The Pursuit (Alias)

by Elizabeth Skurnick

  Vaughn laughed. “No, just the opposite. I just meant, whatever he’s doing, it’s working. You see how he’s got us fighting amongst ourselves and not trusting each other already?”

  Melvin was nodding fiercely. “That’s what I mean. We have to stay cool. We can’t go running around like a bunch of crybabies. The army is full of bad apples—you just have to work around them. Believe me, they’ll split a group apart, and when it gets down to the wire, they don’t get the blame for whatever happens, you do.”

  They were all nodding. “So we’re agreed?” Akiko asked in a manner Vaughn was sure had had lawyers on the other side of the table from her quaking in their boots for years. He was impressed that Akiko, who clearly had more experience than any of them in making other people see the wisdom of her point of view, wasn’t leaping into the leadership role. In fact, no one was—they were all taking advice and opinions from each other and coming to decisions together. Like people who’d known each other for longer than a day or two. Like a team.

  “Wait and see what happens?” Akiko reiterated, looking around at all the faces. Vaughn gave his yes with the rest.

  As the weeks went by, however, it became clear that the wait-and-see approach had its drawbacks.

  The first half of their training, as their instructors had emphasized, was team based and involved the basics of clandestine intelligence work: what their instructors called field tradecraft. “You’re going to be spotting, assessing, and approaching your assets,” one of their instructors droned, explaining how the team would find people the CIA called NOCs—those under nonofficial cover. These would be personnel in various corporations and agencies that they, as handlers, would train and protect as acquired intelligence for the CIA. “You’re going to learn self-defense. You’re going to learn to use disguises and provide disguises to others. You’re going to learn all about clandestine photography and how to sketch a situation. You’re going to learn how to write CIA reports. And at the end of the day, PDR is what you’re going to do. Procure. Document. Report.”

  It was all pretty straightforward, except that Nick seemed preternaturally skilled in throwing a wrench in whatever operations they were performing. As they went through their training in self-defense, for example, Nick seemed to take particular pleasure in slamming Chloe, the least powerful in the group, to the mat. Once, Vaughn could have sworn he’d seen him grind his elbow into her spine as he locked her into a submission pose.

  “You okay?” Vaughn asked her after she’d tapped out and Nick had released her. Chloe had walked away from the group to the side mats they used for their stretches, and she was leaning over as if she was in pain. “Fine,” Chloe answered through gritted teeth. Vaughn could see tears standing out in her eyes. He’d seen what Nick had done—how could the instructor have missed it?

  He was hoping he’d be called on to spar with Nick next, but the instructor called Akiko to the line. She didn’t even bother to do the preliminary assessment. In a second, Nick was slammed on his face, his elbow held back to the breaking point by Akiko, who hadn’t even mussed her ponytail.

  Nick tapped the mat. “Give!” he finally burst out, his voice muffled by the plastic padding in his face.

  Akiko got up slowly, taking her time releasing Nick’s arm. Nick jumped to his feet, glaring. “Ortiz,” the instructor called blandly, motioning him to come spar with Akiko. Their teacher hadn’t noticed anything, and they all, it seemed, let out a collective breath.

  On the one hand, Vaughn knew, it was satisfying watching Akiko kick butt on behalf of one of their teammates. But on the other hand, he knew that what the instructors kept repeating was true: They were here to teach each other. That was the way it worked in the field, and there wasn’t room for anything else. If they were all protecting each other from and wreaking revenge on one person, they weren’t working together. They weren’t supposed to have real enemies; they were supposed to take turns being the enemy, teammate, and asset for each other. If they were all focusing on Nick, they had no time to learn from and teach each other.

  “Oomph!” Ortiz said, his face also ground into the mat. Akiko had slammed him, but not as harshly. They were all doing that—using the energy they needed for one another to defeat Nick.

  “Bitch,” Nick muttered as the instructor gave Sam some directions and Akiko watched, nodding. Vaughn whipped his head around. He couldn’t believe what he’d heard.

  “Yeah,” he heard Melvin mutter back. “It’s a bitch that you can’t beat her, champ.”

