My wife always jokes with me that she never quite knows when I'm telling the truth or not. Then she laughs, tells me that she loves me anyway and that's the end of it. But she's right, you know. I mean, we've been married for almost twenty years now and she doesn't even have a clue about what I do for a living.
She thinks I gather up my briefcase and bag lunch and trot off to my nondescript office building downtown to slave for a ruthless and thankless boss who's so tight he doesn't even have a Christmas party.
She thinks my working life is one boring, meaningless task after another and that I'm just marking time until retirement.
She thinks that I am shunned by my coworkers for one reason or another - I'm too mousey, too bold, too smart, or not smart enough, just because I never really socialize with the people I work with.
She thinks wrong… but it's not really her fault. You see, I'm a counterfeiter, a forger, a fake and my lovely bride of nineteen years is just another of my countless victims.
Even back as a kid, I was fascinated with copying things, not just making a semblance, but exact copies. By the time I was a teenager, given a sample, I could replicate just about anyone's handwriting. I could even make a dollar bill that would fool the casual observer, until they noted that there were blatant errors. I'm not stupid, even back then I knew you could get into serious trouble for counterfeiting, so I was very careful.
In college, I made a tidy sum helping out my fellow classmates when, in a jam, they would need a paper copied over in their own handwriting. Okay maybe it wasn't ethical, but they would have cheated one way or the other, why I shouldn't I be the one to profit from their weakness, lack of motivation or laziness? I dropped out of college on the third go around of my junior year, mostly because I was so busy there wasn't time to study and I'd miss classes in order to get a rush job done. For me, money over-ruled trig. I wouldn't miss my art classes, but that was job-related.
Work was steady, I liked being my own boss and I'd had enough business classes to know what was and wasn't allow under the law and I was careful to adhere to the rules. And then this little old man came along… and suddenly I wasn't just someone who was good at making copies of things, I was a counterfeiter and legally doing all the things I'd been avoiding for years. I was working for an international organization that, among other things, employed assassins, spies and lots of talented people like me.
Not many of my days were repeats of other days, every affair, that was they called them, affairs, is just a little different. Some are simply fake IDs; others are more complicated. I've been asked to write orders that have toppled governments or call for the elimination of enemies to the state or to flood a country with counterfeit bills, so good that even the experts couldn't tell the difference… hell, once I even…. no, I'd better not say – the walls have ears, you know, and I'm not sure if it's declassified yet.
These jobs were fine, but the ones that bothered me were the others that really put our Section Two guys into harm's way. Mostly, they're good old boys, just trying to live from one assignment to the next, literally live. More than once, I'd been in the shower after working out when some of them wandered in and their bodies look like frigging road maps, with the road you're taken outlined in red. Just once I'd like to ask one of them why they do it? Or rather how do they do it? How are they able to crawl out of bed each morning, knowing a bullet, a knife, or a beating waits for them? But it's not like you can approach the Section Two boys and ask, not as a rule. They have to approach you and they are a pretty close fraternity; they stick to their own as a rule.
Most of them are polite, but really only the Section head is what I would consider outgoing. Napoleon Solo is friendly, easy going and a great conversationalist. He can engage you on a dozen different topics in almost as many languages. He knows some of the funniest jokes and just when you think you know the man, you discover you didn't have a clue. But you see that what makes a good Section Two agent. He will have you laughing right before he snaps your neck.
The day had started out just like any other. I'd kissed my wife, rode the No. 23 bus to my stop and walked in through the employee's entrance to UNCLE. Once inside, I collected my badge and climbed aboard the elevator to ride down to Section Eight. Officially, we're called Research and Development, but that was just a polite way of saying forgery, snooping and gizmo making. There isn't a scrap of information that exists that we can't track down or in a pinch, create on our own. We replicate (yeah, I know, I know) any and all documents needed for a job, we design all the fake identities, we make all the equipment that the Section Two boys take out into the field - weapons, cameras, you name it, we make it. They'd be nothing without us and it's up to us to keep them safe and able to perform their tasks.
The elevator opened to a corridor that was abuzz with activity. That's not that unusual for us, but it's not all that normal either.
What was weird was that a person, stretched out on a gurney, was being wheeled through it. Granted, we're just a floor above Medical. That's when I realized the face was covered – not a person, a body. The sheet shifted slightly and I saw longish blond hair. There was only one guy I knew who wore his hair like that and it was Kuryakin, our Russian agent and Solo's partner.
