This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 JB Trepagnier
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means – by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without prior written permission.
Origins
I’m lying on the bed trying not to move. It’s not part of my job to be sick. My handler has been bringing me soup and medication. I have a handler, he has a handler, then there is she. You are really in deep shit when she gets involved. She is 6’4” in heels and she always wears them. She knows at least ten different ways to kill you. She knows another five to just knock you out for a little while. She does not take shit from anyone and she really doesn’t tolerate it when you mess up.
She runs an agency for secret agents. No one knows her real name. Everyone just calls her “She”. Several weeks ago, an anonymous group of hackers calling themselves “The Arm” hacked her computers and that of several other agencies. They released the real names and addresses of nearly every active agent and every person being actively recruited. Everyone has gone into hiding, including recruits. There was no record of her because she doesn’t exist anywhere.
When the news broke, I was sitting at my desk at my insurance job trying to fart around online while taking calls even though I’m not supposed to. I am at the bottom of the totem in the insurance industry. My job does not require any type of license. Basically, I’m the one that answers when someone calls in because they need to file a claim. I input everything they tell me, then it leaves me and goes to someone with a license to investigate. I get a lot of people crying on me and they don’t pay me enough. We have a high turnover rate, but I don’t have anywhere else to go, so I’ve been here a while. I’ve tried, but never been promoted to manager.
I was interested in the story because I used to watch James Bond movies with my dad growing up and it always seemed glamorous. I kept following the story until they started posting that there was now a worldwide shortage of agents and recruits. I started wondering how I could become and agent. There was nowhere for me to go with the insurance job unless someone helped me get a license and trained me.
That’s when all the ads started popping up. “Become a secret agent”. You could learn via correspondence course online! I knew I wanted to do this, but I didn’t really make enough money. I finally found one that offered financial aid for the basic class, so I signed up and figured I could pay it back when I was a rich secret agent.
It was a six-week online course, but they expected you to do all the physical training locally and pay additional money. I was trying to do the courses when I got home from work. I didn’t make enough money to pay someone to train me to fight or shoot. I thought I had hit a dead end, but then I hit Google and YouTube.
I found Tae Bo videos on YouTube. I had watched a movie that described fighting like dancing and this seemed perfect. I could fight and dance at the same time while getting into banging shape. The shooting part took a little more work.
I didn’t have enough money to pay for shooting lessons, let alone a gun. I thought about the cap guns my neighbors had growing up and wondered if there was some sort of toy I could learn to shoot with. BB guns were too big. YouTube told me there was such a thing as potato guns. Potatoes could be like bullets. So off I went to the toy store.
I had to go to a few before I found what I needed. YouTube had people who made potato cannons, but that’s not what I needed. I needed a small, handheld potato gun. I managed to find one at the last store I was going to that day. You just stuck the tip into the potato and it would core a half inch piece of potato and you could shoot it. Perfect! Checking out was a little weird. The cashier looked at me, then at the potato gun.
“For your son?” she asked.
Now, I knew you aren’t supposed to talk about being a secret agent or none of these people would be in hiding. I couldn’t tell her it was my mission was to become one.
“Um, yes,” I said. “He wants to shoot bottles and I figured this was safer than a BB gun.”
Next, I went to the grocery store. I wasn’t sure how many potatoes I should buy. I needed to be an excellent shot, so I bought I sack of ten. I also knew I should be eating better, so I got all beef Hot Pockets because I thought they would be high in protein. I got oatmeal for breakfast.
The first night doing the Tae Bo, I thought I was going to die. The guy on the video is screaming at me, trying to motivate me, and I’m holding my side and screaming. It felt like there was a hot poker jamming into my side and my legs and arms felt like jelly. I was enthusiastic when I first started kicking, punching, and shimmying. About ten minutes in, I couldn’t breathe and lifting my arms an inch felt just awful. My kicks were maybe an inch off the ground. My neighbors started pounding on the ceiling with a broom or something because I must have been making too much noise. I needed to get lighter and quieter. Surely this would get easier.
Since it was dark when I got home from work, I didn’t get to use my potato gun until the weekend. I took the stairs up to the roof of my apartment building and saved some beer bottles. I lined them up. I had read the instructions on the potato gun. I stuck the tip of the gun in my first potato and tried shooting. I missed every single bottle. I went through an entire potato and hit nothing.
What I was not expecting the next morning, was the pigeons. When I left my building, there were pigeons everywhere outside the front door. There was a cab driver waiting for someone just standing there watching them. When he saw me staring, he shook his head.
“Some jackass left a bunch of potato pieces out here for the pigeons,” he told me.
Oops, I thought. I wasn’t even thinking about pigeons. I would either need to get better at shooting or find some way to shoot so that the potato bullets didn’t end up on the street or people would start asking questions.
