by Lisa Ladew
My mother had misgivings, but my father thought it was an excellent idea. My mother wanted to know ‘what if the baby grows into an adult who doesn’t want to do this kind of work?’ The senator laughed and said that was no problem. They were training spies, not slaves. Eventually, my father wore her down and she agreed. ‘We’re both excellent agents,’ my father said. ‘And we both love our jobs. Chances are the baby will want to be a spy too. And imagine, he or she will start out at 18 knowing everything they need to know, with no need to take more schooling.’”
Sara stopped and looked down, shaking her head. Jerry took the opportunity to try think about everything she had said. He tried to imagine toddler Sara playing with gun parts instead of baby dolls. The image came too easily. Sara was a very serious, expeditious person. It wasn’t hard to imagine that she’d been denied a normal childhood.
Sara’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “What my father never imagined was that they wouldn’t wait till I was 18. They wanted me to start missions at 14. My mother balked at this, especially when she discovered what they wanted me to do. I’d gone on a few missions with one or both of my parents. Small ones. Talking to assets - those are people who have information you want and are willing to sell it to you - looking for new assets, surveillance. Stuff like that. No immediate danger. So when the senator’s assistant at the time showed up and laid out the mission they had in mind, my mother went nuclear. He was in our home, having dinner, and when he laid out his plan, my mother threw him out of the house. Physically. She knocked him out of his chair and hauled him to the door by his collar. That turned out to be a huge mistake.”
Jerry had a probing tool slightly in the hole in Sara’s arm. He took it out when he heard how quiet Sara’s voice had gotten. He was afraid all of a sudden. He knew he didn’t want to hear anymore of this. But he also knew he had to. “What did he want you to do?”
“He wanted me to be traded in to a brothel as a child sex slave. The man who ran it had a penchant for pre-teen girls. I was 14, but I could pass for 11 or 12. When I was in, he wanted me to ask some questions of the man, and then get him to drink a poisoned drink. Once he was dead, I was to open the window and throw a red flag out, and the team would pull me out.”
Jerry’s tool fell from his fingers into the dust below. “AT FOURTEEN?” he yelled.
“That’s what my mother said. She said, ‘she’s never even kissed anyone, and you want her to have sex with a monster and then kill him?!’ Then she pushed him out of his chair and threw him out. I remember the look of hatred on his face very clearly as she slammed the door in his face. I’ll give you one guess who the man was.”
“Frank Thorpe,” Jerry said, his tone flat.
“Yes. He wasn’t in charge of the DCIA back then. He was trying to work his way up to it though. Back then they didn’t do most of the things we do today. My mother had acted as a prostitute a few times I’m pretty sure, but I don’t think she ever killed anyone. My father killed someone in self-defense twice, but not as one of his duties. It wasn’t until Frank Thorpe took over completely that we started to get more aggressive. And one of the biggest reasons he could is because the group of super-spies that the senator had set in motion in from 1980 to 1989 were growing up and able to take on missions. You have to understand, none of us went to school, none of us played with our peers, none of us knew anything but what our parents and our handlers and our counselors told us. We were indoctrinated. There was a camp that we went to in the summers somewhere in the southern U.S. I’m not even sure where it was. But it was 6 weeks long and we could start going when we were 10. It was mostly war games, survival training, that kind of stuff, but the camp instructors filled us with propaganda. America is the greatest country in the world. America is the only country able to save the world from communism and other human evils (Of course in the 2000s communism was changed to terrorism). Killing the worst of the bad guys is sometimes the only way. Justice doesn’t work in third world countries. Stuff like that.”
Sara looked down at her arm. “We have to get moving again, are you done with my wound?”
“No, uh, keep talking, I’ll be done soon.” Jerry had been so fascinated with her story he had forgotten what he was doing. He picked another tool out of the pack and went back to work on Sara’s arm. As she spilled out the next part of her tale he fished out the bullet, receiving only a small grimace from Sara, then cleaned, packed, and wrapped her wound.
