by Brett Baker
Forty-five minutes later I left the restaurant and drove to Migsy’s house. She lived in a large two-story near the center of town. Her house had been built more than a hundred years ago, and had historic significance that everyone in town recognized. She kept the lawn impeccably manicured, and could always be seen working in the gardens that bordered the front and sides of her house. I hoped to see her outside when I passed just to alleviate any wonder about whether she was home or not. Unfortunately, I saw no one outside as I passed.
I parked my rented car in front of a park two blocks west and one block north of Migsy’s house. At least a dozen other cars parked along both sides of the street, and I walked into the park toward the shelter where adults stood around chatting while children chased each other at what appeared to be a child’s birthday party. I walked past the shelter, along the sidewalk that cut through the park, and came out on the next residential street. From there I walked another block-and-a-half until I stood in front of the house directly behind Migsy’s. It had a for sale sign in the front yard, and no curtains hanging in the window, so I assumed it to be vacant. I cut through the side yard and stopped right behind Migsy’s garage.
Peering through the window of her garage, I saw Migsy’s car parked, and the garage doors closed. She had to be inside the house.
I had developed my plan of action during the trip from Tucson. Although I’d broken into countless homes and buildings during my time with The Summit, and I knew how to ambush a suspect quickly, without warning, and put myself in a position to achieve whatever I needed to achieve, Migsy was not an average suspect. She probably had more experience and training than anyone I’d ever encountered, and even though her best days were behind her, and she appeared weak, frail and easily bested, I had no doubt she would still provide a difficult challenge. If I underestimated her resourcefulness or her persistence, I did so at my peril. But perhaps the biggest threat came from her wickedness, a quality of hers whose depth I hadn’t previously understood. Despite our long history together, I had to treat her as a mortal threat.
When peeking around the corner of the garage, I could see the back of Migsy’s house, which meant I could see three windows and a sliding glass door. On the other side of one window was the kitchen sink, and a second, frosted window opened on to the bathroom. The sliding glass door provided access to the dining area, but the beige vertical blinds were closed. The remaining double window had a shade pulled down, and cut off a view inside to a guest bedroom that almost always remained unoccupied. Only the window that looked out from the kitchen sink caused any concern. Migsy couldn’t see me from any of the other windows, but if she happened to be standing at her kitchen sink she’d have a wide-open view as I scampered across her backyard, which meant that my visit to her house would likely be short and deadly for me. Approaching from the back made more sense than trying to surprise her from the front of the house though, with its windows that opened to the living room and her bedroom, which were the two rooms in which she spent most of her time.
I watched the kitchen window for a few minutes hoping that she’d show up, and I could wait for her to walk away and know that she wouldn’t return. I quickly got tired of waiting though, and when I didn’t see her in the window I raced across the backyard, and took shelter with my back flat against the blue vinyl siding right next to the kitchen window. I half-expected the sliding glass door to open and for Migsy to come out armed with a shotgun to put an end to me. However, I waited ten minutes and she never surfaced, so I continued with my plan and scampered across the backyard, to the side of the house. Evergreen bushes provided cover as I squeezed my fingers beneath a window, and slowly, steadily and quietly pulled up. Migsy often kept her air conditioning off and her windows open during the summer, so I would have been surprised if the windows were locked. Luckily, Migsy remained true to form. As I lifted the window I worried that its age would cause it to shriek, but it opened without a sound. I stood outside the window and didn’t move for ten minutes, waiting to see if Migsy heard movement and would come to investigate. When she didn’t appear I made the next bold move, in which I leaned my head through the open window, pushed the shade to the side, and tried to get a good view of the room. With Migsy nowhere in sight, I took a few extra seconds to absorb the location of the twin bed against the interior wall, a dresser and a chest of drawers situated on opposite walls, and a stack of blankets in the corner. The furnishings were sparse, which didn’t surprise me, as Migsy’s gruffness probably kept away most visitors.
After waiting another ten minutes, I hoisted myself up, kicked a leg through the open window, and straddled the sill, the shade on the inside still covering the window. Had Migsy walked in the room at that moment I had no doubt she’d assault me, and I’d have my hands full trying to fight off the elderly woman. But she didn’t burst through the closed bedroom door, and I made it inside the room without her detecting me. I opened the closet door in the bedroom to see if I could find anything that I might need to use later, and couldn’t believe its emptiness. She kept only necessities, and apparently only for herself.
As I approached the bedroom door I could hear the low din of other voices. With the door still closed, I put my ear up to it and tried to make sense of what they were saying. It didn’t take long before I realized that the voices were actually from the television. I cracked the door open out onto a carpeted hallway that ran through the middle of the mid-century ranch. A large, overstuffed couch sat empty, but Migsy made her presence known when she cleared her throat. She sat straight up in a leather recliner, facing away from me. Before I snuck up on her, I wanted to make sure she couldn’t see my reflection in the television, which hung on a wall directly in front of both of us. She wouldn’t be able to see that I was the person tiptoeing toward her. All she’d see is a person. So she’d likely use lethal force without warning. I wanted to avoid that at all costs, so studied the screen from a distance, and the brightness of the picture as well as the sunshine entering the room from the large bay window negated any chance of seeing a reflection in the screen.
