He first meets Larry Sizemore on an airplane landing strip in Zagreb, Croatia, in the summer of '91. It is only his second op in the field as a spy. Michael Westen's career since enlisting at seventeen had been characterized by a series of transfers, each one premature relative to his age and experience: army to special forces, military intelligence, and now this, the most covert of covert intelligence agents to still collect a government paycheck. It's never clear, the motivation behind each of these moves: whether he had seriously impressed his new bosses, or just really pissed off his old ones. In any case, each move brought with it a little more freedom and a lot more training, danger and risk; this suited Michael.
Now he is here, in Croatia, where the summer is gorgeous and the sandy beaches of the Dalmatian coast are just calling, or would be, perhaps, if not for what was so rapidly unfolding not just in the republic but in all of the Balkans, the soon-to-be former Yugoslavia. A few weeks ago the country's northernmost republic, Slovenia, had seceded with a fairly bloodless ten day war against the Serb-controlled national army. Now Croat leaders were preparing to do the same, a move whose fallout promised to be much bloodier and everyone – the US, the Europeans, the Russians – has eyes on the country, waiting for all hell to break loose.
Larry is already waiting when Michael steps onto the tarmac. The man is middle-aged, with a rather distinctive profile, short brown hair and a well-cut suit.
"So you're the new kid," he says when Michael gets within hearing range, grinning. Michael smiles, that insolent, fake-sincere grin of his, preparing himself for yet another variation of the 'know your place' type speech so popular with superiors and more experienced agents. "Well, lets have a look at you then," Larry says, and circles Michael, looking long enough to make the younger man feel more than slightly uncomfortable. "You'll do, I guess. If you're as smart as they say you are you should get out of this fine, no bullet in the skull or anything," he add, tapping his own temple for emphasis, and laughs. Michael laughs too, and they leave the airport quickly.
At first they just wait, do surveillance details, make runs from Zagreb to Belgrade and back, get into a scuffle with a pair of German agents which Michael diffuses because Larry is just a bit too eager to start a shoot out. Then the fighting really breaks out, and hell certainly is one way that Michael would use to describe things. There are Serb militias and Croat militias, the army, thuggish paramilitary gangs. Their missions get very dicey, very fast. The first time they go out on one of these, Larry casually points one of his pistols at Michael's head as they leave the safe house.
"You screw this up kid, and I'll shoot you myself," he says, grins.
"I'm sure you will, Larry, I'm sure that you will." Michael responds, shooting the older man a grin of his own. They go.
(He blames that grin, the fake-sincere insolence of it, for why he is coming to like this kid. By their very nature, spies tend to be lone-wolf types. Occasionally, however, a mission calls for a partner, or even teamwork. More experienced spies usually have at least a little say in these partnerships, since a bad match can get a mission blown and operatives dead, and almost to a tee all of them categorically refuse to work with Larry. Larry Sizemore is insane, trigger happy, scary, threatened my life, absolutely not. So on the rare occasion when the higher ups insist, he usually gets stuck with these kids, greener than grass and practically useless. He takes a particular pleasure in scaring them shitless, has seen a variety of reactions to that particular threat: anger, bravado, disbelief, outright fear even. This Westen kid though, he just grins that little shit grin of his, completely unreadable, and hell of Larry doesn't like him for it.)
In the Balkans Larry does most of the talking, his Serb being impeccable, but Michael quickly picks up whatever gaps in his Croat were left by rushed training; they complement each other. They do bad cop worse cop perfectly. They have a running 'friendly' competition to see whose the better shot. Michael learns all kinds of things. No kid, Larry will say, you do it that way you're going to get your ass shot before you can finish up, here, see, this way is faster. One night they find themselves staring at the pistols of two pissed off Serb paramilitaries. You know, its gonna be hard to shoot me with that safety on, Larry says to the nearer of them, laughing. The man glances down for a second and by then Larry's fist is making contact with his jaw. Michael catches on immediately, goes after the second, and within a few minutes the two men are down, disarmed and half-conscious.
"Remember that trick, kid," Larry tells him, "cause three times out of four they're going to glance down for a second at least."
"I will, Larry. Thank you." Before they leave, Larry shoots both of the injured men.
"You didn't need to do that.?
"Of course I did, kid, lets go."
"They were already out, you didn't need to – "
"Hey, look who's talking. Weren't you just complaining about these bastards shooting women and starving out civilians and all that? Well look, now there's two less of em. Big loss. Now lets go!" And go do – Michael knows the futility of arguing the point further, especially here, now; bile rises up in his throat as they run nonetheless.
