by Nina D'Aleo
“I’ll take him to lock down if you script the report,” Dark told me as we neared the front counter.
“Five minutes of walking versus an hour of writing—sounds fair to me,” I said dryly.
He pushed ahead with his cocky strut and flashed a cheeky grin back at me. Desk work didn’t involve enough shooting, punching or full-frontal nudity to interest my partner. Marissa, at reception, was attempting to look serious and focused as we reached the counter. She had a thing for Dark, but the poor girl didn’t stand a chance. She’d committed the cardinal sin in his eyes. James from Accounting had told Beck from Surveillance who’d told Terri in the tea room that Marissa had said that Dark was cute. For him it was a four-letter word so offensive that even I didn’t go there. Sadly, there were no second chances as far as Boston Bonacci-DeScuro was concerned.
Knowing this made her nervous fluttering painful to watch—and even more painful still was the fact that she reminded me of the way I used to act around guys I liked when I was a teenager. The hair twisting, the awkward laughter, the stilted conversation crammed with things you later relive and repeat to yourself under your breath in the hopes that it didn’t sound as bad as you think it might have—and yes, it definitely did. Finally she gave Dark a temporary clearance for Medical and buzzed us through to the offices. I exited the cringe-fest, embarrassed for her, embarrassed for me, and pretty much over men in general.
Dark nodded to me as he led walt toward the internal elevators heading for Medical Division, where our guy would be locked down and re-capped, after which time he’d be returned home with a significant gap in his memory. I paused to watch them go. I’d conducted the same LIA (locate, isolate and apprehend) countless times before, yet I still felt moments of unease. I knew we were doing the right thing, saving the walts from themselves and protecting others, but they were just so vulnerable and unaware. They were watched and controlled and they never knew a thing about it. Exactly how the operatives in Medical Division reversed their break-thrus and re-capped them I didn’t have clearance to know and, admittedly, I probably wouldn’t have been able to understand the process anyway. There was an emergency boredom override switch in my brain that activated at the onset of any scientific, mathematical, mechanical or technological conversation, mentally transporting me from reality into fantasy. Incidentally, I’d spent a lot of my teen school years and adult work life in fantastical places, at least inside my head.
The ‘why’ of the process was more my level of operation. walts were people identified as having a syndrome discovered in the early nineteen-forties by Dr Douglas K Whitman, whose name inspired their codename ‘walt’. Shaman Syndrome was a genetic disorder characterized by a mutation across numerous chromosomes. It was passed through certain families. However, its sequence was not the same in each person and had not been mapped with any exactness, prompting the discoverer of the syndrome to famously ponder: if not explicable by science, could this aberration possibly be considered in the realm of magic? (Thus the name Shaman) The symptoms of the syndrome in an un-capped or breaking-thru carrier were an uncontrollable, preternatural heightening of the senses, which made the person, the walt, superman strong and mentally unstable: basically homicidal and suicidal all in one hit.
Shortly after the discovery, a global meeting of heads of state unanimously voted that it was in the best interests of the human race as a whole not to have these people existing. They were extremely dangerous to themselves and anyone around them. The first suggestion was wiping them all out, but in the aftermath of the heinous genocide of the Second World War and the following international laws and conventions on group extermination, less horrendous methods of controlling the walts were sought. Someone came up with the idea of inventing a disease with symptoms mirroring those of a person close to breaking-thru. They thought it would encourage carriers to come forward and seek treatment, and that treatment would be specialized sedatives to keep the symptoms in check, as well as a sterilizing drugs to stop the syndrome passing on to another generation of walts.
The planning was solid, but the operation failed. They hadn’t taken into account that the condition manifested itself differently in every carrier. For some the medication worked, and for others it didn’t at all, plus somehow the walts were still falling pregnant and giving birth, despite the sterilization. The science at the time just couldn’t explain how, but as an outcome, a new group of researchers, recruited from the very top of their fields, developed a method to suppress the symptoms, to ‘cap’ the current generation of walts as well as those being born. Chapter 11 was established to monitor these individuals and, in its modern form, was the longest-running, largest-scale surveillance operation in the history of the world.