  Vaughn breathed, trying to let his rage out slowly. His heart was racing, and his temper was up. But if Melvin could keep himself from getting physical with Nick, he reasoned, well, then, so could he.

  It would have been easier on all of them if Nick had been incompetent—if his performance had been as poor as his personality. But the hard truth was that he excelled both in the field and the classroom. His shooting trumped everyone’s except Melvin’s, and his performance in their role-playing asset acquiring, scoping out dead-drops, and performing nighttime clandestine maneuvers always got a special nod from the instructor. The demented mentality he’d revealed in the conference room that first day at Langley was totally absent in the classrooms too—as Nick discussed how to analyze and sift through complex information to learn what was disinformation, what was chatter, and what was real in a variety of international scenarios, even Vaughn was impressed.

  But that didn’t make up for how Nick was always breezing into their dorm at two or three in the morning, loud and obnoxious, or teasing and berating slow Don on the three-mile runs they took at five A.M. every day. Somehow, although his behavior seemed brazen and openly destructive to the team, the instructors either didn’t notice or had given Nick a free pass. To them—and they were the ones who mattered—Nick was just one of the team. Vaughn and the others kept assuming that one of the instructors would notice Nick’s antics and shut him down. But the lip service they gave to students only competing with themselves was definitely true in one respect. And in that regard, it was clear that they all felt that Nick was a particularly valuable member of the team—his team of one.

  Vaughn started to think back over all the things Nick had done since they’d come to the Farm. It was true: As isolated incidents, they would all seem fairly minor—a joke about Don that could have just been in bad taste, a physical move toward Chloe that could have just been a misjudging of strength. Taken together, however, they added up to a veritable siege, a kind of psychological warfare. Was the troublemaking deliberate on Nick’s part, Vaughn wondered, or merely instinctive? Did he have any idea what he was doing to the group, and, if so, what was his purpose in messing with them? Was he some genius who knew that if he distracted his team members, he’d come out on top—or was he just a naturally obnoxious idiot who was getting the better of six formerly mild-mannered, successful people?

  Nora could help me out with sorting through this guy’s m.o., Vaughn suddenly thought. That is, if I were allowed to talk to her about what goes on here.

  Vaughn remembered a phrase from his reading about the history of the CIA. The phrase came from James Angleton, the agency’s former head of counterintelligence, and it referred to what he’d perceived as the Soviets’ campaign of disinformation to their American enemies. They were propagating, he’d said, “a wilderness of mirrors.”

  And now I’m in the wilderness of mirrors of the Farm, Vaughn thought.

  At the far corner of the gym, something caught the corner of Vaughn’s eye. It was Betty, standing against the tall white walls, perfectly silent, somehow almost blending in to the background. How long had she been standing there? Vaughn wondered.

  And even more important, had she been able to see what the instructors had all been missing?

  That evening, Vaughn caught up on his e-mail. The Farm’s computer network allowed him to send blind e-mails, and he’d been sending occasional messages to his mother supposedly from the University of Geneva—although, as she confessed
the technology was beyond her, the wait for a reply could be considerable. Usually the only mail in his box besides replies from her were additional paperwork from his instructors, schedule changes, or administrative notices. The e-mail he found that night, however, was personal.

  To: vaughn@etu.unige.ch

  From: ncarlisle@columbia.edu

  Dear Michael,

  I got this address from your mother. It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? I’ve been so busy I haven’t even had a chance to think, but I have a lot to tell you—about my program, about everything. Are you going to be back in the States anytime soon?

  Je te manque beaucoup, chéri—

  Nora

  Michael’s heart was in his throat. He wanted to laugh at Nora’s use of French; the language she had avowed even sounded like snails rolling around on china (bad enough that French people ate them). He was so glad that Nora had finally gotten in touch with him, he wanted to shout with relief. But her letter posed a problem.

  Now he’d have to write her back.

  5

  “I’VE GOT AN IDEA,” Akiko said, smoothing her neat hair back under her baseball cap.