Perhaps somewhere else, some other place, a different conflict or op, it would have been a deal-breaker, a nail in the coffin of the working relationship of Mike and Larry. Here, however, it is hardly the worst thing Michael sees. Here, moving back and forth across the border between Serbia and Croatia he see worse. He sees the desperate inhabitants of besieged cities fleeing, refugees. On the outskirts of small Croatian village Michael Westen sees his first mass grave. He learns to sleep through aerial bombardments, if fitfully. For a week they infiltrate a paramilitary group - Larry does all the talking, as usual (Michael's Serbian is too basic to pass at all so they give him a flesh wound on his throat and a cover story that some "Croat bitch" slashed him in self-defense, injured his larynx) and for once Michael is glad because he doesn't trust his voice, what he might say to them. The war is as bloody and crazy as you could imagine, each side killing the other, killing women, killing children, killing old men, and in comparison Larry seems, well, sane enough. A bit too much black humor perhaps, and trigger happy yes, but still one of the good guys. They make a very good team: ruthless, just cautious enough, and scarily efficient.
They get pulled out of the Balkans in early '92 after the two sides settle down into some kind of ceasefire. Michael is 'relaxing' on a military base in Germany when he gets a call from his handler.
"So how did you feel about working with Larry Sizemore?" he asks after a bit of small talk.
"It was fine, I guess."
"What does that mean, Westen?"
"He had my back when it mattered. I guess I can't complain."
"How would you feel about working with him again? We have an op in the Philippines we could really use you two on. I mean, the two of you – you get results."
"The Phillippines?"
"Come on Westen, it'll be nice. I hear the weather is great there this time of year."
The weather is not, in fact, 'great', not when you are hiking for days in the jungle, getting bitten up by mosquitoes and flies and trying not to get shot at by Moro rebel and who knows what else lurking in the brush.
"This is almost as bad as Vietnam" Larry says, and laughs. Larry is always laughing, at the most inappropriate threats, when one of them has just been shot, when somebody dies. Michael hasn't decided what to make of it.
"You were in Vietnam?"
"Not as a soldier kid, hell no, but yeah, I was there. Was about as old as you, actually. God, our side sucked though. Deserved to lose, we really did," he says. Michael doesn't know what to make of that either. He'd known a couple of vets, back home, who didn't have much good to say about the war when they talked about it at all, but he's pretty sure he never heard someone say something quite like that before. They walk in silence for a while, after that.
A couple of days later they almost walk into an ambush. Larry is all for doing so anyway and shooting it out, but Michael has other ideas. The plan involves a toothbrush, several lengths of rope, blank magazine rounds, Styrofoam cups and a blood-spattered t-shirt. In the end, they manage to take down the would-be attackers with a minimum of gunfire and no injury. It is the kind of plan, the kind of success, that would have frustrated the hell out of Michael's old superiors in the army or special forces. Larry just laughs.
"You're squirrely kid. You're damn squirrely and I like it!" he says, and slaps Michael on the back.
The next time they get sent on a mission together it's in Yemen, mostly. The country is on the brink of civil war, much to the consternation of Saudi Arabia, its Northern neighbor and ally of the US. They train fighters, track movements, work with Saudi intelligence near the border, this and that. This time, Michael takes the lead often as not: his Arabic is clearly better than Larry's, much to the older operative's displeasure. Michael can even do a decent Gulf dialect, more Kuwaiti than Yemeni but close enough to earn him some goodwill from officials and agents used to foreigners mangling the fus-ha, modern standard Arabic, if they speak any at all. Larry shows his displeasure by being even more trigger happy than he was last time they worked together. They argue more, this time.
"That really wasn't necessary, Larry."
"What? It's what they pay us for, kid."
"You didn't need to do that."
"What, and suddenly you're the expert of everything? Sometimes people die kid. It's part of the job."
"I know it's part of the job, Larry. I'm fine with it being part of the job. What I am not fine with is creating unnecessary trouble."
"Trouble, what trouble? You think these guys, they care? They would have done it themselves if they were competent. Tell you what – if you're really worried we can slip em some cash. No trouble then, guaranteed."
"That isn't the point."
"Oh, but it is kid. It really is."
