About the same time I was learning that kicking the world only gets you broken toes, my tribe as I guess you'd have to call it was getting broken toes of its own. I was off elsewhere in the world, so I didn't learn all this until later, but at that time power struggles had become unusually serious.
What sex is today in Western culture, or maybe just American culture, death was to us. Sex to us was just part of life, like eating and shitting. Death is, of course, inevitable, and is just the natural conclusion of life, but we couldn't quite get over it. Death was all around us, but it bothered us like you wouldn't believe. We had some of the same defense mechanisms westerners have against sex. We didn't talk about it. We used euphemisms. We whispered about it like it was dirty. We told our children it was wrong to think about it or talk about it. Death was something dirty and shameful. We didn't speak of the dead, or name them. It was considered the worst kind of blasphemy to speak of the death we caused by hunting and eating. We needed those deaths to live, to survive, but this bugged us so much that "religious" schools of thought circulated to excuse or explain it, almost all of which dictated how much you could speak of such things. Some went to great lengths detailing how and why and when you could kill animals, and touch them, and prepare them for food. Others regarded even speaking that much about it scandalous. Funerary rights were negligible, and often consisted of several of the least liked adults of the time being assigned the nefarious task of disposing of the body.
Death was omnipresent in the human population, as well as the animal. Only about half of newborns survived their first year of life, and very few adults lived to have gray hair. Physical injury was the most common cause of death, although our malnourished state, unbalanced diet, and complete lack of medical knowledge didn't help. Winter was probably the second biggest killer, although the fluctuations of the hunting prospects and weather-related food scarcity could have contended. It wasn't just us against the elements, either. We were against each other a good portion of the time. Murder is too strong a word, but a fight could often result in the death of one or both of the participants. It was usually just a matter of how slowly they died. I suppose that's the real problem; we were all dying, we all knew it, but we just couldn't accept it.
The outbreak of fighting that overtook my tribe was basically the result of three men and two women vying for alpha status. My father was one, and I hold him primarily responsible. He was in power for a long time. Five years almost, no small feat. But more than that he was a tyrant. He enjoyed abusing his power. But this caught up to him when he started getting too arthritic to physically compete with some of the younger men. He was young by today's standards, and his arthritis came mainly from badly healed bones rather than from age. In any event, two contenders had gathered a fair amount of the hunters' support, which if it had been one of them would have been a deathblow to my father's power. Luckily for him, he was in a position to play them off each other, for a while anyway. He also had to deal with the midwife. She was sort of like the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof; a widow, a grandmother, well respected in the tribe, and very opinionated. Plus she had a crucial skill, and was more or less indispensable. She also at that time had chose to team up with a self-proclaimed holy woman. Not exactly a believable character, but she was eccentric enough and made enough predictions that she had a following. So my father was hard put to it.
In the end, they tore each other apart. Worse, their respective supporters tore each other apart, as well. Fights were common, several people died directly at the hands of their attacker, instead of later of infection or blood loss. Not that this hadn't happened before, but before it had been a once or twice in a lifetime occurrence rather than weekly. Although granted, a lifetime then encompassed only a decade or so rather than half a century or more. Usually in those sorts of power struggles, one person (or group) comes out more powerful than the others, and life continues. Unfortunately, no one really came out on top. In the end, my tribe was severely crippled by the loss of life, and who was in charge was almost a moot point. Our rivals, another tribe, who we competed with for hunting grounds and scavenged food, took advantage of our weakness and made slaves of not a few of our people. Although we had done the same to them when they had been weakened, and slavery had been a common custom before and was after. Time rolled on, and things balanced out in the long run, until the great equalizer we so feared would come at last.
