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Killer Code

Piece for NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge 2017

Genre: Spy, Subject: Counseling, Character: A hostage

Word Count: 2453

A special agent is faced with an old enemy seeking revenge; the father of a young girl he had killed accidentally in a siege gone wrong. With only his student, an ex-vigilante hacker, by his side, he must try to save the lives of his wife and infant son. 

Three years had passed since the death of Leo Bianchi’s daughter. Charlize was only fourteen, still clad in her school uniform when she was shot in the head during a firefight between Bianchi’s men and the government special agents who had been targeting the crime family for years. I knew the anniversary was coming up because I still had nightmares about that day and they intensified the closer it got. I still feel my finger pulling the trigger. I still see the life fading from Charlize's blue eyes. Almost every night I hear Bianchi’s tormented cries as he realized his little girl was dead.

When I have those nightmares, I have to go into my son’s room and cradle him for a little while. My wife, Manon, calls him “Houdini” because he always finds a way to escape from his confines. By hook or by crook he will get around every baby safe gate and playpen to find us.  Even though he was growing up and becoming a little character, I still cradle him as though he was a tiny newborn, and as I do, I understand the sound Leo Bianchi made.

After the accident, I took a leave of absence. I didn’t want it, I wanted to bury my head in the sand, but I’m glad I was forced to take it. The lawyers managed to worm me out of any criminal charge; Bianchi’s men had killed many more of our's, but I was still moved to a newer clandestine unit that my bosses were developing, training special agents to work like hackers and take down targets remotely. I ended up with a more supervisory role, giving orders rather than getting into the dirty work. I wasn’t trusted out on the field, yet, so I stayed behind. I still kept my service pistol with me at all times, because of the paranoia that someone may one day make me pay for what I had done to Charlize.

It was getting easier and easier to monitor targets these days. With better gadgets more accessible and affordable, the public put anything and everything online. They buy things with their electronic wallets, they tweet their locations for lunch, they send their most private photographs to their lovers. And when everything is online, everything is easier for the wrong hands to get a hold of.

Chosposi Austin used to be those wrong hands. She was a millennial who, somehow, managed to hack into the most secure network in the world. Cho faced an ultimatum; use her skills for the good of the government, or face a prison sentence.

Cho was one of my targets, the best I had ever seen. I still don’t know exactly how she managed to break down every single firewall we had and gather the most closed off documents; documents even the President couldn’t get his hands on. She had no qualms about using the sensitive information against anyone and everyone. She was the perfect candidate for the new, highly skilled technicians we needed. Vigilante hackers were always going to be better than us. Where we had the connections and technology to break down barriers, they had the guts and brawn to do it on so much less.

It wasn’t just the fact that she was highly intelligent that caught my attention, and she was one of the most gifted people out there. Cho flew through the special agents testing like we were asking her “What color is the green ball?” And yet she wasn’t this reclusive, nerdy girl with little social skills. She was a vibrant extrovert who went shopping at the mall with her friends and drank beers at bars on a Saturday night. She lived on a reservation with her family, working at a clothing store four days a week and tending the horses the other days. She was a normal girl, with a normal life to everyone on the outside. That was what caught my attention, her ability to appear just like everyone else. Hiding her true identity like a millennial Clark Kent. She fascinated me, captivated me.

Maybe suggesting that she would make a valuable asset to our team was entirely for selfish reasons. I saw potential to make her one of the good guys and I wanted to be the one to steer her in the right direction. Teach her how to use everything that she had taught herself for the greater good instead of filling this void that she had somewhere inside of her. Maybe I was using her to fill the void I had inside of me. Coaching her and guiding her towards this greatness that I took away from myself when I killed Charlize.

When I first started working with Cho, I thought it was going to be a breeze. Intelligent and fast-thinking, I thought she was going to grab the bull by the horns and rise to the top of the hierarchy faster than anyone had before. But what I found was that she had issues. There was no obvious reason for it, but she thrived on being powerful. The power she held when she had the worst of your past organized neatly in a laptop, ready to make you do whatever she wanted you to because, if she chose, she could ruin your life.

She found out about Charlize pretty quickly. Obviously, the first person she planned on manipulating was her mentor. Cho was met with something she hadn’t before, though. I was stone-faced, unmoved by her exploitation. No matter how hard she tried, her manipulation techniques didn’t work on me. She couldn’t find anything else about me online, so all she had to go on was that one legal document. That’s when I finally broke through and she started to listen. That was the moment she started to learn and understand that this opportunity she had was going to help her channel that itching feeling of powerlessness into something productive. Something good. That Cho could fill the void she had by doing to right thing. By being the hero instead of the villain.

Cho was desperate to finally get out on the field and crack down on a target of her own. She wanted the action that I had experienced and told her stories about, she wanted to be a real special agent. I tried to explain to her that the person sat in front of the computer was composed and steady, five steps ahead at all times with every situation planned for in advance. When the screens were taken away, she was reckless and impulsive, her immaturity and superfluous thrill-seeking making her an easy prey. Cho needed to learn how to keep the composure she had in front of the screen when face to face with her target.

We worked together solidly for a year and a half. It wasn’t just me teaching Cho how to become a special agent, either. She taught me so much about technological warfare. Even though I’d been in the department for more than a year, there were things hackers could do that I couldn’t even fathom until she showed me. How easy she found it to hack a nuclear power plant, to cut the power or to combust a reactor. Cho told me she even knew how to hack a pacemaker, but she never tried it out.