“So back to me and the mission they wanted me to take on. I didn’t do it. My mother ranted and raved for days. She wanted to pull me out of the program. She wanted to quit. She wanted my dad to quit. She wanted to report Thorpe to the president. My dad calmed her down, but she stuck to her guns about pulling me out of the program. I was glad and terrified at the same time. Glad because I didn’t want to go into that brothel. But terrified because suddenly my life seemed to have no purpose. I wanted to be a spy. I wanted to do what my parents did. I’d been trained for it from the day I was born and really, I knew nothing else. What would I do if I weren’t a spy? Be a waitress? Become the garbage truck driver? I didn’t have contact with the real world, with anyone who wasn’t in a service position or in the agency. I didn’t know what else existed. Being a spy was fun, glamorous, exciting. Hadn’t I been taught that and shown that by the two people I loved most in the world?
All my training stopped. Mom went out and bought me some books. Real books. Not agency-approved stories. She said we were going to learn how to cook together. And then she went out on a mission and didn’t come back.”
Jerry looked up sharply. He knew this had been coming. He had been praying in his mind that he was wrong. But he wasn’t.
“It was a simple mission. She was to fly to Bogota, talk to someone that said they had some information on babies that were being stolen from women’s arms in shocking numbers, and fly home. Something went wrong, and supposedly her contact stabbed her instead.”
Jerry had just finished his bandage and looked into Sara’s face, trying to read the emotional weather there. Her face was a stoic mask, her eyes peered out over the swiftly lightening desert, but appeared to see nothing. He put an arm around her and pulled her in to him. She let herself be hugged for a short moment, then stood up quickly, pulling away from him.
“We should get going. I want to be up on that ridge by full daylight. We can walk and talk.”
“OK.” Jerry got to his feet. His poor, bruised feet. He couldn’t wait to get these boots off. He wondered where they were going to sleep today. Or if they were going to sleep today. Sara already had her pack on her back and her cot legs in the air. She took off and Jerry had to jog to catch up with her.
“Sorry about your mom,” he said when he did.
“Yeah, thanks.” She whispered. He thought she wasn’t going to pick up her story thread for a while, but she did.
“My dad tried to hold things together, but he was lost without my mom. My mom was the strong one in the family. The decisive one. I never did leave the program, and after a while things just got back to normal. I started going on all my dad’s missions with him. One night I realized he was talking on the phone with Thorpe. He was telling Thorpe, no, he wouldn’t, that was ridiculous, but Thorpe was obviously not listening to him at all. My dad finally hung up, seemingly disgusted. And the next night he was on the phone with Thorpe again. It seemed like Thorpe talked to him almost every night for weeks. And my dad eventually gave in.
He came to me and he asked me did I remember the mission that the agency wanted me to go on? It had been over a year since they’d first asked at that point. I had turned 15 and was halfway to 16, but still looked younger. I said I did. He said that the bad man who ran that brothel was still free and he was still having sex with little girls, younger than me. He asked me if my mom had ever had the sex talk with me. I said yes, but I was embarrassed. She hadn’t really. What little I knew was from the summer camps and the other kids there. I asked my dad why they didn’t just shoot t
he guy through a window or blow up his car or something if they wanted him dead. He said the guy was too careful for that. He always kept the shades drawn, always checked his car or had it watched, that kind of thing. I asked him if they still wanted me to do it. He said they did. I asked him if I had to do it. He said no, I didn’t have to, that it was my choice, but that I’d have to start taking my own missions at some point. Every day I inched closer to 18, the agency was going to put more pressure on me.
