My line of work’s proven increasingly difficult over the past few years, which is one of the reasons for my semi-retirement. More sophisticated computer systems and CCTV cameras mean surveillance has improved. Facial recognition software and AI can catch you even when you don’t realize someone’s watching. Banks and security forces and law enforcement are linked via computer networks. Thanks to the EU, European passports are damned near impossible to forge anymore without deep connections and a whole lot of money.
The Pentagon, CIA, and other American alphabet-soup intel services choose to go with pork-barrel contracts that benefit their cronies running “security companies” rather than use lone-wolf freelancers they themselves trained and turned loose on the world to reduce their liability. Back then, we got all the perks with none of the guarantees a formal rank provided.
Not anymore.
Now, even the CIA handler I dealt with for a decade won’t return my calls.
I quit being a young man a long damned time ago, and this is a game for people far younger than me.
I’m left without a country, without an official history, or a future. Money was the only thing left to me.
Now, looks like that’s off the table, too.
Maybe I ignored my instincts on purpose.
Maybe I hoped to be liquidated.
Maybe that’s because I wish I’d dropped to my knees on that busy sidewalk in front of that hotel a few weeks ago, wrapped my arms around His legs, and begged him to take me with Him.
The man sets the tablet aside and lets out one of those “I’m really disappointed in you” kind of big-brother sighs.
Just like the onesHeused to use.
Well, fuck me.This reallyisgoing to be torture.
“Well, Eddie. Let’s get started, shall we?”
Fuck.This man truly is a doppelgänger for His voice. I wonder in what other ways he’s like Him.
I do wish my cock wouldn’t harden like that. He might get the wrong impression of me.
Even worse, he might get the totally right one.
Chapter Two
Then
Sometimes I’m haunted by memories of kneeling in a colonel’s office, where the air lays so still and thick with cigar smoke that it permeates the pores of every piece of furniture, while the very same colonel rams his dick down my throat and holds the back of my head with one hand, and usually smokes a cigar in the other.
Related, I’m sometimes haunted by memories of being bent over the same colonel’s desk and holding on for dear life while he fucks me, my knuckles white where they’re wrapped around the edges, while I keep my lips clamped shut against any noises trying to escape.
If I was lucky, the interludes happened in the evening or late at night, when I could immediately go shower off the stench coating me as thickly as my confusing mixture of shame and need. Or, if I was unlucky, it happened in the daytime and I was still on duty and had to suck it up and try not to puke every time I got a whiff of it on myself, until I could shower and change.
To this day, the smell of a cigar makes me nauseous.
Sometimes, the past is rife with the thick and cloying scent of roses and other flowers I can’t identify at the age of four, the starkly conflicting aroma of aftershave and perfume, the sound of soft sniffles and people murmuring to each other and blowing their noses as they file past my mother’s coffin in the tiny and stifling church while my mother’s neighbor holds me on her lap.
To this day, the sound of an organ playing “Amazing Grace” also makes me want to puke.
Maybe that’s the place to start, because I likely wouldn’t have ended up in the first situation if the second hadn’t occurred.
A week following my mother’s funeral, after no living relatives could be located for me, I ended up in the foster care system because my deadbeat father apparently fled the scene when Mom was pregnant with me. I never met him, to the best of my knowledge. She’d married him, though, so she couldn’t really move on with her life without divorcing him first.
I guess a single mom without a high school education and raising a young child, a woman who could barely keep a roof over their heads, didn’t exactly have the resources to free herself from an absent husband, much less the ability to track his worthless ass down and force child support out of him.
She couldn’t even afford a doctor visit when she started having abdominal pain, which turned into appendicitis that killed her when it burst.
I know little about my family history beyond what’s on my birth certificate, and what fragments I gleaned from our old next-door neighbor, who I tracked down still living in the same building my mother and I used to live in when I was in high school.
