I asked him about his family. He told me that he didn’t have any family left. His parents both made it to the end, dying of natural causes well into their eighties. He’d had a wife once and a daughter. Both had been killed. His wife was a civilian before he married her but that didn’t stop them. She was murdered eight years into their marriage when their daughter was just three years old. It was a sloppy job, he said. She was killed in their home one day while he was out running errands. He was pretty sure they were looking for him. When he got home that day, there was blood everywhere, blood in multiple rooms. She must have put up one hell of a fight, he said. He found her body sprawled across the dining room table. They had stayed and watched her die before laying her on the table and leaving. His daughter was home the whole time. When he got home, she was hiding in the bedroom closet. He couldn’t be sure if she ran there or if they put her there. She never said. She never spoke about what she saw that day, not once. She never talked about what she saw them do to her mother but as soon as she was old enough, she threw herself into the War. We have to teach some people to hate. Others learn it all on their own. She became a high-level Intelligence officer, one of the youngest in history. She rose through the ranks quickly because of how aggressive she was. That aggressiveness made her a prime target. She was murdered just two weeks shy of her twenty-eighth birthday. “Look, Joe, I don’t like ’em and I’m proud that I’ve done my part in the fight against ’em,” Dan said to me as he drove, “but too much hate will ruin you. My poor little girl, I don’t know if she had more than a couple of happy days in her life after seeing what happened to her mother. I’ve always felt guilty about that.” We were silent for a few moments. “Enough about me, son. What about you?” he said, slapping the top of my knee.
I didn’t expect to tell him much. What was there to tell? Once I started speaking, though, it was hard to stop. I told him about growing up in New Jersey, about my family members who had been killed in the War. I told him about my job, about what being a “working man” entailed nowadays. He was thrilled to hear the War stories. He wanted to know as many details as possible. He seemed to think that my life was extremely exciting. To him I was James Bond, no matter what that bastard Allen had said about me being a pawn. I told him about how my two best friends were “working men” too. I loved using the phrase in front of Dan. It made me feel honest. I told him all about my adventures at the Jersey Shore, embellishing the story in some places. Dan ate every bit of it up. The only thing I didn’t tell him about was Montreal. I didn’t tell him about you.
After about an hour on the road, we pulled into a little retirement community just outside downtown Naples called Crystal Ponds. We drove slowly through the neighborhood. Everybody we passed waved to Dan and Dan waved back to everyone. All of the lawns were superbly manicured and there was a flagpole adorned with a waving American flag in every yard. After making a couple of slow turns we pulled to the end of a cul-de-sac and into Dan’s driveway. Dan’s house was a small white ranch sitting in front of a tiny pond. “We’re home, kid,” Dan said to me after pulling into the garage and turning off the car engine. “Go inside and grab yourself a drink. I’m going to get the mail.” Then Dan hopped out of the driver’s seat and began sauntering down the driveway toward the mailbox.
I walked into the little house and was immediately hit by the rush of cool air from the air conditioning inside. The first room that I stepped into was the kitchen. Not wanting to disappoint Dan, I decided to take him up on his offer and help myself to a drink. I walked over to the refrigerator and opened it. Everything in the fridge was newly stocked. There were two full six packs of beer, an unopened loaf of bread, an unopened orange juice, an unopened package of hot dogs, and on and on. Dan had done some shopping in anticipation of my visit. God knows what he ate when I wasn’t there. I reached into the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer. I twisted off the cap and threw it in the garbage under the sink. That’s when Dan walked in. He spotted me with the beer in my hand and asked, “Mind if I join you?”
“Be my guest,” I replied. I turned back toward the fridge and pulled out another bottle. Then we sat at the kitchen counter together and drank our beer in comfortable silence. “So, Dan, I believe you have a package for me,” I said to him, midway through our beer.
“Yes, sir,” Dan replied. “Wait here.” Dan walked off into another room and returned with a familiar, sealed manila envelope. “I suppose you’re going to want some time alone to go over that?” Dan asked as he handed me the package.