I'm getting sick of shaking off tails. Not that I truly fear the pursuit, or worry about being observed, but actually getting rid of them is a bit of hassle. And worse, a waste of time. To be honest I don't know how they don't notice each other. Or, if they do know about each other, how they keep from getting in each other's way. Or if they intend to get in each other's way, how they manage to keep up appearances so well. Or how they keep an eye on me and each other at the same time. Some are definitely more skilled than others. But they're all professionals, and if I wasn't so skilled at reading people I would have been hard pressed to loose all of them.
I've got four distinct tails pinned to my ass at the moment. One has been there for weeks and represents the current main concern in my life. The other three are only there because of my performance at the bar. One has been coming and going; I think their superiors are sending them mixed signals as to whether they're actually supposed to be tailing me or not. I think these are the Watchers, and if they don't back off in the next twenty-four hours I'll have to have Jerome put in a personal appearance to assert my freedom from observation. The second two are really serious about their work. I think they've been competing with each other, as well, but the main monkey wrench in their designs has been the Watchers, because the Watcher-tail is completely oblivious to the others, or else is really good at pretending. Anyway, no matter how many times I loose them, they keep showing up again, which is expected, but frustrating.
In a lull of footpad activity, I dial up Director Johanssen. I get his secretary to start with, but I identify myself as Special Agent Ramey, my current avatar with his organization, and since my call is expected I'm patched through.
"You're late."
"Good morning to you, too, Car."
"Report," he says in a less than amused tone.
I sigh. I suppress the urge to say something him about all work, no play, and Johnny Carson. "I'll be brief, I'm not sure how tight surveillance is on me." Meaning I can't risk saying anything important in case this phone conversation is recorded or they're otherwise observing me without the tails. All they need is line of sight and they can read my lips or simply record audio. "It was the second party. Probably a loose cannon. I'm initiating tracking now. I'll debrief you at our next scheduled appointment. And try to see if you can get some of this surveillance lifted, huh?" We had no next scheduled appointment. Meaning I'm going to be paying him a personal visit and he should expect me to turn up on a moment's notice. Hopefully I wouldn't have to leave him hanging for too long.
"Negative, you are not to initiate tracking, we'll take care of that." He suspects I'm personally involved, as well he might.
"Still my case. I'm in a better position to initiate anyhow. I'll contact you via Switzerland later tonight. You'd best prioritize it." Switzerland is his not-too-ingenious way of indicating a third, hypothetically neutral, party.
I can practically hear him sweating. "I'll try to do something about that surveillance."
I laugh, and genuinely, too. "Jesus, Car! Why don't you act like I scare you, you know, just a little, huh? I guess I'll have to practice being intimidating." I hang up before he can hear me laugh in earnest and before I have to realize that I'm wasting my sarcasm.
I turn into the public library to use the computers and hopefully loose two of the four that have resurfaced. My library card, unfortunately, is still under the name Andrea, which is an identity I'm not really supposed to be using anymore. Overuse of an identity makes tracing me too easy, and it's something I avoid when I can. But I don't have time to get a new one, so I just use it and hope for the best.
Once logged in to one of the library computers, I access my satellite website and hope I have enough time to actually look at the photos. If Pao is heading to Canada on foot, she'll still be in upstate New York and keeping to foot trails and access roads. I'm guessing the Catskills is a good region to start with, but there're bound to be plenty of people roaming around. My search algorithms are pretty advanced, so I give it a shot. I wait impatiently as the server cycles through the decryption with the keys I give it, but the search is quick enough to make up for it. Unfortunately, the library computer is slower to download the images than I expect. Cursing in several languages, I scan the library for my tails. One pair come in, and I can see one of them looking for me unobtrusively while the other makes a mental note to subpoena the library's computer records and video surveillance for the day. I roll my eyes and glance back at the screen, but I'm disappointed to see progress hasn't been made. Well, I might as well let the other tail arrive before dodging them, too. I never intended simply entering the library to loose them, I'll have to do that in the upper floors amongst the books.
