Variant Exchange

by Fox J Wilde

  “She told me I would feel something.” he mused, “She said I would never feel more alive…that I would never feel anything comparable. She said everything would change. But the bitch lied. That vampire bitch lied to me.”

  He hated her more now than he ever had before. She was the wretched creature that had made him do this. She had meant to demean him, no doubt—to lower him down to her level, and force him to hate himself just as much as he hated her. She had failed though. He already hated himself…but he could never hate himself, or anything, nearly as much as he hated her.

  As the minutes passed, however, and the blood began to pool at his feet, he began to feel differently about it all. “I shouldn’t feel nothing. I should feel…something…anything. I should feel some small sensation. It isn’t right and it isn’t fair. I just took everything from these two men. I stole every memory they had ever had and erased them from existence. I took their relationships, their holiday vacations, their broken bones, their first kisses, their grades in school, their plans…I brought it all to a screeching halt, and I feel fucking nothing.”

  Suddenly, he began to weep. The tears flowed down his cheeks, and down his neck to find their way under his collar. Yet he didn’t wipe them away. At least this was something that he could feel…something that could anchor him to the moment. This was something that added even the slightest modicum of meaning to the terrible things that he had done just moments before.

  “I need to leave.” he menaced to himself, “I need to go make myself right. I need to go feel something meaningful. And I know just how to do it.”

  Kunststück

  Lena sat with her mouth ever-so-slightly unhinged. She had heard him right...right? He had just said “Counter-intelligence”, right? It was a word that she knew nothing about, and hadn’t heard since she left the prison, but she had heard it before. That couldn’t mean they... that they were...but, well, it kind of had to, didn’t it? What else could it mean?

  “Any ideas, Lena?” Mr. Collins asked.

  “I...I’m a little confused,” she replied. “That’s when spies...uh, go and...spy on spies?”

  “That’s...” Mr. Collins said, looking slightly taken aback.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Matt chuckled. “Finally! An answer that isn’t completely stupid!”

  “There’s a first time for everything, I suppose,” Mr. Collins laughed. “So, Lena, why do you think we would be asking you that question?”

  “Because…” she stalled, “Because...”

  “Don’t slow your roll now, genius,” Matt jested.

  “Because you work for the HVA?” Lena spoke, before instantly regretting it.

  Immediately, she stood up and put both of her hands over her mouth, realizing her mistake. She had just given away who she worked for. I mean, she hadn’t said it, per se, but that was precisely what saying it meant, right? Oh, Dragon Lady was going to murder her now—Lena was a dead woman.

  “Ah, I see.” Mr. Collins said, knowingly, before turning to Matt and speaking in a firm tone, “Matt, why don’t you go hand Jeff a guitar?”

  “You got it, Boss,” Matt spoke as he stood up, and began walking out of the room.

  “Why don’t you just smoke a cigarette and relax for a minute,” Mr. Collins said to Lena, as he leaned back and relaxed himself. Soon, Lena heard the sound of people drunkenly cheering outside the tour bus to be followed by the faint sound of a guitar towards the front entrance. After a minute or so of this, all of the drunken voices began singing along together.

  “We always try to have at least two counter-measures in place,” Mr. Collins said. “The first electrifies the walls of the cab back here, making this place pretty difficult to use electronic stuff for spying. But...” he added with a laugh, “I’ve often found that the best counter-measure is a bunch of drunken groupies singing bad songs together.”

  “That’s...” Lena laughed, “That’s brilliant, actually.”

  “Oh, it works like a charm. And it’s entertaining, assuming you operate with the same sense of whimsy that Matt and I do...which I assume that you do.”

  Just then, Matt walked back into the room. He was clapping his hands and humming tunelessly under his breath, “Cuz I love you...that’s why I punched that ‘gator in the face…”

  “What in the hell are you singing?!” Lena laughed.

  “Oh, I’m just making it up, same as Jeff. He’s gotten pretty good at this, just making it all up as he goes along. Most music is stupid predictable anyway. Most of the time, the groupies sing along not even knowing it’s fake.”

  “I...that...” she stuttered. She didn’t know if that was funny or sad, but the implications were vast.

  “I think it’s pretty telling,” Mr. Collins said as Matt sat down, “that folks can be so oblivious to something like that, not even paying attention to what’s going on right in front of them.”

  “Yeah,” Matt nodded.

  “You know, Lena,” Mr. Collins continued as he turned towards her, “that’s the difference between them and us...the people singing outside the bus, vs. the people in this room. Out there, they don’t have any higher aspirations aside from living in the moment and reveling in the status quo that we engineer for them. They just want to seek pleasure, avoid pain, get married eventually, and basically enjoy life. Honestly, I can’t fault them for that one bit. It’s a good way to live their life, and we’re happy to help them live it. But I’ll tell you what the big difference between you and the two of us is.”

  For a second, Lena’s heart skipped a beat. Despite his friendly tone, she felt she was being chastised, dismissed, or worse. It was an assumption on her part, sure, but she still felt the pangs of embarrassment and failure all the same.

