How to be a Bad Man.

"The Base."

August of 1990.

When a man becomes a spy, he is introduced to a world that few are privileged to see. Secrets and lies are as common as fatigues on a soldier, as expected as guns in a warzone. Friends are rare, and you begin to sink into yourself. You learn things that no one else can ever know, and the burden of that knowledge will never, can never, leave you. It begins in training and it never stops.

It was dawn.

I had been in a windowless, concrete building with no name for six days. I had grown accustomed to life without sunlight, without grass and trees and sky. I was used to being lied to and purposefully startled – so used to it that when I opened my door that morning and found a man standing there with a gun in his hand, I barely reacted. It was only my escort, Bernard. He sighed at his failed attempt to scare me and led me out into the hall – into a concrete hall, with tall, porous walls and no pictures, like every other hall in this place.

"Did you hear me coming?" Bernard wondered, directing me to the right this time. He deliberately took me a different way every morning. "Or did you have a late night? Just sleepy?"

"No, but if you wanted to kill me, there are better ways than shooting me in the hallway."

Bernard was a stout man with rust-colored hair, brown eyes, and the most casual personality of anyone in this building. He was the only one who smiled at me, the only one who talked to me outside of lectures and evaluations. He was the person I clung to when I felt myself slipping away from the things that made me human.

On my first day, I had a bag over my head and someone kept pulling a trigger near my ear. It was supposed to get me used to the thought that I could die at any moment. It gave me nightmares. Every day since, someone had tried to kill me – or at least pretended to. I was used to the adrenaline, that knotting in my gut, those hairs rising on my neck. Now I knew when someone was lurking, when someone was acting strangely. It activated a buried instinct. It was working. When I saw Bernard at the door, it was my brain that spoke, not my gut.

He took me through the labyrinth of corridors, which seemed intentionally convoluted, and dropped me off at my first station. It was always the same. Education in the morning. I studied wars and land acquisition, borders and ethnic groups, feuds and foreign cultures. From there, I was escorted to lunch, and then directly to the vault. I sat in a dark room, in a chair against the wall, and watched images pour past on a projector screen. I identified ethnic groups, languages, weapons, and various plants and animals from countries of interest.

In the vault, I was a machine. Every other part of my brain shut down and the things I had learned came to the front. It was like that sometimes. Pictures of death and decay were slipped in with plants and language cards, desensitizing me to the violence I would no doubt face in the field.

I was unaffected for six days, but today a picture took my breath away.

She was standing by the back door, a cigarette in her hand, cherry red lipstick wearing off on the filter. I could see inside the house from this angle – beer cans stacked up in the trash, the wall phone carefully mounted on its receiver, a few old lotto tickets on the counter. I could read her expression, see the quiet contempt inside. I could even feel the hot Miami sun beating down on my neck, hear the mosquitoes buzzing on a warm midsummer day.

It was her. It was my mother.

I sat in silence, staring at her, asking myself how they had gotten it and why they were showing it to me. It was recent. It had to be. Mom looked older than when I had left home. Something in her expression was entirely new to me.

With the surprise came the fury. "What is this?" I asked, unable to stop myself. I got up, pulling off my headset and groping around for the door. "Hey! Open the door! Open it!"

Her picture disappeared, and everything went dark. I stood wearily in the blackness until the door popped open. Tom Card was standing there, wearing a pinstripe suit with his hair combed neatly to one side. He wore the same expression he always did – part of it fatherly, part of it dangerous.

"Michael," he said in greeting, inviting me out into the hall. "Sorry about that."

"Who took that picture?" I demanded.

Card glanced up and down the empty hall. "Come with me. We can talk."

He led me to a conference room with only two chairs and folded his hands neatly on the desk.

"We assess our recruits for all potential weaknesses, including family. We had to take a look at yours. We went over that when you got here, remember?"

I was bristling. I had never agreed to have someone at my house, taking pictures of my family. "You already know about my family. You read it in my file."

"Right. But a file is just paper." Card sat back in his chair. "You can relax. Your family is fine."

He said it matter-of-factly, like he had said those same words a hundred times in his career. It gave me no peace. But I still struggled to regain my temper.

"I never agreed-"

"You signed your life away, son," Card said, suddenly threatening. He tapped into that soldier side of himself, that sharp tone that welcomed no backtalk. "We did our homework, and it came back clear. End of story."

"Why did you show me?" It was some kind of power play, some kind of test.

"Must have slipped in," Card said, almost eerily. He smiled at me. "Your training is progressing nicely. I want you to move on to soft skills now. Your combat training will continue, but your mornings will be spent with me."

"Soft skills?"

"Languages, behavior, and the art of lying." Card got up, motioning toward the door. "I left a book in your room for this evening. Read it. I want you to be familiar with the content by tomorrow morning. You and I are going on a field trip."

I followed him back into the hall, noting that it was now clear of any other agents. Bernard was gone. Everything was quiet.

"Sir," I caught him before he made his exit.

"Please, call me Card."

"Card, sir, stay away from my mother."

Card smiled, giving me a hard pat on the shoulder. "You got it, sport."

I watched him walk off with a sinking feeling in my stomach. For the last six days I had been wondering what I'd gotten myself into, and this made it so much worse. Larry had never really delved into how far-reaching these agencies were, and the movies could never do it justice. I could be here, halfway across the world, in this windowless place, and someone could be standing outside my old home, taking pictures of my family from the bushes.

