The Pursuit (Alias)

by Elizabeth Skurnick

  The notes she’d written him over the years were all in French.

  But this note was in English.

  4

  “SHOOTERS ON THE LINE,” a voice barked. The area fell silent. “Eyes and ears.” There was a rustle as twenty hands adjusted goggles and headphones, then virtual silence after everyone had assumed the proper stance. The speaker dragged out the heavy quiet for a few seconds, letting it settle over the waiting bodies. Finally, there was a decisive bark:

  “On my command!”

  Michael tried to steel himself from taking a step backward. He knew many of his fellow trainees were doing likewise. That had been their first mistake as a group—instinctively cringing in anticipation of the loud reports of ten weapons firing at once. Even if you were wearing earphones, the sound of ten trainees firing sophisticated weapons at once was tremendous. And in clandestine operations, reacting to something the wrong way was bad enough, but reacting to something you weren’t even supposed to know was going to happen could mean blowing your cover—and ending your life.

  “Fire!” the instructor commanded.

  Without thinking, Michael squeezed off five rounds. In earlier sessions, he had been hampered by too much thinking, instinctively trying to assess what wrist position and stance would yield the most bullets in the center mass they were all aiming for. That method had yielded a pattern on the dummy like a pool table after a good break. This time he was sure he had managed to rack those balls together.

  Michael leaned down to pick up the shells he had scattered and saw that over his right shoulder, the instructor had pressed the button to bring up his sheet. It whizzed to a stop in front of them.

  “Well, he ain’t goin’ ta the pitcher show tonight, that’s fer sure,” the instructor drawled, lightly tapping the human form outlined on the stiff paper with his grizzled knuckles. Right in the center of the chest, as Vaughn had hoped, were the majority of the holes. As the instructor moved on to the next student, Vaughn suppressed a small grin. It had taken all the trainees some time to decode this instructor’s West Texas accent, but Vaughn was almost sure that he had just been given a compliment.

  If only I could take out the bad guys with my hockey stick, Vaughn thought. The CIA would just have to make a commitment to only send me to places like Finland, and I’d be in business.

  Even though he wasn’t really sure what a “pitcher show” was, Vaughn was happy to get any acknowledgment that wasn’t an instructor leaning over to flip a piece of equipment the right way or—even worse—saying “Absolutely not” to one of his conjectures in class. He was starting to understand that compliments—any form of reassuring human communication, in fact—were rare in this new world.

  “Great job, Vaughn!” his fellow trainee Nick Pastino cried, giving him a big, fake smile. Then Nick smirked and spat a big mouthful of tobacco near Vaughn’s shoes—making sure, as usual, that the instructor was too far away to witness it.

  This time, Vaughn managed not to jump back, just as he had when shooting. If you hung around Pastino enough, you realized he only came right up to the line—he never dared cross it.

  Although it had only been six months, it seemed that at least six years, possibly an entire decade, had elapsed since the blank-faced man in the wrinkled gray suit had finally come to get him. Since then he had been bussed over from Langley to the campuslike Farm, where all career trainees in the CIA learned how to find, recruit, and handle spies.

  So far, his time at the Farm had been everything Vaughn had expected it would be. He was in his CIA-issued garb, picking locks, engaging in CIA role-playing sessions, and taking what seemed like triple his college course load. What he hadn’t expected was the incredible rush he got from it all.

  “Jump!” the instructors shouted. “Fire!” “Release!” “Abort!” Vaughn obeyed every directive with gusto, throwing himself into every exercise, and he loved them all.

  In addition, Vaughn felt the security that came from doing something he knew he was truly good at. Although he’d always enjoyed his academic work, he was glad to find that his dread of being doomed to a job behind a desk at some podunk university had been well founded. Vaughn had always been sure that something would be missing in the academic career his professors urged him towards—that he could never be happy just lecturing students, correcting papers, and then pulling into the driveway of his suburban split-level at six o’clock. He didn’t know why he’d been so sure that a career at the CIA would fill that hole, but now that he found himself perfectly at home disassembling the latest firearms, flipping a fellow trainee onto the mat, and discussing signals technology, he was glad that he’d been right.