Most walts lived their lives never knowing what they were. A small percentage ‘broke-thru’ and started exhibiting symptoms. Then agents like me and Dark acted to bring them in to be re-capped. We were operatives, we were the clean-up crew, we were spin doctors. Most of us had an inborn propensity to stretch the truth, which made trusting anyone difficult, but imagination was like any other beast—it was either chain it up and hear it roar, or run with it. Of course, with any operation of this magnitude, questions regarding preservation of secrecy were always thrown around. How did we function without anyone finding out?
That wasn’t a brain-teaser. Either we kept the secret alive, or we kept it in our graves, and anyone we told outside of the Chapter also had an immediate target on their backs. It wasn’t written in any operational manual, and certainly not mentioned during recruitment and training, but the fact was the Chapter had long outgrown its former constraints and had evolved into a self-regulating, self-enforcing machine. We operated beyond any government, above any law and outside of any help should we run afoul of the company. It was something agents learnt quickly, mostly through rumors and sometimes with first-hand experience. Agents and their families had vanished. The official response was always that they had been relocated for debriefing and retraining, but we knew this wasn’t the case.
When it came to saving the world, the Chapter had an extremely cold-blooded approach that, at times, ran in opposition to the beliefs of their individual agents, and there was definitely a climate of fear governing everything we did. And I could understand why: if the general population of the world found out what we were doing—watching one in three people worldwide, twenty-four hours a day, and performing non-consensual medical procedures on them—there would be a mass uproar, maybe even revolutions—wars—and then what? What if all the walts started breaking-thru and killing civilians and themselves? It was our moral obligation to stop that—I understood that—it was just the ‘at whatever cost’ that stuck in my throat.
Mostly the Chapter hired agents who could easily fall into line with the operational ideology, but there had been many times when I wondered how I’d slipped through, why they’d accepted me knowing how I’d felt and thought. I’d been honest during the recruitment process, if not extremely naïve. When I’d discovered how things really were, I’d wanted to leave, but by then I was trapped by the fear of something happening to my family—so now I just did my job, inflicting as little damage as I could, while trying to pretend everything was okay. But every day the things we did were getting harder and harder to justify, and more questions about the Chapter were forming in my mind.
Dark vanished down the hall and I turned right. I passed through frosted glass sliding doors into the offices of my division—Operational Services.
5
Compared to most agents operating in other intelligence services and organizations around the world, I was elite as far as security clearance went, but inside Chapter 11 Headquarters, the reality was significantly less grand. I was a small fish in a big ocean of sharks. I was a regular field agent and regular field agents didn’t get their own offices; we had cubicles within kissing distance of each other. I had Dark’s desk in front of mine, a colleague, Dragomir Jovanović (Codename: Jovic), on the left and his partner
, Mai Lin (Codename: Feng), on the right. They called it a pod of desks. It was kindergarten all over again.
I received and returned a few hellos from fellow agents as I weaved my way toward our pod.
“I thought you were on morning shift this week,” an agent codenamed Boots called out.
“Called in,” I replied to a chorus of sympathetic groans.
My regular shift would start in five hours—seven am. I’d had exactly two hours off in the last forty-eight hours.
Jovic and Feng, looking like the dictionary definition of mismatched, were already standing at our pod. Jovic was of Serbian descent with deep Mediterranean skin, a blond crew-cut and a squat weightlifter’s physic. His claim to fame was a walk-through part in an eighties Schwarzenegger film. I hadn’t personally been able to catch sight of him in the millisecond of footage, but I’d told him I had, as friends do.
