Although he finds it difficult to understand why, every day Medic becomes more comfortable with the whole situation, lingering doubt and questions subtly transmute into proactive involvement with the mission.
“Shouldn’t we be trying to get more info on the Academy?” he asks The Handler after a few days of growing restlessness.
The Handler holds up a pausing finger as she cranes her head forward, listening.
They’re standing at the bow of the vessel, its rusty and worn exterior a stark contrast to some of its sumptuously gaudy interior. Their donated Bermuda shorts and thin floral shirts waft in the hot breeze as they watch black clouds gathering on the horizon. Occasionally, flashes of lightning rip through the distant darkness followed at length by dull claps of thunder. After a few cycles of this she taps something into her phone and then turns to him.
“I leave that to Dmitri,” she finally responds. “He’s way better at hunting down info than me. I’m sure we’ll get a big juicy debriefing when we meet up.”
The Handler had already described how she planned to get them there.
The first half of their journey will end shortly with their arrival on the island of São Vicente in the Cape Verde archipelago. In response to Medic’s concerns about how they’d get into the country without passports, money, or a smattering of Portuguese, she said simply that she had it under control. Her confidence was very reassuring.
Once there, she continued, they’d “borrow” another boat to take them around the southern tip of Africa, up past Madagascar, through the Indian Ocean and finally land on to the western coast of Thailand. There they’d connect with Dominic and Dmitri and figure out next steps.
“We disembark tonight,” she says firmly, turning back toward the open door that leads below deck.
“How are we getting off the boat?” asks Medic, fluttering nervousness and jittery excitement suddenly wrestling in his stomach.
“One more hurrah with the crew,” she responds resolutely as she descends down the corrugated steel stairs. “I can’t get into the details right now. Just follow my lead when the time comes, okay?”
“What, you don’t trust me?” asks Medic with feigned surprise.
Having reached the bottom of the stairs she turns around to face him. “Trust you to not spill the beans when you’re drunk? Jury’s still out on that one. You know that you talk in your sleep?”
Immediately his thoughts begin to race from memory to memory. Could she have heard him talk in his sleep? What could he have possibly said? What about the dreams involving her?
The Handler decides to put an end to the turmoil building on his face. “Don’t worry,” she says, shooing away the concern with her hand. “Mostly just mumbling. Only time I understood anything it sounded like you were having an argument with someone, maybe a friend or family.”
“Oh, yeah,” says Medic with a heaving sigh of relief. “Probably my sister. We’ve been arguing about what’s going to happen to my mo–“
“That right there,” she says firmly, holding up her hand to cut him off, “is why you don’t get details. I mean, to be fair you haven’t really had any training but right now you just serve answers up on a silver platter. And you haven’t even had a drink yet.”
“But I could’ve been making that up,” shoots back Medic defensively.
“If it were true I could say the same thing but now you’ve confirmed that it wasn’t,” she says pointedly.
Feeling caught out, he struggles to unpack her sentence.
“Look, don’t sweat it, okay?” she consoles him with mild amusement. “We just haven’t covered this stuff yet and it takes some practice. Like the eye thing. We’ll have another couple of weeks once we leave Cape Verde but in the meantime, just please trust that I’ve got shit handled. I mean, it is kinda in my name.”
Wanting a comeback, Medic strains to remember any personal information he’d learned about The Handler. After some moments he realizes that he has none. He’s not sure he can even guess where she’s from, let alone how old she is or any of her history before they’d met. She had so far evaded such questions by alluding to or just outright stating her need to remain undercover. Anything she did tell him, she’d conclude, could therefore be a lie anyway. Although she’d given him no reason to doubt her, The Handler’s inscrutable language and their lack of shared history made it impossible to tell how truthful she was being.
Maybe that’s the point, thinks Medic, as they pass through the compartment where he’d first woken up, his cot and her files now gone but the equipment still up and running on the bolted table.