I told him I’d let him know in the morning. He nodded. I remember his face. He looked incredibly sad. Like no matter which answer I gave him, it would be the wrong one. I thought about it all night. I knew my mother wouldn’t have wanted me to do it. If it hadn’t been for that I just would have said yes. I didn’t think my dad would let anything happen to me, and I didn’t think it would be that awful. And I was another year older. And if I did it the man would stop hurting the little girls. And I would be considered a real agent once I did my first mission, not just a trainee. All these reasons to do it floated around in my brain. And the only two reasons I could think of not to do it were that he might get to have sex with me, and that my mother hadn’t wanted me to. I had been trained in weapons, computers, surveillance, escape and evasion, persuasion, machine repair, hand to hand fighting, survival, lock picking, disguises, disabling alarms, languages, first aid, and I was even starting to take flying lessons. But I was still just an immature teenager who made poor decisions. I said I’d do it.”
Sara snuck a look at Jerry’s face. Jerry could feel the weight of her gaze. He kept his face even, relaxed. He knew she probably wasn’t looking for approval - but maybe more like an absence of contempt. He had no contempt for her. She’d been trying to do the right thing.
Whatever she saw in his face allowed her to keep going.
“The agency came in and outfitted me. They put me on birth control, just in case. They gave me a necklace that was strong enough to strangle a man with, but they felt any more weapons would be a risk. They gave me the pills I was supposed to put in his drink in a little pouch. I tucked it between my cheek and gum, way in the back of my mouth. The tied a dirty red handkerchief around my wrist like a bracelet and said to throw it out the window when it was over.
I was put in a car and driven to a man who was supposed to be with the agency. He was dirty and old and he didn’t seem like he was anything but a criminal. He took me in to the city and locked me in a small house. 2 other men came and got me from there. They were crude and handled me horribly. At one point I was afraid they were going to rape me before I ever got close to my mission. Finally, we made it to the brothel, a large hacienda with an 8 foot wall like a prison. I was put in a big room with dozens of beds and a lock on the door. There were 8 or 9 women there, but they didn’t act like prisoners. When they wanted out they knocked on the door and someone let them out. Sometimes a man would come and get one of them. They would go happy and joking, not by force, like I had come in. I waited for hours. No one came to get me. Finally, I got up and started talking to some of the women. In one of the far corners I saw a girl with dirty clothes and stringy hair hanging in her face. I thought maybe she was someone’s daughter, but no one ever talked to her. She seemed to be hiding between the wall and the bed, just sitting on the floor, hugging her knees and talking to herself. I tried to talk to her, but she stared right through me. I asked one of the woman about her. Her name was Lupe. She was 9. She’d been there for at least 2 years. She wasn’t anyone’s kid. The woman didn’t know how she came to be there, but she knew why she was there. The fat man liked her. I knew who the fat man was. That was who I was supposed to kill. I was horrified. She was 9! I made up my mind at that moment that she was coming with me out of that place. I sat at her feet and sang songs. I told stories. Eventually she looked at me, then I got her to smile. I told her my name. I asked her if she would go with me when I left the hacienda. She didn’t say yes or no, but she cried a little.
A man came into the room, and I saw Lupe’s eyes lock on him, huge and terrified. I got up and walked towards him, hoping that he was coming for me and not her. He was. It was my chance. Hate burned a thin fire down my insides. When I got to the fat man’s room, all fear had fallen away from me. I wasn’t there as a scared little girl anymore. But when I saw him, I knew I’d have to do this the way I was told, and not the way I wanted to. Oh how I wished for a weapon. But my necklace was no good. His neck was too fat for it. So I steeled myself for what was going to come next. I told myself I could handle it. I could handle it for Lupe. But I didn’t have to go through with anything. He left me alone to go to the bathroom and I put the pills in his drink right away. He was sweating in 2 minutes, his lungs were drowning him with fluid in 5. He fell over, making horrible noises and died in front of me. I watched him and I was glad. I opened the window and threw the red bandanna out. Nothing happened for the longest time. I was just about to search his room for weapons and try to sneak my way out, when finally a ladder came to the window. I tried to tell the agent that we had to go get Lupe. He wouldn’t. He said his orders were to get me. I said I wasn’t going without Lupe. He grabbed me and practically threw me out the window. I told everyone I saw that we needed to get Lupe out, but none of them would listen to me. Even my own father. I still wasn’t a real agent after all.
