Day 364

Writing exercise

His loneliness bothered him less than the reasons for it.

…

“It happened when I was very young.  I wasn’t brought up this way; that was forced on me by people I thought I could trust.”

The psychiatrist had been working for weeks now, trying to get to the nub of the matter, and perhaps if I had decided not to play a game with them, she might have got there.

But when did I ever make anything easy for them?

“So, you have trust issues?”  She scribbled a few notes on a page near the end of the book.  It was the sum total of my life, according to her.

And the material she would use to write her assessment.

Looking back, that one moment when I finally lost, that one moment of rage that sent me off the metaphorical reservation, there would be consequences.

For her, my last statement could be construed as a major breakthrough, passing through the gate and onto where the grass is greener.

Of course, in reality, it was nothing like that.  I simply had another argument with my parents and left, their strict and stifling rules about how we should behave, and live our lives finally too much.

They could have compromised, as they had for my brother, but they didn’t.

I could see that self-satisfied half smile and understood what it meant.  The longer this had gone, the quicker she had started disappearing down a rabbit hole.

She worked for the department.  She had analysed and buried good people over small mistakes, with what I had told the ivory tower dwellers was a lack of experience or understanding of the nature of our work.

For her, snapping as we sometimes did, was a form of release from doing what no one else would, work that is vital and necessary.  It’s just when there’s collateral damage, the bosses are antsy.

Civilians always seemed to find themselves getting in the way, accidentally, and for that, I blamed the mobile phone culture.  Take phones off people, and they wouldn’t become zombies, they’d be aware of what’s going on around them, and then I wouldn’t be in this chair in front of a one-person execution squad.

That was the truth of the matter.

She simply said I was shifting blame.

Finished scribbling, she looked up.  “Tell me more.”

Pen was poised, expression expectant.

I hesitated for a moment longer before I spoke, an indication of whether she was smart enough to interpret as me taking a moment to work out which lie she would buy.

“My parents simply up and left one night, leaving me alone in the house.  Gone, not a word, not an indication, nothing.  Just simply gone.”

“And before that, how were they?”

“Normal.  Like I said, no indication anything had changed.”

“How old were you?”

“Seven.”

“And what happened next?”

As if she didn’t know what would happen to an abandoned seven-year-old with no other relatives, or none that they looked for, because the child welfare officer at the time was taking children and selling them to the highest bidder.

It had been my second job for the department.

Nasty people came in all shapes and sizes and backgrounds, but this person was a chameleon, someone no one would suspect, which is how she got away with it for so long.

“I was put in the system.  You know how that works, and you can guess what happened to me.  Not what is on the reports, but I’m not going to spell it out for you.  Those memories are buried.”

The nod was acceptance, because my story was the same as many others that came before her.  Candidates who came from broken homes, abandoned, or simply maltreated to a point where they had to be removed.

And sent to Joe’s Diner, to have all that hate and rage twisted into an effective tool against those who had harmed them.  Tapping into that basic raw instinct of killing, maiming and destroying anything or anyone that put them there.

My story was slightly different.  I ended up in jail, framed for something I didn’t do, by a small-town sheriff protecting his son, the real perpetrator.  I was minding my own business, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I was rescued from one form of torture only to finish up in another, but the end result was the same.

It eventually broke us and brought us here.

…

I knew the mention of buried memories was, for her, manna from heaven.  A bone she was going to pick at, because in her teaching and subsequent experience, that’s where the key to our problems lay.  In the past.

We had to confront our demons head-on, make the connection ourselves, and start the gradual healing process, somewhere far away and isolated, and preferably to never see another weapon or bad guy again.

I jokingly told the director the only way that would happen was to be put in a pine box six feet under.  That’s when the memories would truly be buried.

It was hard to tell if he thought I was joking or not, but it must have weighed on him, the number of cases like mine.  Just reading the executive summary of the cases before the briefing began made people physically ill, and those were just words on paper.

“Of course, you know that isn’t going to cut it.  You have to be forthcoming in all aspects of this investigation, and it would help your case to remember that.”

Threats no less.  Perhaps the director had told her that I was going to be the one she wasn’t going to crack.  Just as he was wont to tell anyone who would listen that I was his best agent.

I wasn’t.  Not by a long chalk.  That was Andreas.  Even I was scared of him.  He was the best, the best of the best.

Until he wasn’t.

He let his guard down for a fraction of a second.  Less than a fraction of a second.  An eternity in terms of vulnerability.

Another case of shattered trust.

…

Perhaps somewhere in all of the narrative she had put together over the last six weeks was the truth. 

In training, we were told that when interrogated, everyone grounds their stories with elements of truth because when asked over and over and over, it’s too hard to remember all of the lies, particularly after a long and painful torture session.

This was the more subtle form of torture.  She was looking for inconsistencies, lies, half-truths, and stories worthy of the best thriller writers.

Our whole life was a collection of stories, our cover identities with back stories to suit the person.  Butcher, baker, candlestick maker.

