But Koksun resolved that he was going to do it, and a deeper part of his mind realized that painful or not, there would be no arguing with Koksun’s will. He counted to three and then . . . HEAVE!
He shot to his feet. He felt and heard his back pop at least sixteen times in the process, and he wasn’t sure whether he had just broken it. He stood there, wobbly-legged like a newborn giraffe on ice skates. If he felt his Herculean act of getting into a sitting position was worthy of a long break, this, he felt, had earned him at least an hour before any more brutal tasks should be attempted.
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. His head ached. His back ached. His thighs ached. His feet felt as if they were being asked to bear the weight of a small wagon. His head listed slightly from side to side like a ship being tossed to and fro on the high seas.
He continued to breathe in and out deeply.
Suddenly, like a dreary day pierced by a ray of sunlight, he felt an energy sweep over him. Not the kind of energy that had for the last five days sustained him while he ran mile after mile, climbed up several-hundred-foot walls as if they were short flights of stairs, or swam for miles with a forty-pound backpack on. But it was perhaps at least enough energy to feel like he was something more than a statue.
He looked near the doorway.
There it was. Like a key taped right next to the exit door in a room full of rapidly advancing alligators. Valder. One small sniff of that stuff, and the aches, pains, and lethargy holding his body and mind hostage would be left far, far behind.
He took a couple steps towards it. His body ached with each one, but he didn’t feel worthy of a gold medal, as he had after sitting and then after standing. The smell was powerful. Sweet but with a spicy tinge unlike anything he’d ever smelled before.
(or ever will smell)
He bent over to get a closer look. His back began popping like a pile of dry twigs stepped on by a hefty hunter wearing thick boots.
It was a finely ground green powder. And as he drew so near that his nose almost touched it the smell alone almost seemed to intoxicate him. Maybe it did.
He stepped back abruptly, realizing that he had come less than half a second away from taking another dose right then and there. But doses were off limits right now. “Two-week detox” had been his instructions. And who knows if he’d get another dose after those two weeks.
He wasn’t sure, but one thing he was unsure of in spite of the dreary cloud of pain and fatigue occupying his mind was that this was not going to be his stumbling block. He had undergone too many tests, made too many sacrifices, and come just too damn close to becoming a Varco agent for some final mind game like this to bring him failure.
“HA!” he laughed to his own surprise. The mere thought of failure seemed amusing as another tiny, yet not invisible, ray of sunlight pierced the storm clouds, revealing to him a strange irony. All he had to do right now was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
It seemed to make a certain kind of sense to him also. He began to imagine scenarios involving future missions where perhaps doing nothing but sit and wait would be the challenge. Maybe it would be a matter of waiting in a closet for a week for a target to come within striking distance. Maybe it would be a surveillance mission. It didn’t really matter. The point was sometimes inactivity was in and of itself part of the mission. And he supposed that perhaps this was part of what his instructor was trying to instil in his mind. The discipline to wait.
Then, a joyous thought came to him. He ought to lie down and have the most well-deserved, guilt-free nap in the history of mankind. He sauntered back to bed, collapsed as he had done the night before, and was dozing away moments later.
Chapter 6
When Koksun woke up again, he didn’t feel quite as bad as he did before. A lot of the pain that had previously been pulsing throughout his body seemed to have dissipated, although whether it was gone entirely or just not aware yet that the body it had invaded was now awake again and ready to be tortured some more he was not sure.
What he did know was that it had been replaced with something. A craving. Something much unlike anything he had ever before thought worthy of the word. His mind drifted back briefly to one day when he was a homeless eight-year-old, still a full four years away from that fateful encounter where his prowess at pickpocketing caught the propitious attention of a Varco recruiter, who decided this young street runt just might have what it takes to a member in the ranks of the country’s elite spy and assassin organization.
He had only been recently orphaned, and while picking pockets would one day become as effortless to him as walking along a sidewalk, it was at that time still a craft of which he knew nothing. He had gone two weeks without a meal and was traipsing through a well-to-do part of the city when he saw a child about his own age seated with his parents and siblings with a large ice cream cone in his hands.
Still not accustomed to using thievery, much less violence, to acquire what he needed, Koksun had simply stood there in a near trance, wishing, wishing, and wishing he were that boy seated there surrounded by family and enjoying the sugary delights of a heavenly treat such as that. The desire became so strong he could almost feel his soul exit his body, travel through the air, enter the body of the young child, and begin licking and sucking on that delicious treat. His stomach growled. His body shook. His look must have been discomforting because the father of the family turned and faced him and said, “Beat it, street worm!”
Beat it, he did. He found the most recondite corner of an abandoned alley that he could and stayed there for hours, still in a trance-like state, the full reality of his desperate plight sinking in, and it was then and there he realized he was going to have to take what he wanted in this life if he was going to survive.
