Snippet: “Project SHIVA – Prologue.”

No, really, I’ve been thinking about this one lately.

Project SHIVA – prologue
St Louis, 2006

Even spies get old.

Jack Brinley felt that that was somewhat unfair, actually. When he was smack-dab in the middle of his career, Jack always assumed that it would all end somewhere godforsaken, in an abrupt fashion, and with nobody around to care afterwards. That was fine, though; because the corollary to that would be that at least he’d be going out at the top of his game. You didn’t want to fail at your job, but you don’t want to live long enough to stop getting to do it, either.

But that was what happened. Go out the door almost willingly in ‘96, spend the next ten years pretending to write your memoirs, wait for the clock to run out. Deflect questions about what you did, until you realize that saying nothing and smiling faintly was usually all that people wanted to know. Play grandpa — and wasn’t that an alarming, but ultimately welcome, late-life revelation to have? — and practice your cover as a ‘character.’ It actually wasn’t so bad. Compared to prison, a mental ward, or an unmarked grave in Delaware? It wasn’t bad at all.

The most interesting thing about it all, Jack mused, was how little he felt like talking about — everything, really. He’d expected to have to constantly watch his speech, bite his tongue to keep it from spilling out horrible revelations, and maybe even gag himself as he slept. But it turned out that everything about his career — especially its malignant highlights — fit snugly and safely into the mental box he had put it into. If it weren’t for this yearly chore that he still went through, Jack thought that he might even end up not remembering what he did at all.

But the chore still remained. It was simple enough. You found a pay phone, called a specific number, and told whoever answered on the other end to keep the files on hold. Jack had been doing it for thirty years, both before retirement and afterward; and as he watched the growth of computers the agent grew more impressed with the simple analog security of the measure. No email to trace, no papers to file. You just needed two people and a public phone system. Very, very elegant. OK, it wasn’t as easy to find a pay phone as it used to be, but still.

In a more dramatic sort of story, Jack Brinley would have been hit by the bus on the way back to his apartment. But he was instead more prosaically struck down six weeks later, thanks to a malfunctioning brake line and some fair nasty snow conditions. It was, nonetheless, an accident that took place in somewhere a bit out of the way, happened in a reasonably abrupt fashion, and Jack’s funeral would be attended by only the people that knew him after he retired.

Which was, indeed, a bit of a comfort to him, in those final moments. It could have all been worse. The universe had caught up to him in time.

The end of the world could be somebody else’s problem.