“On another note, your tests results have been confirmed and you’re eligible for an upgrade,” she says perkily over her shoulder as she walks through another opening in the bulkhead. She enters a narrow corridor lined on either side with crew quarters and stops momentarily in front of the door to her room. “Think of it as a higher security clearance.”
“Those were tests? If I’d of known I would’ve studied,” jokes Medic, standing in front of his own door.
“The whole point was that you knew as little as possible. I had to evaluate you ‘in the wild’,” she says, hooking her fingers into air quotes. “This is why I can’t always tell you stuff up front.”
“Huh,” he acknowledges. After a brief pause he asks, “So what can you tell me about now?”
“Well, right now we have about an hour to pack and scrub every trace of ourselves from these compartments,” she says, pointing around them. “Then let’s chat.”
Other than The Handler’s equipment, some duffel bags, clothes, a few towels, and a couple of sturdy raincoats, there’s not much to pack. They stack all of it into large black plastic containers and lock their waterproof seals. Then they strip mattresses and pillows, using the linens to collect toothbrushes, soaps, combs, razors, and anything else they’d used or touched. They throw in their plates, cutlery, and cups. They chuck in books, pens, notepads, and any other loose bits they find. Finally, they tie together the corners of the sheets and surreptitiously toss the parcels overboard, watching them sink into the darkening wake of the ship.
The pair return below deck and sweep meticulously, then wipe down and chemically clean every surface they may have touched. Roughly fifty minutes later, they’re as done as they can reasonably be.
“The tests that I was running on you,” she starts, resting on one of the black plastic containers, “aren’t supposed to evaluate things like intelligence or mental stability. They’re supposed to evoke certain somatic responses.”
“Somatic?” asks Medic.
“Body,” explains The Handler. “It reacts to the outside world whether you’re conscious of it or not. We use these responses to build a profile. The profile allows us to customize your training.”
“I don’t get it. Were they some sort of physical fitness tests?” he asks.
“No, not at all,” she responds, shaking her head. “They test for natural abilities. You know, some people are faster runners, some can do math like a calculator, some can bring you to tears with their voice, and then there’s the stuff that us agents can do.”
“And what exactly is that? The eye thing?” quizzes Medic.
“No, not really,” she says, stopping what she’s doing and leaning against the wall. “That’s kinda my specialty but it’s not the only thing I can do. We both know that it’s just gussied up hipster Mesmerism, right? What I’m talking about” — she pauses, slowly raising an eyebrow — “is a little more underground.”
“Like what?” he asks, deeply curious.
“Walk first,” replies The Handler with a contained enthusiasm, “then run.”
“Huh?”
“One step at a time, Medic,” she answers with a final nod.
Medic decides to switch directions. “Okay, well can you tell me something about the agency then?”
“Like what?”
“Like how do you get assignments? And what if you don’t want them? And how do you get paid?”
“Okay,” she begins, “well, we get our mission intel through a thing we call the pod. We should probably give it a better name but you’ll see it makes sense. It’s a sort of giant egg thing. The outside is made of these panels, some sort of acoustic and electromagnetic shields. Fully private, completely silent. Inside are some electronics and a collapsible recliner, aluminum and nylon I think. Pretty comfy. All of it breaks down into a big briefcase which is with Dominic right now.
“About not wanting missions, that’s not a problem,” she says, pausing pensively. “The agency has an excellent record in matching missions to agents. I’m not only talking about abilities but also desires. I want to take assignments. So I could only ever see myself rejecting a mission if I had something more urgent happening, but if I did I suppose someone else would have to take my place. Like I said, it’s hard to say.
“And what was the last question?” she asks Medic.
“How you get paid,” he reminds her.
“Oh yeah. We get paid in the same way we receive material support, phantom dead drops. We call them that because we’ve never once prearranged or planned one. We make the request and if it’s approved then they just show up. I’ve found them at the most random times and in the most random places. Sometimes it’s a hidden package or a box, sometimes just sitting out in the open. Kinda freaks me out, to be honest with you. I try not to rely on them too much. Besides, I have other ways to get what I need,” she finishes with a wink.