Feng on the other hand had Chinese parents. She was vampire pale with flowing black satin hair and a statuesque frame that made even a tracksuit look elegant. Her family had disowned her after a string of embarrassing, rebellious acts. She described the event as my emancipation. That was before the Chapter had recruited her. Feng was the archetypal agent—a single loner with estranged or deceased family and a flexible conscience. But that wasn’t her complete persona. She was also a Gemini, a boating enthusiast and three quarters of her way through a PhD studying the positive or otherwise effects of physical contact on the human psyche.
“Hey you,” Feng said to me as I reached my desk. She rubbed my arm affectionately and I smiled. Her attempts at “reaching out” always made me smile. Despite countless hours of laboratory observation, role-playing and modeling of culturally normative behaviors, Feng’s physical contact always came across as mechanical and was often situation-inappropriate. She was trying to prove that a person who had grown up in a physically cold environment and who wasn’t naturally demonstrative with affection could become viewed as such by forcing him- or herself to make regular contact with other people. I wasn’t holding out much hope for the evidence supporting her hypothesis, but I did appreciate the effort she made. Our society could be so cold—people too afraid to touch in case they got sued for sexual harassment or contracted some horribly mutated animal flu. Every little bit of human contact helped.
I turned my smile to Jovic and winced at a pain in my jaw. I couldn’t remember getting hit in the face; maybe it was from smacking into the ceiling.
“Tough night?” Jovic asked.
I shrugged. “Not so bad.”
“Clean catch?”
“Cleanish. Just a totaled bathroom at La Nox.”
“The strip club?” His eyebrows shot up.
I nodded.
“Damn!” he cursed. “Why does Dark always get the good jobs?”
I decided against telling him about the wrestling—that would have just been cruel.
Feng fixed her partner with a down-the-nose stare and said, “Men, monkeys and dogs.”
She used the saying a lot and even though I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, I could hazard a guess. I loosened the straps of my body armor and sat down at my desk. My whole torso felt tense and bruised.
“Where’s the man?” Jovic asked, leaning around his computer.
“Medical,” I said.
“Leaving the hard stuff up to you again, is he?” Feng spotted her blonde nemesis passing our pod and shot the girl a threatening look.
“What’s new?” I grumbled.
“Smart man,” Jovic put in. “I should take some tips.”
Feng gave an annoyed grunt and said, “Dream on, Dragomir.” She turned to me. “We have to go. One of the walts on our strip is starting to look green.”
“Is it just me, or does it seem like there’ve been a lot more break-thrus lately?” I asked them.
“Maybe,” Jovic said. “Maybe it’s just age catching up with us. We’re not so young any more, yes?” He grinned and patted me on the shoulder. “See you later.”
“Do good work.” I gave the standard alternative to “Good luck,” which was incidentally bad luck to say aloud.
“You know it,” Jovic responded. He took his sidearm off the desk and slid it into his hip holster. “Say hello to the man for me—tell him I hate his guts.”
He turned and headed for the external elevators. Feng paused beside me. She leaned down and whispered close to my ear, her dark hair spilling across my desk, “Heads up. Twenty’s foul today and it’s that time of the month again.”
I inwardly groaned. Monthly unscheduled performance reviews with our boss, Agent Twentyman. The man had perfect elocution, a penchant for tweed jackets, and the worst god complex I’d ever seen. I’d expected the reviews to be soon, but the thought was still putrid. They never went well for me, and for some reason, I felt particularly vulnerable today. I wasn’t sure I could handle it. I could hope for Feng to be wrong, but her intel was never off. She always knew the latest office news or gossip before anyone else. She was carrying on a clandestine relationship with one of the bigger bosses from another division. She’d told me once that it wasn’t love, more like, in her words, he had a thing for Asian chicks and she wanted a promotion, and she was more than willing to use both her racial heritage and her feminine wiles as weapons to advance her standing in a kingdom ruled by men. I didn’t know whether to think of it as a modern form of feminism or that we’d actually slipped back to square one in racial and sexual terms. So I deferred to my dad’s life motto—when in doubt, mind your own business.