I didn’t tell anyone at work what I was doing, but they all wanted to know why I was so sore lately. I just said I was working out again. I got several invitations to power walk the building with people, but I could barely make it to my desk and said no.
I was sore all week, but knew I needed to be tough, so I did Tae Bo every night without fail. Someone at work who worked out told me I should at least take a few nights off a week, but I couldn’t tell them that I was trying to do an accelerated program to become a secret agent, so I didn’t get nights off. It hurt like hell and some nights, I did it so feebly, my neighbor wasn’t pounding on the ceiling to get me to quit thumping.
I had moved the bottles against a brick wall so that there were no pigeons on the street anymore. I thought they would be gone by the time I got back to my bottles on the weekends. I hate to say it, but they were waiting for me, stalking me for more potatoes. As soon as I started shooting, I got swarmed by pigeons wanting my potatoes. I had to run around the roof waiving my arms and screaming to get them to go away so that I could continue shooting.
I was getting really tired of pigeons and they were getting really vindictive. It was like they recognized me from the roof during the week and everywhere I went, it seemed like there was a group of pigeons watching me and waiting for me to drop potatoes. And I must have bought old potatoes because they started to sprout and get all soft. I wound up having to replace my potatoes. I was shooting one potato a day on the weekends. I was also running out of bottles, so I had to stock up on more beer. I told myself it was for wor
k and rewarded myself with a beer after a hard Tae Bo session before bed.
About two weeks into the course, I had gotten into the section about disguises. I tried using what I had learned and disguise myself went I went out to shoot, but it didn’t fool the pigeons. As soon as they spotted the potatoes, they swarmed me. I was getting really tired of pigeons. Hopefully, my disguises were better at fooling real people than birds.
Five weeks into the course, I was getting really good with the potato gun. I could shoot all the bottles with ease. The pigeons still bothered me. I had to interrupt my shooting to frequently run around the roof running around screaming and waiving my arms. I didn’t know how fast I would be with a real gun because it took time to load another piece of potato and chase off the pigeons, but my aim was really good. I was already on level five of Tae Bo and I was barely out of breath anymore. I knew once I got my certificate, I would have a lot to offer when I started applying. My downstairs neighbor was very angry with me about the thumping and had progressed from banging on the ceiling to leaving passive aggressive notes on my door.
I aced my exams on spying, espionage, disguises, undercover work. My certificate popped up when I finished, but I had to wait until my lunch break at work to print it because I don’t have a printer in my apartment. I printed it out, updated my resume on my lunch break, then went back to the phones. When I got home, I did level six of Tae Bo because training is important.
I tried looking for jobs to apply to, but they don’t exactly advertise those jobs. I tried finding message boards to figure out where the jobs are actually posted and how they list them, but apparently secret agents don’t post on message board. I noted that for when I was hired because I didn’t want to get in trouble.
I couldn’t actually figure out how to get hired as a secret agent now that I was qualified. Then an idea hit me. I went back to the articles when the story broke and found out the company names that they were using as a front. There was one here in New York, so I looked up the company name and found their career page. They were hiring for several position, but none of them said anything about being a secret agent. I thought that was a front, so I just applied to all of their open positions.
We weren’t supposed to have our phones out at work since we took back-to-back phone calls, but I managed to hide mine on my desk because I just knew they would call me with all my recent training. My phone didn’t ring all day. I came home disappointed and did my Tae Bo. I continued my shooting training on the weekends.
Two weeks later, I still hadn’t heard anything back, so I went back to the website, but there was no contact information so that I could follow up. I was starting to lose hope when finally, my phone rang around ten. I couldn’t answer because I was on a work call, but on my lunch break, I practically ran outside to check my voicemail. It was Stantech calling about my application! I was so excited, but I had to take a few breaths and calm myself down before I called back.
I tried to remain calm when I dialed the number and asked for Mr. Black. They transferred me and he actually picked up. I was worried he would also be on his lunch break. He started asking me questions and some, I knew I didn’t have the right answer to. He asked how many foreign languages I speak and the answer was none. I had to take Spanish in high school, but the only thing I can say now is “Please hold, I don’t speak Spanish” if anyone calls in at work.
He told me my background was highly irregular for what they were looking for, but that there was a shortage of applicants right now and invited me in for an in-person interview. We arranged it and I managed to get the entire day off work. I normally wouldn’t take an entire day off for an interview, but I wanted to be calm and collected, but also be able to go home and cry if it didn’t go well.
The day of my interview arrived. I wasn’t sure what to wear, so I called my mother to go through her closet since I didn’t think anything I had was appropriate since we wear jeans to work and I couldn’t afford a new outfit. I went through her closet and found the perfect outfit. It was a mauve jumper that reminded me a Charlie’s Angels since it was from the seventies. My mother tried to talk me out of it, but I didn’t think it was wise to tell her what kind of job I was applying for because if I got it, I would probably have a cover job and she could never know.
