by Slaton Smith
“Have you tried the triggers?”
“Yes. On Pasco, but they were not effective. He laughed it off. I have not had the opportunity, or the means to contact Garrison.”
“Well, it might be the easiest solution, if handled properly. You can have him eliminate your agent and then commit suicide,” Dr. McFarland suggested with a tone that exuded arrogance.
“I plan on eliminating both of them,” Waters insisted. “I have a team on the ground and one in the air and my office is running scenarios as we speak. We will have them before the end of the day and then I can focus on the removal of Pasco.”
“Robert, have you not been listening to me? Leave Garrison alone and it will make your job easier. If there is a relationship between the two, as you say and he perceives a threat to her, you will have made a terrible mistake. You will find him standing next to your bed in the middle of the night, cloaked in black, with the means to your end in his hand.”
“I will consider myself warned, doctor!” Waters shouted, as he slammed the phone down. He starred out his window at the Boston skyline. He had been with the CIA’s Counter Terrorism team for eighteen years. However, this was an off the books effort that would ruin him if it saw the light of day. He had to bury the project and everything and everybody associated with it. If discovered, he would be dragged before Congress and would probably end up in a federal prison somewhere. Only his boss knew about the program. No one else. Not the CIA director. Not Congress. Not the President. He returned to the situation room where his gang of nerds and geeks were formulating a game plan that would bring about the end of Sean Garrison and his rogue, assassin girlfriend, “Sandy”.
VII
So long Morgantown
Sunday
It was around 9 A.M. and Sandy and Sean decided it was the right time to head out. Before leaving the Mountainlair, Sean pulled on the backpack and stopped back at Dunkin Donuts to get refills on their coffees and a dozen donuts. Glazed mostly. Sandy stood with the duffel on her shoulder and watched him, thinking that if his metabolism ever slows, he’s going to get really fat. He walked towards her holding the coffees and the snack. They left the student union and got into the silver pick up parked in the adjacent garage.
“I’ll drive,” Sean said.
“Fine by me. Get us to I-79 and head south, with no detours this time.”
Sean started the truck, left the garage from the rear entrance and pulled onto North High Street, slightly up the hill from one of the older dorms on campus, Boreman South. Sean nodded as they passed the dorm.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You and Brian lived there,” she said. They proceeded past the Chi Omega house and came to the light at Willey Street. Sean looked around. He really loved Morgantown and wished his visit were under different circumstances. The light changed and they moved down High Street passing the Dairy Queen and the Boston Beanery. Turning right on Walnut Street, then left onto Don Knotts Boulevard which took them out of town and up towards a hook-up with I-79. Sean accelerated to 70 MPH and began fiddling with the radio.
A steady rain was falling.
“This has XM. Can you get something on the radio?” he asked Sandy. She was slightly irritated. He was taking everything so lightly.
“No.”
“Come on, are we going to ride in silence? Do you want to talk? I can tell you more about Pittsburgh and then later, more about Morgantown.”
“I’ll find something on the radio,” she said, leaning forward and working the tuner of the satellite radio.
“Try XM 34,” Sean said, pointing at the display. Sandy found the station, sat back in her seat and sipped the hot coffee. With the rain coming down outside, the hot coffee and Sean running his mouth inside, the windows started to fog. Sean flipped on the defroster and the windows cleared.
“Sandy, why do I know how to speak at least two foreign languages? Oh, and lets not forget that I can fly a helicopter,” he asked with a little concern in his voice.
Sandy not really knowing when to begin finally decided to give him the headlines.
“We needed disposable killers that could remove people who posed a direct threat to the United States,” she replied with an almost clinical tone.
“Who is ‘we’?”
“A man named Robert Waters. He’s CIA.”
“Never heard of him.”
“And you wouldn’t have. He is running programs that don’t make CNN. He sent people like you out to assassinate targets that are on a list he generated.”
“What? That’s nuts. I have never killed anyone.”
“You have.”
“Not possible.”
“You have eliminated nine targets on a list of nineteen names, plus another sixteen people that were considered collateral damage. All of your travel was based around intelligence we received surrounding the targets on the list. Singapore, Berlin, London. All of those stops were where you were sent on missions.”
“No! No! No! Not possible. I don’t remember any of it,” he argued, visibly shaken. Sandy began to wonder if they should pull over.
“I’m sorry Sean.”
“Don’t give me this sorry shit! You’re one of the people who did this.”
Sandy was quiet. She was unsure if she should explain her role. She definitely didn’t want to tell him that she was there to kill him if anything went wrong. It was kinda hard to find the right time to talk about something like that.
They rode in silence for several minutes.