In late '94 they send him back to the Balkans, this time in Bosnia. At first, he is working ops with a Special Forces team, doing "the more tricky stuff" as it were. There is Harlan, Joe, Andy, Wayne. Michael is very quickly reminded of all the reasons he left the military and became a spy. He is reminded of why he really prefers to work alone. The guys mean well, but…twice in as many months they are almost killed – he is almost killed – because of someone else's stupidity. He hates having to play nice, to pretend it is fine, to have to spell every damn thing out and jump through hoops to get past idiot rules.
It is a relief, finally, to get a solo mission again, even if it does involve criss-crossing Bosnia-Herzegovina in the midst of a conflict that makes Croatia look like kid games. In Bosnia there are villages razed, town after town conquered and purged. There is a winding, dirt road that passes through fallow fields, and for about half a mile that road is littered with corpses of men and boys shot through the back of the head as they kneeled. There is site after site where some group of corpses was thrown into a hole in the ground. There are firefights, pitched battles large and small, tanks, munitions factories changing hands again and again. There are UN peacekeepers, a few, somewhere, and German and Russian and British agents on the ground. There are Iranians, somewhere, and Michael is tasked with finding them, trying to discuss certain delicate issues. According to intel there should be quite a few, running around handing out guns and cash and spreading radical Shia propaganda to the rag-tag Muslim Bosnian forces, but by all indications on the ground there is only really a handful, and unfortunately for him, they are making themselves quite scarce.
Instead, Michael runs into Larry Sizemore again.
"Michael Weston…well I'll be damned!" the old man says. All things considered, Michael is mostly relieved to see a familiar face. They exchange pleasantries, news, a bit of intel.
"So why are you here, kid," Larry finally asks.
"Iranians. According to our intel they should be running amok all over the place."
"Iranians, huh? Haven't seen much of those kid. A bunch of Arabs, yeah, not so much Iranians."
"Arabs?"
"Yeah, you know, mujahedeen, trying to make this another Afghanistan or something. Hell kid, you should see the videos they've been making. Classic – I mean, really good stuff in there. They tape their own corpses, stuff about how great it is to be dead like that for the cause, good music, I mean, really – "
"Larry!" Michael says, interrupting the older agents, who seems almost in tears from laughter at this point. "Are they a threat?"
"Not really. I mean to us, yeah, if they see you. Don't like us Westerner's much, gotta say. Mostly have a thing for the Brits right now but you know, better safe then sorry…"
"Yeah Larry, I know."
"So you want some help finding your Iranians?"
"Are you really offering?"
"Why not, I'm going in that direction anyway. Could use some excitement. What do you say?"
They both grin, then.
After Bosnia they work together a few more time – in Albania and Moldova, a short op in Gibraltar and another in Palermo. Their last mission together is in Paraguay. They are meeting a man, a Lebanese "merchant of death" type arms dealer at his home near the triangle border with Argentina and Brazil. They make a good pair for the op, really, Larry taking care of the natives in Spanish, Michael doing most of the actual negotiations with the man in Arabic. The man is hospitable, his home nice enough considering it is a bunker by any other name in a notoriously shady area of South America. Considering his profession, the fact that he is accused of committing all kinds of war crimes during the Lebanese civil war and funding all kinds of terrorist groups since, things go surprisingly well. Michael can tell Larry is disappointed by the total lack of violence.
"I'm sorry, Larry," he says once they are back in Asuncion. "I know you were looking forward to shooting someone."
"What can I say kid, you win some you lose some," he offers, and as usual it's hard for Michael to figure out how much of the banter is serious and how much a joke. As for himself – well, in all honestly he is relieved that something they did went just right for once.
They part ways after that. Larry leaves for some mission in Venezuela and Michael goes off to make himself an urban legend among the Russian special forces: Kiev, St. Petersburg, Volgograd.
When he hears, a year later or so, that Larry is dead, that he walked into an oil refinery that went boom, he feels more than a bit of regret, the knowledge that he will never see and never work with Larry Sizemore again. He was a bastard, sure, but a magnificent bastard and, well. You get used to losing people when you work in intelligence, used to the idea that your partner today might be a corpse, or your enemy, tomorrow. With a man like Larry, it isn't even a surprise, really, just….unfortunate, in a way. Some people die, the old man had said.
That night, when he is sitting at the VIP table of some booming nightclub, negotiating terms of a deal with a Russian oligarch, he makes a silent toast to Larry, dead Larry Sizemore, as he swallows his first shot of vodka.