope,” he stays firm. “Not going to happen.
He wraps his arms around me, pulls me into his lap, and holds me. I don’t know how long we sit there like that, time ticking away. I feel like my world is ending one breath at a time. Whatever happens next cannot be good.
“Come on, Mary. It’s time to go.”
Ken is back. He is composed and calm. I hate that, because I know what it means. It means he doesn’t need me anymore. It means he’s prepared to let me go to my fate.
Tom lets me up and presses a kiss to my forehead. “Be good, little girl.”
“I will be,” I say, wrapping my arms around his neck to g
ive him one last hug. He feels so good, so safe. I hope I get to see him again, though I know in all likelihood I never will. I can see that in his eyes too. This is goodbye, and it’s happening so quickly neither of us can properly process it.
“Where are we going? Am I going to jail?” I ask Ken the question as we get out to his car.
“I don’t know.”
It’s hardly a reassuring response, but then again, I hardly deserve reassurance.
“Put this on.”
He hands me a dark hood. A big black cloth bag. Usually this is the sort of thing that gets shoved over your face. He’s at least doing me the honor of letting me put it on myself.
I pull it over my head, breathe deep through the cloth that blacks out the world.
“I’m sorry, Ken.”
He grunts as he starts the car.
It’s too late for sorries. I just wish he could pretend that it wasn’t. But I guess we’re done with pretending now. He knows what I am. An enemy. A traitor. A spy.
It’s a relief, in a way, to no longer be hiding everything from him. I’ve known since we met that I don’t deserve him, and that the loving would end soon enough. Now that the end is here, I feel a kind of peace. If he were to put a bullet in the back of my head right now, I wouldn’t blame him for it. I’d consider it a mercy.
“You can shoot me,” I say. “It’s okay.”
He doesn’t even dignify that with a response. I guess execution isn’t on the menu tonight. Or at least, not in his car.
An hour or so later, I am taken from the car, ushered through some place I don’t know. It smells like bleach, rarely an encouraging scent. Could be an abattoir. Could be a gym. Could be a hospital. I’d rather the abattoir.
“Listen to me, Mary,” Ken says as he pushes me down into a hard chair. “You’re about to talk to someone. Someone very important. Tell her everything. And I do mean, everything. She will know if you’re lying.”
I hear him walk away. Then I hear high heels enter the room. The hood is removed from my head and I find myself looking into the steely gaze of a very stern looking lady in her fifties. Her silver streaked hair is pulled back from her face and she has a demeanor about her that I find even more frightening than Ken.
She doesn’t introduce herself. She sits down in front of me and starts asking questions in the sort of way people do when they have your life in their hands.
This is the end of the line. I am all out of chances. I am all out of hope. There’s no point in lying anymore. I have nothing left to protect.
So I talk to her. I tell her everything. I confess my sins and crimes and she listens to them all, neither overtly judging or giving any kind of sign which would let me know how this is being received. I’m sure Ken is listening too, learning every terrible thing about me.
It’s a real possibility that I’ll be spending the rest of my life behind walls like these. I may never see the light of day again. But I’ll always have the memory of Tom as he holds me over his knee and spanks me as if I’m still a girl who can be saved.
KEN
Everything that ever took place between Mary and I was a lie.
It hurts, but it’s the truth and I have to accept it. The number of things I knew about her could have been counted on one hand, and now I’m pretty certain at least half of them were untrue.
These are the things I know about her for sure:
She is a spy.
She is a professional liar.
She is a traitor to everything I believe in.
These are the facts of the matter. I have been sleeping with the enemy.
I am angry. I am disappointed. In her and in myself. I should have known something was wrong. I did know something wasn’t right with her, but I always put it down to her broken past. I just didn’t know how broken it really was. I thought I could love her better, but there are some things love can’t fix.
That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on her. Not at all. It means that our relationship is about to change in a serious way.
There’s separation between government and military. But there’s also a gray area in between, and in that gray area there are a series of branches hardly anybody nobody knows about. Task-forces, spies, special forces units, all acting under the cover of total anonymity and ultimate deniability. I have been engaged with several of them, from time to time. I guess Herr Fuckwad didn’t know that.
Mary was right about needing to be turned in. She’s in the kind of trouble you cannot get out of on your own. Her whole life has been a lie, in many respects. Her childhood a facade, her adolescence a farce. I feel for her, but she fucked herself and she fucked me when she didn’t tell me the truth when she had the chance.
