Chapter 6
Drake hasn’t returned by the time I head out to the target’s house.
Bryce. His name is Bryce, and he’s a forty-year-old hedge fund manager.
When the assignments come, there’s never any high-level information, like who the target might have wronged or why Nora has assigned the particular “solution” the Company has been contracted to provide.
It’s not always termination. Sometimes it’s an injury, perhaps a warning of some kind, or it could be that the target just needs to be out of commission for a time.
Sometimes a media storm is required; the target needs to be found high, surrounded by hookers, or some such, and a reporter needs an anonymous tip.
Something big enough to derail a career, upset an election, end a marriage.
It’s not for you to know, Nora said the last time I asked. Just know we’re in a fight for good. That we’re ever striving for progress, moving toward the light.
When I was younger, I believed everything Nora said. Lately, it’s starting to sound like bullshit. Maybe that’s what she means when she says she feels like my heart isn’t in it anymore. Maybe that’s just what people say when you stop buying whatever they happen to be selling.
It’s getting late, after ten, as I pull into Bryce’s circular drive.
He’s left the gate open for me. I happen to know that his security system is on the fritz, that none of the cameras are working.
I messed around with the system on the app; I can’t have images of myself arriving at his house.
I also happen to know where all the red light and gas station cameras are on the way here.
Still, I was careful to keep my hood up, wear big glasses to obscure my face during the ride over.
There are eyes everywhere now. People have no idea.
The house is bright, the twinkling white lights on the towering tree visible through the big front window.
Bryce is most likely waiting for me in the bedroom.
Our relationship, such as it is, is simple.
Fuck, banter, eat, repeat. There’s not much to him really, not that I’ve seen, except his head for numbers and his enthusiasm between the sheets.
He told me that he’s never read a book, that he cheated his way through high school and college with SparkNotes.
Which struck me as depressing and something most people wouldn’t admit.
Except the Steve Jobs biography. Read it cover to cover. Right. Because every aspirational douchebag who fancies himself an entrepreneur has read at least that.
The screen on my phone is a field of notification bubbles, more calls from The Asshole. I almost break down and ring him back; this is a lot, even for him. Even at Christmas.
After Vegas, it was a series of secret assignations at hotel rooms and rental apartments around the world.
I was still under Nora’s thumb to some extent, living at the Farm.
So if we weren’t working together, Julian would meet me after jobs, and we would steal our hours late at night into the early mornings.
We talked about a place of our own, coming clean to Nora and asking for permission to be together.
Would she allow it? Neither of us knew. And if she said no, then what?
No more assignments together? We’d have to break her rules to be together?
It went on like that for a while, Julian pressing for something more solid, more permanent.
Me pushing back, afraid of angering Nora, afraid of .
. . I’m not sure what. That what we had couldn’t survive in the light of day, maybe?
That it could exist only in secret, in the wee hours, in hidden places?
Sometimes we fought about it. Then we started to argue about other things.
Then it started to feel like we were only arguing, only angry.
“So why did you and Julian break up?” asked Dr. Black in our last session.
“Irreconcilable differences?”
“What does that mean to you?”
“I think at our cores, at the very center of who we were, we were just different. Had totally different values.”
“For example?”
“We don’t share the same ethics.”
“Okay.” She has a way of drawing out the word so that my response rings back to me. It sounds hollow, but maybe that’s because it was only a half truth. “Can you be more specific?”
This is why things aren’t working out with Dr. Black.
Because I can only tell her so much. I can’t say: “Well, in our work as hired assassins, we have fundamental differences in our opinion of collateral damage.” So I said something like, “There are certain ethics in our profession as IT security consultants—who we work for, what we do, why we do it, who may or may not be wronged—on which we couldn’t agree. ”
“Ethics are very important to you,” she said.
“That’s right. How we behave, how we treat others, it’s foundational, isn’t it?”
What a hypocrite, right?
Still, after a job, I might experience heightened anxiety, feel the tendrils of a darkness pulling at me.
Julian, on the other hand, was energized, infused with a kind of bizarre giddiness.
(Hence our Elvis wedding in Vegas.) As if he was drunk with power.
He would want to party, to stay up all night.
I just wanted to crawl into bed and wait for the darkness to pass, replaying the job and others, going over details, critiquing my performance, examining flaws, mourning mistakes.
At first, he tried to comfort me, but eventually he would just get annoyed, leave me to it.
The truth was that he saw what we did as a job, and only a job.
He dehumanized targets to the degree that he didn’t view them as people, but I never forgot it—perhaps deeply flawed people, but still human.
People with children or lovers, parents or friends left behind to grieve.
He refused to ever use their names, avoided any news coverage, and never wanted to talk about a job after its successful completion.
“It comes down to faith in Nora,” Julian told me. “Do you believe in her mission?”
“What is her mission exactly?”
“That’s above my pay grade. Our pay grade.”
“How can you believe in the mission if you don’t know what it is?”
“I believe in Nora.”
“It’s more than that,” I said. “You’re not just doing this for Nora. There’s a part of you that likes it. A part of you that wants to kill.”
Julian is another rescue, like me, like Drake.
Another foster kid, he was kicked out of the army, where he’d enlisted as soon as he was eighteen; his answers about why have been vague.
Nora found Julian living in a shanty town outside Portland, hustling for daywork, twenty years old and thinking about taking his life.
The reason the army didn’t want me was the reason Nora did.
How many of us are there, doing her bidding?
Lord knows, she pays us well. But I don’t think that’s why any of us do this.
We all have our reasons, some of them darker than others.
I stare at the phone. The last time Julian and I talked, he was calling from Istanbul.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about some of the things you said.