  Right about everything, that is, except for one important aspect: what pains in the neck some of his fellow trainees might turn out to be.

  Even though the company line at the Farm was that you were only competing with yourself, in fact, it was more like a huge family. The instructors were the parents, and the trainees were the brothers and sisters. Except this was no volleyball game at a campground. These were special brothers and sisters: siblings who got to race real cars, drive state-of-the-art speedboats, and parachute out of honest-to-God airplanes.

  And like all families, it had its black sheep.

  Vaughn didn’t even bother to shoot a look back at Pastino. He and his fellow recruits had tacitly agreed to use the same method with the difficult team member: freeze him out when they could and tolerate him when they couldn’t.

  Their unity on the subject of Pastino was the one thing that made him bearable. Because Vaughn and his fellow CT’s had all had the same reaction to Nick that first day they’d all arrived: instant hatred.

  His first day, Vaughn had arrived at Langley at seven A.M. sharp, his bags packed only with essentials, per the instructions given to him by Les. A serious young man with a clipboard had taken Vaughn’s things and ushered him into a small room off the main lobby of the vast, sprawling megalith that was the CIA’s main headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

  There were already some recruits seated around the table. “Well, if it isn’t Michael Vaughn,” one of them burst out. Happily surprised, Michael saw that it was Akiko Schwartz.

  “Hey,” he said, coming forward to clasp her hands, this time prepared to fight back with a strong shake of his own.

  “Don’t worry—I’ve cut down on my reps,” Akiko said, giving him just one firm shake, then releasing him.

  “Not quite enough,” Michael winced, laughing.

  Like any group of strangers suddenly thrust upon one another, the assembled men and women went around the table and introduced themselves. In addition to Akiko and Vaughn, there was Don Hewitt, a slightly portly aeronautical engineer and former pilot in the air force; Chloe Murphy, a baby-faced twenty-three-year-old wunderkind with a Ph.D. in linguistics; Melvin Brewer, a former police detective and lieutenant in the army; and Sam Ortiz, a helicopter pilot and former high-school physics teacher.

  As Vaughn looked around at his future teammates, his jitters turned to excitement. All of them seemed intelligent and interesting—so far, at least, good people to be stuck with. He also noticed that they already appeared to be in sync in one significant way. Everyone’s hair was freshly cut—the women’s to chin-length, the men’s to just above the collar—and they were all dressed in corporate casual—khakis and plain button-downs. Either we’re already on the same wavelength, Vaughn thought, or the CIA has one hell of a subliminal fashion directive going.

  “My name is Betty Harlow,” a woman announced, striding into the room. Vaughn realized with shock that it was the folksinger lady from his final interview. She was not quite as tall as he’d thought, Vaughn saw, and she walked with a slight limp, gripping a dark, shiny wooden cane for support as she gazed around at the trainees.

  The chatter had died down the minute she’d entered the room, and the small measure of comfort the trainees had built up from friendly conversation evaporated completely. Now that Betty Harlow was in the room, the
y all seemed to be thinking this wasn’t just a dream anymore—the job they’d worked so hard to attain was actually going to start. But those tests they’d passed, the interrogations they’d sat through, the physical challenges they’d overcome were only the beginning. Now that it was down to the wire, were they going to have what it took to make it through CIA training?

  As if she’d read their minds, Betty smiled. It wasn’t an entirely nice smile. “You’ve all done well enough to be chosen for the career trainee program at the CIA,” she said, measuring out her words so that each fell like a successive weight on a bar. “Now we’ll see if you can do well enough to actually work for the CIA.”

