Hold Out

This was taking too long.

My mystery date should have revealed himself by now.

I had taken us out on a limb, made sure he was closer to the leaves than me, and then started sawing. Anyone in their right mind would be looking for the exit instead of me.

Right mind....

As I sat there in that closet, staring at the phone's small screen, I kept thinking about all of the waiting and all of the watching all over the world.

Ninety percent waiting, ten percent abject terror: that's what they told us in training.

I remember once, very early on, saying something to Phelps about the waiting and the watching. I was a doer, a worker; not a waiter and a watcher. I was so excited to get the assignment to IMF because of what I thought they did. When I found out it was just as much, if not more, waiting and watching, I went to Phelps and complained. He listened without a tell. Like his hair, his face never moved, never gave anything away.

And then he said, “It's not about the waiting, it's about who we're waiting for.”

Like most pieces of wisdom, it was direct and to the point and meant absolutely nothing to me at the time.

That was one reason why I worked mostly with Barney. At least we were always doing something and not waiting for something to do.

I didn't go through all that I went through just to hand him tools, but it was better than spending time in yet another anonymous hotel room with that bitch Cinnamon, waiting for the mark to take the bait.

I kept wiping at my eyes.

The temperature in the closet was going up by the second and that meant the sweat was pouring off my head and into my eyes like sand through an hourglass.

Breathing too was more of a challenge.

A house full of smoke was collecting on the third floor and pushing whatever oxygen might be left back toward the ravenous flames.

I had to stay ready, which meant that I couldn't lie on the floor where the only fresh air was. I had to stay on my feet for when he showed up..., in case he showed up. It was like breathing through a wool scarf and feeling the fibers and they scratched their way up your nose and down your throat.

The fire was changing the biosphere of the house pretty quickly now. It seemed like I was inside a gigantic bowl of Rice Krispies as the snapping and the crackling and the popping of the house got louder and louder.

No way I'm going to hear him when he comes.

And then I lost the feed from the other phone.

I knew it would end like this.

I guess I had always known.

These are the kinds of things that people in my line of work think about. You can't help it. The work you do and the people you go up against, it's never far from your mind. Who you are when your cover is blown, or some piece of one-off technology fails at the critical moment, says a lot about the space between what is true and what is real.

And the longer you're in, the more real life examples you have of people who could hold it together and the much larger percentage of those who could not.

When you start out, you have too little real life and too many movies in your head. You think you're the guy who's going to break the interrogators and the torturers. The more time in, the more you hope that you can hold out long enough. And when you're close to your date with a sheet cake, you start working harder and harder just to keep your head down and you pray that somebody, anybody else's number comes up ahead of yours.

I was going to be the one who made it through: I was bigger, I was stronger and I was tougher.

And I did make it; I had my cake date.

And then somebody, my mystery man, moved the finish line.

Instead of Game Over, I had been fooled by a prolonged time-out. It was like play had been suspended for a car in the street and now the other side had called Game On.

Just when you think you're out....

Out.

He must have gotten out.

But how?!?

I was surprised how long it actually took to think this through—a lot longer than I would have expected—but it turns out I didn't want to go out like this. I wanted to get out too.

The Fire Department had decided to try and save the house.

I knew that because, when the broke the windows at the front and back of the house in order to get water on the fire, the rush of oxygen gave the fire the push it needed to really take hold on the second floor.

I couldn't stay in the closet any more.

The question was what about the other guy?

Operators are superstitious. Stakes are usually high enough on a job that when you find something that works for you, you stick with it. That's how you become successful and it's also how we were able to take so many of them down. The odds were in my favor that if he had come in through this window, he'd go out the same way. I just had to wait him out.

But he wasn't coming.

Maybe he'd gotten out ahead of me? Could that be?

I went to the window and looked out.

Damn!

My dog was still there.

He knew enough to keep his distance from the firemen, but he didn't know enough to go home.

He barked.

I think he saw me.

Damn.

I took in as much fresh air as I could and pulled my head back in.

It didn't look like he had been back through here but it was hard to see and even harder to tell.

I could still hear my dog barking. And I heard something else too: I heard the muffled shouting of firefighters in full face oxygen masks searching the floor below me.

It was going to be over soon. I just had to hold out a little longer.

I made my way across the room to the wall next to the door. Pushing the furniture to one side, I made a space for myself and, with hammer in hand, waited for the next person to come through the door.

Just a little bit longer.