Tales From the Agent's Lounge - Prologue
#1 of Agents Lounge
The introduction to the new series I have been promising to write since New Year's, a series of short stories from the early days of FOX Academy and its oldest continuously serving agent, amongst others.
While it seems that these are unconnected stories, pay attention to the narrator as the final story will deal with the tale of his tales.
Enjoy!
Dikran
Tales from the Agent's Lounge
Prologue
Call me Gray, and not because it's my name, although it is, but rather because that is what I am: the gray man, the invisible one, the sponge that absorbs fears and desires and secrets and keeps them safe ... for now.
I'm a bartender, and like most bartenders I'm a good listener. It's part of the job, really, to listen to the customers as you serve them libations sure to loosen their tongues. People talk a lot more when they are drinking and they say things that they otherwise would not say. What is it the Romans said? In vino veritas - in wine there is truth.
Most bartenders nod understandingly and filter out ninety percent of what the clients tell them, but knowledge can be valuable, so they also keep their ears open for betting tips, insider trading information or that bit of celebrity gossip that they can cash in on. But not me; I listen to everything, and I remember it all.
The people I work for are well aware of the habit of drinkers to whine, brag, boast and bitch; they should, they exploit such tendencies regularly while gathering intelligence for the nation. You see, I work for Canada's most secretive of secret services, the Foreign Operations eXecutive, F.O.X. For short.
F.O.X. Agents have had great success hanging out in Moscow's bars, Beijing's taverns and Tehran's hooks parlours, pretending to be interested in the Mundane problems of military and government officials while they paid the tab. Once past the point of no return they would adroitly steer the conversation to more interesting subjects, like why do the policies of the new Minister of Defence piss you off so much? Soon enough the subjects are spewing secrets like someone left the floodgates open.
The problem lies in how to prevent one's own employees from doing the same thing when they are off duty. The agents and analysts are tremendously talented people, but the stress of keeping all those secrets can be overwhelming, as can the burden of having ended lives, sometimes innocent, unsuspecting lives. A clean kill on an obvious enemy is not always possible; there is always a chance of collateral damage. True, they try to recruit folk with personality traits resistant to lingering guilt, but not psychotic killers. The field agents are still people, and they still need to socialize and unwind and unburden themselves just like accountants, lawyers and machinists do. Otherwise they would burn out and become useless, or turn into stress addicts, maybe becoming double agents or worse, writing a tell-all book.
The simple solution is to provide them with a place where they can do this out of the public view, a secure place controlled by the agency, where all the customers have the appropriate security clearance and all the employees are vetted by the agency.
That's where I come in. I ply my trade in a lounge with no name on the grounds of a government facility that does not show on the records for an agency that officially does not exist.
The agents, operatives and analysts come in when they are in town to reconnect with their peers and colleagues. They moan and anguish over their decisions and actions and wonder if they did the right thing, or at least the best thing possible. Being rational beings for the most part they know that there are no absolutes, no pure good or evil, right or wrong, good or bad, just shades of gray, like a dark cat in a London fog ... or the familiar but ignored figure drifting back and forth on the other side of the bar.
The aviation industry has a saying: "There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots." The same is true for the espionage trade. But because they favour the bold when selecting potential agents the end result is that there are very few old agents at all. In this agency the only relic of the Cold War that is not on display in a glass case is an agent known only by his codename - Silver. He matches the description, having a stock of thick silver fur that he claims was solid black back when he was a lad.
"The silver started spreading in my twenties." He told me one time. "When I was in the army I just had a bolt of white at the temples. Then I started working for this bunch and the rest quickly followed."
Silver was an occasional drinker but a heavy one when he got started. After decades of practicing operational security he was pretty tight lipped about current missions, but like many agents that had worked undercover in hostile lands he was a good storyteller, one that could hold an audience with his sometimes embellished descriptions of people and situations that he had encountered. He and the retired agents that still had privileges at the lounge would drink and reminisce about the old days, trying to outdo each other with their outrageous stories. Or on other occasions, often after he had a few, one of the younger agents would ask him about some aspect of his career and he would launch into a tale of the times before desktop computers, the internet, touch-tone phones and digital cameras.
As likely as not I would have heard the stories before, although he and his cronies tended to add more detail with each subsequent telling. I have come to memorize the salient points of each, and I would like to share them with you.
How much of each is true is up to you to judge.