  Suddenly, there was a loud bang. They all jumped—even Betty Harlow. The group had been assembled for at least twenty minutes, and Vaughn had assumed that those at the table made up the entirety of their training team. However, a new member had loudly thrown open the door to their room. Wearing sunglasses, espadrilles, and a violently orange Hawaiian shirt, the man they would come to know as Nick Pastino staggered—and that was definitely the word, staggered—into the room.

  “Whose butt do I have to kick to get a cup of coffee around here?” Nick asked, grinning broadly at his seated classmates and Betty. Then he pounded on his chest like a frat boy and belched.

  Vaughn felt as if he and his fellow trainees might actually shatter like glass figurines from the explosion created by Nick’s entrance. He found himself fighting the impulse to get up and toss the man from the room like a bouncer at an exclusive bar.

  But he stopped himself. This isn’t a bar, Vaughn thought. And if there’s anyone who really doesn’t need your help with a thug, it’s one of the top officers at the Directorate of Operations at the CIA.

  Vaughn looked at his fellow trainees to gauge their reactions. Sam and Melvin seemed to be fighting impulses similar to his own. Don looked like he wanted to hide under the table. Chloe just looked horrified. Akiko was harder to read: She was staring at the intruder with almost friendly interest, as if he were some rare specimen of bug in a glass slide.

  After the initial shock of his entrance, Betty seemed to have decided to remain unfazed. “Take a seat,” she said shortly, as if these kinds of goings-on were beneath her notice. But her order fell on deaf ears. The man had already taken the seat closest to the door and was leaning back in it as if he were about to watch the evening news. He removed a yogurt lodged precipitously in the pocket of his shirt and, finding himself without a spoon, took off the plastic cover and began to slurp it straight from the container.

  “As I was saying . . . ,” Betty continued, but Vaughn found it hard to pay attention to her. Like a baby or an especially rowdy dog, the man simply sucked all the attention from the room as forcefully and grossly as he sucked the yogurt from the container.

  “These packets contain your administrative orders for the next week. When we complete these sets of forms, we will make our way to the facility where you will be doing the majority of your training. Laptops and firearms will be issued. . . .”

  Vaughn saw that the young man—his name tag read NED—who had taken his bags had returned. He was passing out folders to each of the trainees with their names stamped across the front, above the CIA logo. The folders were each as thick as a meatball hoagie: They seemed to have been stuffed with about a ream of paper.

  “More forms,” Akiko muttered, sending Sam into a laughing fit he tried dutifully to suppress. Vaughn found himself on the verge of laughter, too—the shock of the man’s entrance, followed by his devoted yogurt-sucking, had made them initially hugely tense, then suddenly punchy.

  As each trainee removed a pen from the file and began to settle down to what looked like business as usual, Vaughn gave the man one last glance. The man was twirling in his seat, holding his folder to the overhead light as if it might contain see-through documents. He continued leaning back and then, just on the verge of tipping over, came forward with a loud thump. His folder sliced back against the table, sending a cascade of papers to the floor, which was soon joined by the contents of Chloe’s and Don’s folders as he swept them over the side as well in an awkward attempt to secure his fluttering pages against the leg of the table.

  This time, Betty could not look away. As if it were all too much to bear, she simply walked out of the room. Ned stood watching for a moment, as if he was considering helping out with the mess, then thought the better of it and followed suit.

  “Brilliant,” Don barked in their wake, his sarcasm clipping the word. He slapped his hands down on the table for emphasis. Vaughn knew it wasn’t his folder that had just been messed up, but he wasn’t sure he was crazy about this guy, either.

  “Here, I’ll help you,” Melvin muttered, kneeling down by Chloe, who was fruitlessly trying to separate three sets of forms that seemed to have been joined into one increasingly messy heap. “Let’s use mine as a guide to put them back in the right order, okay?” Akiko said, beginning to reassemble the forms Chloe had been able to return to the tabletop. Sam joined her in reshuffling, and Vaughn kneeled down with Chloe and Melvin to bring the pile of papers back up to semiorganized groups.