  The group of recruits—Sam, Melvin, Chloe, Don, Akiko, and Vaughn—were enjoying what had become their weekly routine: burgers and fries in the Farm’s canteen, the wood-paneled retreat that functioned as bar and eatery for all the CTs and the Farm personnel when they couldn’t stand the cafeteria one more day. Even though the seven-member team spent all their time together in classes and performing mock operations, these dinners served as a break from regular study groups and mealtimes—a chance to discuss issues, events, and of course, problems. And although they’d tried to get Nick to come in the beginning, he’d refused. Whenever he wasn’t required to be with them, he disappeared to someplace where the team couldn’t find him—into the camp’s acres of woodland to hang out with his wild-animal buddies, Vaughn suspected.

  “Spill it,” Melvin said, licking the ketchup that had squeezed out of his overstuffed burger onto his thumb.

  Vaughn stuffed a few of the commissary’s sadly soggy fries in his mouth and looked around at his fellow team members. In the months they’d been at the Farm, they’d all become noticeably different: certainly fitter, more alert, yet also somehow quieter and more self-contained. Melvin, who’d already had rock-hard abs and a soldier’s demeanor, now seemed even more coolly judicious. Sam’s jittery edge had been shaved off, and he was like a panther—coiled, dangerous, ready to spring. Chloe’s hesitation was gone, and she went into spectacular 180-degree turns on speedboats and cars without fear, once even toppling Nick with a sharp cut to the windpipe during their sparring sessions. Akiko, like Melvin, seemed to have risen to a new level of physical and mental expertise. Even Don seemed taller.

  And how have I changed? Vaughn wondered. If I asked them, what would my teammates say about me?

  He knew he felt like a pretty different person. The worried, sometimes almost self-pitying boy of some months before was gone, and his last name had somehow taken the place of his first. Now he felt almost like Batman sometimes, as if his new knowledge had given him special powers. When he shadowed Chloe or Sam in their exercises, he could actually picture himself on a real city street in some foreign city tailing an asset or setting up an operation. Patiently explaining to an instructor what it would mean to procure information for the U.S. government during a role-play, he found himself so caught up in his argument that he became almost impatient—when would he be allowed to put his powers to real use? And parachuting out onto a field from a military cargo plane during their paramilitary training, then returning and spending all night in the library with his team writing and transmitting a cable—the raw field reports officers were required to file from operations—he felt a kind of mastery that even his greatest shot in a hockey or pool game had never given him.

  Overall, the entire team had come closer to the CIA ideal: someone who could perform both complex physical and psychological feats. Or, in one instructor’s words, a person who could get out of anywhere and talk anyone into anything.

  “Is your plan to get this place to stock some Dr Pepper?” Chloe asked Akiko, slurping her Pepsi mock-angrily. “Because I’m dying over here.”

  “Why don’t you just bring some in on the weekends and put it in the dorms?” Vaughn asked, grinning. “Don’t you have a Ph.D., lady?”

  Chloe glared, then slitted her eyes toward Don, who was absorbed in his eggplant parmigiana. “I have been bringing it into the dorms,” she said sotto voce. “It keeps liberating itself from the area of the refrigerator.”

  Don suddenly looked up, as if he’d just now tuned into the conversation. “Hey, is it you who’s been bringing in the Dr Pepper?” he asked, reaching across to pat Chloe on the shoulder. “Thanks a lot, man.”

  Chloe’s voice rose to a shriek. “I’m going to kill you!” she said, crumpling her napkin and preparing to launch an assault.

  Akiko’s voice cut smoothly through the melee. “So, anyway, about my idea,” she said loudly. Chloe lofted the napkin gently over Don’s head, then settled back in her seat to listen.

  “It has to do with Nick,” Akiko continued. A collective groan rose from around the table, Vaughn’s voice the loudest of all.

  They’d debated Nick endlessly, but after a few stalemates, the final decision had been made: There was nothing they could do about him. Though he was continuing to drive them crazy, he was their instructors’ favorite, and he hadn’t done anything big enough for them to pin on him. In short, it was a strictly slash-and-burn operation at this point.

  Vaughn was especially sensitive about reopening the Nick issue. Since that day he’d been spat at by Nick at the firing range, things had only deteriorated, and an event had occurred that had almost caused Vaughn to be ejected from training altogether.

