9 Lives

By Lisa Polisar

He sometimes called it drifting, though this was just one of a hundred or so euphemisms used by DESTA operatives. Other times it felt more like a bubble surrounding your thoughts, insulating your conscience from the chilling reality of the tasks you performed, not for money, not for recognition, and not just following orders — but to stay alive. Be a destroyer or a victim. Consume or be consumed. Though his mind could deny it, he knew the image of two bodies lying face down on the kitchen floor, the bodies of two strangers, two innocents, would be permanently affixed to his memory. There had to be a way. Marlene understood, at least until now. But she was a thousand miles away so it didn't much matter what she understood or not. Denny's bar was the closest venue, a logical choice for a hideout. Denny would float him a few bucks if he asked and perpetuate the illusion of friendship.

"Hey, man." Drake Gonzales looked across the bar at Denny's long white face and receding hairline. His eyes were full of stories, the kind of trustworthy eyes that could betray you any second.

"Hey." Denny slowly brought his hands out from under the bar.

"You gonna pound some lead into me or what?"

"Try using the front door for once and you won't have to wonder what I'm grabbing for under the bar."

Gonzales scanned the clientele. Nothing ever changed here. Same gloomy paneling, same cliques — girl cliques, boy cliques, hoodlums, pool table junkies — sitting in their assigned seats judging one another, comparing, concluding, estimating a person's worth based on the shallowest criteria, this combined with bad music throbbing at drum-popping decibels and unventilated, smoky air. He felt the familiar sediment of depression take root in his body as his fingers fondled the object in his pocket. I can't do this anymore, he thought.

"What do you want to drink, man?" Denny asked, tone changing from disinterest to irritation.

"Vodka tonic."

Denny smiled out of half his mouth, his right eye twitched like he was a puppet with invisible strings yanking at his face. "Must've gone all right then."

"What makes you say that?" Gonzales squirmed on the vinyl barstool, uncomfortable, unhappy, and tired of running. He wondered if he'd smoked his last cigarette already. But there was no being careless around Denny. Careful to act the part, say the correct words, dress according to strategy and otherwise fool even himself into thinking he was somebody else or a normal person.

Denny spread his fingers out on the bar. "Vodka tonic means success. You remember now, don't you?" He tilted his head. "And Gin and tonic, well hell baby, you know what that means." He let out a sandy, smoke-hacker's laugh. "You're dead, or as good as dead. You're on the line and you sure as hell better be prepared."
"Yeah, man, it went all right. Nothing unexpected."

"Then I guess you got something for me."

The essential paradox of being trapped, he'd decided, was that you thought you had nowhere to go but there were always options. Run out of the bar and take off down the untraveled dirt road, or maybe just don't show up for the next assignment. Instead, he slid the blank disk across the lacquered wood. Denny dropped it in his shirt pocket the way he always did, thinking it would be the same as always. Get all the information without bloodying up your hands. Well not this time.

"So vodka tonic then. Coming right up."

 

 

The smell of burned toast, bacon, and coffee floated up to the loft bedroom. He heard someone putzing around in the kitchen below, quietly setting plates and cups on the table. It took a full ten minutes before he could pull his two hundred pounds of nervous exhaustion from the warmth of the futon.

"Morning."

"Jesus, Drake. You scared me," Marlene said with her hand to her chest.

"Sorry. You took the squeak out of your stairs."

She smiled and wrapped her arms around him. "Your feet just memorized where to step. After all, being sneaky's what you do, isn't it?"

"Don't remind me." He kissed her lightly on the lips, then the neck, and her cheek, and remembered how it had all started. Not just her part, but every part. It was so innocent at first, ironically based on ideals like charity and altruism, words whose irony made him sick after five years. Perverting someone else's dream into a string of secret agendas, it was all about killing now. Nothing more.

"I love you," he said and felt like crying as he held her in his arms, the fuzz of her pink bathrobe on his lips, the feel of her hair on his forehead. To wake up in that loft every day, to hear her humming every morning, he would have given up oxygen next New Year's Day.

"I look awful today. I wish you'd slept later so I could clean up."

"Don't say that. You're perfect."

"I'm not pretty."

