The Agency V: The Exile Returns.

In between the last entry that was made and now, not much has happened. Or perhaps I say that because I am trying to overcome the guilt that has been brought on due to my procrastination—my procrastination against entering daily accounts of my life. The truth is that up until now I couldn’t be bothered to write anything, as my mind has always been on something (or someone) else. Orion Night is, I believe, the constant thought that invades my head every day, and I don’t know why. I’ve said that before, that I don’t know why, and I say it again: I still don’t know. About ten days have passed, and I am just as thoughtful over who he is as I was ten days ago. Just as consumed by him. At one point I thought I had lost my mind, and I can’t say that I’m thinking differently about that. But I don’t feel as annoyed with myself for thinking this, because I’ve realized that there are many individuals in this world who are slightly unwell and still function properly enough for society to accept them as being mentally stable. It could even be that there is no such thing as a mentally stable state of being, what with every know-it-all psychologist from here to Timbuktu holding to their own definitions of what mental stability really is. And now that I think about it, I’m quite stable mentally, as stable as anyone else. I can still perform all the tasks I’ve set out to do, can’t I? Nothing about me has changed, except for a questionable desire to find out what Ri is hiding. What I’ve already found out behind his back pushes me to want to learn more, and I’m well aware of what this could do to our friendship—that ship is already sailing; it’s only a matter of when. Many times I’ve considered that I might get more than I’m looking for (a euphemism for I might be killed), but if everyone ran from every fear they had, then we would never have a democracy, we would never be fighting for racial rights, and no one would know how to ride a bicycle.

A lot can happen in eight days; that is what I believe. On Day One someone who was on top of the world in every dimension of their state of being (emotionally, physically, mentally, financially) can end up a wreck in every dimension of their state of being by Day Eight, because as everyone knows, Lady Luck is no respecter of persons, neither is The Good Side of Fate, or The Good Side of Destiny, or The Universe, or whoever. Not to say that on this day, the eighth day, someone has become an emotional, financial, mental or physical wreck—well, considering what Ri, myself, and a few others have been up to during those eight days, we might have caused a few to experience wreckages of every dimension. But that is not the point at which I am driving. What I am saying is an individual can see himself standing on the white side of the black-and-white world, but when he walks into the next day, and passes through to the next and the next, he will go through a process of metamorphosis where his morals and the way he looks on the whole world will be greatly affected, even changed altogether. By the time the metamorphosis has changed, he will look at the ground and see one of three things: 1) he was never really on the white side at all, but in the grey area where good and bad are in a single chaos; therefore he has lost his moral compass 2) he was never really on the white side at all, and the removal of his previous blindness shows him that he has been on the black side all along, therefore giving him a new and negative identity, or 3) nothing, meaning the idea of our morals being divided into black and white was only someone’s idea to create a sense of belonging and purpose for himself, nothing more. So when he looks down on the ground, he doesn’t see anything—no white, no black, no grey. If he needs to create a sense of belonging for himself, he will then have to make up his own school of thought, inclusive of titles, subtitles, definitions and elaborations.

As for me, I’m still in the process of sweeping away the shards of the painstakingly-constructed glass world that has, in the passage of those eight days, fallen and smashed all around me. I know I started off this entry by mentioning ten days and not eight days, but the first two days cannot be said to have done much to do who I have become now, on this, the tenth day since the last mission. So I care only for the last eight days. Now that I think about it, I do think it is better to continue making these entries; they will be the anchor that keeps me grounded, the one thing that will be forever certain.

Every time I mull over the events of the last eight days, each scene is displayed in black and white. I have, for some reason, drawn out all the color from that collection of memories, and left only those two greatly contrasting shades. I’m not sure why. And if I reminisce on these events years later (if I’m still alive), they might still be seen in black and white without me having to place any effort into making them so. So these are my black and white memories. Notable too, is the fact that I’ve altered the sequence of events. Is this a sign that my way of thinking has also changed? Because instead of watching these black-and white scenes in the order of past to present, I watch them in another way, a very strange order…

August 10th—Sunday, 11:50 am.

Ri and I waited by a black Ford Edge for the arrival of our new target. The car was parked in front of a mall, JC Penney. It was a good enough cover on account of the number of people from the middle to upper class who frequented the place on weekends. There were many cars, and ours did not particularly stand out. We leaned on the door, staring up the road, down the road, at our feet and at the ground. I rubbed my arm, glad that I had chosen a black, short-sleeved blouse instead of a black, long-sleeved one: the day was going to be hot. The woman would be there by 11:55 am. Five minutes left to stare at nothing.