By the time my images download, the second tail has shown up, now having dwindled to one person. I assume the rest of them are stationed at the exits or decided to stagger their entrance. One of the first tail is trying to get a good vantage point to see what I'm doing, so I hurry up and give my satellite pictures my personal attention. There are several likely candidates for Pao, but I nothing conclusive. To be honest, I don't think any of them are Pao. No matter how small, the images don't have the right proportions or something to be. I've used these satellite photos a lot, and even though I can't be more than 70 certain of my identifications, I've gotten good at it. I want to spend more time looking, but I should get off before that tail behind me gets a better view of what I'm working on. So, I close the window, delete the history files, and relay an instruction to my satellite server to fill this computer's cached memory with fluff and hope it's enough that no one will be able to recover what I was up to, for a while anyway.
I take off for the upper floors and begin the waltz of tying my tails in knots.
I've pissed off a large number of people in my time. At one time I'm pretty sure I had more enemies than God. Nowadays, their numbers have dwindled enough that I can keep track of them without much trouble. There was a time, not so long ago, that I hoped one of them would come for me and I could let it all be over. There's not much hope of that anymore. Until recently, I thought all the enemies I had that actually had a claim on my life were dead. The rest are just a byproduct of being alive. It's really hard to go through life without pissing anybody off. Most of my enemies nowadays are political enemies and rivals. Some of them want me dead, but it's more because I have some power, and that's threatening.
But then someone resurfaced whom I had assumed dead. She swore vengeance once upon a midnight dreary, but up until two and a half weeks ago I hadn't seen or heard a sign of it. She finally caught up with me, and as she so swore, her vengeance begins with killing, or probably torturing and then killing, those I love. Those two souls that lost their lives in a seedy bar witnessed her killing someone who had information on me, which is how they got involved in the first place. Poor bastards, all they did was join a terrorist organization, spy on world governments, and watch their leader die at the hand of a Fury. Not that they were innocents, but they were young and stupid, and I can imagine how terrified they must have been to get from Louisville Kentucky to a safe house in New York in a matter of hours. They probably thought they were out of the woods, too, to be out in the bar instead of in the safe house. To be honest I haven't given them more than a few passing, pitying thoughts.
What I've given more thought to is what will happen when she and I meet. I've been so involved with current events that I haven't given too much thought to the past. She has a legitimate claim on my life. It might be the last opportunity for justice.
So, the hunt is up. I'm being hunted and hunting, all while dancing an unnecessarily complicated and laborious dance with my career. Even as I evacuate the library, I'm considering walking back, confronting my tails and saying "Look, this has nothing to do with you, just buzz off and I'll call you when it's back to business as usual." I'm not actually going to do that but it's fun to imagine the panic and incredulity on their faces.
Well, for better or for worse, Pao's trail is going to be too time consuming to pick up today. Time for some reconnaissance to find out what everybody else involved knows about her. That might be easier, as they may have been keeping tabs on her since she killed those men. It's also more complicated that way, because there are so many parties involved. But it's worth it. If none of them have any better idea of where she is than I do, we're on a level playing field and I can pick up the search at the Canadian border where it'll be much easier. If they have more information than I do, I need it and they're probably the fastest way of gathering it.
So, time to play phone tag. Checking that I don't have any new tagalongs at regular intervals, I make my way to NYU campus. This is strictly farther than I need to go given time constraints, but I want a redundantly secure phone line, and given that I don't often spend much time in the city, or even in the state, it's the one place I feel secure with. One of my identities is a "student" there, although technically she's taking this year off. I also feel better using this identity as I haven't used it much. After tonight I should probably retire her, along with Andrea. So I find the right phone in one of the computer labs and go about securing it.