Although I knew that Migsy was spry for a woman in her nineties, she was still a woman in her nineties. Without the aid of a weapon, she was unlikely to withstand a surprise attack from behind. I knew that if I carried out my plan exactly as I envisioned it, things should fall into place rather easily.
I employed The Summit’s silent walk training once again, and stood within three feet of Migsy’s chair. I could hear the labored scratchiness of her breath. I glanced around the room to make sure I didn’t see signs of anyone else in the house, but everything seemed clear.
As my heart raced, I took three cautious steps toward Migsy’s chair, grabbed both sides and pulled the entire chair back toward me. I stepped back so the chair wouldn’t knock me down, and pushed it down to floor. Migsy yelled and grabbed for the chair’s arms as she felt herself jerking backward. When the chair hit the floor her momentum kept her going and she slid along the back of the chair, which was now flat on the floor, until her head glided over the top of the chair, and then onto the floor. I heard the back of her head hit the hard tile with a thud. Still carried by momentum, her body began to flip toward her head, her feet up in the air, her butt and stomach following suit, and for a split second her feet were directly above her head. She completed the roll, and ended up flat on her stomach, her face rubbing against the top of the chair.
I waited a few seconds for her to say something, but not only didn’t she speak, she didn’t move at all. As I fell to one knee, I kept both eyes on her and her hands, making sure she didn’t have a weapon stashed on her body somewhere. A well-placed firearm could deliver a bullet to my face without warning.
“Come on, Migsy. I don’t think that little fall is going to kill you,” I said, as I leaned closer to her, placing two fingers on her neck to feel for a pulse. “You’ve survived tougher falls than that. Get up.”
She pulled her legs closer to her chest, and I heard a slight moan. �
�I think my hip’s broken. Help me up.”
“Your hip’s not broken,” I said. “If it were broken you wouldn’t be able to bend your entire leg like that. Besides, you didn’t even hit your hip very hard.”
Migsy didn’t say anything. I heard a series of moans, and then she rolled onto her back and lifted her right leg into the air, bent it repeatedly at the knee, and placed her foot back down on the ground. “What the fuck are you doing?” she asked.
“It’s Mia. I came to talk to you.” Migsy remained on her back, her eyes closed. She spread her arms wide, with her hands palm down against the floor as if in preparation to be crucified. “Let me help you up and then I’ve got a few questions.”
“Why’d you throw me down if you’re just going to help me up?”
“You know why, Migsy,” I said. During every training session I’d ever received from The Summit the importance of surprise had been emphasized. An unexpected engagement or attack always provided the attacker with the upper hand. I couldn’t remember the exact statistics they had on such encounters, but the chances of subduing an enemy increased something like sixty percent if the encounter began by surprise. I had physical superiority over Migsy, but I worried that she had enough experience to counteract my advantage. Adding the element of surprise just gave me a greater advantage, which might seem unnecessary when the adversary is in her nineties, but I knew better than to underestimate Migsy.
“Get me off the fucking ground, you stupid bitch.” I bent over and grabbed Migsy’s hands and helped her sit up. I put the chair back and then helped Migsy stand up and shuffle to the chair. She collapsed into the chair and leaned her head on her left hand and sat with her eyes closed. I backed away from her, never taking my eyes off of her, and pulled the nylon cord from the blinds that covered the front window. I wrapped the cord around Migsy’s left wrist, and then fed it through the bottom of the recliner, picked it out the opposite side, and tied the other end to her right wrist. I cinched it tight. “Too fucking tight, idiot. It’s digging into my skin. This isn’t a torture technique.”
“It is now,” I said.
Migsy shook her head in disgust. “You fucking young people don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”
“Okay, Migsy. Why don’t you tell me what I don’t know then? How about you sit there in your fucking chair, with your body that just wants to die, and your mind that should be dead already, and just tell me what the fuck I don’t know.”
“What are you doing, Mia? Where’s this anger coming from?” Migsy didn’t open her eyes, and tilted her head back as if too worn out to hold it upright.
“Where’s this anger coming from? It’s directly from Lloyd Logan.” I walked into the kitchen, grabbed a chair from the table, and parked it in front of Migsy. I straddled the chair, and leaned toward Migsy, waiting for her response.
“Lloyd Logan makes a lot of people angry, so I can’t say I’m surprised you’re upset.”
“Don’t do that, Migsy. Don’t fucking brush this off and pretend like you don’t know exactly what he told me. You know.”
“I’m not pretending anything,” Migsy said. “I’m too tired and I’m too damn old to pretend any more. He told you that he was trying to kill you? He really wanted you dead.”
“Yeah, he mentioned that,” I said. “He also said that you tried to kill me, and when that failed, you killed my parents.”
Migsy nodded in understanding, and said, “I guess he told you everything.”
“So you’re not denying it?”
“Denying it? Why the fuck would I do that? What would that accomplish? I’m too damn old to waste my time any more.”
“Then explain it to me. All of it. What the fuck happened to you to change you into a bitter old woman who forgot the meaning of loyalty and would sell anything in exchange for a dollar? How do you live with yourself?”
