Life Under Water

When I was a kid, I remember nosing around in my dad's room.  He had a little china dish on the top of his dresser and, every night after he got home from his desk job, he would unload his pockets into that dish.  There were coins and keys, one or two random bits of hardware and a partially-consumed roll of Tums with a trailing streamer of plastic-lined foil wrapping.  His prized possession, a Cross pen and pencil set, would have a place of honor on top of his used handkerchief.

These were the artifacts of his day and as unique to him as a fingerprint and what I think about when I think of him.

When I was going through "orientation" this was one of the first things they drilled into us.  "The things you carry in your pocket can get you killed."  Six months I was there and every day they found a new way to make that clear to us.  You do field work, you take nothing you can't walk away from and you leave everything when you're done.

What they didn't make clear at the time was that marks have memories and when you play a mark they have a bad habit of coming back on you.

We'd build our jobs so that the mark would get dealt with by his own people, but that was no protection against one of theirs figuring out what we'd done and coming after us.

Every time we came off a job, we'd first go to a safe house and dispose of our work cover IDs, destroy our equipment, burn the work cars and pick up whatever travel documents we would need in order to head home.  Often, we would pass the time until ex-fil by quizzing one another on our new names and other key biographical information.

It got so it would be a little jarring when we reached the final safe house where we would transition back into our lives.  I got so accustomed to seeing my face over unfamiliar names that when it would be my actual life, I almost didn't know what to do.

Returning home was almost as complex a process as the jobs themselves and one of the reasons that when we began spending more and more time on domestics, I really wasn't all that upset.  It didn't make the process any easier, but there were fewer names to keep track of.

I remember one time when Barney and I got picked up.  We had just "borrowed" a phone company truck in some country, I don't remember where. 

Luck would have it that the truck's licence tag had expired and some wet-behind-the-ears cadet, eager to make his bones at the local detachment, pulled us over.  It was a routine stop and the kind of thing that Barney and I should have been able to bluff our way out of like we had a hundred times before.  Only this time, Cadet Bones wasn't buying our shit.

He didn't buy our "A" story, nor our "B" and he wasn't convinced when we produced our State Security credentials and tried to bully him off the scent.

He pulled his weapon and marched us into the town.  I don't know how far it was, but it was a long fucking walk.

We got to the detachment offices and Barney was pissed.  He demanded that the lieutenant--just a kid, not much older than Barney's oldest--call the capitol.

If I weren't so pissed at having to walk into town, I would have laughed as the kid watched his entire career and the futures of his children pass in front of his eyes.

Barney gave the junior looey the legit number and, just before he dialed the last digit, I chimed in and told him that he should bypass the switchboard and call our superior on his private line.  The number I gave was for our superior, only not one who was in any way connected to state security.

I remember hearing the lieutenant reading the information from our identity cards into the phone and after he was done with Barney's he began reading mine and I could feel myself wanting to challenge him on every detail. 

"That's not my name....  Not my address....  My birthday is in a completely different time of year...."

I was not in the moment and I didn't recognize my cover details.  In those days, that was a prescription for a permanent vacation behind the Curtain.  And, at my pay grade, nobody was going to trade me out.

Staying alive in that business means learning to navigate between the watertight compartments of your lives.  You want your sheet cake moment and the sorry excuse for a pension that comes with it, then you learn to stay beneath the surface, off the radar, in permanent stealth mode.

A couple of hours later, Phelps and that bitch Cinnamon were in the building and we were back on the street almost immediately.

That was a real wake-up moment for me.  I had gotten so used to moving between the different compartments in the submarine of my life that I was no longer paying close attention.  I was taking closed doors as being sealed doors and, as anyone in the boats will tell you, they are not the same thing.  When you've got a ten storey building worth of water between you and your next breath, there is no such thing as a little leak.

When you're a kid, lying is a game.  Most of the time, you aren't even really sure why you're doing it.  You lie to your friends to seem more important, you lie to adults to stay out of trouble.  And, while the stakes of being caught in a lie may seem horrible, they do not compare to the potential downside of getting caught lying as an adult.  How easy my job would have been if all I had to worry about if I got caught was being sent to my room?

We lied to everyone in each of our lives.

We lied to some to keep them safe and we lied to others to get them in trouble.  We even lied to ourselves in order to make it to the end of a job.

And just like in the boats, the deeper under the lies, the greater the pressure. 

In the end, it's not your conscience that gets you, it's your memory.  Every name you've ever used has a real-time biography that goes with it and making sure all the stories match can kill you.