It had been a life-changing moment, after which he had begun burglarizing, pickpocketing, and, on occasion, robbing in order to get what he needed, and he had always considered it one of the most powerful emotional experiences in his life, one he had never expected to be surpassed in importance.
But, to his immense shock, he realized at this very moment that it had been, and that the craving he now felt for the small pile of pungent-smelling, finely ground green powder made the aforementioned childhood experience seem tame by comparison. He looked at it. It captivated his eyes. It seemed to almost drag him towards it, for he knew that one sniff and he would be restored to his recent godlike state.
He asked himself how long the craving would be this unbearable. He calculated that, since the detox period was two weeks, more likely than not after the first week the worst of the physical pain and unbearable cravings would be behind.
Just six and a half more days to go then! an inner voice told him cheerily, and he found its optimistic tone sadistically mocking rather than encouraging. He began to wonder if the reason the Valder was placed right there by the door was really for the protection of the recruits. On the one hand, it seemed at least feasible, given the hell his mind and body were going through right now, that the detoxification period could be so overwhelming that a man could die from it.
But, on the other hand, he wondered why the death of a recruit would matter to the Varco if failure meant expulsion anyway. Why not just let the weak recruits die, while the survivors would be forced to endure the agony?
Then the thought occurred to him that that would not reflect the reality of actual missions. On an actual mission, they would have the Valder in their pockets and would have to exercise self-restraint. Thus, this was going to reveal who had not only the physical strength to survive the withdrawal but also the mental strength to consciously resist the solution.
Given the strength of the hold this drug had already revealed itself to have taken on his mind after just five days, he realized the instructor was taking him to the brink of full-blown addiction. Those who set off the alarm would reveal themselves as beyond that brink.
(and what kind of a Varco agent would a drug addict make?)
No agent at all.
T
ouch that powder, and you’re dead, a voice told him. Forget about expulsion.
The truth of this subconscious revelation was self-evident the moment it asserted itself. While he wasn’t sure what had happened with those rejected early on in the Varco program, long before they had been turned into physical and psychological weapons far too dangerous to be permitted anywhere other than under the close watch of the Varco, he had felt intuitively over the last year that failure in this program meant death.
With this particular issue, however, he felt not even the smallest trace of doubt. The notion that the government would permit a highly trained human weapon to walk the streets of Metinvur with no thought in his mind other than his next sniff of Valder was laughable. Such a man would assassinate, blackmail, bribe, and do whatever else it took to find access to this substance, which would then probably start to make its way into the general populace, and the thought of that made him shudder.
Criminals under the influence of this substance would be formidable opponents for regular police to deal with, and the Varco was designed for international espionage missions and counterintelligence, not domestic law enforcement. Yet, for anyone other than the Varco to take on a criminal organization using this substance made him shudder. Not only would their ferocity in combat be unprecedented but so would their desperate, unpredictable nature.
Furthermore, he couldn’t fathom that the Varco would even permit the risk of word spreading of their secret substance, even if they didn’t fear the expelled agent would himself directly be seeking to obtain it.
A chill settled upon the back of his neck and ears as the resolution of this issue became firmly settled. For the first time in his Varco training, he found himself truly doubting whether he was going to survive.
Chapter 7
A NEW BREED OF CRIMINAL!
WILL IT EVER STOP?
STORES ROBBED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT, SHOPPERS STAY HOME!
Senator Hutherton looked at the sordid assortment of headlines. Upon seeing such dastardly news about the state of public safety in the republic of Selegania, a store owner would likely look into hiring an armed guard or changing professions. A father might issue his children a strict prohibition against going out in public until these fiendish criminals—or at least the ringleaders—were brought to justice. A police officer might regret his chosen line of work.
But as Senator Hutherton looked at the sundry articles spread out in front of him, he smiled with the same satisfaction as a man viewing his royal flush in a high stakes game. He didn’t know what strings Ambassador Rochten had pulled to accomplish something like this, nor did he care. What he did care about was whether it was enough. Enough to convince the senate to formally outlaw this . . . terrible substance (and he began to laugh uproariously at his own hypocrisy as his thoughts reached this stage) in spite of a small constitutional problem:
Article 8: The senate shall not prohibit the voluntary adult consumption of any non-poisonous substance.
Yes, Article 8 was a bit of a problem, but it permitted enough leeway, he felt, to certainly get the senate to pass legislation outlawing Smokeless Green—after all, the term “poisonous” permitted some flexibility. Then, it would be a question of whether some citizen would sue and challenge the law as unconstitutional. The very thought made him groan but only for an instant.
If Ambassador Rochten had such connections as to orchestrate a series of headline-catching criminal acts—such that had certainly shifted public opinion in favor of banning this substance, which had only recently arisen out of the most opaque obscurity—it would likely be child’s play to silence anyone foolish enough to challenge this law.