When I got home that night, all I could think about was Lupe. I did the math inside my own head and knew that if I had done the mission the first time they had asked me to, Lupe would have been in there for only a few months. After my father went to sleep I searched through his papers until I found the address to the brothel. I took two of his guns and two of his knives and the car, and I drove to it. I thought the place would be crawling with cops but it wasn’t. I couldn’t decide if they didn’t know the fat man was dead, or if they buried him in the garden, but I didn’t care. I climbed over the wall, found an unlocked window, and searched out the locked bedroom. It was 3 or 4 in the morning, but there was a guard. He was dozing on his feet, but there. I argued with myself for a long time. I wasn’t tall enough to efficiently cut his throat, but I couldn’t shoot him either, or the whole house would come running. I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. Finally, he walked down the hall - to the bathroom or something. I took my chance and tiptoed in. Lupe was sleeping between the bed and the wall, where I left her. I whispered in her ear until she woke up and then she and I went out the window. I boosted her over the wall and drove her to my house.
My father didn’t discover I had her on a makeshift bed in my closet for 2 weeks. She was quiet as a mouse and barely ate anything. I brought her books, and she read all day. I finally had to tell him because he wanted me to go on a mission out of town. She was terrified of him. I tried to explain that he wouldn’t hurt her, but she wouldn’t even look at him. She curled into a ball and moaned if he was in the room.
He was livid when I told him what I did. And terrified. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to take Lupe to an orphanage. I wanted to find her parents. She hadn’t told me her last name but I was confident I would get it out of her eventually.”
Jerry had been so entranced in the story he didn’t notice that Sara’s voice had taken on an almost frantic tone. When she had talked about her mother dying, her voice had been flat, neutral. But now her final sentence pulled him out of his reverie and he looked at her closely. She was crying and her face was contorting as if in pain. Jerry wondered if she had ever told this story to anyone before. He doubted it. Who would she tell? He reached his arm out to hug her, one-armed as they walked, but before he could she spewed out her next sentence with a moan.
“The next day the choice was taken from us. Lupe hung herself in my closet with one of my belts.”
Sara collapsed to the desert hard pan.
Chapter 24
Jerry threw off his pack and covered Sara’s body with his own, at first afraid she’d been shot somehow. When he heard her sobbing he realized she’d been ambushed by only her emotions. He ran
his fingers through her hair and pressed his cheek to hers. “Shhhhhh, baby, shhhhhh, it’s OK,” he murmured into her ear. His heart went out to her, and to Lupe, and to the whole goddamned mess. If the fat man had been here in front of him now, he might have killed the fat fucker himself. He didn’t normally believe in violence as a way to solve problems, but one man who could inflict so much pain on children didn’t deserve anything better, did he?
Sara sobbed and shook and Jerry let her. He held her close but knew she’d be better off if she got this out. He wondered if she’d ever cried over Lupe before. Knowing Sara, this might be the first time.
Eventually, her cries started to break off into sniffles. She pushed herself to a sitting position and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Sorry,” she said.
“Oh baby, you don’t have to be sorry. Everyone cries sometimes. It sounded like that was a long time coming.” Sara bit her lip and nodded, looking at the ground.
“Sara, you know it wasn’t your fault right? What happened to Lupe?”
Sara’s mouth twisted. “Some of it was my fault. I could have saved her earlier.”
“No baby, you couldn’t have. You were just a little girl yourself. You didn’t even know she existed.”
Sara shook her head. Jerry could see on her face that she didn’t believe it for a second. Sara held herself fully responsible for the atrocities visited on that little girl. Jerry wanted to press. He wanted to insist. But he stayed quiet. She wasn’t ready to give it up yet, and he knew he had to respect that.