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Tim decided to get a sandwich on his way back to his condo. A good sub shop was close by, and he ate there often. CNN was on the sub shop’s TV, and although the sound was turned down very low, Tim could hear a panel of talking heads discussing the President’s job performance, it was not a particularly positive review. Tim had an opinion on just about everything but was surprisingly neutral about the current President—and, for that matter, about all of the Presidents going back to the first President Bush. Tim simply felt that the President was for the most part a figurehead and that it didn’t matter who held the position. The fact that everyone in the press seemed to hate this particular President was a mystery to Tim. He knew the man was a racist, but he recalled hearing a recording of one very progressive President making an extremely racist remark as well.
Tim suddenly realized what he was thinking. How the hell did he hear a recording of a former President making a comment about African Americans and Jews? Was this another one of his dreams? What was going on? Tim thought about seeing his neurologist to get an opinion, but the prospect of more MRIs and CAT scans scared him. Maybe he should speak to Mary Ann about what was happening...but did he want to scare her off as well? Why would she want a senile boyfriend?
Tim’s sandwich was now ready, and the talking heads on CNN had apparently finished talking. The station had gone to commercials, so Tim paid for his sandwich and Diet Coke and headed out the door for North Charles Street and his condo. As Tim walked, he noticed a car, no, an SUV, out of the corner of his left eye. Tim had begun to notice how much his vision had improved lately, and he could see that a black SUV was slowly tailing him as he walked up to Charles Street. Was somebody following him? Why?
Tim decided to find out, so he stopped, turned, and faced the street. The black Mercedes SUV pulled up right in front of him. Tim had to bend down slightly in order to see in the vehicle, and he spotted two men. He could not make out the driver, but the man in the passenger seat had graying hair and a light brown complexion. Maybe from India or Pakistan, Tim thought to himself.
“May I help you?” Tim was somewhat surprised by how direct he was becoming. It felt like he was pretending to be a different person, yet his new behavior also seemed natural.
The man in the passenger seat smiled and said, “Yes, I certainly hope that you can. We are looking for North Charles Street.” The man had a slight accent, perhaps from the UK. One might call it posh. Yes, Tim thought. He had a posh British accent.
“That’s interesting,” Tim replied. “I’m headed that way myself.”
Tim immediately felt stupid. Why the hell did he just tell two strangers where he was going?
Then again, maybe he was just being paranoid.
“Well then,” the man in the SUV replied, “perhaps we can give you a lift?”
Paranoid or not, there was no way Tim was going to get into that car. “Thank you, but my mother told me to never accept a ride with strangers.” Tim was now laughing, although he was still on guard. “But if you take a right turn at the light and then go down two blocks, you’ll see North Charles.”
Tim pointed while walking, hoping to put some distance between himself and the black SUV. The man in the passenger seat gave Tim a friendly wave and drove on.
Tim knew that he had seen the man before. He was just too familiar. Tim thought once again that he was acting paranoid, which might also be a sign of some medical condition. He decided to call his neurologist after all.
Tim made the call to his neurologist as soon as he got home. At first, the doctor’s receptionist told Tim that the doctor would not be able to see him for more than six weeks, but when Tim told her that he was having new symptoms, she relented and a made an appointment for Friday in two weeks. Thirty minutes later, the neurologist’s nurse called Tim back and told him that they had arranged for a number of tests, including a CAT scan and an MRI with contrast plus some blood work to be done before the examination. They also made appointments for Tim to be tested on his cognitive ability and IQ. All of that could be done the week before the appointment.
Tim sat down and began to make notes about the coming appointment in his day planner when he heard a heavy-sounding knock on his door. There were three knocks, to be precise—and then nothing.
When Tim looked through the peep hole, he didn’t see anything. He slowly opened his front door and cautiously looked each way, but he still saw nothing.
However, at his feet was a thick, padded envelope. Tim bent down, picked it up, and returned to his couch. He placed the package on his coffee table.
All that was written on the large envelope was Tim’s full name, Timothy Robert Hall. He didn’t usually use the Robert, since that was the same name as a low-end men’s clothing store that existed in the 1960s. Tim remembered that some kids used to call him “cheap suit” at school.
Tim had been remembering little things about several subjects all day long but had been unable to connect them with anything. And now he had a mystery package on his coffee table. Tim took stock of the entire week. First, he’d traveled to the Dominican Republic, where something he couldn’t explain had been done to him. Next, he came home, went out with his girlfriend, and took her to bed for a day and a half, not to mention that he’d almost broken a guy’s hand at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. But what was really beginning to worry Tim was that his personality appeared to be changing. He found himself thinking and saying things that he ordinarily would never say.
