Soft Skills

January of 1992.

Opiekun, Bolivia.

"James Michael Honeywell."

I stroked the tab of the folder on the desk between us with something near to reverence. I had been sitting with him for hours waiting for this folder to come in, looking at his smug face and hoping beyond hope that there was something I could use to make him talk. Here it was. Black and white, still warm from the fax machine. It took everything I had not to grin at him.

He sat in the chair across from me, tied at the wrists and ankles, his clothes and hair perfectly neat. He showed no sign that he had a fresh hole in his leg, or that he was worried he might spend the rest of his short life in a black prison. On the contrary, he stared into my eyes, and I stared into his, both of us impassive. Honeywell had dead eyes, tired eyes, but I had seen faces like his before. Dead men looked me in my dreams every night. I was no stranger to it.

"Five feet, two inches tall… must have stopped growing after puberty." I ran my finger down the first page, occasionally pausing to note a detail. "Brown eyes… they look more hazel to me."

Honeywell had hazel eyes and reddish hair, and a short, tidy beard. He could have passed for many ethnicities with his relatively plain, ambiguous face – but the file said he was born in Russia.

"Saint Petersburg. Big city. But you only spent… two years there. Your parents were gangsters, gunned down while you slept in your crib." I scanned the paragraph, in all capital letters, that detailed his movements in early childhood. "You were adopted by a couple in Yekaterinburg… but they moved into the countryside. North. Probably further north than you had ever been. I always tell people that the real beauty of living in Russia is in the north."

I looked up, and said in Russian, "Just you and the winter."

Honeywell took note of my pronunciation. I could see apprehension in him, finally. His cold mask was broken by the most human of expressions – curiosity.

"But I think the really important part of this folder is what you did in college. You had dreams to become a nuclear engineer. Your admission letter is very… poignant. Dreams to be more than your parents were, dreams to make your country proud. But when you were caught in Tallahassee with known terrorists, you flipped. You said you were innocent. You just wanted to make some extra money. You had no intention of hurting anyone. You were given the option to work for us, or rot in a prison cell. You chose to betray your homeland."

His gaze did not falter. Was he ashamed of what he had done? Did he have any regrets? Was he ever really working for the United States, or was he just biding his time and planning his escape back to his home? I had no faith in his loyalty.

"Why did your parents give you an American name?"

Honeywell blinked, and said nothing.

"We have no names on file for them. Who were they? How did the police know they were gangsters? How did anyone know anything about you when they found you covered in gunpowder and blood in that back bedroom?"

His eyes narrowed slightly, almost unnoticeably. If I had not been staring into them, I would have missed it. It was an important detail to me. I was provoking him.

"So, you have an American name, but you were raised in Russia, and caught in America associating with known terrorists. Have you ever heard the term sleeper, James? Is that what you are? If so, you are the worst sleeper I have ever met. I have known shpala who were like ghosts."

Finally, he spoke. It might have been his ego shining through, or an effort to unnerve me, but hearing his voice was a turning point in this interview.

"I am like ghost, boy."

"You say that, but I see you now." I reached over and poked his arm for effect, and his lip curled in displeasure. I saw it now, his personality shining through. Honeywell had a temper.

I flipped through his file, picking up names and dates as I skimmed the pages. His specialty was weaponization and he had developed a few nasty devices for the United States over his ten years as their puppet. He was dangerously clever and creative. Some of his personal notes had been attached to the file, photocopied versions of sprawling Russian script. I knew little about his science, but the genius was not lost on me.

When I came to the newest section, I stopped and gave it a proper read. Honeywell had a family. He had a wife, a son, and two daughters, all of them living in the United States.

But the details here were critical.

"You have a beautiful family."

Honeywell smiled, but the things he thought he knew had already fallen apart. His cockiness made me smile in return, and his own expression faltered.

"Unusual for a sleeper to take on a family – well, I take that back. I think the best sleepers always establish families to deepen their cover. But not you. No." I laid a few of the photos on the desk between us, black and white and grainy from the low-tech way they had arrived, but still meaningful. "You go on picnics and take your kids to the park. Look at that. You look at them with all the love in the world – all the love of a parent."

Honeywell kept his eyes on me, not bothering to look down at the photos. He had seen them all before, of course, because they had come from his own home.

"You tried to get them out of the country when this all went down. Your plan was perfect. But once you went missing, the assumption was that you had been abducted, so your family was put on lockdown. Your guys went in… and it was chaos."

He was paying more attention now. I noticed his posture become more erect. His fingers drummed on the desk. He was waiting for me to finish, waiting for me to tell him what had happened when four armed Russian spies barged into a house full of United States Marines, with his family in the middle of all of it.

I lowered my voice to a sinister murmur, imitating my dark mentor. "Have you ever seen what the spray of an automatic weapon does to a house? It just takes one slip, and a thousand rounds pierce every wall, every door, every appliance."

