CIA Headquarters

Langley

My name is Mary West.

I am a CIA agent.

I have been working for the CIA for the past eight years. They recruited me when I was only fifteen. My work consists mostly of covert missions and long-term undercover assignments.

I am the CIA's most prized possession. And that wasn't just because I was pretty.

I began working for them when I was fifteen, but I was already in training as early as age seven. How did that happen? Well, I guess it's a fucking long story, and also the reason how I became, probably, the most indispensible member of the black-ops division.

Just know that I hadn't always been working for the CIA.

My parents were killed when I was six. I was told that it was in a car crash, but I wasn't born yesterday. I know that my parents didn't simply die of said stupid make-believe incident but so far, I still haven't uncovered the truth. That's the primary reason why I agreed to work for the CIA, to know the truth behind the death of my parents.

Anyway, since I was orphaned at six, I was put into the system. I lived in an orphanage for about a week, and then, as I remember, a couple took me in. When I asked the people at the orphanage, they said the couple was going to be my new parents.

They couldn't have been more wrong.

The next six years of my life became a huge blur of killing, blood, more killing, training, a little bit of fucking, and other fucked up shit. They trained me to become the best. I almost died in the process. My IQ was through the roof because they tortured me if I didn't answer questions correctly. My reflexes were next to no one because they electrocuted me whenever I didn't react on time.

Everything about me, my skills, my everything, was programmed into me. I was a fucking robot trained to kill and to kill only. They started young. They said it was like teaching a child to play the piano, seeing one's potential at a very young age and holding onto it, honing it, until it became perfect, one of a kind. Exceptional.

It was a few years later when I realized that I wasn't an agent. I was actually an assassin.

My first assignment was when I was twelve. I was sent to kill an oil magnate's son.

It was easy, really. Too easy.

I wasn't stupid. I had a feeling that I wasn't working for the good guys. I knew that the moment they touched that live wire to my body when I was only seven years old. They were sick fucks, experimenting on children, making them soldiers to fight in a war that they didn't even know. They experimented on children, yes, because I knew I wasn't the only one. I knew.

But there wasn't anything I could do. It wasn't because I didn't know what to do though. It was just because I didn't know what to do. I'd never known a life apart from them, apart from what I was raised in, and I was afraid that if I try to escape, I wouldn't be able to make it.

Besides, I knew that if they saw the slightest indication of disobeying an order, they'd get rid of me. Quite as easily as I dispatched that oil magnate's son.

I've been to many more assignments since then, and I never questioned their intentions, not once, because I was a soldier. I was trained never to ask questions, to do as I was told. So I just went along with them. As long as they gave me food and a place to sleep in, I never raised a question.

That was until the assignment that changed my life at the age of fifteen.

On site, I was captured by the enemy while I was on my way to clean up a "mess". As I was finishing up, I didn't realize immediately that it was a trap. They were waiting for me. I really couldn't remember if it was a whole army or not. It didn't really matter. At the time I was just really pissed that they got the jump on me because that never happened. I was the best. Thinking about it now though, I should have realized.

I'd been betrayed. Given up. I don't know, probably as a distraction or something.

They didn't kill me. Of course not. It was common knowledge that you never kill a captive, unless absolutely necessary. You interrogate them and get what you want by whatever means necessary.

When I woke up, I was tied to a chair in the middle of a dark, spacious room. There was nothing special about the room. It just seemed like an ordinary motel room, actually, except there were no beds. They asked me the standard questions about the people I worked for and what sort of work I did for them.

Of course I knew what to do. It has been grilled into me since I was a little girl that if I was captured and couldn't kill myself, I was to endure for as a long as possible. Tell them nothing until I found a way to off myself by any means possible.

So they took out some of my teeth, pulled out my toenails, dipped my head in buckets of water until I was almost drowning and some other possibly fucked up shit (this is how I lost the little toe on my left feet actually). I endured though, all the while thinking I'd been through worse because I had. I really had.

That kind of puts into perspective just how fucked up the people who trained me were.