“I think that’d be best,” I replied, feeling the weight of the package in my hand. It was light—that tended to mean that the job was supposed to be pretty easy.
“My office is just down the hall.” Dan pointed in the direction from which he had come with the envelope. “I won’t bother you while you’re working. Just let me know if you need anything.”
“Thanks, Dan.” I took the package and began walking down the hall toward the office.
“You going to be up for some dinner tonight?” Dan asked as I walked away, eager for the company.
“You name it, Dan, and I’m up for it,” I replied. I was eager for the company too. I turned into Dan’s office and closed the door behind me.
Dan’s office was just a small room with a sofa and a desk. Above the desk were bookshelves containing a few books and a bunch of pictures. I stared at the pictures for a while. It was obvious that every picture was of Dan’s family. In some, the colors were fading into a sepia tone. One was in black and white. Not a single picture could have been less than thirty years old. It was like Dan’s life had stopped then. There was one of Dan and his dad. Dan had to have been about eight years old but he looked exactly the same. In the picture, Dan was holding a fish that he had just caught up to the camera. His father was squatting down behind him with a wide grin on his face. There was a picture of Dan and his wife at their wedding, decked out to the nines. Dan’s wife was gorgeous. She looked a little bit like you, only taller. I imagined for a moment what you’d look like in a wedding dress. There was a black-and-white picture of two people that, from the looks of them, must have been Dan’s mother and father looking young, smiling, standing in front of a small box with a roof that I could only assume was their first home. Then there was the picture that stopped me cold. It was a picture of Dan and his wife, standing next to each other, Dan’s arm draped around his wife’s shoulder. His wife was holding their baby girl in her arms. In the picture, Dan and his wife were gazing directly at the camera, but the little girl, who couldn’t have been more than six months old, was staring up, smiling at her father. Finally, there was the newest picture, still probably at least thirty years old, but the one whose color had faded the least. It was a picture of Dan’s daughter, as a teenager, standing in a white, puffy prom dress next to a pimply faced boy in a tuxedo. In this picture, Dan’s daughter was smiling. This must have been one of her few happy days. As I stared at the picture, Dan’s voice echoed in my head, reminding me, “Too much hate will ruin you.” “But not enough and the world falls into chaos,” I whispered to myself. I sat down at the desk, opened up the envelope, and began to study the next man whose life I was supposed to end.
My target’s name was Jimon Matsudo but he just went by the name “Jim.” He was born in Hawaii to Japanese immigrants and fought for the United States in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. He was a logistics expert who had, throughout his career, planned multiple deadly and strategic operations for the United States Army. He had also, separately, planned multiple deadly and strategic operations against us. He retired from the U.S. Army as a major general. As far as our Intelligence could tell, he stopped actively planning operations against us at about the same time. To this day, however, he continued training their logistic experts. In fact, most of their top guys had been trained directly by Mr. Matsudo. It was impossible to gauge exactly how much damage he had caused in his lifetime, either directly or through his pupils, but taking Mr. Matsudo out would apparent
ly be an enormous blow to their operations. According to my paperwork, this was a key strategic strike. Even so, Mr. Matsudo apparently kept a low profile, with little evidence of protection. It looked to me like the job would be relatively easy. Then I got to the end of the report, the part that contained the information I needed to actually find my target. That’s when I found out that my target lived in a small, quiet, unguarded retirement community in Naples called Crystal Ponds. That bastard Allen had me killing one of my host’s neighbors. Brian never would have pulled a bullshit move like that. I couldn’t help but think that this was a test.