“So you’ve never met the people behind the drops?” he asks, perturbed.
“Never even seen anyone,” she responds with earnestly raised eyebrows. “Phantom.”
“Weird,” remarks Medic with a reflective frown.
He maintains the frown as The Handler explains how their initial encounter was essentially the same thing, a “phantom encounter”.
“I still don’t see how that’s possible,” says Medic, revisiting earlier doubt.
“Don’t know what to tell you, dude. The agency is capable of some crazy shit. You’ll just have to experience it for yourself,” she replies with a shrug.
Their conversation comes to an abrupt end as an alarm on The Handler’s phone goes off, signalling the next phase of the “disembarkation” plan.
They follow the smell of spicy food to a small room in the ship’s aft where the Malaysians have already set up the table, tin cups of hard liquor lining the edge, cards shuffled and waiting in the middle. “Don’t get too trashed tonight,” whispers The Handler to Medic as they sit down.
Another night of raucous poker is well underway. The crew imbibe heavily, cheered on by The Handler who has been secretly disposing of her own caustic drink beneath the table. She notes with satisfaction that the Malaysians soon have difficulty walking a straight line, and not just because of the increasingly agitated motions of the ship.
Medic hasn’t been as careful with his drinking but he’s sober enough to have noticed The Handler’s sleight of hand. He’s even more alert when she leans over and whispers instructions for him to follow, starting in five minutes.
The Handler quickly excuses herself to go to the toilet, putting on her best puke face for the laughing Malaysians. Medic buries himself in conversation and food until, to everyone’s surprise, the crew member assigned to man the helm of the vessel stumbles in and pulls up a chair.
“Boss want drive ship,” says the man with a heavy accent. The other Malaysians don’t seem bothered by this sudden change in the roster and welcome him back to the table with a fresh cup.
At that, Medic folds his hand and invites the trio to keep playing while he goes to check on The Handler. She’s just emerging through the disguised hatch of one of the submersibles wearing only simple black underwear as he approaches. “Here,” she says, tossing a heavy plastic bag to Medic. “Put your clothes in there. Everything else is packed and ready to go.”
“We’re leaving now? From here?” asks Medic, an anxious confusion wrinkling his face.
“Yup,” she replies distractedly as she examines a nearby control panel. “I convinced Lukas that he knows how to pilot the ship, that he needs to. Our friends should be tipsy enough by now to go along with it. Lukas will want to take his boat into port at full speed, which will be our diversion. Storm should help too. Meanwhile, we’ll slip onto shore in his getaway subs,” she concludes, pointing at both of the subs’ hatches.
“Wait!” he says, panic swelling in his chest. “I have no idea how to drive one of these!”
“Relax,” she says, grabbing his arms. “I’ve played with the controls a bit. Seems pretty simple. Watch.”
The Handler climbs into “Chance” and invites Medic to look in. She demonstrates the power switch, the light controls, the acceleration lever, and the steering joystick. There’s a headset slung over the headrest that connects to a simple panel with a few switches and a dial. Anything else, she assures him, they can figure out. “If Lukas can use them…” she finishes pointedly.
Medic’s heart is pounding as he gets undressed, lowers himself into the cushioned seat of “Second”, places the bag of clothes at his feet, and puts on the connected headset. He turns on the power, then the radio. With the “Channel 1” indicator active he says, “Hello?”
“Hey!” responds The Handler cheerily over the headset. “We lucked out on the first try. That’s a good sign!”
“It is,” he says weakly. The paralyzing onrush of reality, of what they’re about to do, is pressing in on him.
“Medic, listen to me,” she says calmly into his ears. “Just take a few deep breaths, okay? Close your eyes, forget everything around you and just breathe for a few moments. Slow and deep. I promise it’ll help.”
He does as instructed, haltingly at first but eventually building up to a slow and steady rhythm.
“Umm, Medic,” she interrupts. “We have a problem. You’ll want to close your hatch, like now.”
He quickly opens his eyes and pulls down the clear hatch, locking it into place with the levers on the sealing ring.
