I am not just hanging out at the food court. I am waiting for my activation phrase.
I have to insert myself into a wide variety of situations so that I can be more easily contacted by the government. If they use the same go-between more than once the enemy will discover a pattern and I might be attacked in my bed along with my beloved wife. I would do anything for my beloved wife. I will keep her safe from the enemies of democracy.
I think a lot about what I would do if my beloved and beautiful wife was kidnapped from me by democracy’s enemies. They would keep her chained up in a basement with concrete walls. I would not rest until I found her scent but it could take several months even to collect my first lead. The enemy would probably take her away to a prison camp in the heart of the Gobi desert and make her collect oyster shells in a big pile for the governor of the camp. Once she had cut her delicate fingers to the bone collecting all the oyster shells they would topple it over with shovels to make her think that she had failed. I cannot stand the thought of my beautiful and intelligent wife being treated in this way.
I would have to pinpoint the location of the camp using satellite data. But it is unlikely that the government would give me access to this data so I would first have to turn against my own people and break into one of their facilities. I would subdue the guards nonlethally which would add an extra quotient of difficulty to the situation. But they have wives of their own.
Then I would have to hijack a cargo plane and fly across the Russian border into the heart of the Gobi desert, avoiding radar detection by staying below the clouds. I would probably crash and get rescued by nomads and make friends with them to stay alive. The nomad chieftain would want to kill me but I would seduce his grandmother even though she is old and ugly and she would pretend to identify spirit signs in the clouds which say they have to keep me alive. And they would bring me to a lost city where I find special gauntlets made of bear paws that give me the strength I need to fetch my wife back.
It would go something like that probably.
I do not remember all the details of the missions I am sent on by the government. When I hear my activation phrase I go into a psychotic death trance and do not awaken until the mission is complete. I wake up at home in my own bed next to my beautiful snoring wife with only little physical traces to indicate to me that I have actually been on the mission.
I have a scrapbook in my garage that is extra secret and you are not allowed to tell anyone where I keep everything that I have been able to deduce about the nature of my missions so that if I am interrogated by the enemy and they threaten to torture my wife unless I tell them everything I know I will be able to save her. I know that I am not allowed to do this. That is why it has to be a secret. I would not talk if they pulled my fingernails out and pushed my eyeballs in and made me gargle a big drum of acid like I read on a forum they did in Guatemala one time. But if they touched my wife I would talk. She would be in danger if they knew.
Sometimes I try to convince my wife that I do not love her so that she will go away and not be in danger any more but she is too wise and insightful to believe that and she always sees through my deceptions. I love her so much I cannot hide it. It is very dangerous to her how much I love her. She would be luckier if she had not met me.
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In my scrapbook it says that I woke up after my last mission with a smudge of soft white ash on the inside of my left big toe. I took a picture of the ash with a digital camera and printed it out and glued it into my scrapbook. Then I showered and broke the camera and buried the pieces in a secret ditch underneath the house. My wife asked what I was doing and I told her I was hunting for a dead possum I thought I had smelt down there.
I looked up online to see if the enemy had experienced any globally recognised ash-related failures. I could not find any documented volcanic eruptions but one might have happened in secret. Houses burn down every day and it is difficult to tell if any particular burned down house was an enemy safe house or just a regular house. The whole point of safe houses is that it is difficult to tell that.
I have a training routine that looks like just normal activities to those who are not in the know. It is the only way I can keep fit for my mission without alerting the enemy agents who are no doubt surveilling me even as we speak. I am very strong. It is not suspicious for me to go to the gym as long as I do not perform any military exercises. I am friends with the other people who spend a lot of time in the gym and sometimes I act in such a way as to divert attention onto them. For instance I will convince them to perform military exercises.
I do not own a gun as all my equipment is provided to me by the government. I train my accuracy by throwing things in very precise ways. Sometimes I accidentally on purpose throw a cricket ball into a tree so I can practice climbing as well as throwing. I take a cooking class as an excuse to become comfortable with knives. The chef says that I make the best paella he has ever tasted but he says that to everyone he thinks lacks confidence and he does not know that I consider the paella irrelevant.
I listen to people to practice my overhearing skills and in case one of them is a contact who says my activation phrase. I have never been caught experimentally following people home even though it is hard to do correctly on wide suburban streets. Once I looked through an old man’s window for an hour and noted down everything he did. It was quite a lot. I did not know old men could be so busy and I reported him to the government later on the secure line they give me for emergencies in case he turned out to be an operator in disguise.
Sometimes my activation phrase comes to me in the waiting room at the dentist’s office or in the middle of a long line at the water park. Once I went underground and joined a radical protest group for three days because I got a vibe from the leader and suspected he might be a contact. I was not disappointed and he sent me on one of my longest missions yet. I woke up from that one not in my home but in a car park with the lid of a milk bottle clutched on my hand like a talisman. I do not know what the milk bottle signified or if there is a way to torture people with milk but I have it pasted onto one of the lumpiest pages of my scrapbook.
I could die at any time. There is no reason to assume I will come back safe from any of my missions. Once I woke up with an infected lump on my pinky finger and I had to hide it from my wife until the antibiotics went into effect. Another time three of my fingernails had been pulled out which is how I know I can be trusted not to talk when that happens. It is often my hands and feet that suffer the most damage which I put down to the centrality of those dextrous appendages to effective espionage.
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I have lots of skills.
I can climb concrete walls that look perfectly sheer to the naked eye by taking advantage of little-known physical laws. I can flex my tendons in such a way that they become invulnerable to swords. I can eat all poison. I can decode any encrypted message up to AES-128. I can become sexually irresistible to any human being with only fifteen minutes of preparation and a small quantity of essential oils. I speak three languages at any one time although I have to forget some to make room for others because of the method of acquisition I was taught at the academy. I play chess in my head and always win.
I know five martial arts including muay thai and bartitsu which is based on the two fundamental tactics of baiting and striking. I am expert in both. I also tied up a Mossad agent and made him teach me the highest level of krav maga over three grueling days at a facility in the Negev. Now we are friends and have set aside our differences although I do not see him as often as I would like. I have been all around the world and have useful friends in every country. I am gregarious although I have to conceal this fact to maintain my cover. It is one of the many difficulties of my life.
My wife is my best friend and she is so special to me. I would like to see my friend who is a crab fisherman on the White Sea and really a smuggler who runs the Communist blockades with crates of pop records from the West so the peasants can enjoy a psychedelic tune. But I would get in trouble. I would also like to see my friend who is a rebel in Bolivia against the government there and we are on opposite sides of the fight but sometimes we team up against the drug cartels who are enemies of both of us. And once I went hunting in Africa and was supposed to kill a lion but I made friends with the lion instead and I think he is still alive on the savannah.
I have lived a full and complex life. I do not need to work because the government pays my rent as thanks for the missions. I would do the missions anyway because it is so important we protect democracy but it is nice to have these simple issues taken care of.
But I cannot get my wife to go away and there are three messages on my cell phone. And sometimes I worry that she has been looking at the scrapbook. She does not know that I do not need to have a job and I am not sure how to explain to her that I am sitting in the food court instead of in the office where she thinks I am. She is very smart and that is why I love her but my love is dangerous as I have already explained.
I hope they say my activation phrase soon.
I do not know how to talk to her about democracy.