"You are to me."

"I'm fat."

"You're just right." Her red hair looked less vibrant than it had a month ago, her skin slightly more wrinkled around the mouth. She's been smoking again, he decided, but it wasn't her fault. Being the crossover point was the most challenging position in the whole operation, and carried the highest possible risk of exposure. Breaking into a house in the middle of the night and killing a few bad guys in their sleep was bad enough, but not the same as lying to everyone you know every single day in the naked glare of daylight. Marlene had the most to lose. As a woman, as an operative, and that meant as her soul mate so did he. There had to be a way. It had already started.

"How about marrying me?" he said without thinking. "And before you say no, I assure you I'm very well trained. I put the toilet seat down after I use it, I do my own laundry and I'm a damned good cook."

"What makes you think I want to marry an assassin?" She returned to the stove and ladled eggs onto two plates.

"What do you think you are?"

Marlene smiled. "A liaison. It's different."

"Why? Because I kill strangers and you kill people after you spend a year earning their trust?"

"Are you trying to get me to say no?"

Gonzales bit into the charred toast and took a sip of coffee. He peered at her to see if she was still smiling. Maybe someday she'd take him seriously. "I don't have to try. It's what you always say. Maybe you want me to kneel down and beg you."

Marlene sat at the table and shook her head. "I know what this is, Drake. You trained me don't forget. You're going out again and you want to make sure I'll be here when you come back. If you come back."

"Will you?"

"You know the answer to that. How long this time?"

"Depends."

"Always does, doesn't it?"

 

 

"Lunch?"

"Check."

"Raincoats?"

"Check."

"Life preservers?"

"Check."

"Water?"

Marlene looked up and scorned. "I knew it. Throw me the keys, I left the jugs in the back seat."

He watched Marlene stomp down the creaky wooden pier toward the pick up parked against the roped off area that made up the marina's parking lot. Creaky wooden pier. Then something came to him. The loft. Oh God, he thought. The wooden pier creaked as almost all wooden planks creak when you put weight on them. So why hadn't the loft stairs creaked this morning when he stepped on them? No one could ever call him slight of build, and despite what Marlene said, he hadn't been the least bit careful where he stepped. The only other time the stairs hadn't creaked was on Halloween night five years ago when he was hiding under them, having crawled into the half-closet under the stairs from the second bedroom. His broad back was tucked under the sixth stair from the bottom, the creakiest of all of them. Jesus. Not Marlene. Please.

His first instinct was to hightail it back to the truck and start yelling for her. But that wasn't the way. Not this time, and not with these people. The moon, a glowing orb in the November sky over Portland, bled lines of milky white onto the pier and the sand leading to the parking lot. In it, he could make out footprints of her sneakers running to the truck. He followed them now, ironically, in the same stealthy silence that trained him to kill terrorists, thieves and hardened criminals who just happened to slip through a hole in the legal system. Ironic because this time the chase was made to protect someone. Someone he loved, he was devoted to. How deep could love go, after all? It didn't last forever, according to songs and movies. Like the taut, supple, glowing skin of youth, it would eventually fade and fall and transform itself into some diluted, unrecognizable half-sibling of love. It was at least worth entertaining the notion that maybe theirs was different. That maybe, possibly, her love for him was the same in character and depth, and could last forever or close to it.

Something yellow caught his eye twenty yards ahead. Marlene's raincoat lying in a puddle from last night's shower, half folded on one side with one of the sleeves inside out. From behind the truck someone came, probably a man, a colleague, dressed all in black and grabbed her by the arm and got the jacket instead. She yanked her arm out and slipped out of the hold, then got about a foot before a second person grabbed her and ditched her into the gray van. He had been in that van, had driven the God damned thing a thousand times.

It happened faster than he estimated it would. Thought it would take Denny at least a day to find the time to insert the disk and realize he'd given them a blank, and then another few hours before he realized the reason. Sure, Marlene was an obvious bargaining tool and for that, the plan was over before it got started. He knew what they would do to her if she didn't give him up, and knew they'd probably do it anyway just to make an example out of him. To say wagging the dog was frowned upon by DESTA was the foulest of understatements. Run by a chain of soul-less automatons, there would be no second chance for either one of them. Drake Gonzales stood alone against the cold, empty wind of the marina parking lot and looked into the night sky. Silence, along with a clear sky on a cold dark night, had the power to shrink anything down to the head of a pin. Terror, fear. Even resignation.

