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The front door closes behind me and I toe off my heels, leaving them lying on the floor. As I make my way to the living room, eager to curl up on the couch, maybe drag some of my men into a cuddle pile. I stop when I see all four of my men in the living room, looking tense. John is seated in his armchair, Johnny and Kyle are sitting on one of the couches together and Simon stands next to John, hovering in true Simon style. They look up as I enter and I raise my eyebrow, “who died?” I joke. None of them laugh.
“Guys, what’s going on?” I start getting nervous. “We need to talk,” says John, not unkindly, but not in the same loving tone he always uses with us either. He gestures for me to join them, so I sit down on the couch that they left empty.
I look at them, desperate for answers, but none of them meet my eyes. “We need you to tell us about your job, love” says John and I stiffen. The way he calls me love sounds hollow, empty. “You guys know what I do for a living,” I laugh half-heartedly, “you guys have picked me up from my boring corporate office more times than I can count.”
John shakes his head and throws a picture on the coffee table. I look at it and cringe as my own face looks back at me, blood splattered on my face and a large gun slung over my shoulder. “Look, I can explain,” I stammer. “Can you?” snaps Simon, taking a step forward, only stopping when John gestures for him to calm down.
My mind goes a hundred miles an hour, trying to come up with a way to explain this. But I falter when I look at Simon’s angry face, John’s disappointed one and Kyle and Johnny’s sad but hopeful ones, so I settle on telling the truth.
I sigh, leaning my arms on my knees. “That picture was taken when I worked for an organisation called ‘The Agency’.” Their expressions don’t change and I sigh again. “It’s a long story.” “We’ve got time,” snaps Simon, though with less spite than before. I nod and settle into a more comfortable position.
“You know about my parents, how they were bad parents and that they died.” John nods. “When I was a kid, they both started gambling. At first they were good at it, but they got cocky and they lost everything. They had asked everyone they knew for money, but gambled it all away, so they had to sell the house, along with everything we owned, but it didn’t pay off their debt, not even close.”
“Then they died when I was fifteen and I was all alone, none of my family members would take me in and I lived on the street for a while.” I shift uncomfortably. “Then these people found me, they let me shower, gave me a warm meal and sat me down. They said they were from the government, that they knew about my parents' debt, about how I had nowhere to go.”
“They explained the facts. That I was fifteen, homeless and for some fucked up reason my parents debt fell on me. No one would adopt or even foster a kid with a debt in the millions. If I was lucky people would take pity on me and give me some cash, maybe I could find a job where they wouldn’t ask questions, do background checks and would pay in cash. Because the pay of any job I would get legally would automatically be used for my parents' debt.”
“So they made me an offer, I would go work for them. They would start teaching me how to do the job. They would match everything I earned while working for them and it would go towards paying off the debt, but I didn’t have to worry about paying for a warm bed, a roof over my head and three meals a day.”
“And ye accepted their offer? Jus’ like that?” asks Johnny incredulously. I huff a humorless laugh. “What else could I have done?” I ask him, bristling. “Did you know that of all homeless girls and women around seventy percent become sex worker? And of those seventy percent about forty percent does it willingly while the other sixty percent is forced by others, usually sex or human traffickers. And If you don’t deliver enough money, you end up dead in a ditch.”
Johnny flinches and I deflate, “look, I understand that that’s not how it works in the UK, but things are very different in the States,” I explain softly, before turning back to look at John. “So yes, I accepted their offer and started working for them. They started teaching me easy things at first. How to track someone’s devices or find someone by tracking their money, how to follow someone’s paper trail. Then it evolved into teaching me how to clean up a crime scene or how to stage a crime scene. How to make a death look like a suicide, or an accident, or how to make it look like a jealous husband killed his wife’s secret lover.”
“Then they started teaching me the sketchy stuff. Which veins to cut to make someone bleed out as fast as possible, or which veins to cut to make someone bleed out as slow as possible, so they could give the information we needed. They taught me which back vertebrae I’d need to break to make someone partly paralyzed, which to break to make someone completely paralyzed.”
“They taught me how to torture people,” I whisper, looking down at my hands. “Once they decided I knew enough they started sending me into the field, I was eighteen at that time. They sent me to kill mobsters, corrupt politicians and people who simply had different ideas then they had. They had me infiltrate governments, had me get close to county leaders and kill them. They even had me kill innocent people, just to send a message. I hated it, I hated knowing that they were someone’s son, someone’s daughter, brother, sister, mother or father. I worked for them for five years.”
“When did you leave this agency?” Asks John. “Eventually I stopped caring,” I explain. “I stopped caring that they were people, just like me, I stopped caring that they had families. There was this man, he’d taken me under his wing. He once said that in this line of work you need to quit when you notice you stop caring, before you look into the mirror one day and you don’t recognize who’s looking back at you. By then the debt my parents racked up was paid off, so I disappeared, I changed my last name, altered my appearance and came to the UK. I got a boring nine to five corporate job and six months later, I met you guys.”
John hums, “why didn’t you tell us? don’t you think we’d understand given our line of work?” I bite my lip nervously, “you do this work because you want to help people, to make the world safer for the innocent, I did the opposite. Can you honestly tell me that if we encountered each other when I still worked for the agency, you wouldn’t have killed me?”
They don’t answer, but we all know what would’ve happened. “How did you find this picture?” I ask suddenly. John leans on his arms and clasps his hands together, “our CIA contact, Laswell, showed us the picture, imagine our shock when we saw our girlfriend in it.” I cringe, “I didn’t mean for you guys to find out like this.” “No, you didn’t mean for us to find out at all,” says Simon coldly. “Simon, please,” placates Johnny, “she explained ‘er reasons an honestly, if ah were in her shoes, ah probably would’ve done tha same.” Simon just huffs and crosses his arms.
“We can make you an offer of our own,” says John, “you come work with us, as a part of taskforce 141. You can use what the agency taught you, but you can use it for good. You can use it to help us hunt down terrorists, use it to help and protect the innocent.” I blink, surprised. “If your past comes back to hunt you, we’d be able to protect you.” John reassures.
And for the second time in my life, I take the offer.