That night, after I had reviewed my target’s file and slipped the envelope into one of the drawers in Dan’s desk, Dan and I headed out for dinner. Instead of driving toward the fancy part of Naples, we drove in the other direction. We went to some backwoods joint that served ribs and catfish in the front and had live country music in the back by the bar. Dan told me that he couldn’t stand the pretentious new restaurants downtown. The ribs were great, drowned in a spicy barbecue sauce. Dan and I threw back a few more beers while we ate. The more Dan had to drink the more interested he became in my job. To Dan, I really was a hero. I was the avenger of his wife and daughter. I’ll have to be honest, I ate it up. After the verbal beat-down that Allen had given me on the phone, it felt good to be told that I was somebody; that there was a good reason why I didn’t have a life. It felt good to be told that the trade-offs that I’d made weren’t a complete waste.
We went to the bar for a few more drinks after dinner. “So, what else do you have to do to get your job down here done?” he asked me in between beers.
“I’ll go out tomorrow to do some reconnaissance, check out the target’s patterns and tendencies, try to figure out the best time and place to make my move. To be honest, this job looks pretty easy. I don’t think there should be too much trouble.” The quicker the job was done, the quicker I might be able to get back to Montreal, I hoped.
“Reconnaissance, huh? Back in my day, you were just given a name. You’d go out and find the bastard and do the job. Bang, bang, two in the head behind the shed, that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, well, they don’t make them like you anymore, Dan,” I replied. I couldn’t help but think about how much Dan would like Michael.
“Nah. It’s just more complicated now,” Dan said. “You kids have it a lot harder than we had it in my day. I don’t think I’d last twenty minutes on the job today. God bless you.” Dan lifted his bottle of beer toward me in a toast. “So, who’s the bastard?” Dan asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Who’s the bastard that you’re going to kill?” he asked again, more loudly than I would have liked.
“I really don’t think I can tell you that,” I whispered back to him. I could immediately see the disappointment in his eyes. “It’s too dangerous.”
“What, I buy you dinner, buy you beers, welcome you into my home, and you still don’t think you can trust me?” Dan was kidding. He knew the rules. Still, he would have loved for me to answer him.
“It’s not that,” I replied. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s that the information is dangerous. The more people who have it, the more dangerous it becomes, for you and for me.” I swallowed hard. “That’s what they taught me.”
“I know. I know. Fucking protocol, right?” Dan said, slapping me on the back. “Play it by the book, kid. Make me proud.” Dan paused for a moment, trying to think of something else to say, trying to think of something else that mattered. Dan threw back the rest of his beer. When he was done he slammed his hand back down on the bar. “Barkeep,” he shouted, “two scotches, neat. The cheapest single malt you got.” The bartender came over and poured us two half full glasses of scotch. Dan lifted his glass toward me and made a toast. It sounded like an old toast, like Dan had lifted a glass to it many times before. “To breaking the bastards’ backs before they break ours,” Dan said.
I was game. “To remembering what it is we’re fighting for,” I countered. Dan was pleased, finding a drunken man’s wisdom in my words.
Dan put his hand over my glass to make sure that I didn’t drink before he was finished. “I got one more, one more.” Dan lifted his glass in the air again and looked me in the eyes. “To not drinking alone.” Then Dan took his hand off my glass and we both threw our heads back and swallowed our drinks whole. The cheap shit burned and the burn felt good. After that, we paid our tab and headed home.
We were both still a little drunk when we got back to the house. There was no way that Dan should have been driving, but that didn’t seem to faze him any. I was feeling pretty good. Then I remembered what Jared had told me back at the beach. He told me that these old guys would tell stories that would burn your ear off. I had to imagine that Dan was pretty high up in the ranks when he retired. I wondered if he knew something.
“I think I’m going to call it a night there, kiddo,” Dan said to me as we walked into the kitchen from the garage.
“Wait,” I said, not sure where I was going with this. “I’ve got a question for you, Dan,” I said.
Dan looked at me. I could see the old soldier in him now. He wasn’t dead. It wasn’t too long ago. “Shoot,” he directed me.
“You were in the War a long time.” Dan nodded. “So did they ever tell you what the whole thing was about?”
“The War?” Dan asked.