Migsy cleared her throat and then let out a fake, sarcastic, embellished laugh. “First things first, I live with myself quite nicely, thank you. I enjoy having the place to myself, and even though I’m old I still get around. I don’t need a live-in maid or someone to wipe my ass like every other goddamn ninety year old out there. I’ve been taking care of myself my entire life, and I’m not going to stop now.” Migsy paused and it seemed like she was waiting for me to respond in some way, but I just sat in the chair and looked at her. “Loyalty. What the fuck good is that? Where’s loyalty going to get you, Mia? Nowhere. You’re going to be loyal to someone for years, and then when you find out that person was never worth your loyalty, or never appreciated it, or never reciprocated it, then you’ll realize you wasted years that you’ll never get back. It’s a one-way street, Mia, and you can either go with the flow and keep moving forward, or you can go against traffic and someone will fucking run you over. I got run over for too many years, so finally I decided to change direction.”
“You decided to change direction? That’s your explanation? You divulge the existence of perhaps the most secretive organization on earth, you risk the lives of countless agents, you try to murder the person who has relied on you the most in your professional life, and all you can say is that you decided to change direction?”
“I don’t know what you want from me, Mia. Are you getting rich doing this job?”
“No. I didn’t set out to get rich though. I set out to help people who can’t help themselves. I set out to do things that make the world a better place, no matter how small or large those things are. There are enough people in this world who are on a never-ending quest for more dollars, but that’s not what we do.”
“Spare me this save-the-world bullshit. The only thing we’re saving are the assholes who end up with our services. And half the time I’m not even sure we’re on the right side, legally, morally, ethically. Lloyd Logan, for example. You worked your ass off in Kazakhstan to help that guy and the whole time he’s poisoning thousands of people and ruining large sections of the earth solely for his own profit. What the fuck sense did it make for you to help him?”
“I never did anything to help Logan,” I said. “I worked in Kazakhstan to help free those people who were being kidnapped and forced to work themselves to death in brutal conditions. The mission wasn’t to help Logan, the mission was to free those people. No other entity on earth could have achieved the results we did. Dozens of people are alive today because of what we did.”
“Holy fuck you’re delusional, Mia. You didn’t save any lives. You prolonged suffering. Those people are going to go back to their villages, and their wives and families have moved on, and there’s not going to be anyone there for them. They’re going to poor, alone, worn out from the mines, and no one is going to take care of them. But if you would have just left them in those mines at least they were fed and given shelter. Better than whatever they had to look forward to when they returned home.”
“When did you get so cynical?” I asked. “This isn’t the way you thought of things when you recruited me. You told me that you made a difference, that The Summit was the world’s best hope in achieving justice beyond the confines of judicial and criminal systems. What about those missions where no money was involved? We have missions all the time where all we do is save someone’s life. That’s it. Plain and simple. Nothing to be gained other than someone doesn’t have to die. I don’t know how you can say that’s not important.”
“Fuck you and your holier-than-thou attitude. Go ahead and try to save the world. You’re still fucking young so you can keep the delusions you’ve created in your head. But someday it’s all going to become clear and you’ll realize that you’re the only one not looking out for yourself. And then you’ll start asking yourself questions that are uncomfortable. Why am I doing this? Who am I actually working for? Why have I sacrificed so much of my life for this? What am I getting out of this? And when you’re honest with yourself you come to the conclusion that The Summit is a fucking waste. It’s a waste of your life and your talents and your commitment. I’ve been at it
a long fucking time. My days are numbered. It’s already stolen all of my life. So I might as well take something for myself.”
“That’s what you’re doing? Taking something for yourself?”
“You bet your sweet little ass,” Migsy said. “I’ve had it up to here with worrying about everyone else. It’s time to worry about numero uno.”
“And if people die, then so be it,” I said. Migsy shrugged her shoulders. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t speak. “Are you crazy? Is this age-related? You’re senile, aren’t you?”
“The fuck I am,” Migsy said. “I’ve never seen things so clearly in my life. I don’t hate anyone. I’m not out to destroy anyone. I’m just no longer letting anything stand in my way. If I want something I’m going to get it, no matter what.”
“You make me sick. You’ve turned into the type of person I’ve been battling my entire career. People like you are the reason The Summit exists.”
“No, Mia. That’s where you’re wrong. It’s people like you who are the reason The Summit exists. With your rose-colored glasses, and your warped sense of justice, and your obsession with fairness. Get over it! Stop expecting things that will never be. Human beings are selfish. The sooner you realize that it’s every man for himself, the better off you’ll be. If everyone just accepts that, then there’s no problem. We can all live in that world and we know the rules and we know what we have to do. Problems develop when some goody two-shoes like you expects people to do things that are counter to their best interests. The best thing in the world for me is to go right, and you’re demanding that I go left. But I know that going right is what I need to do, it’s what I want to do, and it’s what I should do. Which means I’m left with a choice. And it took me a long time to figure it out, but I finally realize that the only rational choice, the only choice that makes any sense at all, is to go right. Do what I want. So fuck you, Mia.”