By the time I manage this, it's late at night and I'm starving. But having secured the line, I don't want to do something monumentally stupid like leaving the thing free while I go hunting for a vending machine. So I try to ignore it and begin a series of long phone calls in various languages. I always relay important instructions through people who speak unusual languages for the region I'm in. In the States, this is easy. I pick Bulgarian and call someone who speaks it to relay my message. Then Sidamo. Then Min Bei. Their lines are all more secure than mine, although since they're in regular use have a higher probability of being tapped. I've had to work very hard in recent years to keep that sort of thing from happening, but it's still a possibility to consider. Anyway, my requests are now in the pipeline, and I can have a real meal before returning to the endeavor of saving my children.
I left the city in the turmoil of assassinated leaders and exposed plots. The powerful were laid low that night, but I left my friends to be buried in the rubble. It was a stupid, unfeeling thing I did, abandoning human decency in an attempt to expose the corruption and torpidity of a republic turned aristocracy. My friends didn't deserve it. They were scheming, too, but they truly wanted to kick the world and have it move instead of breaking their toes. Well, they moved the world, but I stepped on their feet and broke their toes in a hurry to get out of the way of the moving world.
After that, I fell into a black despair. I traveled far south, hoping to find my way home at last. Instead, I met some highway robbers, some wandering merchants, and a few nomadic people who didn't like the look of me. I met a few enemies, we fought, but my heart wasn't in it. I should have died then. I still don't understand why one of those enemies never managed to kill me. In the state I was in, it should have been easy. Well, easier. Easy enough. I don't know how long I went on like that, but something finally shook me out of it. Disgusted with myself, I decided some mindless wandering was in order, and took to the road again. Well, I traveled a few miles away from the road, so as to avoid other travelers. Which was how I met the first child I ever loved.
The road once led through jungle, but then it was savanna and becoming drier all the time. Not the kind of land you'd find rice farmers on. But there they were, trying to find a way to make a living on some high, dry, slightly more forested land, and I was fascinated. They were clearly trying to stay away from the road and civilization in general, at some cost to their health. Wisely, they had given up on rice and were trying to grow a variety of grains. They were an old couple, maybe in their fifties, but looking much older than that. As I approached, the husband stopped dead in his tracks and stared and stared at me. The wife, who had been working outside, tried to sneak back into the house without being noticed, a baby on her back. The baby started to cry, ruining her attempt. I knew they wanted to be left alone and were terrified of me, but I couldn't help it. I felt drawn to them, and as approached the husband I knew that no matter how unwelcome I was, they weren't about to neglect the tradition of hospitality.
He surveyed me, looking worried, and I tried to smile and show that I was a kind person, but my heart was breaking. They were just so… defenseless. And so scared. I thought I could put my finger on the reason; there was something odd about their child, which they were trying to hide from the world. I could see on their faces the long stretch of their lives that consisted of worrying for their child, and wishing passionately to do something and being unable.
When they had gotten over their shock, they were indeed hospitable, and I stayed the night with them. The next day, I offered to help the husband in the fields as payment for their hospitality. At first they were alarmed, but they agreed. Days went by like that. Days that I spent building their trust, reassuring them that I understood, without them having to say anything. Then days turned to weeks, and weeks to months. I watched their child closely without seeming to. He never grew, even though he looked to be only a month or so old when I arrived. But I acted like it was perfectly normal, never commenting on it, just watching and reassuring them. I never spoke of it, and neither did they. I wondered how old their son was, how many years had passed with a fitful infant in the house. I wept sometimes thinking of it, I still do. Their anxiety was so marked; I could see the growing concern on their mind had been what would happen to their child when they died. Which, although they weren't old, was not far away.
The husband had terrible jaw and hip pains, and before long he was barely helping me with the farming, although I didn't mind, because I could see how much he wanted to, and how much it shamed him that he couldn't. He had difficulty eating. The wife has asthma and no medication, and probably had some other pulmonary disease as well, because she frequently sounded as though she had water in her lungs and would cough. And their son… he was no relation to me, and yet I felt so drawn to him, I felt maternal for the first time in my life. I took as good a care of them as I could. But neither husband nor wife survived the winter.