Perhaps his memory was returning. The doctors had said that it might, after all—but Tim also knew that a personality change could be an early sign of dementia, which just plain scared him.
Tim looked back down at the package. There were no stamps or postage of any kind on it, no return address. Tim’s address was also not present on it, which told him that it had been hand-delivered. There was only a white label with his full name printed on it.
When Tim picked up the letter opener and carefully opened the top, a book with plastic binding fell out of the envelope onto the coffee table. The book was similar to an employee manual and was certainly not very fancy. The paper could have come from any copy machine.
Tim opened the book to the first page and saw the title “Who Am I?” That is a very good question, Tim thought to himself, but he was fully aware that he was a former employee of the CIA. He was just a little unclear about what his job had been for the last 5 years or so before the accident. Tim had tried to tell some regulars at the Goose that he was a CIA Case Officer but only Mary Ann believed him. Once you retired from the Agency, you were pretty much dead to them. Sometimes, you got the feeling that they would prefer you to actually be dead. Nothing annoyed Agency management more than retired officers shooting off their mouths to civilians at cocktail parties...or worse, write a book. The best the Agency could do was to issue what was known as the Stump Speech, which said, we can neither confirm nor deny (fill in the blank and your name here).
Most people had general misconceptions about the Agency. Generally speaking, CIA employees were usually either analysts or technicians. The ones known as the case officers were actually what people would consider to be spies. Both analysts and technicians could be case officers. These employees worked at CIA Headquarters at Langley and at most US Embassies around the world. Often, the analysts and case officers would be responsible for different tasks—but the one aspect they all held in common was lying. They all lied so often that you never really knew when a case officer or analyst was telling you the truth. Therefore, you just had to accept the fact that you were being lied to most (if not all) of the time.
The other CIA employees you would likely encounter were known as contractors. These men and women performed much of the dirty or unpleasant kinds of work that the CIA was known for. For example, if anyone had a gun, it was probably a contractor, especially since contractors were responsible for Agency security. The case officers tended to feel that they were above that kind of work (although they planned and supervised all of it), but the case officers would be lost without the support of the contractors.
The fourth type of CIA employees were known as assets. These were the people who supplied the CIA with valuable information. Although the assets were not considered paid employees of the Agency, many were actually paid very well for the information they provided. Other assets believed that they had a moral obligation, and a few others were simply blackmailed by the Agency. Most of the assets reported to a case officer, who would be known to the assets as their handler. The assets perhaps had the most dangerous jobs of anyone, since if they were caught, the result was usually a very unpleasant death.
It was also not lost on Tim that someone had gone out of their way to erase his past after his accident. Tim accepted that he was suffering from retrograde amnesia, which was the name his condition was given, but the fact that no one came forward and tried to explain anything about his past life before the accident just did not make any sense. Did he not have any friends or coworkers from the Agency? Why didn’t anyone take him to his old house or the town where he lived just to see if any memory would return? He remembered that his doctors had suggested this course of treatment, yet no one ever followed up on it. Tim did not even know where his late wife Pam was buried or where her ashes were scattered. He’d been told by the doctors and nurses in the hospital that Pam had died in the car accident, but that was all. No police officers ever visited Tim in the hospital to take or follow up with a report. Wasn’t that the common practice? Tim’s mysterious second cousin showed up one day to take care of his home, and she did present him with a check for $478,000, which was apparently the sale price of his house and car. He was given a do-nothing job at the Social Security Administration, where he tried to look himself up in the system until the words “Denied Access” appeared in big red letters. “Classified,” it also said.
Tim tried going directly to human resources after that, but all they would tell him was that he’d been transferred from another agency, and its name was redacted. Tim asked if his wife had life insurance. All Federal employees had life insurance provided to them with double indemnity for accidental death, yet no one had any information about that. The manager of the human resources department sympathized with Tim and suggested that he contact his Congressman, which he considered doing until he thought about what he was going to say. “Hi there, I was some kind of spy, but I’m not sure for who or where.” It sounded crazy because it was.
He finally had to face the fact that someone no longer wanted him around and had decided that Tim needed to retire. The message “Just stay in Baltimore and collect your pension” was loud and clear. Tim’s retirement annuity was almost 90K per year, plus he had money in the bank from the sale of his home. And now that he had a girlfriend, so what was there not to like about life?
Well, for one thing, why the trip down to the Dominican Republic? Tim had been lured there, but for what purpose? Now, those two men had appeared in front of the sub shop, and this book was delivered. Tim wondered if the two men were in Baltimore to kill him. Maybe the people who had worked so hard to erase Tim’s former life had decided to retire him for good.