by Erik Carter
It hadn’t happened yet. But it would.
Maybe Falcon had recognized the rashness of his decision and put Nakiri in charge of training to counteract his imprudence. An attempt at checks-and-balances. If so, she was taking that responsibility seriously, if not personally; she was doing her damndest to fail the trainee.
On his very first evening of training.
Suppressor stifled a scream as Nakiri pressed into the bandages on his right shoulder.
“Wrong! Eight-zero-six-four-five-four-one-six-two-nine.”
Suppressor’s forehead was wet with exertion “Eight-zero-six…” He swallowed. “Four-five-one—”
“Wrong!”
She clamped down.
Another silent scream as he bit down on his lip. Sweat dripped from his nose.
She released the pressure. “Eight-zero-six-four-five-four-one-six-two-nine.”
“Eight-zero-six...” He panted. Swallowed. “Four-five-four-one…” Panted. Swallowed. “Six-two-nine.”
She tensed her fingers. Stopped.
He’d gotten it right.
Well, what do ya know?
“Good,” she said. “Did you notice something about the number I gave you?”
Suppressor just stared at her, chest heaving.
“You need to be perceptive, Suppressor. That’s something else for you to work on.” She narrowed her eyes. “Ten digits. Just like U.S. phone numbers. You need to be able to memorize ten-digit numbers the first time you hear them.”
She took her pen knife from her pocket, snapped open the blade.
Suppressor pulled back into his pillows, eyes going wide beneath his sweaty brow.
Nakiri smirked. “Relax. I’m not that mean.”
She cut the plastic handcuff on his right wrist, leaned over the bed, pressed herself against him just so, batted a pair of bedroom eyes in his direction, then cut the right handcuff.
Suppressor rubbed his wrists.
She yanked back his cover and sheets, glanced at where she’d busied herself a few minutes earlier, below his waistline, gave him a salacious grin, then undid the large strap restraining his legs.
“There,” she said. Other than the IVs, you’re completely untethered. But don’t go getting any ideas. You’re three stories underground, and this place is monitored.” She held up the loose strap. “Just consider this like getting the training wheels off your bike.”
She flipped her eyes to his crotch again.
“This undying thing you’ve got for Cecilia Farone—you know you’ve just projected a perfect image onto her because of your own low self-image, right? Weak people do shit like that. You would’ve become anything she asked you to become. Pitiful.
“But you liked our lesson in touch. You can’t possibly deny that. The proof’s in the, er, pudding. Keep a dead woman rattling around in your brain for all eternity if you want, but it won’t change what’s happening in the present, in the real, living world. You’ll find there are lots of gray areas within morality. That’s where we exist, all the Watchers, but especially us, the Assets. We live in that gray area.”
She gave him another one of her coy grins and walked to the door, opened it, looked back.
“Get some rest. Training resumes tomorrow, bright and early.”
The next day.
Suppressor was walking well, better than she would’ve expected. When Falcon had told her the guy had fortitude, he’d clearly been referring to Suppressor’s mental toughness. But evidently he had physical resolve as well. His knees were rather weak, and he squinted a lot, but otherwise he was walking around fairly normally.
They were in the crumbling area outside the building where the underground medical facility was housed: a tower in an abandoned attempt at a commercial park off the interstate in Alexandria, Virginia. All broken concrete and weed-filled cracks and untrimmed trees.
Squinting, Suppressor looked about the surroundings. “I’ve been…” He stopped to swallow. “Here?”
Nakiri grinned at him. “What, did you think you were under the Pentagon or something? We work where we have to.” She looked him over. “How’s the pain? Are your legs holding out?”
He pointed to his throat, frowned.
“Your throat hurts worse than your legs?” she said.
He nodded.
“You’ll have to learn to live with that one, buddy,” she said. “Time for your next lesson.”
She stopped. And he did too.
With their last turn, they were now in an abandoned alley full of trash and downed power lines and overturned dumpsters.
“You seem like a quality guy. A future family man, had you not murdered a handful of people. But even if Cecilia was still alive, you wouldn’t be having a family. Falcon told you, didn’t he?”
Suppressor gave a confused shake of the head, shrugged.
“All us Assets have been spayed or neutered.” She pointed at his crotch and made a pair of scissors with her fingers. “Snip-snip! You’re shooting blanks from here on out, dummy.”
His reaction was confusion, not a shred of disappointment. He really was that committed to the dead chick. Crazy fool.
“A right of passage, like our GPS dot,” she said and held up her right arm, twisting it. “Anyway, I digress. My point is, you’re such a good guy, I’m wondering if you really have what it takes to get down-’n-dirty as an assassin.”
She paused.
“Hit me.”
Suppressor cocked his head.
“Hit me,” she repeated.
“Why?”
“Because you need to learn to hit anyone, to be prepared for anything. You were always such a gentleman to Cecilia. I know you don’t want to hit a woman. Find a way.”
Suppressor hesitated.
“You have to be able to do this. Go.” She patted her cheek, turned her face, gave him a nice, open target.
Suppressor grimaced, raised his hand.
And lightly slapped her.