Her husband died first, became sick shortly after the seasons changed. He had given up on life, it seemed. He was nearly blind, a condition that had come on strangely rapidly. She died later, drowning inside her own body. She fought long and hard. I truly admired her, and felt ashamed that if death had come to me like it had to her, I would have opened my arms to it. Before she died, she made me swear that I would protect her son, and it was the only time she spoke of that which made her son different.
"Please," she said, "I know he will never grow up, it has been many years since I hoped he would, but please, protect him! Swear to me, please, swear you'll care of him as if he were your own."
I nearly dissolved into tears. "I swear, I will care for him as if he were my own." Released from her burden, she smiled, and cried, and soon fell asleep and never awoke.
On the hill overlooking their home and their fields, I buried them. I brought their son with me, strapped to my back, and he cried and cried as if he felt as aggrieved as I did. I knelt at the foot of their graves and sobbed like their child. When my tears were finally spent, I just sat and stared, as the light faded and dusk approached. Finally, I took their son off my back and set him on the ground between their graves.
I smoothed what hair he had down onto his head. "Gift from the Heavens, your parents loved you, and so do I. But I swore to care for you as my own, and I am so bound. I don't know if you understand me, I don't think you do, but just in case, I want you to know that you can go be with your parents now. They're waiting for you, let's not keep them waiting."
Tear still running down my cheeks, I drew my dagger from its sheath and sent the gift from the heavens back to the heavens, where his parents waited.
I've never managed to disentangle myself from my spy games, but I try very hard to keep my children from getting entangled. It almost always works. I know that they're still a form of leverage that makes them appealing targets for my enemies, but I've found ways of keeping them secret from my enemies, or making them less appealing, or both. So it's very strange to me that it's now, when they're grown up, that they're under real threat. Although I still think of them as being very close to me, they've grown up and lead lives of their own. That distance helps them from becoming entangled as adults, or so I thought.
Perhaps it's unfair of me to blame them, or their choices. It is, after all, not my political, every day enemies that have targeted them, but a mortal enemy out of my past. If I thought it would help, I would ignore my children and gun for her, hoping she would just be satisfied with me when pressed and so not bother with hunting my children. But I know better. She would hold me prisoner while she hunted for them, and wouldn't kill me until they were dead. Such is the way of revenge.
I consider how much blame I should apportion myself as I eat my way steadily through a hoagie. My diet has been reduced to pure caloric intake these past few weeks. I briefly consider if I could have found a healthier option that would have sufficed, but decided the only way to have done so would have taken too much time. At least my requested information is beginning to trickle in. I down the last of my hoagie in a rather large bite and focus on my PDA. The data is encrypted, but the decrypted version is in code and in the languages I used earlier. I had intended to get some sleep on the train but this can't be disregarded, so I concentrate and try to ignore how thirsty I am.
The FBI has not been alerted to Pao's presence. They have been alerted to mine, now, however. They seem to understand the murders to be outside of their jurisdiction, which I find odd, as I haven't leaned on them yet. I suppose someone is leaning on them, but it's unclear as to who. The Watchers are completely confused. Their information was sadly the easiest accessed, and it seems there have been many miscommunications as to whether they should be watching me or not. That should clear itself up, but there is a distinct lack of information about Pao. At the end of that report, however, is a note that more information will be on its way concerning the "rogue" Watcher. I suppose her file was harder to pull than mine, which is again disconcerting. But then, it's not my file that was discovered, just many communiqués concerning me. The strange thing is that Watchers don't seem to be leaning on the police at all. Apparently that roll is or was being taken up by Army Intelligence of all people. I wonder who arranged that, as the Army was in no way involved, except by periphery. Possibly the intention is to stir up trouble between the executive and legislative branches of the government, and that sort of finesse is indicative of the CIA. Fuckers. I work with them often, but they drive me insane.
Needless to say, my CIA information hasn't arrived yet. That will probably take the longest, but unless it contains a cornucopia of surprises, it can wait.