Chapter Four: Tier One Boy
February 2006
Entering the bar of the hotel where he was told he could locate Kara Stanton, John immediately saw her sitting at the bar having a few drinks. She is beautiful and confident, John thought to himself as he made his way up to her.
Nodding to her, John waited for Kara to acknowledge him. "You're the new guy, right?"
John nodded again.
"Let's go somewhere private so we can talk," Kara said as she motioned for him to follow her.
As they entered the door to a backroom, John stated, "You're Stanton. "I'm…"
"No. You're not. The ID NCS gave you didn't pass muster. So you're nobody," she said with her back to him.
She is beautiful and tough, John thought. His heart was racing. He was captivated by her confidence and persona. He had rarely altered anything that the military had told him to do, so it surprised him that his handler could so casually change his new cover name. He didn't know who or what to question, so he said nothing.
Kara then turned around to face him. Looking him up and down, she continued, "Which means I get to name you."
John knew that naming something meant ownership. He felt conflicted.
"Wilson maybe," she offered. She continued, neither waiting for nor expecting an answer from him, "No." Then after several taut moments, she added, "You should have a drink."
"I don't drink when I'm working," John calmly stated.
"No? Well, start," she answered in an agitated tone.
John was stunned. He had never met anyone quite like Kara Stanton before. With her dark eyes, black hair, and strong persona, she was in many way the polar opposite of Jessica. He didn't know what to do.
"You Tier One boys are all the same. Tense," Kara continued. "Tense gets us killed."
John wasn't sure how to respond, so he remained silent. Being in the Special Forces had instilled in him a level of intensity, but he had never thought that that was a bad quality.
"In your old job you were behind enemy lines…six…twelve months? In this job you never go back…because there is no line to cross back over. There never was. Understand?" Kara asked.
Again, John didn't understand. He didn't know what to think. This was all new to him. The military had always made sense to him. He would go to foreign countries and kill the enemy. Once his stint was over, he would return for a while then get called back to fight another day. That made sense to him. This lady before him telling him that there were no lines…and you never go back…didn't make sense. He blinked several times in an acknowledgement to her that he had heard what she was saying. He was confident that she knew he was confused, which meant she probably also thought he was weak. He didn't want to appear weak to her, but none of what she was saying made sense.
"So you may as well get comfortable" Kara stated again as she nodded toward the table where she was sitting.
After John sat down, Kara asked, "When you were in transit, did you see any old friends?"
He reasoned that there was no way she could have known that he had seen Jessica at the airport and that they had talked. He also believed that his new partner didn't need to know his personal business. So he lied, "No." He held his facial expression fixed. "Why are you asking?" His voice was calm and controlled.
Kara reached forward to the envelope on the table and handed it to John. He opened the envelope to see a surveillance photo from the airport of him and Jessica as they stood and talked. The moment of Jessica asking him to tell her to wait for him and she would was forever frozen in a grainy, black and white surveillance photo.
John flashed back to that moment the previous day, remembering how he couldn't bring himself to ask her that directly to her face even though he so desperately wanted her to do so. He remembered that gnawing feeling in his gut as he watched her walk away, muttering those exact words to himself as he allowed his emotions to come to the surface.
Catching Kara's movement from his peripheral view, John came back to the present moment. He became aware that they didn't trust him yet, which angered but didn't surprise him. But he didn't feel the need to respond; there was truly nothing that he could have said being caught in a lie.
Kara then interrupted his thoughts, "We know about the ex-girlfriend."
John looked up to face her, again saying nothing in response. There was nothing he could say.
"Like I told you, you never go back," Kara interjected.
They were then interrupted by the door opening. The two operatives they were questioning came through the door. John was grateful for their interruption. They stood before Kara and John with their shoulders tensed back and their overwrought facial expressions disclosing two men who were uncertain of their destiny.
"Relax," Kara said to the two men. "We're on the same team. Besides, where would I hide a gun in this dress?"
"You're Stanton, right?" one of the men asked. "Who's this?"
"I haven't decided yet," she answered, looking John up and down again as he sat beside her. "Miller said you like bourbon," she said to the two operatives.
"You know what they drink here? Plum Brandy," the first operative said as he approached the table where Kara and John sat.
The second operative approached the table beside his partner and said, "Shame about Miller."
"What happened to him?" the first agent asked, pulling the cork out of the bourbon bottle.
Kara took a sip of her drink then answered, "He wasn't getting the job done. Word came down. Time to take the gloves off."
John didn't know what that meant in the CIA world. He felt uneasy about their conversation and what his role was to be. It was shaking out to be a lot different than he had visualized.
The second agent looked around to his partner and asked, "So, what can we do for you?"