His jaw tightened. "You lie."

"I do not," I snapped. "You're damn lucky your family was moved before your guys made it to that house. You would have been stumbling around in shackles trying to put the pieces of your kids back together."

Honeywell scowled, "What is the point of this? What do you want?"

We had finally come to this, the point of our conversation. I had noticed how calm Honeywell and his only remaining bodyguard were and suspected they had something else planned. While the SEALs prepared the hotel for siege and arranged an airlift out of this place, I sat with Honeywell and tried to find out what we were up against.

"I know you have contingency plans." I glanced at the back window, where I could still see the darkness through the frilly curtains. "I want you to tell me what they are."

Honeywell smiled again, back to his cockiness, and said nothing.

"You know we have your family."

He snorted. "You will not harm them. Your government is soft."

"I agree, and if I were a soldier, my threats would be meaningless." I drew one of the pictures of his family back to me, tapping my index finger on the youngest, the infant girl. "I work alone, above the law. You have people like me in your homeland… I've met a few, killed a few. Ivanov, Sokolov, Popov, Orlov… Do you know these men?"

Honeywell seemed to recognize a few of the names I listed, but there was no way for him to know their fate. The names were powerful on their own.

"If you don't cooperate, I can tell you what will happen. I'll survive. I'll go home. I'll hunt everyone who ever had the misfortune to love you. I'll dent the walls with their bodies. There will be no safe place for you, and no safe place for them."

Honeywell was impassive.

"I care more about the lives of those men out there than I do about your family. If I have to make my point with blood, I will. You betrayed your country once before because you were a selfish coward," – that provoked a scowl from Honeywell – "But now you can think of someone other than yourself. You can save your family."

Honeywell snorted, disdainful, "You have high opinion of yourself."

"I was told to bring you back to the United States, dead or alive, by any means necessary. If you escape now, so be it. I will do whatever it takes to force you out of hiding, even if I have to string your kids up in the middle of Times Square."

Honeywell sat quietly for the longest time, and I sat with him, saying nothing, doing nothing, not even fidgeting. I had a quiet rage swirling through me, calling for violence, asking me to make good on my threats. But I also felt the shame of my own words, the weight of my own darkness. Larry said when you threatened people you had to mean it, so I did, if only for a moment – and that moment was enough to make me feel like a monster.

"If I cooperate, my family will be safe, and left alone."

I nodded, "I can send them away to start a new life, where no one from your past will find them."

He ground his teeth, and then said, "An extraction team is on the way. When they do not find us in the mountains, they will come here."

"What kind of team?"

"Wetwork. Five men."

"Who's leading it? Someone I would know?"

"Fedorov – Mikhail Fedorov."

"What else?"

"I know nothing else." Honeywell twisted his lips into a withering frown, and he finally seemed to lose his confidence. "I was only told to be here."

The SEALs were waiting in the lobby. I had taken the time to memorize their names at last. Sam and Thompson were the most experienced, and the other two were Donald and Newton, who were younger and bolder. Thompson mostly did the talking, Sam mostly did the eating, and Donald and Newton played cards into the night.

I left the door open and Sam leaned around me to look at Honeywell, squinting. "What'd you do to him? Does he still have all his fingers?"

Sam was worried about me being alone with Honeywell. He thought I was going to torture him.

"We just talked. He told me there's a Russian extraction team on the way here – probably already surrounding this area. They'll take advantage of the darkness to surround us, and strike at dawn."

Thompson touched the gun on his hip, "How many?"

"Five, led by Mikhail Fedorov. Heard of him?"

"I have." Sam crossed his arms, scowling. I had never seen him look so menacing. "He led a team against our operation in San Jose and killed our extraction target."

"We can handle five," Donald said.

"Barricade the doors," Thompson ordered. "And put those damn cards away."

I took a look around, not liking what I saw. "In a place like this, they'll breach one of the non-load-bearing walls with a ring of explosives."

"You're the expert. Tell us what to do."

I began combing the hotel, looking for weak points. Everything Larry had taught me about Russian military tactics came to life in my head and I drew out maps for the SEALs. We moved book cases to weak walls, locked the doors and covered the windows, and moved the hostages to the interior closet in the lobby, where the door frame would help shield them from gunfire. We took up behind the front desk, two stationed on either side, and one in the center. Behind us was a hollow wall leading to the staircase and then the outside, unlikely to be breached.

When sunrise neared in the next few minutes, I stood in the center of the hotel lobby, alert to any subtle changes in the outside world. The SEALs waited like living stones, grasping their guns, having the discipline to barely make a sound when they breathed. Just watching them wait there gave me faith that we could come out of the siege alive.

But that faith dwindled as the sun rose.