Just at that moment, one of the drunken crew members stumbles into view, a look of startled surprise on his face as he recognizes Medic. The man presses up against the glass and knocks on it while mouthing muted words. Medic can’t make out what he’s saying but he doesn’t need to.
The ship is rocking quite violently now and the increasingly agitated Malaysian is having trouble steadying himself.
“The only thing I haven’t figured out yet,” says The Handler over the headset, “is how to release these things. Hope we don’t have to do it from out there.”
Medic nods in agreement, unaware that she can’t see him because he’s already too focused on finding some way to release the sub. There are a few levers and handles that look like they open storage compartments or access panels. One prominently red lever to his left reads “EMERGENCY” which he assumes will release the hatch; not what he wants.
Suddenly, Medic hears a sonorous clunk and and he spins his head just in time to see the top of The Handler’s craft disappear into a violent spray of water. The splash drenches the Malaysian and the canopy of his own sub with churning seawater before the crew member manages to secure the opening with a sliding steel hatch.
“Did you do that on purpose? Are you okay?” asks Medic with an increasingly frantic tone.
There’s no response.
“Hello?!” he asks again, panicked.
Silence.
The dismal possibility that maybe she’d abandoned him there begins to creep into his thoughts.
Breathing heavily, hands sweating and shaking, Medic pulls on each of the handles and levers in front of him, confirming that none of them release anything let alone the sub.
Dismayed, he takes a deep breath and thinks about what he can possibly do now. The thought of facing Lukas and his crew conjures up increasingly bad scenarios. His only chance might be to sprint up to the deck and jump into the ocean. The storm feels rough but at least he’s near the shore. That’s something.
Puffing in a deep breath, Medic grabs the “EMERGENCY” handle, pauses a moment to mentally prepare for the mad sprint, and yanks down. With a sudden jolt the sub drops out from under him.
He reconnects with his seat in a soft thud, landing awkwardly on a metal seat belt clasp that he hadn’t noticed before. After a moment’s disorientation, he looks out of the hatch to see only inky blackness and receding circles of light shining out from the ship’s bottom.
“Holy shit!” remarks Medic at his unexpected turn of fortune. Then he hears something that sounds like tinny, whispered speech. He scrambles around for the headset that had popped off his head during the sudden descent.
“–ear me? Medic? Hello? Dude, come on! Are you there?” a familiar voice intones urgently into his ear.
“Yeah, I’m here!” replies Medic with continued amazement.
“Awesome! I thought I lost you there for a minute! Hey listen, you gotta pull the emergency lever, okay? That’s the manual emergency release. You’ll get pushed down pretty hard so–“
“I’m out already,” he cuts her off, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.
“Oh man, my bad,” she replies. “I must’ve accidentally switched channels when I dropped. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong.”
Medic lets out a loud, cathartic laugh. “Okay, so what now?” he says as he calms down.
“Turn on your outside lights and then use the joystick to turn yourself around. Right or left, doesn’t matter, just try to keep it level. Keep spinning until you see another light. That’ll be me. Stay pointing at me and I’ll come to you since you’re closer to shore. After that we just need to put a little distance between us and the distraction”, she instructs.
Medic acknowledges, activates the external lights, and begins to spin his sub horizontally. For a while he sees only iridescent bits of marine detritus and occasional clumps of glowing aquatic plants move by.
Then, in the distance, he sees a sweeping beam of light that flashes briefly as it aligns on him. Immediately he stops his sub’s rotation.
“I see you,” she says jubilantly.
“Yeah, I see you too,” he replies with a smile, subtly adjusting his sub’s position to better line up with hers.
As Medic sits in the darkness watching The Handler’s light approach he suddenly hears a dull crunch followed by a long metallic groan, like a giant rusty door being painfully wrenched from its hinges. The eerie sound seems to come from all around him.
“Good work, Lukas!” shouts The Handler triumphantly. “Let’s not waste this opportunity. I should be there in a few seconds,” she says to Medic, the shape of her underwater craft becoming more distinct.