Seeing Kara look at him from his peripheral view, John answered, "We're looking into reports that Alim Nazir was in the country last month…possibly to secure financing."
"We sent all of our Intel to Langley last week in the pouch," the first agent responded.
"And Nazir made it safely out of the country two days ago," John answered. "We want to know how."
"That's also in our Intel," the second agent answered. "Like we said, he must have paid customs a fortune," the second agent said as he took a drink of his bourbon.
"And how much did he pay you?" Kara laughed. After a brief pause, she added as she looked over at John, "Kidding." She then added, "Like I said, you boys are too tense."
John offered a slight split-second nervous smile.
"Here's to taking the gloves off," Kara said as she raised her glass in a toast.
The two agents lifted their glasses. Within a second, Kara shot through the first agent's glass, hitting him squarely in his heart. Within the following second, she shot the second agent.
John sat frozen and silent, realizing what she meant by taking off the gloves and that Miller, her former partner, must have suffered the same fate. His mind began racing, and he wasn't sure what he had gotten himself into. He then saw Kara turn to look at him.
"Harper? No. Not a Harper," she calmly and casually said to him.
John continued to sit, dazed by the recent events. This mission was quite different than he had ever thought it would be. He could feel his heart beating intensely in his chest.
Kara then added, "I need you to dispose of this…and them."
John then saw her fling onto the table the gun she had just used to take out the two CIA agents he had thought he had come to Hungary only to question. He had never considered that they would be gunned down so inhumanly and so quickly. "We didn't even question them," John flatly stated as he stood up.
"We don't have time for questions…only answers. These men took a bribe to let a mass murderer escape."
"How do we know it was them?"
"Anonymous source," Kara answered.
John turned to look at her.
"Very reliable," she added.
John continued to stand, feeling conflicted and confused.
"No teeth. No fingertips," Kara said as she walked away from him toward the door.
John wrestled with his thoughts as he watched her walk toward the door.
"One last thing," Kara said as she turned around to face John. "You have no old friends. You see them, you don't know them. We're walking in the dark here. Understand? You need to know this is right. I'll tell you one last time before it gets complicated. This is right. The threat is real. Your country needs you."
John didn't respond.
"I think I got it," Kara stated then paused. "You'll be…Reese."
As John stood there looking at the dead bodies of the two CIA agents, he searched his mind for something to reassure him that she was right and that they had accepted a bribe. Special Forces training taught interrogation then killed only when necessary. How could killing two American citizens, two of their own, without interrogations be necessary? He was always able to get the truth out of his captives. But his new partner had blown them away with no second thought, no assurance. What had he gotten himself into? Who was this Kara Stanton he had been paired with? Could he trust her? Why would she have to kill Miller? What the hell had he done? What could possibly be meant by not getting the job done?
His mind continued to race and he considered how he would remove their teeth and fingertips and then dispose of their bodies. He finally concluded that in order to survive, he had to trust the woman with whom the CIA had paired him. So he moved forward to begin doing what she had instructed.
Reese, he thought, was a fine name. He could live with that. As he opened the back door carrying the first dead agent over his shoulder like a sack of flour, he saw Kara standing outside the door with a black bag in one hand and a Champagne flute in the other.
"A gift," she said as she thrust the bag at him.
"Thanks," John hesitantly answered as he reached forward and took the bag.
"Lighten up...if you want to get through this probationary period. Got it?" Kara added as she reached forward with the keys to the car parked beside her.
"Got it," John answered as he took the bag and keys from her. The bag clanked when it moved, so he realized that she was at least not expecting him to yank out their teeth with his bare hands. Loading the first dead agent in the trunk of Kara's car, John saw her continue to stand there and stare at him as he went back and got the second agent and threw him on top of the first dead agent already in the trunk.
"Be back soon…but not too soon," she stated. "They need to be erased…certainly don't want their bones popping up next year, so you better employ proper disposal techniques."
"Got it," John repeated as he got in the car and started the ignition. He looked at her for a moment as he put the gear in drive and headed onto the street.
Kara returned his look, offering a wide smile across her face.
John didn't know where he was going, but he decided he would figure it out as we went. He saw Kara in his rear-view mirror continuing to stare at him as he drove down the road. He wondered what could possibly be going through her mind. As for him, he was perplexed. He didn't know for sure if what he was doing was right, and he tried to never make any move he wasn't sure of. But his gut told him to do as Kara had instructed. He knew for certain that if he was going to survive, he had to trust her. He felt uneasy but knew he needed to dispose of the operatives that Kara believed were traitors to the United States.
John's brain then flashed on his commanding officer five years ago. The commander's hollow, caged-animal facial expression finally made sense to him. He then shook his head several times, continuing to drive in the dusk away from Kara Stanton.