“I don’t know how to kill anyone,” he insisted, biting his lower lip and white knuckling the steering wheel.
“We gave you the knowledge.”
“What? Gave it to me? How? When?”
“I am not 100% on the science.”
“Come on! Don’t give me that crap!”
“It has something to do with hypnosis. During your first week of training in Boston, the doctor running the program came in to speak with you one day at the hotel. All of the cameras went out for nearly an hour. I have no idea what he did or how he did it, but it worked. The other procedure was done when you were in the hospital for dehydration. The reality is you were drugged and passed out in your room and taken to a lab. No dehydration. There was nothing wrong with you.”
“Drugged me? When?”
“You ordered room service and they slipped something into the food. They carted you off to the lab that was run by a doctor named Seamus McFarland. He’s the brains of the operation. He implanted something in select sections of your brain. Skills. Things you otherwise would not have. Skills you needed to carry out the missions they planned for you.”
“I don’t like this. You said you cared about me, and you let this happen?”
Sandy reached across and put her hand on his leg.
“Sean, this was at the beginning. I didn’t know you . . . .”
“How can you know me?”
“I was with you everyday. I was right by your side.”
“How come I didn’t see you?”
“I am really good,” Sandy replied. She didn’t want to bring up their encounter in Berlin. She was not sure he would remember it. She had noticed that his mind was blank on the fringes of each assignment. The memories from several minutes before and after he was activated seemed to be lost.
“But, I didn’t know you were there everyday. That kind of makes you a stalker.” His tone of voice had changed.
“Don’t say that. Earlier you said you wouldn’t mind me stalking you,” she said, trying to smile.
“That was before I learned I was some sort of killer guinea pig,” he paused. “You said I was disposable. What do you mean disposable?”
“You were not supposed to survive one mission. Bodyguards would kill you or you would be mortally wounded executing the mission. The people running the program wanted these people dead, but did not want the CIA, or Special Ops troops involved. Some of the targets were members of supposedly friendly governments. If random people committed a random act of viole
nce, it would be hard to implicate us.”
“So, I obviously survived.”
“Yes. You surprised all of us. During the evaluation process, it was determined that you could handle two advanced implants. They drilled into your skull with a special piece of equipment and pierced two specific areas of your brain with organic implants that would leave little or no trace once they were inside your head. The implants supposedly dissolve, but the muscle memory, combat and language skills remain. The implants contained skills that would help you execute more and more complex and dangerous assignments. The others were only given a simple skill like advanced shooting or hand-to-hand combat.”
She took a breath. “McFarland did not think most of the candidates could handle more,” she said, slightly above a whisper.
Sean grimaced.
“Well, that explains the headaches,” he said.
“And the OCD.”
“I don’t have OCD!” Sean snapped.
“You do push-ups until you pass out. You run until your feet bleed. Your OCD manifests itself through an unconscious need to constantly be doing something.”
“Hmmmm. Could be worse, I guess.”
“You are lucky.” Sandy thought back to some of the stories she had heard. Awful things. Men who scratched themselves to death. Others committed suicide. When things went wrong, they just disappeared. She decided to hold off on telling him about the injections McFarland had given him to increase reaction time. It was too much too soon. His body seemed to have metabolized it, but the long-term effects were unknown.
“I don’t remember any of this. I thought I was working for an international consumer research company as a consultant. I guess I should not put this on my resume,” he said, his voice drifting off.
“You will start to remember,” she said.
“How did it work?”
“They used trigger words or phrases to activate you. By the way, your reports were quite good, I read them all.”
“Well, thank you. What words?” he asked and added a fake smile.
“I don’t know. I only know bits and pieces. I think that when you were smashed in the head by that douche bag at the lacrosse game, it broke the trigger. They can’t tell you what to do anymore, and the skills now are live. Ergo, the French and Italian, which I love by the way,” she explained, smiling at him.
“Please don’t use the word ‘ergo,’ I hate that word.” Pausing a moment, staring at the road he gathered himself and continued, “Our government did this to me? Isn’t that a violation of my rights?”
“This is an unauthorized action by a rogue segment of a government agency. Only a handful of people know this happened. By the way, they don’t care about your rights, or mine for that matter.”
“Happened? It’s over?”
‘Yes. You and another man are the only ones left.”
“Who is that? He’s got to be pissed.”
“They called him Number One. His real name is Oscar Pasco. From what I know he is a very nasty individual.”
“Number One? I’m not Number One?”
“You are Number Two.”
“How do I get to be Number One?”