I grabbed the arm of one of the attendants. "Kuryakin?"
"Not exactly." And then they were gone. I heard someone approaching me and glanced over my shoulder.
"Here, Jake, you better grab your hat and start running, boy!" That was Jimbo and he meant exactly what he'd said. I took off at a dead run for my office.
I ignored the usual piles, the passports and photo IDs that needed to be creatively touched up, and picked up a folder marked with a heavy red stripe. These were the rush, top secret, fail and get your teeth kicked in, assignments and I caught my breath. At first, these things gave me a stomach ache, but now I lived for them. They were always really important and always high pressure.
I flipped open the file folder and there was Illya Kuryakin staring back at me… well, not exactly Kuryakin, but his spitting image, save for the scar on one cheek and the wire rim glasses.
"What the hell?"
"Meet Col. Nexor." Kuryakin's voice startled me. Now if anyone else had been hanging out in my office, I'd have pitched a fit, but him and his partner, well, we gave them more than the usual wide berth. These guys were a legend even among legends.
Kuryakin's voice always surprises me; it is usually even, with just the hint of a British accent, pretty weird since he's Russian. You don't usually hear the Russian accent, but it's there, hiding just beneath the surface. That's sort of reflective of the man, a veneer of civilization thinly coating a trained and highly efficient killer. Now the Brit accent was gone, replaced by something coarse, harsher to the ear, the Russian accent was definitely surfacing and it sounded… and I know this is crazy, but it sounded wrong. It sounded wrong for our Russian to sound Russian. Is that weird or what?
Anyhow, I needed to say something, so I took the photo and held it up beside Kuryakin's face. "The resemblance is remarkable. Did he…?"
"There isn't much information on Nexor, but research has indicated that he was made into his father's image. The father lives on in the son."
"In this photo, he looks a little… would it be wrong of me to presume he was the one under the sheet on the gurney that just went by?"
"No, quite correct, and, unfortunately by my own hand. They are taking him to make casts of his body" Kuryakin took the photo and stared at it. I didn't want to think what was going through his mind.
"Must be scary, killing yourself."
The smile Kuryakin flashed me was sort of sad. "He represents the worst of what Germany had to offer my people. They slaughtered over a quarter of our population and now, to stop them, I must become the one thing I despise even more than THRUSH. I must become him." He dropped the photograph down onto the table as if it burned him.
I nodded and wondered how a man could become his worst enemy and still hold onto his soul. Yeah, I know what you say about Russians being godless atheists, but Kuryakin wasn't cut from the same cloth as your run-of-the –mill Soviets. Otherwise, he wouldn't be here. Now he was being asked to become the slaughterer of his people and make no mistake, he wasn't just doing a cheap imitation. That wasn't Kuryakin's style; he would truly embrace the man and emulate him down to his very cells. That was the only way he could go into this and come out the other side. And I was willing to bet, it would take a couple of visits to one of our psychiatrist before he'd shake himself of the nightmares that would inevitably follow. Again, I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to do his job. What did it take, what level of commitment was required to be able to handle both the mental and physical stress of his job?
I respected him for that and suddenly wanted to do the very best job that I could to help make his task a little easier.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Kuryakin?"
"We need these documents forged." He handed me a list and I sucked my breath in. "Impossible?"
"A challenge to be sure. How long do I have?"
"Yesterday."
And I made a mental note to call the wife and tell her I was going to be working late.
We don't usually hear much about the affairs until they are over, shelved, and grown musty. Still I was anxious for info on this one, hoping my job had been good enough to get him in. It had and then we'd learned what price both he and his partner had had to pay for that admission. Kuryakin had nearly tortured his partner to death. In fact, Kuryakin had killed Solo and then brought him back to life thanks to a couple of our pharmaceutical inventions. It made me sick to think about what it took to kill your own partner, moreover what it took for Solo to allow himself to be killed by the very person sworn to keep him alive. To be so sure of both your job and your partner, that you were willing to die at its command and by his hand was an alien concept to me.
It made my job seem pretty tame and I'd be lying if I said I was ever considering a job in any section other than my own. I may be a faker, but better a live faker than a dead hero.