That next morning, I got dressed and I looked amazing. All that Tae Bo really paid off. I had lost about ten pounds and had firmed up a little. I drove to the building using GPS on my phone and didn’t get too lost. It was a big glass building with tinted windows so you couldn’t see inside, but it looks like it could be any type of business. That’s probably what they were going for.
The receptionist looked at me like I had a second head when I told her I was there for an interview. Maybe the outfit was a bad idea? I still thought I looked good. Mauve was a good color on me. It brought out my blonde hair and green eyes. She told me to take a seat and someone would be out for me. I didn’t know if I should sit and wait or if it would be appropriate to check my social media accounts on my phone. I wound up reading a magazine they had out. It was boring and on finance.
Finally, Mr. Black came out and called me to his office. He was a tall man, with gray hair and a stern face. He was dressed impeccably in a gray suit and a gray-blue tie. I was rethinking my outfit again. Maybe I should have borrowed a power suit?
He looked at me and asked what I knew about the company. I wasn’t sure if I should mention the breach, but I did anyway. I told him that I had been following the breach in the news and that there was now a shortage of agents. I took a correspondence course and found their company name from an article and tried to apply.
He cleared his throat and informed me that they had updated their security servers and nothing like this would happen again. He wanted information about the course and what all I had learned. He also told me this is not normal training for an agent. He informed me they normally recruit people while they are still in school, based on particular talents, and then train them on fighting and how to use guns when they graduated. Since it was already out, he told me all of their agents had gone into hiding and everyone they were actively recruiting had also left school or transferred so that they couldn’t be found. They now only had two agents and the new recruits they have started looking at are freshman and sophomores and it would be several years before they graduated and were able to join.
I mentioned to him that I had taught myself to fight while doing the correspondence courses from Tae Bo videos and I learned to shoot with a potato gun and was able to hit all of my targets now. He looked at my very strangely for a moment, then asked me if I was aware that Tae Bo was an aerobics program and not actually a style of fighting and that a real gun recoils much stronger than a potato gun and is much heavier. I was not aware, but pointed out I was willing to learn any type of fighting they would teach me and learn to use a real gun.
So far, I thought this entire interview was a disaster and I had made a total ass of myself thinking I could do this. And I was wearing a mauve jumper from the seventies to boot.
I was surprised when he told me that my background was all wrong for the job, but that he liked my initiative trying to learn everything I did. If I could apply it here, they would teach me everything I needed to know. I would need to learn foreign languages, different ways to use a computer, fighting, and how to use a gun.
I wanted to jump up and hug him, but that would have been unprofessional and he was already taking a huge shot on me. I knew part of it was that they were desperate and I just happened to be here willing to learn. He told me to give notice at my insurance job and show up prepared to learn on Monday.
I called work as soon as I got home and told them I wouldn’t be back. We have a high turnover rate due to the stress of the job and the low pay, but they were surprised I was leaving since I had been there so long. I couldn’t tell them what I was doing, but I just said that I had taken another job. I was keyed up the entire time leading up to Monday.
Training
Monday rolled around and I wasn’t sure what to wear. Should I borrow a power suit from my mother? I thought they might be teaching me to fight, so I wore yoga pants and a t-shirt. As soon as I walked in, I learned this was the wrong thing. I was supposed to walk in the door like this was a normal office dressed up like a worker for a large computer tech company. I was to bring a bag with clothes to change into for my training. I tried to apologize, but Mr. Black just said he should have told me.
I first had to go to HR and get a photo taken for a keycard badge that would give me access to my training rooms. I got all my logins for the computer training I would need. Finally, someone named Mr. Green came down and brought me to bring me up to training. He did not look like Mr. Black. He was younger, had a crew cut and was totally ripped.
He brought me upstairs and told me for the first three hours, I would be learning a new language. I would spend an hour after that learning about guns, but not using one. I would be provided a lunch, then I would spend the rest of the day learning how to fight. He pointed out to me how behind I was from people they were recruiting.
He sat me down at a computer and gave me headphones. They wanted me to learn Mandarin Chinese. I went through several modules and my head was starting to hurt after three hours. I didn’t know if they just wanted me to speak it or if I would have to learn to write it too. I knew nothing about the Chinese language other than I really liked Chinese food. The modules were pretty basic, just teaching me how to have a regular conversation. There were quizzes at the end of every module. If I failed it, I had to take the whole module again and I failed several of them. I had to repeat everything back into a microphone and I tried to make it sound like the person speaking to me through the computer, but I thought I sounded off.
Mr. Green came in exactly three hours later and asked me something in Mandarin. I wracked me brains to think what he had just asked me, then I realized he had asked me how I was doing. I was able to reply fine. He told me my accent was terrible and I needed to be focusing on that in addition to learning the words and what they mean.
Special Agent Mauve Origins Page 1