Full Circuit
by Gary Clifton
part 1
“Hello, hello, good God, hello,” Nathan St. Croix shout-stammered into the cellular. He would have swallowed the damned thing to shut it up.
“Is it raining in Mexico?” rasped the husky voice on the other end.
St. Croix was in no shape for secret passwords. “Good grief, Chadsey, yes it’s me. And it’s four a.m. down here.” St. Croix heaved himself upright onto the edge of the mattress,
“Boxcar, this is Trapdoor. Maintain security protocol. That is an order. Do not say my name again. Is it raining in Mexico City?”
“Oh for God’s sake, Chadsey, it hasn’t rained since... uh” — he flipped on a bedside lamp — “for three weeks.” He provided the coded response to his desk officer in Langley, Virginia, confirming he’d received his last written instruction package three weeks earlier.
The caller didn’t reply.
“Now what in the hell do you want in the middle of the night?” St. Croix had partied with the Comandante of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, two of his lieutenants and several prostitutes until about an hour before. His expanding headache was well en route to critical mass.
“Code seven red alert, Boxcar. Mandatory that you locate, isolate, and take into custody a female American citizen by close of business today.”
“Chadsey, there are twenty-plus million people in Mexico City, which would include about six thousand female Americans. Would there be an outside chance of some sort of location and other identity information, like a name, or do we just grab some babe at random?”
“Dammit, don’t say my name again!”
St. Croix had always assumed Chadsey was a nom de guerre. They’d never met, but who the hell would name their kid Chadsey to begin with? And besides, the telephone system was so highly scrambled the techs that maintained it often got lost in the middle.
Of course, the techs were machines, too; clones who looked reasonably human but who never required sleep, never wasted time discussing sex or football, and were thus able to spend all eternity trying to keep the Eastern Federation counterintelligence clones from intruding into Langley’s not always so secret communications system.
St. Croix had read in old books that prior to the nuclear exchange of 2028, an entertainment medium known as a three-ring circus had been available to the masses. Chadsey had to be a descendant of one of the clowns.
The room spun dangerously. No time for intensive analysis of the screwed-up 2061 world of clandestine intrigue. “Yes sir, Trapdoor, I understand. Now what the hell do you want me to do? And why don’t you just send instructions down in the regular shuttle?”
“Dammit, Boxcar, we don’t need to let the other side have any more chances at our written material than necessary.”
“Actually, it’s more like four sides down here, depending on which alliances are honored on a given day, plus two or three more who sorta bounce with the wind. Now what the hell do you want in the middle of the night?”
Since everyone on all sides more or less had full knowledge of the roster of the entire intelligence community south of the United States by both real and codenames, St. Croix had always viewed the world of pseudo-secrecy with scorn. But the pay was good, and it wasn’t exactly that he had alternatives.
“Go ahead, Chad... uh, Trapdoor,” St. Croix said wearily. A shard of pain traversed his skull like the electrical shock procedure he’d undergone years before at the “Farm” in rural Maryland.
“Female’s real name is Madeline Gilmore; blonde, 26, attractive...I’m sending you a photograph. We have reason to believe she got out the back door with at least part of the plans for the new JX-7, Down-Fire model. Detain her until we can send somebody down to shuttle her little ass back up here.”
St. Croix sat there in abject, booze agony, wondering what the hell a JX-7 was but, if he’d learned anything in his years of association with Langley, he knew that to ask was as futile as trying to breathe water.
* * *
St. Croix had been a DEA Agent for fifteen years until he’d shot and killed two kids who he had mistakenly thought were robbing a U.S. Government owned liquor store in St. Louis eight years before. After he evaporated both with his DEA issue service thruster, the locals had informed him he’d exterminated the manager’s two teenage sons.
Condemned and ready for the bureaucratic punishment of shipment for life to labor in the titanium mines near the Arctic circle of Canada, his life had essentially ended. As he sat in the St. Louis County Jail, guards had unceremoniously dragged him down to an interview room where he was confronted by a pair of sixtyish ladies, both with a full load of large gray hair.
“I’m Ms. East,” the first fragile little creature spoke up. “Mr. St. Croix, you’re in what we call a hell of a fix.”
“We?”
The second lady, Ms. North, her eyes as cold gray as her mass of hair, explained in detail they were from the Central Intelligence Agency and that St. Croix had just been pressed into service with the huge agency. His assignment would be in South America and he would never be allowed to return to the U.S. under penalty of death. Or he could opt to be colonized to another galaxy and be history of a different nature.