“You know what I don’t like about Sundays?” my partner asked.

“What?”

“It’s like there’s some sort of mystical rule set in stone that the day has to be dead and dull. You can feel it in the atmosphere. You’re either supposed to be at church or at home reading a book, watching stale t.v. show reruns or sleeping.”

I yawned. “You do have a point there. Sundays feel different from every other day. Which is why we should be thankful that you and I have interesting stuff to do on days like this.”

“I hate Mondays. But I hate Sundays more. That’s a good line to put on a T-shirt, don’t you think?”

“Uh-huh. We could do that. We could do that.”

He knew that my mind was elsewhere. For a while he said nothing, then, “What are you looking for?”

“What?”

“What are you looking for, I said.”

He said this because I had fallen back into the newly developed habit of looking everywhere around me. I had a perpetual, unshakable feeling that I was being watched. But whenever my eyes searched the area where I suspected the person to be, no one was there.

“Nothing. I just wish they’d hurry up.”

“They aren’t late. We are the ones who are early. We’re always minutes earlier than our targets.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I tried doing yoga; I don’t think I ever told you.”

“Really? With Kathlyn, right?”

“Yeah.”

“How was it?”

“She put in this DVD and everything went downhill from there. Everything including my pride. The hot chicks who do it, they’re hot when they do it, I’m not gonna lie, that’s partly the reason why I allowed her to leave the DVD at my place. But when guys do it, it’s—well, it’s wrong, plain and simple. Our bodies weren’t made to expose such things, if you get what I mean. I was so uncomfortable the whole time, like I was being prostituted. She commended my flexibility though. She doesn’t know anyone who’s as flexible as I am. ”

I laughed. “That comes with your job, the flexibility.”

“She doesn’t know that…So I’m not doing that again. Ever. She started an argument, like she always does, then we made up. My guess is she’s going to find something else that we can ‘do together’”. He made the quotation marks sign with his fingers and made a face. “Women. Can’t leave well enough alone.”

At 11:55 am two black Mitsubishi Outlander vehicles rolled sedately onto the road by which we waited. I thought then how easy it was for black cars to seem so official, so important, especially the large ones. But this was not for show, as we were about to learn. Not for show at all. We put off leaning on our car door because of the apathetic impression such a posture would no doubt leave upon the minds of our target and whoever else might be present. I let my arms hang at my side—they were set akimbo on my hips, and I wouldn’t want to come off as being egocentric. Fashion matters in gifted agencies for professional reasons. The doors opened, and the people emerged. Their attire was what caught our attention: they were dressed in suits, quite reminiscent of the American mobsters of the forties and fifties. All wore black jackets, black trousers, and white inside shirts, the cuffs of which were purposely exposed at the end of the jacket sleeves. Their shoes were shiny, with an almost magical quality—I thought that should a particle of dust be dumb enough to try to land on one of those, an inexplicable, microscopic laser field that hovered over it in perpetual watch for said idiotic dust particle would zap the particle to nothingness. Only the woman was dressed differently. She wore white, only white, and this automatically set her apart from the other men and women who were there as her escorts. The woman commanded most of our attention, especially mine. She was only an inch above my height, and slimmer than myself, almost waif-like. Short, platinum blonde hair, platinum blonde eyebrows, slate eyes, narrow nose, small lips. Erect back coupled with an I-am-not-amused-expression. This one, I thought, might be interesting.

She stood before us, looked at me, looked at my handsome partner—a little too long to be the kind who is unaffected by physical beauty.

“You are Agent Night?” she said. Heavy French accent.

“Yes, Ms. Laroche.” When it came to our job, he never awarded our targets with his full mega-watt smile. A fraction of it or a smirk would be professionally enough. He gave Ms. Laroche a fraction.

“And you are Agent Bright.”

“Yes, Ms. Laroche.” The usual almost imperceptible nod.

A fraction of a smile touched her face. A fraction. This, I would later learn, would always mean that she was pleased. A wide smile or a laugh would mean something entirely on the other side of the hemisphere. Something not too pleasing to whoever received it. “Monsieur Dupont will speak with you.” Only by the backward tilt of her head did we know that Monsieur Dupont was the man standing behind her. Ms. Laroche headed for the door of the passenger seat, which my partner humbly opened. I could just imagine how well he was fighting the urge to raise his eyebrows and grin as she made herself comfortable. Ri is not the kind to be daunted by ice queens; he has, on account of living with his older brother for so many years mastered the ability of weathering such icy mannerisms, Ms. Laroche, therefore, was no cause for worry.

