My name is Claire McBride (Westen), and my dad used to be a spy.
This is important for you to know for many reasons. Mostly because it helps to explain what happened on Sept. 28th, but also because it helps explain who we all are. Because if had never been a spy, we all wouldn't be ourselves.
I defiantly wouldn't be an American girl with a semi Irish accent living on and island between England and France, pretending to be someone different all together. I probably wouldn't have been born at all, but with my parents that's hard to imagine. I have a strong feeling that something would have driven them together, even if their jobs hadn't. Sometimes I think my mom needs my dad so much something in her would have caused her to swim across the Atlantic Ocean with out even knowing why.
If you had met my father in the years after his career had ended you would not have suspected that he'd been a covert operative. You wouldn't have thought he'd been on the front lines in Afghanistan and that he was once the most feared name among most Russian intelligence agents .
My father did not watch TV or read newspapers, he never surfed the internet. I always thought that was weird. I remember in the third grade I had to do a paper on current events. My mother nearly lost her mind when I left a copy of the Local London paper face up on the table in our dinning room.
"CLAIRE!" She'd screeched, snatching it up and trusting it towards me like it had been a block of C-4 that I'd left out for my brother to use as silly putty. "You're room with it!" She'd shaken it at me again, her Irish accent touching each word. "Right now!"
I'd thought she was crazy, until September 28th.
Until Sept 28th I didn't realize that my father was a recovering big shot spy who could relapse at any moment. I didn't realize that the minute his left foot accidentally got caught in the spotlight he'd instantly be a target. A threat. My mother understood that all it would take was one mission. One job.
Her and my Uncle Sam had been running jobs for as long as I could remember. When we were in Miami it was out in the open. They'd talk about jobs over Grandma's poorly cooked meals, they'd talk about jobs over beers and ice tea at Carlitios. They'd talk about jobs around me. They'd talk about jobs on the phone with Dad, or more rarely when he was home.
Apparently the four of them, Mom, Dad, Sam and Jesse, had been quiet a team in their day. The days before I was born and before my Dad had gone back to work.
I never really understood the whole Burn Notice thing. I'd never really gotten a good answer. My mom would get all twitchy and feed me some line. My father would simply look wistfully at me and tell me it was a long time ago. Uncle Sam was the only one unaffected by the question.
"Good times, Kid." He'd say with a click of his tongue against his cheek. "Good times."
In my conscious memory, only Uncle Sam and Mom took 'jobs'. It seemed to be Dad's job to worry endlessly. Mom tried to hide the first few jobs from my father, but Dad knew what she was going to do before she ever did, so that was out.
Then it was decided that my father would do the prep work. He'd lay the foundation and help them brainstorm. That did not last long. After a few heated arguments, it was decided that although they would not be secrets, Dad was to have no part in them at all. I have a feeling there may have been a job in between where a Mom saw just how addicted to spy-hood my father really was.
So then, the adults in my life struggled to find the right mix. And before September 28th, it appeared they had.
On September 18th, my Uncle Sam broke the rules, breaking down and asking my father for more help then he should have given. My mother was in danger. He hadn't had much of a choice. The job was wrapped up. All was well, my mother was clueless and my father no worse for wear. Until ten days later.
It was our very first vacation without my Uncle Sam. I was ten, my brother had just turned 3. We were going to Whales to meet with my Uncle, Grandmother Glenanne and three cousins. We never made it.
My parents had been fighting. Not an uncommon thing really, but I mention it because if they hadn't been, it would not have been able to happen. Not to my parents.
My father was distracted by my mother's silent treatment. Fiona McBride (Westen) was a dangerous creature when she was silent.
"Fi." He tried again, nothing. "Fiona I'm just saying that it's not that big of a deal."
"Never is." She'd whispered harshly.
"Fiona.." He'd looked lazily out the window before turning his head back to her. "What was I supposed to do?"
"Not that." She shook her head lightly.
"You are my wife." He whined.
"And I can take care of myself Michael." She breathed, moving as far from him as possible in the confines of the small English car.
"Of course you can." He sighed. "I'm completely unnecessary."
"Oh stop it Michael, honestly!" She snapped turning her face back to him as he stopped at the red light. "Do you really have to be the knight in shining armor? Do you miss it that-"
That's when someone smashed in the window next to my mother and started firing tear gas into our car
The three man team.. I would learn later that it was an extraction team.. began to pull my mother out through the door until my father exited the car, jumped over the roof of it and took down the man on the other side.
I remember my mom's body hurtling into the backseat towards my brother before screaming at me.
"Claire get down. Get down!" She must have freed him from the car seat, because Maddox was soon wheezing and gagging right next to me. "Stay down!"
I know the rest because I heard her explain it in painstaking detail to my Uncle Sam, then to Jesse Porter on the phone. I don't remember first hand what happened because I promptly lost consciousness.
In the story, my mother climbed halfway out her broken window and searched for my father who was being pummeled by the second man on the team. At which point my father yelled at her to go, before she realized team member number three had excited the get away van and was heading towards the driver's side door that my dad had left conveniently open for him. My mother had stepped on the gas before her body had even dropped into the seat. She'd pulled us away and into a crowded market place before rushing back towards my dad. Who was already gone.
I came too in a hospital room, with my mother sobbing into her cell phone..
"-extraction team! I told you! I told you!"
…...