“Thanks,” I mumbled to Feng. She gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder and said,
“We definitely need to reschedule tonight.”
Feng was one of the friends who I was supposed to have met up with that night. She’d been called in as well. We were all agents, so we understood, but being able to coordinate time off together was almost impossible. She must have read my expression because she said, “Don’t worry, we’ll find another time. Leave it up to me—I’ll organize everything.”
I murmured a thanks and she smiled and headed off.
I slumped back heavily into my chair and rubbed prickling eyes. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket and I jolted and grabbed it out. The Caller ID said Dark.
“Hey,” I answered.
“You’ve got his wallet.” My partner’s voice came through the phone lowered and urgent.
I cursed and quickly patted down my coat. I felt the square bulge and dragged out the walt’s wallet. One of his cards was sticking up. I forced my eyes away. We weren’t supposed to know anything about our targets. No names, no addresses, no personal details, no nothing. Their identities were classified and I was currently in breach of policy—for the second time this shift—on the same day as performance reviews.
“I’m stalling them. Bring it down—now!” Dark said.
He hung up and I jumped out of my chair. I hauled ass out of the office and headed to the front desk. Another agent was talking to Marissa when I got there and I stood behind her, stepping impatiently from one foot to the other, peering over her shoulder until she got the message and moved on. I rushed the desk and said, “Can I please get a temp pass for Medical—Dark needs something urgently.”
“Oh.” Marissa straightened at the mention of my partner. She quickly formatted a pass card and handed it to me. I snatched it up and hustled to the elevator. Of course it was down on the lowest level and was the slowest ride in history, hitting every single floor as it made its way up to mine. I watched the numbers creep up: nine, Corporate and Conference; eight, Medical; seven, Strategic Intelligence and Liaison; six, Security; five, Legal; four, Surveillance and Technical Operations; three, Support to Operations; two, Human Resources; and, finally, one, Operational Services.
The doors parted and I rushed in, bumping into the people coming out. We did the awkward sideways shuffle with mutual fake-laugh apologies, then I was in and heading down. I shook my head, silently telling myself off. Seriously, where was my brain
? I should have put the wallet straight back into the walt’s pants as soon as it dropped out, or at least remembered I had it and put it back before we reached Headquarters.
The elevator stopped on level eight and the doors parted. Dark was standing right there, jittering with impatience. He still had the walt beside him.
“What took you?” he demanded in a hushed tone as I stepped out. “Have you got it?”
I glanced at the Medical Division agent at the admissions desk. She seemed otherwise occupied, but I knew the surveillance cameras everywhere in Headquarters didn’t suffer from such human limitations. I stepped close to Dark to obscure our actions and slipped the wallet into the walt’s pocket.
“What did you tell her?” I whispered, nodding to the admissions agent.
“I just said I’d forgotten the drop-off ticket—used the charm,” Dark murmured back, showing me the exact ticket he’d pretended I was bringing him. He clicked his tongue at me and shook his head and I nodded, Yeah I know. The walt shuddered and Dark moved him over to the desk. I watched them for a moment as my partner cleared out the guy’s pockets and the Medical admissions agent ticked off the items. Most walts, most people, carried wallets or purses and if one came in without one it always raised questions.
My eyes wandered past the admissions desk down the narrow white corridors of Medical Division. This level was hospital-esque—it smelt sterile and felt cold—and all the agents wore white coats. I thought there was something very creepy about all the closed doors lining the corridors, something unsettling about the absence of sound. It was unnatural.
Laughter broke the unsettling silence and my attention went back to Dark. He was flirting with the admissions agent—or actually they were flirting with each other. I left them to it and took the elevator back up. It stopped at several levels, with agents getting in and out. A couple of them were talking about something to do with archival footage and it made me think. I needed to talk to someone. The elevator stopped at level four, Surveillance and Technical Operations, and I followed a group of people out.