In the unlikely event someone was foolish enough to challenge the new law without being quickly dealt with, there would still be procedural methods of tying up the lawsuit for many years in the courts before anything would come of it—all of which would provide more time to ensure the person was dealt with (a reassuring smile came to his face). And, as a last resort, if public opinion could be stoked even hotter against this foul substance, perhaps the votes would be there to repeal Article 8 altogether.
“Anything is possible with determination!” he proclaimed out loud boldly, not minding that he was not yet in front of an enraptured audience but rather in the privacy of his spacious study. But he considered the thick line of Smokeless Green in front of him a far better audience than the rows of stuffy, old senators he would be addressing soon.
SNIIIIIIIIIFFFFFFF!!!
He had been starting to develop quite a tolerance for Green Buddy, as he was starting to affectionately call it, but he had made the line thicker than ever before (well, almost, a voice corrected him), and that together with the headlines was really sending his happy side into overdrive!
“WOOOOOO!!” he shouted, to no one in particular.
Then, reassuming the solemn face worthy of a senator of the republic, he pulled out a piece of beautiful parchment adorned with ornate calligraphy. It was the proposed legislation. He had come near finishing it a few days ago but then stopped, fearing he would jinx himself by the presumptuous act. But the headlines lying innately on the table now seemed to take on animate form, telling him, Finish the bill! I’ve got a store to run!
I’ve got two young’uns, and I ain’t lettin’ them out of my sight till that stuff is outlawed!
My favorite store was hit by those no-good drug maniacs, and it closed as a result! Now, where am I going to buy my business suits?!
“Calm, calm,” Hutherton told his imaginary pleading audience of desperate store owners, parents, and patrons, picking up a gold-embroidered pen.
His mind’s silly euphoria had now passed, and with a drill sergeant’s face and eagle-like, darting eyes he began making quick, calculated strokes on the parchment, the slightest detail unable to escape the now razor-focused man drafting one of the most consequential bills in the history of Selegania’s centuries-old republic.
Chapter 8
Senator Hutherton sat upright and attentive the next day in the senate, watching with humble attentiveness that belied the condescending disgust he felt towards one windbag senator after another who stood to speak offering lots of complaints but nothing of solutions to what was certainly the most pernicious plague Selegania had ever faced.
Although it seemed the moment would never come, he was snatched from a bit of a reverie by the words, “Senator Hutherton is recognized to speak.” He could pass and let some other senator get the credit for proposing what would inevitably be proposed soon. He had passed on many prior occasions, always fearing his junior status would render his superior intellect unappreciated amongst the ranks of these shortsighted fools. But not today. Today was going to be different. He had only had a small line this morning—and one in the restroom before the senate was called into session (that is, if you’re going to call a few measly grams a “line,” a feisty voice spoke up)—and he was feeling just about perfect. Not too hyper, but focused enough to prevent any of these old empty suits from embarrassing him with a question he couldn’t answer, as he knew inevitably one of them would try. The old and experienced hate nothing more than wisdom in a youth, he told himself.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” he said with a calm, self-assured manner that caught more than one of the senior senators’ attention, and from their looks it appeared they were ready to pounce.
With the practiced step of a groom walking down the aisle to await his dazzling betrothed in front of important onlookers, Hutherton’s somber, dignified air looked like a showcase for proper statesmanship.
He sensed correctly that he was impressing a large number of his junior and senior colleagues with his practiced bearing, but he also did not fail to notice a few stares from both the most senior colleagues and the most junior colleagues that nearly singed his hair with the envy radiating from their eyes.
This increased at least a hundredfold when he then proceeded to execute an oratorical trick usually only risked by those certain of the
fidelity of their audience. He looked calmly in silence to and fro over the ranks of the senators like an alert border collie surveying its herd of sheep. Not wanting to overdo it, he cut the silence a few seconds after it was clear he had everyone’s attention:
“As the great philosopher said: ‘Foolishness prevails in the young, as does bravery.’”
He wasn’t quite sure whether this was the right start, as a few suspicious glances from the senior senators suggested they preferred the first half of the saying.
“In wisdom, you are my betters. But my youthful audacity compels me to propose what is merely the natural conclusion of reasoning far superior to my own which I have listened to you convey today.
“Our republic is in a crisis. We know not where this foul substance comes from that turns men into the most hideous of beasts, adorning themselves with their own feces whilst carrying out any number of felonies in broad daylight in order to acquire this substance which corrupts their soul.
“I’ve spoken to many constituents that have told me their revenue has gone down by ninety percent. They don’t know how much longer they’ll even be able to stay in business!
The Republic of Selegania Boxed Set: Volumes One through Four Page 21