My Dearest Fritzi,
I miss you terribly, and there are so many things that I wish I had told you. I wish I had kissed you and told you how much I loved you that morning instead of sleeping in. I wish I had told you how much you mean to me, that you have made me happier than I ever thought I could be. Most of all, I wish I had told you about my past. Sometimes, I feel like I am living a lie, that you don't know who I really am. I worried that if you knew the real me, you would see how much baggage I am carrying, how fragile I really am. I hid so much from you and from the world, and now it has all come crashing down. I think it's time for you hear the truth.
I was an interrogator for the company, but what I told you was both true and misleading. I wasn't always an interrogator. I started off as a field agent. I began my career with the agency as a probie learning from a senior field agent. He taught me everything: how to spot a spy without giving yourself away; how to blend into a crowd, how to learn every escape route and every place to find cover, how to scale buildings and dash out of fire escapes, how to lull people into trusting you.
I got my first true look into the agency when we were in Budapest. As I was trained, I spotted our target entering a French restaurant. My partner told me to stand guard at the alley. When the man came outside for his smoke break, my partner shot him, execution style. We slowly walked along and blended right into the crowd, as if nothing happened at all. It completely rattled me, but what scared me even more was how easy it all was to adjust to. A couple of hits later, and it becomes routine, like any other part of the job. This is when I felt like my soul was slipping away.
Eventually, I became a senior field agent, and I had my own probie. I taught her, just as I had been taught, and it became my job to shoot the bad guys. Sometimes, I wonder what makes me any different than the people I arrest. Maybe that's why I was so obsessed with catching killers. When I started arresting people, I had a goal of catching as many killers as targets I killed, but when I got there, absolution never came. I went after more of them and more, but it was never enough.
Back to the story, we had a mission, to take down a bomb maker in Moscow. We couldn't just shoot him. We needed to get to his bombs. The easiest way to do that was to become his client. We sent a Russian man to buy one bomb and get it installed into a car. He paid for it and we staged a death. He went back 6 months later and ordered a second bomb. When he came to install it, we came to nab him. Apparently, his team was still working on the bomb, and it went off.
I should have died that day. I still don't know how I didn't, but my partner managed to grab me and push me to the ground, narrowly escaping the shrapnel. I'll never be able to thank her enough for that. The bomb maker's team all died and he was permanently disfigured. Half his face is just a scarred up mess. He went from the hospital to prison to serve what was supposed to be a life sentence, but somehow, he got out.
I assume he came after my team as well, as he blames us for what happened to him. After Moscow, I decided to become an interrogator. I had enough of the field and I almost got my partner and the other agents with us all killed. I got the bad guys to talk, but I never knew what happened to them afterwards. Some would say that's much better than being the one to pull the trigger, but I always feared those men faced a fate worse than death.
I know I should have told you about all of this a long time ago, but there was never a good time. Before I knew it, I was in love, and the last thing I wanted was to scare you away with the skeletons in my closet. Well, it appears one of them has decided to come back out, so now I have to face it.
I hope you are protecting yourself and staying safe. Potovsky is a madman, and he has spent over a decade thinking about how he wants revenge.
I hope that when this is all over, we can embrace once more and enjoy ourselves in a way that only we can. My biggest fear is that I will never get to see you again, but I have to stay positive. I need all of willpower I can muster.
As I sit here, surrounded by all of my inner demons, thinking of when I will get to gaze into your big brown eyes gives me solace.
With all my love,
Brenda
Brenda takes her letter, puts it in a drawer, and starts drinking water. It's so hot right now.