St. Croix nearly blurted some comment to the effect that spies were supposed to look like Daniel Craig in the ancient movies, not his aunt Emma. In view of the circumstances, he listened instead.
Hell yes, he’d go south in lieu of straight up to frozen hell . “What would I be doing?”
“What you’re told,” Ms. East replied softly.
St. Croix had — in addition to the two recently departed misfired teenagers — earlier killed two dopers, neither remotely related to the two dead teenagers. No stranger to the harsh realities, he asked, “We talkin’ wet work here?”
Ms. North smiled sweetly. “Afraid we ask the questions, Mr. St. Croix. I believe I said, ‘as you’re told.’ And be advised, you are not an employee of the Agency. You are a contractor with a salary but no benefits. Remain mindful, sir, the Director of the CIA is now the permanent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with control over ALL military and related activity worldwide. Her appointment is for life... and, sir, so is yours.”
Early on in the world of black ops, he had learned that, as a Langley contractor, he no longer really existed, a classic example of a fully expendable, easily replaceable asset. In view of no options, all he could do was dumbly nod his head and disappear from society forever.
With no wife, no children, parents long dead, and only an estranged sister in Fresno, being AWOL would be relatively easy.
Later, he learned the St. Louis cops had told the grieving relatives of the two dead teenagers that he had been killed trying to escape. Nathan St. Croix was, officially, already deader than hell.
As the years bore on, the business of murder became, while not easier, nonetheless more routine. He had actually gotten to where he could go part of a full afternoon without seeing the contorted, terrified faces of an irregular array of his handiwork.
The good news was that he wasn’t required to work more than a few days of the year, the pay was triple his DEA salary, and with the inactivity, his golf game had improved eight strokes.
After six years in Bolivia and fourteen execution murders — Langley called them “corrections” — the Bolivian National Police issued several arrest warrants for him. Langley had plunked him into a sleazy motel in teeming Mexico City. In two years in the Mexican capital, he had “corrected” five more human beings, had worked at his golf game, and had drunk too much tequila. Occasionally, as today, Langley would give him odd assignments.
Beyond the regular, nondescript packets Langley sent down, which always contained exactly nothing, he never saw another written word from Langley. Actual assignments always were initiated by a telephone call from Chadsey — if Chadsey even existed — telling him he would be contacted in person by an agency operative with full instructions as to who was next on St. Croix’s “corrections” agenda.
* * *
Today was an aberration, a situation forecasting bad luck in the murder business. St. Croix hated the assignment as much this day as he had eight years earlier, but he’d do what he had to do. And this deal sounded soft and manageable. “Where do I meet the messenger, Chadsey?”
“Dammit, my name.”
“Where?”
“No messenger. She arrives, Mexicali Flight 287 at 9:14 a.m. this morning. Detain her; we’ll be down by noon to haul her back.”
“Do I club her ass in the terminal? Or maybe chain her to a chair? You got some kinda plan?”
“This is not a correction, Boxcar. Detain and hold only. You have plenty of credentials. Convince the airport cops you’re the Supreme Federal Police commander from somewhere up here. They’ll lend you a holding room. We’re on the way, for God’s sake. She’s traveling on a counterfeit American passport under the name Angela Madsen.”
So, with his ear-splitting headache in full bloom, he set out to put into motion the deadpan words of his strange, invisible master from afar.
St Croix knew the local cops and the value of the Yankee dollar. By 8:00 a.m., his health was partly in control. He had provided the necessary local police honchos with fistfuls of cash and photos of the fugitive. They had obligingly secured a small interview room to detain her.
At 9:44 a.m., two fat, uniformed cops brought in Madeline Gilmore / Angela Madsen in cuffs. She was pissed big time but showed a glimmer of fear. Maybe Chadsey had longer teeth than his voice on the com system indicated.
Chadsey had described her as attractive, which was short by at least three levels. Chesty, with soft blue eyes that penetrated men’s intentions like Superman’s ability to determine underwear color, she slumped in the hard chair across from St. Croix with a deep sigh. Her pose showed an enticing length of upper leg, which was impossible to ignore beneath a short skirt.
“I’m Nathan St. Croix, Investigator for the U.S. Department of Defense, Ms. Madsen. I’m afraid Washington has some concern about the validity of your passport. Nothing we can’t clear up in a few minutes.”
Her presence flooded the room with the odor of lilacs and vivacious young woman. “Department of Defense, huh? You gotta key to remove these damned cuffs, dude? Do I look that dangerous to a big lug like you?”
She did not, and he snapped off the cuffs.
Copyright © 2023 by Gary Clifton