She also helped me deal with what I had done to Charlize. Cho was the only one the only one I told my side of the story to, warts and all. Although I was resistant on showing my emotions, due to the agent training and my annoying stubbornness, Cho could see straight through it. She saw human emotion like a hard drive; just needing to be studied before rewiring it.

On the night of the anniversary, Cho asked me to go for a drink with her after work. I politely declined, partially because I don’t drink, but mostly because I didn’t know what her intentions were for the drink. Drink away the memories? Drink until I forget my wife? I instead invited Cho over to my house for dinner. I warned her that dinner would be a Thai takeout and not a fancy, home cooked meal, but she accepted anyway.

Arriving at my home, we found the door barged open. Where other people may have gone into a blind rage, storming the house, the years and years of training had me remaining calm, even if the hostages or victims were my wife and infant son. When Cho turned to me and parted her lips to say something, I swiftly placed my fingers over them and motioned for her to keep quiet. I had a light compact revolver hidden in my coat pocket in the armoire in the hallway, I took it out and gave it to Cho. I had considered telling her to hide, but I knew she wouldn’t. It was easier to just give her orders I knew she wouldn’t disobey.

The house was dark, whoever broke into my home did so while it was still light outside. Manon was terrible for leaving every light on in the house. I swept the entire ground floor; nothing was out of place, not even a picture frame out of line. I motioned for Cho to follow me outside. There was a staircase that led up to the balcony of the master bedroom. Soft orange light glowed against the white exterior wall from the french windows.

As Cho and I crept up the stairs, she grabbed my arm, signaling for me to listen. There were three voices, from what I could gather, whispering in Italian. Cho heard it too. She mouthed “Bianchi” at me, and I felt the color drain from my cheeks. She shook her head as I reached for my pistol, her eyes telling me more than words could. She wasn’t guessing, she knew it was Bianchi. I didn’t want to believe what my gut was telling me, but she knew it was him.

Our heads both snapped towards the top of the stairs when the sound of the door caught our attention. Leo Bianchi stood proudly before us, fresh from high-security prison, feet wide apart and arms crossed. He asked us to join him in the bedroom, Chosposi and I. When I stepped through the balcony door, I saw my wife kneeling on the floor, cradling our infant son. She whimpered, hyperventilating from the panic, her lips turning a soft purple.

“My old friend,” Bianchi said, his baritone voice bounced off the walls in a thick, Italian accent, “I was informed that you took your wife’s name when you married her. I feel it must be some kind of, what is the English word? Redenizone, redemption. Stripping yourself of, well, yourself. Bousignac is much more exotic, though,”

Bianchi took strong strides over to my wife, kneeling down before her and gently wiping away her tears. He moved his hand to stroke the black hair on my son’s head, so softly and delicately, the well practiced touch of a father. He was taunting me, showing me he had complete control and ability to do harm and choosing not to. “Raphael is a very stoic name you chose, Manon, mia cara. Names are very important. My wife chose Charlize, but I never call her that. Patatina, little potato, that’s what I call her. A silly name, but traditional,”   

His gentleness mocked me while his goons were stood with assault rifles aimed at my wife and precious child. He was giving me time to take it all in. Giving me time to feel wretched and sick before he took it all away. Cho was breathing heavily next to me, the revolver I had given her lay on her thigh, no sign she planned on shooting.

Bianchi stood up from his crouch, turning to face Cho and me again. “Chosposi,” he said, “I told you to keep him away for a little longer. Ma non importa. You’ve done well, mia cara. I understand this must have been very difficult, but you were a good teacher to my boys, they have been thriving with their online business. And, again, grazie, for getting my sentence reduced,” Cho had betrayed me, I thought I was training a special agent, and she was training as a double agent. "A very clever girl you have here, Friars- oh, excuse me, Bousignac. She is a credit to you, she can take on the world with just a computer,"

He was taunting me again, throwing it in my face that my student was my enemy. I could no longer keep the stone-faced composure I was taught to keep, that I taught Cho to keep. Before I could lift my pistol an inch, I heard a clamor of gunshots.

There is a myth that when you’re shot, you fall to your knees, but you don’t. I felt the burning pain move up my torso before I looked down at my abdomen, my shirt staining with the blood that oozed from the gaping wound. My vision had begun to blur, but still, I looked to Manon and my son. She was laying on the ground, a bullet wound in the exact spot I shot Charlize. Bianchi’s goons lay dead on the floor too. I looked around feverously, confused about what had just happened, my breath catching as I clung to my stomach.

Bianchi stood with his hands up, the fear in his eyes as he blathered in Italian. Cho came into my field of vision as I finally fell to the floor. She was aiming the gun right at him. She told him that she deserved a lot more credit than he had given her, that the websites his men were running were now easily tracked and that his whole organization was about to fall. That she was going to laugh as she watched it all happen. Then, she put a bullet into his skull.

Cho came to me, once Bianchi was dead. She asked for my forgiveness, but they were going to hurt her family if she didn’t do as they asked. That without me she never would have been able to double cross them like she did.  I could barely speak, I could only manage a few words. “You’re amazing,” I told her.

The only thing that kept me from slipping into the embrace of death was the sound of my son’s cries. I hoped he was crying because of all the noise and not because he knew his mother lay dead beside him. He was all I had left.

No, that wasn’t true. I had Cho, too. My redemption didn’t feel so far away, anymore.

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