When I still refused to talk, they knocked me out again and put me in a plane. They drugged me. I nearly died. I couldn't do a thing. I remember I kept wishing for death just so the pain would go away. I wasn't even afforded that luxury.

And then, when I woke up, I was already in a hospital, facing an old guy I've never met in my entire life.

Well, in his defense, he wasn't really that old, probably in his early forties or something. I couldn't really think properly. The drugs were still coursing through my system, and I knew it would be one bitch of a withdrawal when they make me quit cold turkey. It was probably part of the whole torture thing they got going on. My cheeks felt numb but at least, the teeth they pulled out didn't hurt anymore. My feet were bandaged, so were my hands.

My body didn't hurt, but I felt fucking numb as hell.

"Who the fuck are you?" I asked groggily. The words probably didn't come out as nicely as I wanted them. They probably sounded something like hurdfkaru?

"My name is George West," he answered. "I am the head of the black-ops division of the CIA. I am also the assistant director."

"What do you want with me?" I asked. At that point then, I really didn't care what they wanted. I just said it to say something. There were so many things around me that I could use to kill myself. As soon as he was out, I was gonna do it.

"You have been in Interpol's most wanted list for a long time now," he answered, shaking his head. "Killing innocent people. Terrorizing honest, hardworking men." His tone was flat, but despite my drugged state, I could hear the anger behind it.

Despite everything though, I couldn't hold back my laugh. "Honest, hardworking men?" I said, fighting through the fog that was threatening to envelope me. Yeah, right, those businessmen who used children, workers that were never paid, those people that treated their workers like slaves, yeah they were so fucking totally honest.

I may have never questioned my orders but I made sure I knew my victims before I offed them. I didn't know then why I did that. I just did. I suppose now that I think about it, I probably did it to make myself feel better.

He didn't say a thing. He was probably thinking the same thing as I was, then he changed track entirely. "You have been working for an organization called the Enoch. It's a group who specializes in organized crime. They have been using you to eliminate certain people who they didn't feel like keeping alive, to retrieve and deliver objects, packages and whatever you have already done for their profit," he explained, staring me straight in the eye.

It wasn't anything I didn't already know so I just stared back, willing him to blink first.

But I did, and I knew then that I lost. "How do you expect me to react?" I asked flatly.

"I am not expecting you to do anything," he answered just as flatly.

"Well, obviously you have an agenda here," I told him, trying my best to sit up. I did manage to do that in about ten minutes. "So the CIA, really? You're the guys who captured me, right?"

"Yes," he said, nodding.

"You nearly killed me. Nearly being the operative word. You could have just as easily killed me, seeing as you already know who I work for. I don't think you have any further use for me," I said as calmly as I could.

I was trained to be like that. Even though every nerve in my body was screaming at me to kill the person in front of me, I knew I had to stay calm.

"For your crimes, it wouldn't be enough to kill you," he said. "You may only be a child, but we cannot let you go. You may not know what you're doing, and I believe that you really had no intention of growing up in that kind of life, but it is too late now. For you."

I already knew that. I knew that the moment I was kind of old enough to understand some of what I was doing. "Then kill me," I said determinedly.

I wasn't afraid of death. I had never been afraid of it. The worst enemies were the people who didn't have anything to lose.

I was and am one of those people.

"However," he began before I could protest some more. "I also recognize real talent. You are born for this. You are made for this. It would be a waste to not make use of you."

It occurred to me then that I probably should have been pissed when he referred to me as something to be used, but it didn't really register. I was so used to being referred to that way my entire life. It didn't matter, really. I was a thing, made for this. Born for it.

"Wow, I'm flattered," I said sarcastically. The motherfucker held up his hand to silence me so he could continue. I wanted to spit on his face and watch him die a painful death.

"I will give you the chance to redeem yourself. You will work for us. You will help us, the CIA, to eliminate Enoch. You will do whatever we ask of you, no questions, and then we will keep you alive. Do we have an agreement?"

So same job then, just a different master.

He was still looking at me as though he knew there was no other answer for me but to say yes. I supposed then that that was true, really. If I wanted to stay alive, I'd have to say yes.

"Well, you can go to hell," I said with a sneer.