“Yeah,” I said, though I almost told him to forget it. Maybe I didn’t want to know. What if knowing made things worse? I’d watched my family die in the name of this War. I’d killed in the name of this War. What if it wasn’t worth it? Dan looked as if he had suddenly become sober.
“Sit down,” Dan said, pointing to the small table in the corner of his kitchen. I walked over, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Instead of walking to me, Dan walked to the refrigerator. He opened the door and took out another two bottles of beer. He twisted off the caps, placed a beer in front of me, and then sat in the chair on the other side of the table.
He took a long swig from his beer. “What do you know?” he asked me.
“I’ve heard stories,” I answered.
“What stories have you heard?” he asked. I wanted him to just tell me the truth. I didn’t want to play games anymore.
I cleared my throat. “The one I’ve heard the most is that hundreds of years ago, we were slaves. They were the slave masters. But we revolted and after years of battle, we won. So they told us we were free and we left. But as we left, we got word that they’d already begun enslaving other people. Our leaders stood up and said that we couldn’t let them do that. We knew what it was like to be slaves and we couldn’t let it happen to other people, especially other people who were basically just taking our place, people who would be free if it wasn’t for us. So we went back to fight them for everyone’s freedom and that was the beginning of the War.” I looked up at Dan. I tried to figure out what was going on in his head but I was too drunk. I couldn’t read him. “So as long as we fight them, the innocent people stay free.”
Dan leaned back in his chair. He took another slug from his beer. I could see that it was already nearly half finished. “I don’t have anything to add to that,” he said, putting the beer down on the table.
“So you’re telling me that everything I just said is totally accurate?” I asked.
“As far as I know,” Dan said. He was holding something back now. I could tell.
“I also heard that there used to be five groups fighting and that we’re the only two groups left,” I said.
Dan looked uneasy. “I think there’s a kernel of truth to each of the stories.”
He was bullshitting me. I didn’t expect that from Dan. “How is that possible, Dan? How is it possible that we started fighting them because we were slaves AND that there were originally five groups fighting each other? How can there be a kernel of truth to both of those stories? Do you even know the truth, Dan? Because if you don’t, just tell me.” I waited for his answ
er. He sat there in silence for some time. Then he stood up.
“Wait here,” he said to me. He walked away from the table and into his office. I stayed in my chair. I could hear him rummaging through the closet of his office, lifting boxes down from the top shelf. About five minutes later, he returned holding a picture in his hand.
“You see this?” he said to me, handing me the picture. It was an old picture of a young Dan shaking hands with a tall, dark-haired man with a mustache. Dan couldn’t have been more than thirty years old. The man with the mustache had to have been in his fifties. “Do you know who that is?” Dan asked me. I shook my head. I had never seen the man before. “That’s General Corbin,” Dan said, “General William Corbin. Of course, ‘general’ wasn’t a real title in the War, everyone just called him General Corbin or just the General. He was the head of North American operations when I was working. The man was a genius. A lot of the methods and protocol that you use today were his design. He turned the War around for us in North America.” I looked at the picture again. It was hard to imagine the man in the picture doing all that. “And you’ve never heard of him?”
“No,” I answered.
Dan shook his head and laughed. “What do they teach you kids nowadays? Anyway, there’s a reason why I’m telling you all this. After my twentieth kill, and twenty was a lot back then, mind you, I was invited to have dinner with the General.” Dan had told me that he hadn’t kept track of how many people he’d killed. He obviously knew more than he let on. Dan pointed his finger at the picture on the table. “That picture was taken during that dinner.” I could feel myself sobering up as Dan spoke. “I was a cocky kid back then, kind of like you.” It was clear that Dan meant it as a compliment. “So at that dinner, I asked the General the same question you just asked me. Which one of the stories was true? And you know what he told me?” I shook my head. “He told me that he didn’t know either. He told me that he didn’t want to know. It wasn’t important to him. What was important was that each soldier picks the story that inspires them the most and believes that story.”