Mister Nondescript, RIP

I never arrive. I just keep traveling. But not traveling—I’ll never feel the comfortable lull of spacing out in the back seat of my mom’s VW, eyes eating hours of landscape on a road trip. I just keep, what? Commuting. Tip toeing? Pioneering.

Like Lewis and Clark, but dressed business casual.

Today, like a tiger being stalked through the brush, actually. They’ve gotten better at putting tails on you. One is dressed like a spy. Easy to spot because he’s the only guy on the street who looks perfectly nondescript. Northwest DC is full of nondescript white people, so this is a subtle distinction. The other guy is dressed like a real threat. I’m supposed to write him off because he looks too obviously dangerous. In DC this means he’s a black guy in a white tee shirt. It’s August, so he has a small towel draped on his shaved head. I don’t understand the fashion statement, but I do see the slight bulge of the pistol handle sticking from the waistband of his Nike shorts. And of course there’s a third guy, I mean gal. She’s easy to spot because she’s the only white, professional woman in DC whose nose isn’t scraping the bottoms of jets landing at Dulles.

So I go into an office building that houses a slightly disreputable conservative think tank. I pass by Newt Gingrich in the lobby. I nod knowingly to the security guard. Nigerian. We all look the same to him, so he buys my dupe.

I do a quick scan of the building directory. Seventh floor has a number of small offices, so that’s where I’m going. I won’t stand out as a stranger amid the real estate agents, lawyers, dental hygienists, and investment analysts – and their customers and clients and patients.

Ding.

I don’t know how they will know which floor I went to. That’s the tradeoff. I want to take them out, but I don’t want the cops showing up. My badge will shut them up, but maybe not before some tourist snaps me on her Iphone and sends my face around the world. Then I’m out of a job.

If I’m out of a job, I’m probably dead meat. Shockingly, some people think I know too much. Others think I am too valuable an asset to let walk the streets and breathe the air of freedom and independence. I do chuckle to myself to think that I, an operative for the deranged cult of killers and prescription drug addicts known as an unknown domestic intelligence agency, can claim that I have fought for the continued maintenance of our facsimile democracy and faux independence.

I guess my outlook proves I do know a little too much. More on that later.

So maybe I have a tracking bug on my person. Because the elevator is opening. I am perched around the corner, listening. I hope to hear the blather of three lawyers bragging about golf scores. I don’t. I hear the measured steps of an assassin.

The Red Baron killed all those French and British airmen through simple tactics. He did not do barrel rolls or any of that aerial ballet crap that makes us go Woo! There’s a lesson there. So I’m just waiting around the corner. I’ll hear him approach. If my hands are fast, he won’t have time to react.

Fist to throat. Something in his neck makes a crunching sound. He’s down. I see his eyes bulge because he can’t find air. I pin his hand against the carpet. I angle my thumb, find the pressure point. Twist with my wrist. I think I hear a tendon snap. It’s hard to tell because he’s making rasping sounds while I choke him with my other hand. He’s trying to use his legs to toss me, but he’s losing strength fast.

He’s out. Well, shit. I held on too long. Or maybe I shattered his wind pipe and it swelled shut. Either way, he’s dead. Mister Nondescript, RIP.

It’s weird. While I’m being hunted, or when I’m fortunate enough to be the cat instead of the mouse, I love it. Like hide and seek, seriously. When I’m gripped in combat, I feel a joy and terror of immeasurable intensity. Then it’s over. I’ve been lucky and skillful enough (notice which adjective I mention first) to survive. And I feel sick. I feel less remorse for my actions and more pure horror at human nature.

Then I dispose of the body by sending him on the elevator to the twelfth floor while I take the stairs back down. The twelfth floor is where the executives and big brains of the slightly disreputable conservative think tank sit. They will be honored to have a foreign agent turn up dead on their front stoop. It will give them street cred and an air of danger. They’ll falsely assume their “research reports” are catching the eyeballs of the world’s baddest. Maybe if I’m ever allowed to retire I’ll go into PR.

I go all the way down to the parking garage and exit by foot. No sign of the guy with the towel on his head or his lady accomplice.

I hate that. It requires a remarkable resolve to walk calmly down the street knowing that two people who want you dead are out there, unchecked, unseen. Yeah, I ditched them. Yeah, they will probably come at me again. I know I would. My bosses have zero tolerance for failure at this sort of thing. Kind of funny, in a way, when you consider how haphazard, error-prone, and delusional our intellectual work is. More on that later. In fact, I need to get back to the office. Lunch break is over and I have a one o’clock meeting with the Cost Analysis Division.