Gambler, billionaire, financier, mercenary, average Joe. 

When you wake up in the morning, it takes a moment to remember who you are today, and it’s not Harry Wells, the name I was given the day I was born.  He died a long time ago.

Now it was Joshua Bergen.  Yes, Joshua.

“Let’s start again, shall we?  From the top.  Why did you think you’re here?”

Yep, here we go again.

“I believe we’ve covered this ten times, perhaps more, before.  If there are inconsistencies, just ask specific questions.”

“That’s not how this works.”

“Asking the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of madness.  You do know that?”

Perhaps she didn’t, at least not in this context.  Her expression had changed to one of annoyance.  She liked to be the one running the session.

“Again.”  Short, sharp.

“No.  Like Chinese whispers, we both know stories change each time they’re related, otherwise if it was exactly the same, you’d think that it was rehearsed.”

“What I think is irrelevant.”

“It isn’t, though.  He needs to know what happened because, like me, there was more going on than he was led to believe; that he was a pawn in someone else’s game.”

“A setup?”

“Someone else is looking for a scapegoat.  Either him or me, it doesn’t matter.  Just another breach of trust, being told one thing and it turns out to be something else entirely.”

Like that last assignment, a total botch, or so it seemed.

Collateral damage happens, but this time it extended to the wife of a Cabinet minister who was believed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Only I knew the true story, that she was there to hand over her husband’s secrets.

I was there to talk to a high-level public servant who had asked Rawlins for clandestine assistance in a delicate matter.  It was not to meet up with the woman; she arrived unexpectedly and in a highly agitated state.

It was clear to me who she was and what was going on between them.  Except before a word was exchanged, he shot her, turned the gun on me, and I shot him.

The woman was barely alive when I reached her, but with enough time to say just above a whisper, “he is a Russian spy, and I’m not the only one he is blackmailing.”  There was more, but she was out of time and life.

Ten seconds later, the SAS kicked the door in, and I had six guns pointed at me.  Given their first impression of the scene before them, I was lucky to still be alive. 

“What was your mission?”

“To assist the public servant.  Favours owed.  Whatever he needed.”

“Did you shoot the woman?”

“No.  Ballistics will prove it.”

She shook her head.  “No.  They won’t.  Both shots, man and woman, came from your weapon.”

That was impossible.  I only fired one shot.  Except as everyone in the department knew, the boffins could manufacture evidence to suit any narrative.  Write me out of the script, or in.

“So, as you say, a setup.  Someone wants to take Rawlins down.”

“Or you, if you don’t tell me the truth.  Why was she there?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“It can’t be that simple.”

“Well, that’s the problem.  It is that simple.  I know Rawlins doesn’t believe in coincidences, neither do I, for that matter, but there’s a first time for everything.”

“Why did you shoot the target?”

“He shot the woman before she went to speak, then turned the gun on me.  Reflex action.  I can’t tell you why he took that action, but it stopped her from doing or saying anything.  I did not shoot the woman; I had no reason to.  She just burst into the room, indicating she’d met him before, and expected him to be there.”

There was a knock on the door, and without waiting to be asked, Rawlins came in.  A nod in the woman’s direction, she closed the notebook, picked up her bag and left, closing the door behind her.

I knew Rawlins had been watching, and I suspected she had an earpiece where he was suggesting what to ask.

He would also be observing and analysing.

He didn’t sit.

“She said something to you, in those last few seconds.”

Why didn’t it surprise me that the target’s room was under surveillance?  Rawlins obviously suspected the target had an agenda.  That he had waited so long for me to volunteer to tell him was the interesting part.

“Why would you think it would be significant?”

“We suspected she was having an affair.  Her husband did and told his head of security.  He told us.  They weren’t having an affair, were they?”

“From what I saw, it was very definitely an affair.”

“He shot her, without a moment’s thought.”

“Hence, we will never know.  If he hadn’t aimed the gun at me, we might have got to find out,  but I think now, seeing you here, this whole episode was staged to get rid of two problems, a double agent and a treasonous wife, without having to bear the dirty linen in public.”

Rawlins sat in the recently vacated seat.

“A satisfactory result for an unsatisfactory problem.  Two birds with one stone.”

“The minister?”

“Heartbroken, but his personal assistant is helping him get over the crisis.”

“Life goes on?”

“As indeed it always will.  I hate feeding you to the dogs, but you know what it’s like in the new age intelligence landscape.  Transparency.  Access to psychological help to avoid trauma, stress leave, so there’s less room for errors.  A week’s leave, I’m afraid.  Talk to Mandy, she’ll set it up.  So, just what did Melanie say in that last dying breath?”

“Told me to remind her husband to feed Chester, their new cat.  I think she thought more of that cat than her husband.”

Rawlins laughed.  “Of course, she didn’t say that.  We will talk about this again.  When you get back.”

…

©  Charles Heath  2025