I—miss you. But the line went dead, and he didn’t call again, and I didn’t call back.
I thought about asking Nora if he was okay, but in the end, I just didn’t want to know.
I don’t know if she knew about us or approved. It had never come up.
Bryce meets me at the door wearing a hooded cashmere sweater and a pair of tattered sweatpants torn at the knee. It’s his stealth-wealth look.
“Hey,” he says, voice low. “We have a bit of a problem.”
“Oh?”
Stepping inside, I see her. Apple is lying on the couch, zoned out and staring at her iPad. She has that pale, exhausted look that unhappy children get. Just the sight of her drawn face, the way she’s curled up in her fuzzy robe and slippers, makes my heart ache.
Bryce gives me an elaborate eye roll. “Her mom decided that she wanted to spend Christmas Eve with her boyfriend. She dropped the kid off; all her presents are in the garage. I can’t get her to go to sleep. She’s in a mood.”
Imagine that. And what with these sterling examples of parental devotion.
Standing there in the foyer, the totality of my fuckedness dawns cold and hard. I am not going to kill Bryce tonight. And I am going to have to answer to Nora. It’s not going to be pretty.
Something Dr. Black said to me rings back.
In abuse situations, eventually you will run up against a hard place.
You can’t continue under conditions that harm you.
So you have to find a way out, no matter the consequences.
She said this in reference to my mother, when I told her that I wished she’d just stayed with my dad, that she should have known he’d find her and kill her.
Surely, I posited, a punch in the face or a grabbed arm, his occasional drunken rages, would have been better than the alternative.
She was probably motivated to save you. And she did.
Did she, though?
“I’ll take care of her,” I say. Bryce visibly sags with relief, like the idea of trying to comfort his unhappy four-year-old is more than he can bear.
“That’s great,” he says with a sigh. “I’ll make us a drink. You try to put her down for the night. Tell her Santa won’t come if she’s not sleeping or something.”
The world is full of parents who have no desire to parent.
“Hey, kiddo,” I say, approaching her. She side-eyes me, glancing reluctantly away from the screen. The device emits manic sounds and circus music. I put my hand on it, and she releases it easily. I click it off and place it on the glass coffee table. “Merry Christmas.”
She hugs a tattered bunny. “My mommy had to go on a trip,” she says sadly.
“I’m so sorry. But your daddy’s here, and so am I. Do you remember me?”
She nods. “Zoey. You like to color.”
“That’s right,” I say, sitting next to her. She scootches over and drops her head into my lap. I stroke the silken white-blond strands of hair. Her head is heavy and warm.
“You must be tired.”
“I’m not. I’m never tired,” she says sleepily.
“Well, I’ll tell you what. Let’s go into your room and read for a while. And I’ll get you all tucked in. You have to at least pretend to be asleep so that Santa comes.”
She looks up at me. “Is he still coming? I was supposed to be at my mommy’s house.”
“Oh, of course,” I tell her with a smile.
“How does he know where I am?”
“Santa knows everything,” I say with a wink.
She lets me lead her to her bedroom, after a trip to the bathroom, then a stop in the kitchen for a sippy cup of water and a kiss from her father, who’s already drinking. He does seem to love her, gives her a big bear hug.
“Love you, little monkey,” he says as she clings to him. “Santa’s going to be very good to you because you’re the nicest little girl in the world.”
“Good night, Daddy.”
I search through the books on her shelf and don’t find what I’m looking for.
So I download a copy of The Night before Christmas on my phone, turn the lights off so just the night-light is glowing, kick off my shoes, lie beside her, and start to read.
She tucks herself into my body, and she’s sound asleep before I reach the end.
Then I just lie there, wishing I could stay with her.
Fantasizing for a moment that Bryce is my husband and we sneak out to the garage to get all her presents, arrange them around the tree.
That we have a peaceful, imperfect life where everyone is safe and reasonably happy.
I am going to walk out of here without killing Bryce.
And then I’m going to have to go on the run from Nora.
I know this. And I know she will hunt me down.
Julian laid it out for me that first night: With the things you’ve done and what you know, you can never be allowed to leave the Company. You must see that.
If I take off, Nora will enact the kill clause.
If she hasn’t already. I haven’t wanted to be a drama queen about it, but the fact that my security code didn’t work was a worrisome red flag.
Maybe she decided to give me one last chance.
But I am about to let her down again. This is the end; this is the hard place Dr. Black was talking about.
I finally understand my mother’s choice.
Sometimes you have to hurt yourself to help someone else.
I find myself thinking about Julian. The man I thought he was those first months together when it was all great sex and clean kills, wild parties and luxe hotel suites.
It devolved into bitter arguments and ghosting for weeks, makeup sex that verged on violence.
Our core irreconcilable difference? Julian liked to kill people.
He enjoyed it to a degree, the whole puzzle of it—when, how to do it cleanly, how to get away with it, how to evade security technologies, how to be a ghost who was undetectable even if seen.
Nora should have seen at the Farm that I wasn’t right for this job, that I lacked an essential coldness.
I cried myself to sleep after killing that doe, and I never forgot her sad, staring eye.
“Just make me one promise, and I’ll do the same,” he said the last time we saw each other, almost a year ago in some crappy hotel in New Mexico. “If you ever hear that Nora has enacted my kill clause, let me know.”
“She won’t.”
“Nora will do exactly what she has to do.”
Lying here with Apple, her breathing deep and steady, the stars from her night-light projected onto the ceiling above me, I experience yet another stark dawning.
Julian’s repeated calls. His last text: the knife and the Santa emoji.
Kill Claus.
Fuck.