The wind picked up between the time he secured the boat in the marina and arrived on North River Street. It cut into his face and ears like stray shards of glass as he stood under a small sugar maple. Could have been his imagination, but Denny looked more tense than usual. After all, his insubordination, aborting a Status One active mission and failure to obey a direct order, reflected on Denny more than anyone else. But it was likely Denny who gave the team Marlene's address in the first place. They'd staked him out, followed them to the marina and by one lucky strike happened to catch her going back for water. He should have been the one to bring the water in from the truck, but he knew better than to submit to that line of thinking, especially now. Would only lead to depression or worse which would weaken him as an adversary. It had already happened that way and to a greater extent that he'd intended. He had allowed Marlene to become his weakness. For two years he fought their obvious attraction, her flirtations, her speech and the natural way about her that had driven him, still drove him well beyond normal control. The Army had taught him control, Ranger School honed that control, and then CIA and DESTA fine-tuned it even more. But all you had to do was meet Marlene just once and you'd understand. She wasn't polished like some of the other younger female operatives, nor was she as pretty. Not nearly. But some women, he realized, had a beauty that went deeper than just skin, deeper than a tight ass and long legs. An inner beauty that radiated out from a central core, and like a virus infected anyone who got close enough. He had gotten close enough, maybe closer than anybody.

The primary training that DESTA gave its newly-acquired operatives, aside from rigorous physical training, was tactical. And not just mental strategy and negotiation, but anticipating human behavior based on a known set of circumstances. An old man is overpowered in his own home late at night by two strangers. How will he behave? Will he be willing to answer questions or will he allow his outrage at the intrusion influence his actions or reactions? There were variables, of course. Age, social status, race, intelligence. The strength of the human spirit could never be underestimated under any set of circumstances. But there were patterns to be memorized, tells to be read, signs to be interpreted. Denny Simms was slicking his thinning rag of hair off his face. That meant nervousness. Does he know I'm coming? Or does he think someone else is?

 

 

"Gin and tonic."

"Coming right up," Denny said and looked up. And at the same instant he recognized the voice, Gonzales's hand shot up, grabbed a tuft of hair on the crown of Denny's head and snapped it down against the hard surface of the bar. The Friday night shoulder-to-shoulder crowd combined with the music made for a perfect buffer. No one even flinched. Denny slumped to the floor behind the bar, Gonzales caught him under the shoulders and stuck him with a syringe-full of Phenobarbital. One of the waitresses, Jody, sometimes subbed as a barmaid when Denny was out of town taking care of DESTA business. He saw her flirting with some guy on the other side of the bar and summoned her with his eyes.

"He just sort of passed out," he explained. "Can you take over for him for a while? I'll bring him to my car. I have a first aid kit with some smelling salts."

She looked skeptically at Gonzales, then at Denny, then back to him.

"What happened?"

He shrugged. "Could be his blood sugar. Give him about thirty minutes to recover and he'll be fine."

"Haven't seen you around in while, Drake. How's Marlene these days?"

In a split second, he tried to gauge how much she knew. About Marlene, about Denny, about things that had nothing to do with this bar. "Better. That flu really kicked her in the ass, though. She was out of action for two weeks."

Jody shook her head. "Yeah, I felt a little sick myself last night, but I took some extra vitamin C and now," she tapped her chest, "good as new. I hope Denny's all right. Go on. I'll take over."

Two people, propelled by the growing drunken mass, rammed into Jody's right shoulder and tousled the tray in her hands. "Hey, watch out!"

"Sorry," one of them said.

"We'll be out back if you need anything." Gonzales winked at her like he had only once before, after he'd been assigned to sleep with her as part of a mission that later fell through. He had been grateful, at the time, if for no other reason than avoiding that conversation with Marlene. She understood the rules, understood DESTA's expectations and wouldn't have blamed him for carrying out orders, even those orders. But after all, she was a woman and she'd make him pay for it one way or another. He smiled at the thought, and smiled at the fact that in these circumstances he was still capable of smiling when it came to her. He watched Jody walk away into the crowd, watched her slim body packed neatly into a pair of black jeans and felt an unspeakable loneliness. Get used to it, he thought.

