"I put my hand under my jacket and pull out the gun"
John Brownlow's new book, chosen as the Financial Times thriller of the year, introduces the most dangerous man on earth: he has no name, no past, and at any given moment he knows that someone is already training to replace him. Read the first chapter of "Agent 17".
John Brownlow is a director, screenwriter, and author who wrote, among other things, the television series Fleming about Ian Fleming's work in British intelligence. His new book, Agent 17, was chosen as the Financial Times thriller of the year — and introduces a secret organization that employs only one assassin at any given moment. The only way to take his place is to kill him.
1.
Being a spy is not what you thought. It's boring. I don't mean boring in the sense of heavy. I mean boring in the sense of monotonous to the point of soul-crushing, butt-clenching, and teeth-grinding. Sitting in your cubicle, one of a hundred small and identical beige cages, wearing the office shirt, shoes, and tie, listening to the hum of the air conditioner while you wonder what the daily special will be in the cafeteria, fantasizing about being able to afford a decaf coffee after 11:30 AM. All your attention is focused on a six-month-old Azerbaijani newspaper in the hope of scraping a tiny piece of information about tensions at the low levels of the political hierarchy in Baku that can be exploited for our benefit.
Baku is crazy, by the way. Totally cool. Dubai on steroids, but with more handshakes. They love to drink tea with jam there and play chess, which is the national sport, to the sound of music. But you don't know any of this because you've never been there. Because you're a spy — or, as your job description reminds you in every periodic performance review, an analyst — stuck a meter from your cubicle neighbor who has yet to discover the wonders of deodorant technology. You wear crappy government-issued headphones that hurt your ears because the padding fell off six months ago and expenses were frozen because Congress can't pull its head out of its ass for a second to pass a budget.
And so your life slips away, at the rhythm of your heartbeat, as you listen to endless conversations of terrible audio quality between Omar the taxi driver and Hussein the fruit vendor, who discuss the relative advantages of the offside trap in a hockey game, in the fading hope that at some point they will reveal why Omar's brother-in-law, who now lives in Toronto, suddenly has more money in his bank account than you will earn in a whole year. Or have any chance of earning at all.
Not everything is bad. Sometimes they let you review satellite photos of the desert in Eritrea or Mongolia until your eyes turn red. The most exciting moment in your career so far came when you thought you spotted a missile launcher under a construction site on the Korean Peninsula, but when you brought it to your supervisor, she pointed out that it was a sewage treatment facility. But, you know, you get points for effort too.
Actually, I'm saying that all the things you see in series and movies? Trips to exotic locations where you conduct a chase with screeching tires, jumping over rooftops under automatic weapon fire, having sex with wonderful entities from a variety of ethnic groups, and blowing the heads off interesting people with silenced weapons for reasons that remain vague until the third act? None of that exists. It just doesn't. Not even a hint. Unless you're me.
2.
A Bugatti Veyron car is a wild exaggeration, but the expense budget for this job is especially generous, and if I have one motto in life, it is: if they give it to you, take it. So I took it. A lemon-yellow wild horse that purrs at 204 km/h in the left lane of Highway 9 between Munich and Berlin. There is a part of me that wants to veer east to the Nürburgring and do two laps around the racetrack, but you have to leave something for next time. It didn't even reach half its maximum speed, but I try not to look like more of a prick than I absolutely have to. Because today I absolutely have to.
There are two schools of thought regarding the degree of visibility. You can be overt or covert. There is no middle ground. Covert means: you are the tired middle-aged woman juggling her bag and her Starbucks cup as she looks for her employee ID at the security desk. You are the cleaner with bad English who mops the floor around the tables where a pair of Harvard graduates' offspring discuss whether it's better to rent a seaplane or a yacht. You are the gray man on the subway, with greasy hair, carrying a shopping bag full of old books to a homeless shelter, where you will open the cover of one of them with steam and discover documents that will provide you with a new identity. You don't leave digital footprints. You don't use credit cards. You remain analog in a digital world. Security through anonymity.
But what's the problem with that? That it doesn't work anymore. Biometric technology will screw you. Not just automatic facial recognition. You can put a paper bag on your head and the AI will identify you by your gait, by your body's tilt, by your flat feet, by how your thighs rise or how you move your hips. And good luck crossing an international border, unless you are carrying a passport from a country that doesn't yet use biometric technology, like Russia, which will bring upon you all the attention you were missing.
The second school? Security is achieved by simply being completely overt. Hence the Bugatti. When people see such a supercar, they only see the car. Nobody cares who is driving it. At most, they see some disgusting private equity fund manager, or a tech kid, or a Saudi prince, or a Botox-inflated trophy wife. They don't want to meet their gaze. So they look away. I am none of those, but the blazer, the Rolex, the open shirt, and the slicked-back hair make them invent stories for themselves and judge me accordingly. I feel like you are judging me right now. That you want to look away. Great. It works.
Berlin. I give up the chance to stare at the remains of the wall. The days of the Cold War seem almost magical today: desperate people floating over the wall in a hot air balloon or wading in shit while walking through sewer tunnels or bleeding to death in the no-man's-land between the inner and outer wall, victims of the East German snipers. The irony was that East Germany didn't end at the outer wall. That wasn't the border. The East Germans built a separation strip to allow them to manage the western side of the wall, but the strip was also open to the West. The West German authorities had no authority in the area and it became a party zone, a true no-man's-land. The CIA dumped its victims in the French-controlled zone, the French in the British zone, and the British in the American zone, which reveals the state of diplomatic relations between the nuclear powers at the height of the Cold War more than a four-year degree in international relations ever would.