His book was lying in the center of my bed, as promised. I avoided looking at it while I got ready to sleep, trying to be defiant, but my curiosity got the best of me. It was well-read, with a stark black title against a red background.

"How to be a Bad Man."

XxX

Crowded bars with lots of tourists in them are the perfect place to practice soft skills. Everyone is from out of town and not likely to stay long, so you can pretend to be whoever you like. No one thinks too long, and everyone is a little tipsy. Card had me working those crowds, giving me names and nationalities and sending me to different patrons with a mission in mind. Get them to buy me a drink. Have them admit some sort of secret. Get a girl to blush. Get a man to talk about his family. Get a man to punch the guy beside him.

I was a farmer from Wisconsin, an archaeology student from Belmont, a janitor from Wales. Card gave me free reign after a while and I became whoever I wanted. I was a millionaire in for the weekend, a former boxer passing through. It came so easily to me, this lying, that I started having too much fun with it. I was a playboy from the west coast, a diving instructor from Australia, a young medical student from Belgium. I was everything and anything I could imagine.

We finally stopped late at night, when we were only supposed to be out until midday. Card gave me some allowances because of how long I had been locked up. Even when the training was over, we sat together in the back corner of a new bar, each with a small glass of brandy.

"You did well today," Card said, sipping his drink and smiling at me. "You're a natural."

He was right. I could mimic accents like a native speaker and lie through my teeth to total strangers. Every successful lie gave me more confidence, let me make up something more complex. I was practically drunk with power.

"How is it so..?" I began, unsure of how to finish.

"Easy? Some people get it right away. Some never get it."

I sipped my drink and grimaced at the flavor. "What now?"

"For today, nothing. We start with the harder stuff tomorrow. Convincing someone to buy you a drink is a lot easier than, say, convincing someone to commit a crime."

"Do we do that a lot?"

"When the mission calls for it. But the same basic principals apply. You pick your target, tailor your cover, and never admit that you're lying. You might need to convince a mobster to carry out a hit on a target. You might need to get in with a drug cartel to get close enough to destabilize their infrastructure. You might need to get someone arrested to avoid an international crisis."

"Have you done that?"

"Oh, yes. Four times. No, five."

I smiled despite myself. Card was a hard man to understand but spending the day with him was much better than wasting away in that big concrete box. He was teaching me practical skills, giving me tips, telling me stories. I never wanted him to leave.

Card leaned in importantly, "Listen, sport, our game is all about lying. But it's not always for bad reasons. We do it to keep people safe – to keep the people we love out of it, for example. For most people, it's better if they never know the truth."

He was certainly right about that. Even when I was a soldier, I would never admit how dangerous my life was to my mother. She would drag me home if she knew about this.

"Did you read the book?" Card wondered, taking another sip.

I drank longer, finishing my brandy and coughing as my throat simmered. I had wondered when he would bring that book up. "Why did you give it to me?"

"Frank Parker was a hell of a man. Best conman who ever lived."

His gift, a book written by Frank Parker about his decades of lies to his own wife and children, had kept me up the night before. From the very first page, it was obvious the title was not an exaggeration. His lies were almost sickening.

"We take a lot of cues from him," Card went on. "Frank knew how to tell people what they wanted to hear. He could read into every part of a conversation and change his cover on the fly. He could trick anyone into anything."

Like he tricked his wife into committing armed robbery and convinced the police he had nothing to do with it. Like how he visited her in prison and told her he loved her.

"I want you to study that book. Learn what you can from it."

"His wife committed suicide," I said. "Is he really a role model?"

"Everyone is a role model." Card seemed unfazed by this. He sipped his drink and smiled. "We learn what we can from anyone willing to teach us. Frank knew what made people tick. You read people on the surface, Michael – and don't get me wrong, that's a good start, it is – but you have to learn how to look deeper. You have to learn how to reach into people and grab what's most precious to them."

And twist it and use it against them, like Frank.

Card looked around, and then nodded toward the bar.

"See that woman fidgeting up there? What do you know, just from looking at her?"

I knew who he meant immediately. She was wearing a dress that was too small and shoes that were too thin. She had on too much makeup and her hair was a bit of a mess. On the surface she appeared to be having a good time, but between laughs her lips would twitch down into a subtle frown. She sat sideways on the edge of her seat, trying to be involved in a conversation between two other women who were heartlessly edging her out of it.

"She's lonely," I said immediately, pitying her.

"Do you think she could ever kill someone?"

I glanced at him, making sure that he had in fact asked me if this lonely woman was capable of murder. I looked again, uncertain. "I don't know. How am I supposed to know that?"

"If I were betting, I would say she is."

"Why?"

"Lonely people are desperate people." Card finished his drink and stood up. "Come on. We start with psychology tomorrow."

I paused outside, where we were finally alone.

His words had finally sobered me, and that feeling of power I had felt all night faded away into nothing. "Is this…? Are you going to get me to convince someone to… commit murder?"

Spies are bad men.

You learn things that no one else can ever know, and the burden of that knowledge will never, can never, leave you. You feel power in your abilities, in your training, and sometimes forget what that training is for. When the weight of it sinks in for the first time, it takes your breath away.

Card looked me straight in the eyes, unblinking, and he had this tranquil, evening smile on his face. I had never seen him look this dangerous.

"Yes."