Mr. Dupont was a tall, thick-set man with a wide face, wide-set eyes, salt-and-pepper hair and a prominent nose. He behaved as coldly as the woman, though not to such an extreme degree. His kind of chill was not remarkable, only business-like. “Good morning,” he said, in the same heavy accent. “I am Mr. Dupont, her guardian. You know what to do, right? Take her to the places I have told you. There is not much else to say, except take care of her. Make sure that you do what you are being paid to do, because one way or another we will hear of it. Yes, well…There is not much else to say, as we have spoken to your bosses about this and they have no doubt relayed everything to you.” He gave a nod, perhaps to himself as well as to us. He did not seem as distraught or as anxious as how I had guessed he would be in leaving his ward in the care of total strangers. He didn’t show much emotion. Neither did the other six French escorts standing at attention, watching us through black shades.

I spoke. “We were told what to do, sir.”

He nodded again, then strode past us to speak through the window over the lowered tinted sheet of glass to the woman in their native tongue, only a brief word—could not have lasted more than three seconds. There were no tears, no hugs. Mr. Dupont stepped back, and we got into the vehicle and drove off. I could see them for a while in the rear-view mirror, standing like black and white statues looking at us as long as we were still in sight. Then they were gone, and I became aware that, if I lowered my gaze a little, I would be staring Ms. Laroche in the face. I looked at the road before me.

“Allow me,” said our new target, “to make myself familiar with you, because you will be in my company for two days.”

We said nothing, having the feeling she didn’t really expect an answer.

“You do not know the particulars, or the details, of the events that have led me to being in this car with you. But you do know what you are supposed to do. I expect you to do your job, which I do not doubt that you will execute with perfection. There is no need to converse as if we are friends, I will not pressure you to do so. Besides, I like my silence. You will receive the next half of the payment once the job is done. You will receive nothing if it isn’t. Do you understand?”

Eleonor Laroche, we had learnt from the file we had been given that morning, had hired us to escort her to Laroche, a mansion in Midi-Pyrenees, France. The summary informed us that she was an exile who had fortuitously been saved during the murder of her family in 1993, when she was five years old. Her second cousin, her father’s first cousin, was the one responsible, and had committed the act to place himself and his own family into the seat of power.

Eleonor’s father, Wilhelm Laroche was what the file stated as the head of a large underworld organization of closely and remotely related criminals called Noir Larme, a name which, translated into English, means Jet Tears or Black Tears. When the cousin had murdered her family, he had wiped out all those who were capable of using their bloodline to claim leadership once Wilhelm Laroche was removed. Her governess had been told of the conspiracy beforehand, and had left with her and many other servants to escape the massacre. They came to California four days later. From then on, Clement Desmarais has been the new head of that criminal organization. That was as much as we knew. We were only the escorts—we didn’t need to know more.

Aside from Laroche, we were to escort her to a number of places in France, places where persons who were once loyal to the Laroches would be located, and could perhaps be counted on now to prove their loyalty to Eleonor Laroche, the young woman who intended to avenge her dead family and at the same time claim her right as the head of the Black Tears. This sounded impossible, impossible and insane, but we did not care to tell this to her. She did not seem, as she sat there in the backseat, to be the kind of person to suffer anyone to tell her that something that she thought of doing was insane. That aside, we were told that we had been given level three retaliation and two days to carry out the mission. Two days. We were not dumfounded by the short space of time we had been given, because we were only the escorts. If she did not achieve what it was that she wanted to achieve then things would be bad for her, but as long as we took her from Point A to Point B we would get our full pay at the end of the month.

We were driving in silence on our way to the Los Angeles airport, our minds distant. Laroche must have been musing on matters pertaining to her survival during the space of the following two days. My partner must have retreated into his skeleton-infested closet. As for me, my thoughts were not worlds away. In fact, they had not even left the state. But whenever a small bump in the road caused my hands to shift ever so slightly over the steering wheel, I would enter the present with a sigh f relief, relief that I was going to be out of the country for two days. Considering the things that I had done and seen in the recent past, I wouldn’t have minded if I had been asked to remain in France a little while longer.

“Phire,” Ri ventured quietly.

“I looked at him, then on the road. “Yeah.”

“Are you alright?”

“Where’s this coming from?”

“I’m just making sure.”

He usually makes sure I’m alright, just as how I always make sure that he is alright. The key to a long, successful partnership.

I smiled. “Yeah. I’m alright.”

He probably thought I really was.