Nakiri laughed. “Whew! I’m lucky I’m still standing, Rocky.” She laughed louder. “We’ll work on that. Come on.”
Three days later.
Back in the hospital room. 9 p.m. Another day of physical training in the books.
Suppressor collapsed onto the small bed, gasping. The bandages on his right shoulder were gone. Now there was just a large Band-Aid. Like Nakiri, the medical staff was working every day, feverishly, to get the guy ready in time.
“You’ll have to work on your stamina, Silence Jones,” she said. “I don’t give a shit if you’ve been in a hospital bed for weeks on end. We need you trained. Fast.”
She dug in her backpack and pulled out a stack of magazines, tossed them onto his lap.
“Have fun,” she said.
Suppressor lifted one of the magazines, opened it. After a moment he glanced up at her, arched an eyebrow.
“Logic puzzles,” she said. “We’re not just training your body. Gotta work that mind too. I want five complete and correct puzzles by the time I get back tomorrow morning. Find a way.”
Suppressor pointed at a red circle in the graphics on the front cover. In white letters it said, ANSWERS IN BACK. He grinned at her.
Well, now.
A little sass out of the new Asset.
Nakiri reached into her bag again, pulled out the stack of torn-out pages she’d removed from the backs of the magazines.
“Nice try.”
Two days later.
A private boxing gym. A crummy old place worthy of a 1970s-era film, filled with dust-covered equipment that looked unused since the ’70s, fittingly enough. It was one of many such Watchers facilities that had been carefully chosen and utilized.
They were in the ring. Nakiri wore a pair of punch mitts, and Suppressor wore a pair of boxing gloves.
He also wore a tank top, and she noticed that his arms were more toned than she’d have thought after so much time in the bed. He was firming up quickly, which was probably a benefit of all those hours he’d spen
t in the gym in his former life. Through the years, Nakiri had noticed that despite the fact that muscle goes away when not utilized—use it, or lose it, as they say—some hard-earned mass becomes permanent.
This was good news for Suppressor. He had to not only get back into shape in a brief period of time, but she was going to get him into the best shape of his life.
At the moment, though, the guy was breathing hard. He gave another punch, halfheartedly. She barely felt it through the padding.
“Harder!” she shouted. “Harder, damn you!”
Suppressor punched again, feebly, and then stopped, panting. He put his hands on his knees and gasped.
“Too weak,” he said and grimaced, swallowed, took another couple deep breaths. “Almost two months.”
“Oh, so that’s it?” she said. “You’ve been in a hospital bed for almost two month, so that makes you too weak to throw a few punches?”
Suppressor nodded.
And with his head hanging the way it was, she whacked the back of it with her punch mitt.
“Stand up, you lazy shit! You’ve had people bringing you back to life, working around the clock on you for those ‘almost two months.’ Doctors, nurses. Meals handed to you literally on a platter. What are you going to do when you’re in the middle of a desert? What are you gonna do when your target finds you, captures you, beats you, electrifies you? Come on, you sack of shit!”
Suppressor took one more breath and extended to his full height, towering over her, chest heaving.
She scowled at him, wriggled out of the punch mitts, and threw them to the mat. A step closer, a few inches away from him, looking straight up so he could see the rage in her eyes.
His gloved hands hung like lifeless pendulums off his long, feeble body. She tore open the laces, ripped the gloves from his hands, and threw them onto the mat like she had with the punch mitts.
She took a step back, placed her arms at her sides.
“Hit me!”
Silence raised a fist.
“Hit me, pussy! Close your fist and punch a woman. Find a damn way!”
Suppressor’s fist hovered for a moment. Then he lowered it.
She moved back into his space, looked up at him.
“This is why we train your mind more than your body. With enough pressure, anyone can learn to kick and punch and stab a knife and shoot a gun. But an Asset’s mind keeps them alive in the field, Suppressor. Right now, you’re a dead man walking, a man so bloated with ideals that he’ll trip and die. You’re not prepared. There’s no time left. And I’d be a fool to pass you.”
She stormed off.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Several days later.
Silence was back outside the building. Except this time he wasn’t with Nakiri; he was with Falcon.
Crumbling asphalt surrounded them. It was colder now, too. And wetter. In the mornings there had been light snows, and in the afternoons, it had turned to rain, which now trickled down the rotting brick of the building across the street. Everything around them was empty and quiet. They were the only living things aside from a pair of birds and a squirrel doing a tightrope act on a drooping phone line at the end of the block.
Falcon had his overcoat buttoned tight as he sucked on a Marlboro.
“Figured out who I am yet?” he said.
Silence raised an eyebrow.
“Assets aren’t technically permitted to know the identity of their Prefects, but if the Prefect is a public figure—which many of us are—it’s almost a moot point. I’ll just say it would be just peachy if you figure out who I am, but don’t be a sad sack if you can’t.”
He’d put a heavy emphasis on three of the word. Falcon was speaking in code.
“Tell me, Suppressor, what do you think of your trainer?”
“Bitch,” Silence said.