  “The folks we work for...” Mr. Collins said, pointing at Matt and himself, “...want a world where everyone is free to live their own lives however they choose. Be it a simple groupie singing outside of a tour bus, or a raging lunatic onstage howling at the moon. Even the folks in the GDR should have the same freedom as everyone else. But...we’re also willing to go only so far to bring that freedom.

  “You see, Lena, what I imagine the Stasi are probably like, they don’t feel very much the same as I do, and they are willing to brutalize innocent people like you for reasonable expressions of that freedom. Do you know how I know this?”

  Lena held her tongue, but she was feeling strange inside. A mixture of understanding, fear...and other emotions that she couldn’t describe.

  “Because it’s a story we hear in the company all the time. It’s a tactic that the Stasi use called ‘zersetzung’—divide and conquer. They turn everyone into an informer so that no one trusts each other. Because when no one trusts, people can’t band together. Does this sound familiar?”

  Lena nodded.

  “I imagine it goes a little deeper for you, though,” he continued, with a caring tone. “I’m not going to ask if you work for the HVA. Heck, Matt and I here are just going to assume that you don’t. That way, if you are...” he said this with a wink, “you don’t have to tell your boss anything that would get you into trouble. Okay?”

  Lena nodded, but this time, she actually felt a measure of relief.

  “That said, in our company, we are quite familiar with the HVA and how they do things. It’s almost exactly like the Soviets: prostitution, blackmail, extortion, paranoia, threatening…” with every word, Lena’s eyes became more and more unfocused as she correlated his words to her various memories. He seemed to pick up on this, because his words became more pointed...violent, even, “Perhaps you’ve seen beatings...torture even...perhaps even worse.”

  “I…” Lena gulped, trying not to remember that.

  “Don’t you worry about it, Lena,” Mr. Collins said, as he leaned forward. “If that’s the world for you, you are certainly welcome to it. We will never try to steer you away from
it...that is, if that’s a world you happen to find yourself in one day.”

  Lena shuddered.

  “But…” he said with a knowing glance, “I think I’ve got the measure of you right. You might not like that stuff, but I think you love the adventure. And I think you belong in this room with us, instead of being a groupie outside of our bus. You want to be a part of a world that helps make their world for them. Should you wish to find yourself a part of this room and this world, but one that does things in a more palatable fashion than the HVA, we might have some work for you—some work where you might actually be doing some good for both our country and yours.”

  “Well...” she started, “what exactly would that work be?”

  “Lena.” Matt broke in, “I need you to know something before we continue. Mr. Collins here is one of the best—truly. If you decide you want in, you will absolutely be in the best of hands. But…” he said this, while placing a hand over hers, “if you feel like it’s too much pressure for you, I want you to know that we will still find a way to work together. You know, as bands.”

  “I’d like to hear what the work is, I think.” Lena said, blushing.

  “Well, here is where things get complicated,” Mr. Collins responded. “Because this is very much an ‘in or out’-sort of thing. Normally, vetting potential agents takes months or longer. It’s the age-old war between security and efficiency, and normally we have time to sacrifice efficiency; but this is what we call the ‘not soft’ approach. We have an immediate need for someone like you, which means that certain security and evaluation procedures are being thrown to the wayside. Once you are in, the ball immediately starts rolling. This means more fun for you, of course—quicker training, better training, and immediate gratification…not to mention the paychecks which can be substantial. But, it also means that if you try to back out, we have to excise the entire project. So...” he added, with a steely grin as Matt squeezed her hand, “are you in or are you out?”

  “It’s worth it,” Matt said. “You’ve never had so much fun in your life.”

  For a second, Lena relaxed in the moment. This, right here, was the crux: if she said no, then her life wouldn’t immediately be in serious danger. She could go back to her normal life of utter insanity, living in fear of Dragon Lady and any of the other horrors the HVA and Stasi had in store for her. If she said yes, then...well, she was sure her life would simply be even more dangerous than it had been before. Then again, she could just run away. After all, she was on this side of the Wall. Nothing could technically stop her.

  For precious seconds, she reveled in the moment. She knew she was going to say yes. Honestly, who in their right mind wouldn’t?! Yet, until she said yes or no, she was safe in the moment and secure in her indecision. For a brief moment, she reflected on what Grandfather had said back in the Stasi prison about the games that officers liked to play with each other...“As long as they are still playing, they technically haven’t lost yet.”

  For a few more seconds, she sat thinking the words she knew she was going to say, trying them on for size. The thought of the possibility that she was in over her head did threaten to dawn, once or twice. Then again, she had lived the last several months in over her head, so what damage could a little more chaos and confusion really do? Besides, Matt and Mr. Collins really did seem to know what they were doing, and they wouldn’t have asked her unless she really was that good, right? Two entire spy agencies wanted her help—she must really be something!

  “Alright. I will work with you.”

  “That’s why we wanted you, Lena!” Matt said cheerfully.

  “You’ve made the right choice,” Mr. Collins said. “Now let us prove it to you.”

  He then stood up and walked over to a small cubby in the wall. Reaching in, he pulled out a folder. Sifting through it, he sat down and spread out its contents in front of him: just a few plain folders and a map.