  The evening of that day at the shooting range, after a particularly brutal end-of-the-day five-K run an instructor had surprised them with, the group had been straggling back to the dorm. Vaughn was walking a little ahead of the group, trying to stretch, when out of nowhere, Nick brushed past him, clipping him so roughly that Vaughn almost fell to his knees.

  “Hey,” Vaughn called out after him angrily, not caring if the instructor heard. In fact, he was hoping he would, so they could have a public confrontation and sort this out. He was hot, he was tired, and he had had enough.

  But Nick had sprinted far ahead, and he wasn’t stopping. “Hey!” Vaughn yelled again, taking off after him. Leaving the rest of the group in the dust, he reached Nick’s side. And as they pounded the ground side by side, he couldn’t help himself: He reached out to give Nick’s shoulder a shove.

  They had run so far that they’d made it from the clearing where they usually finished out the runs into a sparsely wooded area a few hundred yards behind the dorm. “What do you want, golden boy?” Nick asked, giving Vaughn a manic grin and performing a sweep-kick so quickly that Vaughn found himself on his back before he even knew what was happening.

  Vaughn got to his feet quickly, but not quickly enough. Nick had already reached the patio of the dorms. When Vaughn raced over to tackle him at the knees, they fell to the cracked concrete surface like two tons of bricks.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Nick screamed, trying to push Vaughn off him. Vaughn reached out to try to pin him, but Nick continued to land painful punches on his most vulnerable areas, his kidneys and windpipe, all the while continuing to scream as if he were being torn apart by a pack of hyenas.

  Vaughn finally managed to catch Nick’s arm and twist it behind him. Under the floodlights, they tussled, Vaughn struggling to catch Nick’s arms to stop his painful jabs as the rest of the group emerged, running, from the darkness of the woods.

  Suddenly Nick went limp with Vaughn sitting on top of him, and Vaughn’s arms, which had been tangled up with Nick’s, flew free to deliver a knockout punch to the side of Nick’s head. Nick turned his head to the side and groaned.

  Vaug
hn could hear both the instructor’s voice and Nick’s over the din. “. . . wasn’t doing anything . . . Sonofabitch just tackled me. . .” and a harsh “Break it up, now, boys, break it up!” He felt Melvin’s arms pulling him off Nick while he watched, feeling almost disembodied, as the instructor kneeled down to check on his fallen opponent.

  “He just tackled me!” Nick was still screaming as he got slowly to his feet, holding his now bloody nose with one hand and pointing at Vaughn with the other. The instructor looked at Vaughn, then at Nick, then back at Vaughn. The rest of the group kept looking between the two men. Vaughn was trying to figure out how Nick had gotten that bloody nose. When he’d tackled him? He didn’t remember landing any direct blows except for that last punch at the head, and that had been an accident.

  “He slammed into me,” Vaughn finally heard himself say calmly. “He slammed into me, and I was just trying to catch up with him so that we could talk.”

  “Talk?” Nick yelled indignantly, the sweatshirt sleeve he was holding up to the gushing pipe of his nose becoming increasingly bloody. “Dude, you’re out of your mind. Does this look like we’ve been talking?”

  Vaughn suddenly caught a glimpse of himself in the dorm’s windows. While Nick looked like he’d been through a couple of rounds with a helicopter, his face and hands bloody, his knees cut, and his clothes disheveled and ragged, Vaughn looked barely touched—like he’d been on a long run and through a field of wildflowers, which was actually pretty close to the truth.

  Was he so filled with rage that he’d been able to beat Nick so badly in so short a time without even noticing what he was doing?

  “Son,” the instructor said, reaching out toward Vaughn. “I think you’d better cool down and come with me.”

  Vaughn felt his anger and fear—which had been hovering somewhere around the top of his throat—suddenly plunge down to his gut. Had he really snapped? I could be thrown out of training for this, Vaughn thought. People who lost their tempers had no place at the CIA. But how could he have beaten Nick that badly? He’d just meant to slow him down, to get in his face, to make him finally talk about what he’d been doing.