Took him no more than a minute to drag Denny's body out to the van and dump it in the back. In ten minutes when the drug would start to wear off, his hands would be cuffed behind him and an IV needle would be poised at the inside of his left elbow. A half-drop of yellow food coloring in a cup of half water/half apple juice created a credible color for the imaginary drug. Denny would be wondering, and that's just fine. He might think the liquid in the syringe was apple juice, but knew what resources were at Drake's disposal. Pharmaceuticals, weapons, ammunition, manpower. This was war. This was Marlene. No more fucking around.

He was seated in the back of the van as Denny's lids fluttered apart. Empathy was the last emotion he expected now, but it rose up full throttle as he stared across from him, Denny's body doubly immobilized by drugs and physical restraints. Almost sorry he'd been forced to resort to such extreme measures, the minute his mind conjured up Marlene there was little choice in the matter. His own arrogance in going up against DESTA and his own extreme measures had caused Marlene to be taken out from under his nose. Logic dictated that only extreme measures would get her back — if it wasn't too late already. He knew he'd have to work fast, as only a narrow margin existed between the drug wearing off and the need for another one. Two minutes, tops.

"You're a pretty lonely guy, Denny."

The poor specimen tried to raise his eyes up to the voice, but instead raised his head up and let his lids snap closed again.

Gonzales gently slapped his cheeks. "Hey, you in there man? I need you to pay attention."

The eyes snapped open, and in perfect sync clicked on the realization of danger. The eyes jerked, first left then right, then landed on Gonzales. The jaw clenched and set in place. "Where am I?"

"You live alone, man?"

"Why?"

"You don't got a wife or a girlfriend that you live with? No one to come home to every night?"

He shook his head, but kept his eyes fixed ahead. "No family either. That make you feel better?"

"Why would it?"

"Evens out the scales, doesn't it? After all, you had someone to come home to …for a while. Until you screwed it up."

Drake felt acid pool in the pit of his gut. He breathed in and held air in his lungs for a few seconds to steady himself. "Good you brought her up, Marlene I mean. Cause I've always wanted to tell you something about her. Just never got around to it I guess."

Denny kept his eyes on the back of the leather front seats, unmoving, unyielding.

"It's the most extraordinary coincidence, really. But your son looks just like her. Same hair color, same eyes, same bone structure, light complexion. Don't you agree?"

"Stay away from him, Drake, or you'll never see her again. DESTA knows nothing about him."

"So you're not denying it then?"

"What do you care? It was before she met you."

Drake pulled a cell phone from his jacket pocket and pressed a series of buttons, waited a moment, and then held the miniature TV monitor out in front of Denny's eyes. "Look familiar?"

He knew it would, as it showed a miniature videotape of Denny's son, a skinny, wild teenager, pacing the concrete floors of a small cell.

"What do you want to know?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

"I don't know where they took her, man. I swear it. I'm just the middleman in this, following orders on one end and transmitting them to a team on the other. Two operatives took her and are holding her somewhere."

"I should think it were in your best interest to try to find out where."

Pause. Denny Simms bit his lower lip and considered the question. But it really wasn't a question, was it? Gonzales watched this moment of deliberation with an odd distance devoid of anxiety or anticipation, without the need for aggressive controls and manipulation. The events would speak for themselves. Denny Simms was smart enough to understand that his twelve-year old son wouldn't live to see thirteen unless he came up with a viable location.

"Whatever you're trying to do, Drake, don't. You know I'll do anything to try to save my son, but you can't escape DESTA."

"They're not God. They're not completely omnipotent. They just like to think so. There are holes in their system, holes in the intricate matrix that makes up the impenetrable web that they hide behind and insulate themselves with. I've spent the last two years studying them, memorizing, cultivating."

"What about the blank disk?"