  “Through much of the coming weeks,” he started, “you will be acting more-or-less alone. This is a crucial position for you to be in. So, I want to start out with a few definitions:

  “Information is anything you don’t already know, however useful or un-useful. All information is useful. It might not be useful to you specifically, or to you right now, but it is useful to someone at some point. Conversely, Intelligence is curated information. That means that its information that is in fact useful to you right now. More specifically, it’s useful to your boss, who might be a diplomat, a CEO, a President, a Prime Minister—someone that doesn’t have the time to sift through 300 pages of poorly aggregated information. Intelligence is information that has been further analyzed and presented formally in a finished, readable package. Intelligence is aggregated and curated by teams of analysts and the discernment of experienced directors.

  “Information used in intelligence is gathered by various means. Sometimes—well, the vast majority of the time—it’s gathered by reading the newspapers of other countries. You would truly be surprised what sorts of things your rivals put out into the public forum. They even print things that the government is wanting to keep secret! Failing that, it’s generally gathered by simply asking: calling the editors of those newspapers, for instance, or calling constables, or experts, or people that are in a position to see things that you otherwise wouldn’t.

  “Lena, if I wanted to know when a boat loaded with important cargo is docking, who do you think might have that information?”

  “Someone who works at the docks?” Lena offered.

  “Ok, good!” Mr. Collins said. “But be specific. Who might be in a position to see the cargo unloaded and know what it was?”

  “Maybe a crane operator?” Lena offered again.

  “Good! Or maybe also someone who checks the manifests, right? Who might that be?”

  “Security?”

  “Keep going.”

  “Customs officials?”

  “Give me one more.”

  “Um…maybe a dockhand? I don’t know.”

  “Good—all good ideas. There’s a lot of ways to handle that problem. Understand though, that people are busy. They don’t always want to take time out of their busy day to remember what those manifests say, or look out for specific ships. Its work—it might not always be hard work, but it’s still something that they don’t have to do. That, and its work that’s valuable to you. So how do you think you get these people to keep a watch out for you?”

  “You could pay them?” Lena said.

  “Exactly!” Mr. Collins cheered. “They are doing a job for you! You pay them for their time. So, you see, when we are looking for information to turn into intelligence, sometimes it’s gathered by offering someone something in return. It could be money, protection, freedom, adventure, immunity, access, or any number of things that a government is capable of providing.

  “Now really quick, I want to shift gears into defining what counterintelligence is, because it’s often a pretty misunderstood concept. Really, the most important thing to remember is that it’s not just us—as in, your own team—that’s trying to get information: it’s everyone else, too. In the game of intelligence, whoever gains more, faster, wins. So, on top of trying to get intelligence, we have to protect what we already have. Generally, this is done with packaging, classification-levels, access-cards, cameras, and etcetera. Sometimes, by simply locking valuable information up in a safe, and then only telling one of your employees the code, works perfectly. Do you know why?”

  “Because maybe another country is paying some of your other employees to gather information?”

  “Awesome answer!” Matt cheered.

  “Very good,” Mr. Collins nodded. “But what could we do if, say, we suspected that the one who had the codes to the safe was a spy?”

  “You could just fire him.”

  “But then we wouldn’t know who he works for, would we?”

  “
I suppose not.”

  “What if you replaced the real information with fake information, and then waited for that fake information to show up somewhere in another country? Say, ‘American-inspired’-cars with oval-shaped wheels?”

  “That seems like an awful lot to go through for something that wouldn’t even work,” Lena said.

  “Oh, all Counterintelligence people are pranksters,” Matt said while rubbing his hands together. “One time, we packaged up a live nuclear warhead, and had an American Major charge the Soviets millions of dollars for the pleasure of mailing it back to themselves—without safety measures. It almost went off too, right in downtown Moscow. Boy, that would’ve been fun.”

  “That’s insane!” Lena winced.

  “One of our better ideas.” Mr. Collins laughed. “What about walls, though? Do you think walls are counterintelligence? Or what about fences?”

  “Well, they don’t…I mean, they keep some people from getting in, right?”

  “Exactly! It protects information. Say that you could easily hop over fences though…how would we keep you out?”

  “You could, I don’t know…put out land-mines? Trip-wire? Towers with guards in them?”

  “What if, instead, we went the cheap route and put signs on the fence that said, ‘Warning: deadly force authorized’?”

  “I probably wouldn’t hop over them.”

  “…what if the signs aren’t true?”

  “Well, how the hell would I know that?!”

  “You should see the size of the imaginary ‘dogs’ we have in our compound that you should ‘beware of’” Matt grinned. “Counterintelligence is mostly just slight-of-hand and misdirection.”

  “But unfortunately,” Mr. Collins broke in, “information isn’t just collected by asking people politely. Oftentimes, when you can’t find someone who will willingly provide the information you need, it’s gathered by surveillance. And that puts you—and us—in a pretty precarious position. Surveillance is the art of surreptitiously watching, listening or otherwise procuring firsthand knowledge on a person, place or thing. This is recorded by means of a camera, audio device, or memory.