Falcon laughed, coughed on his smoke. “I can see why you’d say that. She tells me she’s been pretty hard on you.” He coughed again, cleared his throat. “Don’t forget, she gave you an emergency tracheotomy, got you to a Pensacola hospital, snuck you out the next morning, and drove you across the country. She has rough edges, maybe a few more than the average person, but her heart is where it should be. That’s why she’s a Watcher.”
He took another drag from his cigarette, held it for a long moment, then let the smoke drift out the corner of his mouth.
“Allow me to lend a little perspective. We got Nakiri when she was twenty-four. You remember that news story about the woman who chopped her cheating husband’s dick off?”
Silence nodded. Of course he did. The story became a media storm, a progressively common trait in the modern world, something that had concerned C.C. greatly. It concerned Silence, too.
“Well, our girl did something similar,” Laswell said. “Before the Watchers, she had been a middle-American homemaker and a part-time employee at a local bakery. Her husband—let’s call him Bob—was an insurance agent and a pillar in their small town. They’d had a perfect little life, and she was an old-fashioned, doting wife. Hard to picture, isn’t it?”
Silence nodded.
“There was three years of bliss, then she suspected Bob was cheating. He denied, but he couldn’t hide it, not with small-town gossip being what it is. The doting wife tolerated his behavior for a year or so until her niece came to her in tears one afternoon. The kid said Uncle Bob had been forcing her to do things. For months. That sent our girl over the edge. She went to the cops, worked with them for two weeks, in the afternoons while Bob was at work.”
Falcon stopped, blew out another cloud of smoke. He looked away, chuckled, and Silence saw thoughts and memories sparkling in his eyes.
“Do you know what a nakiri is?”
“Knife,” Silence said.
“Right. A big ol’ kitchen knife, for chopping vegetables. That’s what she used.” He took another drag, released. “The night before the warrant was to be served, our girl had a change of heart, didn’t think prison was a strong enough punishment for Bob. Her niece was only ten years old. Ten. So she slipped out of the bedroom while Bob was sleeping, went to the kitchen. She chopped his dick off, fed it to him, then tortured him for a while before she sliced his throat all the way through the jugular. The body was never found. She fled, and we got to her right before the police.”
“Shit,” Silence said.
“Mmm-hmm.” Falcon looked at the end of his cigarette and saw that it still had a half inch left. “You know why she has such an axe to grind with you, right?”
“Took her assignment,” Silence said.
Falcon shook his head. “It’s not just that you took her assignment. You spoiled her debt.”
Silence raised an eyebrow.
“Each Asset has a debt to pay, your alternative to the prison sentence we saved you from. Fulfill the debt, and we pull that GPS dot out of your arm, give you a fat bank account, and send you somewhere peaceful—beaches, mountains, whatever you like. If you’ve survived, you’ve sure as hell earned the luxury.
“For most Assets, the debt is simply a number—a quantity of assignments to complete. Nakiri has been at this for twelve years. Her debt is twenty assignments. Before going undercover as Burton’s girlfriend, she’d completed nineteen.” He fixed a look on Silence. “See where I’m going with this?”
Silence nodded.
“Pensacola was to be her final assignment,” Falcon continued. “And she failed. She broke her cover, aborted her mission to rescue you. She deliberately defied me. I’d told her to let you die.”
“Thanks,” Silence said.
Falcon shrugged as he examined his cigarette again, saw that it had expended, and flicked it away. He blew into his hands, rubbed them together, and shoved them in his pockets.
“Nakiri had put months into the Pensacola job, by far her longest assignment. She was this close to being finished, and she gave up her freedom to save your life. And now I’ve given the assignment to you, and told her to train you.”
; Nakiri’s hatred toward Silence had been a cloudy sphere of confusion for him. Now it was spotlight bright.
“What’s mine?” Silence said.
Falcon turned to him. “What’s your debt?”
Silence nodded.
The older man looked away again, down the deserted street. “I’m still working on that. But I’ll tell you this much: it’s not going to be a standard debt. It won’t be a number of assignments. Yours is going to be custom-tailored, more personal.”
Personal? Silence didn’t like the sound of that. Abstract notions didn’t play well with his overactive brain. A simple number would have suited him much better.
Falcon turned to him and grinned. “You look like you’re giving this a lot of thought. Don’t get ahead of yourself, Suppressor. You still have to complete the training.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
It was Silence’s third week of training.
He and Nakiri were back in the gym, outside the ring.
And he was struggling to maintain his composure.
A twenty-pound kettlebell quivered before him in his right hand. It had been there for minutes, held straight-armed, elbow locked. His muscles burned fire.
Nakiri stood a few feet away, chomping gum, stopwatch in her left hand. She wasn’t looking at either the watch or at Silence; instead her eyes scanned a copy of Cosmo, cradled in her free hand. Her feet were crossed, and she tapped the toe of her left Doc Marten while she read.
“There are lots of different types of muscular strength,” she said, thumbing to the next page. “We’re training you for endurance and stamina. All those fitness-center-sculpted muscles you had looked really hot, but we need something a lot more practical. And deceiving. I mean, take me, for instance. 110 pounds … give or take a little, ya know. You would have never guessed how strong I was when I kicked your ass at Burton’s beach house, huh? Christie Mosley, Burton’s fiesty, sexy little girlfriend.”