Page 10 of The Kill Clause
6.
Drake hasn’t returned by the time I head out to the target’s house. Bryce. His name is Bryce, and he’s a forty-year-old hedge fund manager. When the assignments come, there’s never any high-level information, like who the target might have wronged or why Nora has assigned the particular “solution” the Company has been contracted to provide. It’s not always termination. Sometimes it’s an injury, perhaps a warning of some kind, or it could be that the target just needs to be out of commission for a time. Sometimes a media storm is required; the target needs to be found high, surrounded by hookers, or some such, and a reporter needs an anonymous tip. Something big enough to derail a career, upset an election, end a marriage.
It’s not for you to know,Nora said the last time I asked.Just know we’re in a fight for good. That we’re ever striving for progress, moving toward the light.
When I was younger, I believed everything Nora said. Lately, it’s starting to sound like bullshit. Maybe that’s what she means when she says she feels like my heart isn’t in it anymore. Maybe that’s just what people say when you stop buying whatever they happen to be selling.
It’s getting late, after ten, as I pull into Bryce’s circular drive. He’s left the gate open for me. I happen to know thathis security system is on the fritz, that none of the cameras are working. I messed around with the system on the app; I can’t have images of myself arriving at his house. I also happen to know where all the red light and gas station cameras are on the way here. Still, I was careful to keep my hood up, wear big glasses to obscure my face during the ride over. There are eyes everywhere now. People have no idea.
The house is bright, the twinkling white lights on the towering tree visible through the big front window. Bryce is most likely waiting for me in the bedroom. Our relationship, such as it is, is simple. Fuck, banter, eat, repeat. There’s not much to him really, not that I’ve seen, except his head for numbers and his enthusiasm between the sheets. He told me that he’s never read a book, that he cheated his way through high school and college with SparkNotes. Which struck me as depressing and something most people wouldn’t admit.
Except the Steve Jobs biography. Read it cover to cover.Right. Because every aspirational douchebag who fancies himself an entrepreneur has read at least that.
The screen on my phone is a field of notification bubbles, more calls from The Asshole. I almost break down and ring him back; this is a lot, even for him. Even at Christmas.
After Vegas, it was a series of secret assignations at hotel rooms and rental apartments around the world. I was still under Nora’s thumb to some extent, living at the Farm. So if we weren’t working together, Julian would meet me after jobs, and we would steal our hours late at night into the early mornings. We talked about a place of our own, coming clean to Nora and asking for permission to be together. Would she allow it? Neither of us knew. And if she said no, then what? No more assignments together? We’d have to break her rules to be together?
It went on like that for a while, Julian pressing for something more solid, more permanent. Me pushing back, afraid of angering Nora, afraid of ... I’m not sure what. That what we had couldn’t survive in the light of day, maybe? That it could exist only in secret, in the wee hours, in hidden places? Sometimes we fought about it. Then we started to argue about other things. Then it started to feel like we were only arguing, only angry.
“So why did you and Julian break up?” asked Dr. Black in our last session.
“Irreconcilable differences?”
“What does that mean to you?”
“I think at our cores, at the very center of who we were, we were just different. Had totally different values.”
“For example?”
“We don’t share the same ethics.”
“Okay.” She has a way of drawing out the word so that my response rings back to me. It sounds hollow, but maybe that’s because it was only a half truth. “Can you be more specific?”
This is why things aren’t working out with Dr. Black. Because I can only tell her so much. I can’t say: “Well, in our work as hired assassins, we have fundamental differences in our opinion of collateral damage.” So I said something like, “There are certain ethics in our profession as IT security consultants—who we work for, what we do, why we do it, who may or may not be wronged—on which we couldn’t agree.”
“Ethics are very important to you,” she said.
“That’s right. How we behave, how we treat others, it’s foundational, isn’t it?”
What a hypocrite, right?
Still, after a job, I might experience heightened anxiety, feel the tendrils of a darkness pulling at me. Julian, on the other hand, was energized, infused with a kind of bizarregiddiness. (Hence our Elvis wedding in Vegas.) As if he was drunk with power. He would want to party, to stay up all night. I just wanted to crawl into bed and wait for the darkness to pass, replaying the job and others, going over details, critiquing my performance, examining flaws, mourning mistakes. At first, he tried to comfort me, but eventually he would just get annoyed, leave me to it.
The truth was that he saw what we did as a job, and only a job. He dehumanized targets to the degree that he didn’t view them as people, but I never forgot it—perhaps deeply flawed people, but still human. People with children or lovers, parents or friends left behind to grieve. He refused to ever use their names, avoided any news coverage, and never wanted to talk about a job after its successful completion.
“It comes down to faith in Nora,” Julian told me. “Do you believe in her mission?”
“What is her mission exactly?”
“That’s above my pay grade. Our pay grade.”
“How can you believe in the mission if you don’t know what it is?”
“I believe in Nora.”
“It’s more than that,” I said. “You’re not just doing this for Nora. There’s a part of you that likes it. A part of you that wants to kill.”
Julian is another rescue, like me, like Drake. Another foster kid, he was kicked out of the army, where he’d enlisted as soon as he was eighteen; his answers about why have been vague. Nora found Julian living in a shanty town outside Portland, hustling for daywork, twenty years old and thinking about taking his life.The reason the army didn’t want me was the reason Nora did.How many of us are there, doing her bidding? Lord knows, she pays us well. But I don’t thinkthat’s why any of us do this. We all have our reasons, some of them darker than others.