“Sean, it is not a contest. Numbers were assigned at the beginning of the program, based on a series of test scores. Pasco has a genius level I.Q. However, he is a seriously flawed man. They saw his flaws as a way to manipulate him.”
“Flawed?” Sean asked.
“Seriously flawed. We don’t want to run into him. He is extremely dangerous.”
Sean was silent. It was a lot to absorb.
“I assume they are going to kill you too?” he asked, looking across at her.
“They are going to try.”
They didn’t speak for a couple of miles.
“How do you know you are pregnant?” he asked, breaking the silence, staring straight ahead at the road. This scared the shit out of him.
“I took a test.”
Sean tried to get back to being himself, but it was getting more and more difficult. He paused, smiled and said,
“OK, but I am cutting you off from all sex for the next several minutes. I am mad at you.”
“That’s just plain spiteful,” she said, playfully.
Sean kept driving. He still couldn’t make sense of it. He did know he didn’t want anyone to hurt her. He also knew she could take care of herself. He was mad. Mad at himself for getting into this mess. “Did I really kill all of those people? This is crazy! There’s no way this is happening,” he thought. He didn’t want to believe it, but then again, here he was flying down I-79 in a pick-up with some sort of hot blonde 007.
They were making good time and rode listening to the stereo for nearly fifty miles without speaking.
Finally, Sandy looked over at Sean.
“Why are you involved in this in the first place? How did they recruit you?” she asked. Obviously, it had been a big question on her mind since she first met him.
Sean thought briefly about everything that had happened eighteen months ago, all the quick changes in his life that had transpired over a short period of time that had landed him in the seat next to Sandy, or Andrea, or whatever the hell her name really was.
“It’s really quite an exciting story. I am surprised you don’t know all about it,” he said sarcastically.
“I’m sure it is thrilling!” she said, clinching her hands.
“I lost my job eighteen months ago for insubordination.”
“What? Not you! I can’t believe that!” she replied.
“Now, we can cut the sarcasm,” he said, glancing at Sandy while driving with one hand.
“Now you know how it feels,” she said. “Oh, and both hands on the wheel, please.”
“As I was saying, I needed a job . . . . “
BOOK III
If you are going to kick authority in the teeth,
you might as well do it with both feet.
- Keith Richards
I
I should keep my mouth shut
Shadyside – St James Street – 6:30 A.M.
April 27, 2011
The radio alarm clock went off as programmed. This morning, the Red Hot Chili Peppers woke him up. As always, its owner went to bed too late and was getting up too early. Sean Garrison rolled over and slammed his hand down on the snooze. The big dog next to him stirred but did not get up. She did not want to move anymore than Sean did. Sean was lying on his left side. He opened his eyes and starred at the wall, and realized that he did not want to go to work, but he had to eat and at least pay Brian some sort of rent. He threw the comforter back and covered the dog, who still did not move. He sat on the edge of the bed, reached over and turned off the alarm. Shivering slightly as his feet hit the ground, he walked across the hardwood floor to the bathroom. Spring in Pittsburgh was cold. He walked into the bathroom and started the shower and pulled the curtain to keep the water from running all over the floor. He brushed his teeth while the water heated up, and stepped in when the mirror in the bathroom steamed, quickly washed up and jumped out of the shower. The most time any guy should take in the shower is three minutes start to finish. He wrapped a towel around his waist and wiped a small circle in the steamed-up mirror and looked at himself. First the left side of his face and then the right and then he looked at his dog, Bailey.
“I don’t need to shave, do I girl?” Sean said to Bailey. She just lay there. He always looked good to her. “I don’t think so. After all, I work in advertising,” he said aloud. He had two days worth of stubble. “Who was going to care?” he thought. The owner of the agency had a nasty looking beard and felt it was his trademark. Therefore, it must be OK for mid-level account people as well.
He walked into the bedroom, pulled a fresh t-shirt and boxer shorts from a drawer then pulled on a pair of half-pressed khaki pants that he had worn the day before. He thought they were passable. He donned a clean blue pinpoint from his closet, figured he did not need a tie, so he left his top button un-don
e. He whistled and Bailey jumped off the bed and followed him downstairs. His navy blazer was where he had left it the night before, in a heap on the couch. He picked it up and gave it a good shake. “Looks good!” he said to himself. He walked into the kitchen and let Bailey outside. While she was out, he gave her fresh water and some food. She came back into the house, he gave her a hug and went out to get in his Jeep. The top was still on, but barely. It had seen better days but Sean had put off replacing it, by convincing himself that spring and warmer days were on the horizon. Those days weren’t here yet and he was driving to Cleveland today, a place where the wind blew hard and spring showed up late. It was going to be a chilly and loud drive.