Now we’re on the back foot and entirely at the mercy of the woman behind the glass. A real spymaster. They call her the Head. She runs a small group which might be able to provide Mary with salvation - but it’s not going to be easy, even if the Head agrees to take her on.
They’ve been talking for a while, though I’m sure the Head managed to get everything she needed to out of Mary in the first two minutes of their conversation.
I’m being allowed to watch this for a very good reason, so I pay attention. Make sure I hear everything Mary says. The events she details are not pleasant. She has been through even more than I knew. That, of course, is because she chose not to tell me. She’s a little vault of secrets, that girl, all of them bad.
For weeks and weeks on end, she kept secrets so dangerous it could have gotten us all killed. At first I felt betrayed, but as I listen to her talk, I understand why she did it.
She doesn’t know how to trust. Doesn’t know how to give up control, or how to surrender. There were so many ways I could have, should have taught her that lesson. But I didn’t. And now, she’s going to pay the price.
MARY
I talk for what feels like forever. I tell the lady about what happened in Chile. And then I tell her what happened before Chile. How people would come to see me at college and give me little tasks to do that seemed so innocuous. I tell her about what happened after Ken saved me, how I fucked everything up and then suddenly I had papers for Afghanistan. Didn’t matter that I knew I wasn’t really a journalist. By that time I was just glad to have something to do. Didn’t matter if I died. A lot of what I’ve told Ken over the weeks is true. But I’ve omitted other things. Things that happened to me, things I did. I sold drugs. I took drugs. I have been captured twice by dealers since he rescued me and managed to escape both times.
The woman listens. Sometimes she asks questions. I answer as best I can. But then, in the end, I run out of words. And as the silence falls, I know my judgement is imminent. Any moment now, I will feel the cold steel of cuffs on my hands, and I will be taken to the kind of cell you never leave.
She steeples her hands. “Mary,” she says. “You have shown a remarkable lack of judgement over the years, only made up for by sheer tenacity and what one might call dumb luck. Your association with your Russian handlers has made you a traitor by all reasonable definitions, and yet your loyalty to them can hardly be verified as you seem to have made no contact whatsoever after obtaining passage to Afghanistan. In short, you are a spy who has never actually spied to any successful extent.”
That sounds about right. I’ve been used in a hundred ways, but I’ve managed to avoid being useful in any of them. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help me much now. I’m still a criminal, a liar and a traitor.
“I’ve spoken extensively with Ares,” she continues. “He has provided his impressions and assessment of you, which of course, has to be tempered with the personal component of your relationship. He may not be the most objective source, but I note he did expel you from Afghanistan when he thought necessary, and he did bring you to us immediately upon discovering your identity, so I do still trust his judgement where you are concerned.”
It’s probably easy for him to judge me. He must hate me so much now. He’s not like Tom. He’s not sentime
ntal. I’m pretty sure once you cross Ken, that’s the end of it. He’s done with me, I’m sure.
“I’ve made my decision, Miss Brown.”
Oh shit. Here it comes. The cuffs and the cell.
“From this moment onwards, you are property of the United States of America. You are an asset. You do not have the rights or protections of a citizen. You can and likely will be called on to do dangerous work, which we will expect you to be competent in.”
Shit. I’ve heard this talk before. This is the talk they give you when they tell you they can kill you at any moment. At this point, I almost wish they would. I have screwed my life up a thousand time over. Some things can’t be un-fucked. This is one of them.
“I’m really not a very good spy though…”
“You will be. Ares has been reassigned. He will be your handler. He will make sure you carry out missions assigned to you with competency. You will answer to him in every way. Do you understand?”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. My punishment is going to be… belonging to Ken?
“He wants me?”
“Consider yourself very, very lucky, young lady,” she says. “He requested this course of action. I was disinclined to grant it, but all things considered, I am willing to give you a chance. You must realize that there will not be others.”
Gratitude overwhelms me. I can’t believe that I am really being give another chance. Ken must have called in a lifetime of favors to swing this one. “Oh my god, thank you! Thank you so much!”
She smiles tightly, and it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Don’t thank me just yet, Miss Brown. You now fall under a very strict hierarchy, and I can promise you here and now that you will not find the leniency, nor the leeway you experienced under your previous handlers.”
“Well they didn’t really…”