"I have the loaded one, but let's consider that Phase II of our negotiations. Tell me where Marlene's being held, and I'll call off the guard standing outside your son's cell with an automatic weapon. You'll then escort me to Marlene, and when and if I find her alive and well, you'll get the disk and forget you ever saw either of us tonight."

"You won't get away, you know."

"I might," Gonzales said with his hand poised on the syringe in his left arm. "Hope is worth a lot more than you think. You have five seconds, after which time I'll inject you with another dose of Phenobarbital and instruct the man outside the cell to execute your son."

Denny nodded at him, and blinked.

"Five, four, three — "

"She's home."

Had he heard him right?

"They took her back to her house."

Gonzales smiled. "To wait for me to go back there. Very smart. That's not how it happened, though, did it?"

"Not yet."

Gonzales removed the syringe, got in the front of the van and started the motor. As he pulled out, he looked in the rear view mirror. "If she has so much as a broken fingernail, you're gonna wish you'd never met either one of us."

"I already do," Denny mumbled.

 

 

He could see her from the west window. On the couch leaning her head back, breathing heavy, her lip bleeding. It'll heal, he thought, grateful to even see her breathing. Knowing DESTA's capabilities and their tolerance for insubordination, that alone was a miracle worth acknowledging. Maybe he was eligible for one more.

Then again, maybe not.

Moving around to the other side of the house proved a perfect vantage point. Two men, a spindly one pacing in the kitchen, the same kitchen where they'd sat that morning discussing marriage over coffee and burned toast, and another looming over her with his hand on the back of the couch. She was leaning back with her head cocked to one side. Blocked by the man's body, he couldn't be sure if a weapon was pointed in her face or not. It must be, though. If she weren't immobilized, somehow, she would have kicked the man between the legs and had him on the floor in two seconds flat. He had seen this move a thousand times, had even trained her to do it, to take control of a situation when you've lost it to someone else, to someone bigger with a more powerful weapon that has somehow gotten the advantage. Marlene's eyes were open but she wasn't moving.

Gonzales climbed up on a turned over steel barrel to get a closer look at the weapons inside, but it wobbled under his weight. Left, right, then stabilized. Jesus, he thought regaining his balance. But it was too late.

They heard him.

The thin man moved toward the window. Gonzales leaped off the barrel and took off toward the wardrobe of afghan pines fifty feet from the house. The man opened the window and fired two shots. Hell, what was he aiming at, Gonzales laughed to himself. Then he felt a cold spot on his left calf. Collapsing against the trunk of a large oak, he looked down and saw blood on the outside of his pants. Not a lot, but enough. It was getting dark. There wasn't much time.

Armed with one gun in each hand, he moved back toward the house, hidden in shadows, behind the bulkhead doors, under the eaves and overall out of the narrow line of vision of who he called Operative A. He could see him crouched down by the dining room windows looking off into the direction of the woods. Bad move, he thought, having learned that a perpetrator will never try the same path twice. On all fours now, he crawled around the perimeter of the house from the west side. Ten feet from the front door now and too low to see inside, there was a noise. Not a gunshot, not a scream, but a thumping. This is it, he thought, reviewing the plan in his head. The van was equipped with all the software, satellite, and Internet resources he'd need to erase their files and deactivate the tracking devices planted inside their forearms. He took in a deep breath, kicked open the side door to the house and immediately fired two shots.

"Marlene, get up! Can you walk?" he yelled and then heard a moan.

"Did you get both of them?"

"Come on, let's go."

"Better make sure."

He lifted her off the couch and carried her over his shoulders out to the van. Denny had enough tranquilizers in him to keep him out for two days. By then, dehydration combined with the delirious aftereffects of the drug would keep him still for another day or so, and then he'd be too weak to do anything.

"How bad was it?"

"Not terribly. They figured out pretty quick that I didn't have the disk. I convinced them you gave it to Denny."

He laughed.

"So where are we going?"

"Depends on how much normalcy you can take."

"What'd you have in mind? Me getting a job as a kindergarten teacher, living in a small house with a white fence?"

"Wouldn't be so bad, would it?"

Marlene touched his arm and squeezed. "They'll find us, you know."

"Maybe not. Good luck works the same way as bad. It's cyclical."