  “Seriously, do you know where I can get some coffee around here?” Nick asked, leaning under the table to look at his fellow trainees, all stooping on the floor to clear up the mess he had made.

  No one bothered to answer him.

  Michael knew from his research that working as an instructor at the Farm was one of the most coveted appointments at the CIA. Only the most experienced and effective personnel were asked to take six months, one year, or two years off to bring the next generation of intelligence officers into the fold.

  Betty Harlow, he was learning, was the crème de la crème of CIA intelligence. She’d been intimately involved in the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain, and then with operations in the Balkans and the rest of Eastern Europe. Her work had toppled puppet dictators in South America and brought arms brokers in the Middle East to justice. In short, she was no one to mess with.

  As she walked down the winding, collegiate paths of the Farm, trainees and instructors fell into a practically reverent silence until her cane had thumped by. She had not yet taught Vaughn’s team directly, but she was a shadowy presence throughout all of their training. She would suddenly appear at the classroom door during ballistics training or join them in the screening room as they watched tapes made from hidden cameras of their operations in the Vault, a nearly mile-long network of waterways and caves, or Main Street, the recreation of a city street that the trainees used in many of their role-playing situations. She never added to the instructor’s comments, Vaughn noticed, but he got the idea that she was keeping pretty close tabs on every trainee.

  Which all helped to explain why, as a team, they had decided to stay mum about Nick Pastino.

  Although the seven-member team had instructors in everything from dead-drops to disguises, officially, Betty was their team’s reviewing officer. And while Ned was supposed to exist in an ombudsman capacity, none of them could really imagine going up to the poker-faced young man to complain that they thought one of their team members was a vile, stupid bully.

  They’d discussed it as a group almost the first chance they’d gotten, right after they’d sat through the first official day of training at the Farm, a series of lectures by all their instructors on how teamwork was the core principal of the CIA.

  “Take a look at the other people in this room,” one of their instructors had warned. “Get to know them well, because we aren’t going to be the ones training you, okay? They are.”

  “When you’re out in the field, the only thing you can depend on is your team,” another had emphasized. “If you can’t work with a team while you’re training, you won’t be able to work for the CIA.”

  That night before dinner, they had all found themselves—sans Nick—in the common room at the end of the hallway of the dorm where they were housed with three other classes. “So, I guess they want
us to work together as a team, huh?” Chloe had joked, breaking the ice.

  Akiko leaned over and switched off the TV, which had been set to the all-news station. Another class of trainees who had already been there for a few months came down the stairs, presumably on their way to dinner. The two groups exchanged waves, and once she was sure they were gone, Akiko spoke. “We’ve got to talk. And I think you all know about what.”

  Melvin leaned back in one of the fuzzy, mushy-seated chairs that seemed to proliferate in the common rooms of every building in the Farm. The instructors’ digs, Vaughn assumed, were a little more posh. “I don’t know,” Melvin said, shaking his head. “It’s only the first day. Every speech has been about working together, and we’re ganging up on the poor guy already.”

  “Poor guy,” Don snorted. “He’s a complete idiot.”

  Chloe waved her hands dismissively. “It’s not necessary to get nasty,” she said. “I think we just have to agree that, for now, we’re all aware that there might be a problem.”

  “Might be?” Akiko snorted. “That seems like a generous statement.”

  “I agree with Chloe,” Sam broke in. “If we just know for now that we’re aware of it, that seems to be enough.”

  “To tell you the truth,” Melvin said, “at this point, I’m not sure I’m really comfortable having this conversation. It seems like any conversation we’re going to have about Nick should probably involve Nick.”

  Vaughn leapt in. “Listen, this is classic. My girlfriend’s a psychology major, and she’s always talking about this stuff. In group dynamics, there are certain personalities that thrive on . . . disrupting the order of the group.”

  “So you’re saying we should do something?” Sam asked warily. The others in the group looked suddenly cautious too, as if Vaughn had suggested they take Nick out like a band of vigilantes.