I pass the tourist trap also known as Checkpoint Charlie and go down to the underground parking lot. As soon as the parking attendant sees the Bugatti, he jumps from his booth. He's at least sixty, and judging by the look on his face, his dick has stood up for the first time in a decade while he slides into the amazingly soft leather of the seat. "Don't scratch it," I tell him. Not that I care, honestly, but I want him to sweat so that the forensics team will find it easy to collect his fingerprints. They won't find my fingerprints under them, thanks to calfskin driving gloves, but there's no such thing as being too careful. I take the parking ticket and head to the parking elevators. He doesn't see me throwing it in the trash. I take one last look at the Bugatti as he drives it. And I think to myself: I just hate this car.
3.
I didn't tell you my name. Because it's not mine anymore. It belongs to someone else, who was once me, who I stopped being a long time ago. The chances are that there aren't ten living people left who remember that man. I left them behind. For the people I meet every day, I will be whoever it is useful for them to think I am. The point is to be.
What's wonderful about a lack of real identity, a lack of a fixed personality, is that you can slide from one personality to another like a naked hermit crab sliding into a new shell every time the dishes pile up too high in the sink of his old house. For the people in our profession, I have only one name. Madonna, Cher, Pelé, Beyoncé, Michelangelo, Plato, Seinfeld, all rolled into one person. I am Agent 17. Younger than you would expect. Very well-groomed, pretentious, sometimes too flashy. An American accent that is hard to place exactly. A bit annoying. No. Actually, fucking annoying. Don't like me? That's fine. In this profession, it's not that important that you be liked.
17, because before me there were 16. A number is a badge of honor. Like being the 45th President of the United States, or the 12th Miss World, or the reigning heavyweight boxing champion. The meaning is simple: you are the best. The most powerful, the most beautiful, the strongest, or — in my case and the case of the 16 who preceded me, the most lethal, and therefore — the most feared. Nobody is sure who the first one was. I'm betting on Sidney Reilly, look him up on Google. The second was a boy whose parents were murdered by the Tsar, he ended up in an orphanage, was kidnapped by German intelligence services at the outbreak of World War I, trained in espionage and sabotage, and then returned to the streets of Saint Petersburg from where he reported on troop movements, but then secretly turned against his German handlers and became a double agent. And all this before he turned twelve.
Numbers 3 through 15 are all definitely dead. You won't be surprised to hear that none of them passed away under natural circumstances, unless you consider falling from a window or a Boeing 737 as such. 16, my predecessor, is a mystery. Simply disappeared. Retired for reasons no one understands, while at his peak. Turned his back and was never seen again. Me? I slid into his shell.
4.
The elevator takes me up. It's an external elevator, and Berlin moves away from me: the Reichstag, Tiergarten, Charlottenburg Palace, all come into view. On the seventh floor, the elevator stops and a girl in a blue pencil skirt and white shirt enters, holding a bundle of folders. Looks Italian. She smiles at me for a second and I pity her, because she works among lust-filled pricks, one of whom will surely propose to her, and then insist that she quit her job and raise a generation of clones in one of those modern mansions that now surround the city like a bear trap. I glance at her hand — a sparkle of a heavy engagement ring. With all these assumptions, you might think I'm a jerk. You're probably right. But that's the way of the world.
The elevator rings. Her floor. She gets out. I watch her walk away, hoping for her sake that he's one of the people I'm about to kill. At the reception desk, another girl, tons of makeup and fake pearls. You have to be careful with those, because they have brains. They live in the real world. She sees me arriving and I see, even before I took off my sunglasses, that she caught me. She smiles, but the smile says she hates everything about me, from the handmade leather shoes to the too-straight and white teeth that cost a fortune. I'm already dying for her. She treats me with expressionless politeness.
I tell her I have a meeting at three with Gerhard Meyer, which is true. He sells stocks, which means that fat rats like me enter and leave his office all day. He thinks I represent a teachers' pension fund whose headquarters are in Toronto, and hopes to get rid of some shaky private placement, the commission on which will fund his third divorce. I have never met the man, but I know these people. The waiting area is dotted with groups of suits, sycophants in the court of King Mammon with James Bond briefcases on their knees, and everyone hopes that this meeting will open the credit line. But Meyer is a seller, not a buyer, and he won't make me wait.
His assistant appears, a young black man — Somali, maybe? — impossibly thin. His name is Bashir. I have no desire to kill him, so I slightly change the plan, pass the conference room that contains my target and follow him instead to Meyer's office. Bashir offers me coffee and I ask for a double macchiato because I know it will take time, and then I apologize to Meyer and ask where the restroom is. I leave my bag, which the police will later discover contains only a copy of Of Grammatology by Derrida — a little so it has some weight and doesn't arouse suspicion, but mostly because if you intended to leave a clue, it's better that it be as confusing and meaningless as possible.
In the restroom, I notice my reflection. The men in my profession I can identify from a kilometer away. Sometimes because of the width of the shoulders, the military gait, or a broken nose. Some of them have a kind of calmness that can be unsettling. If you take a look at their fingers, you'll see that by and large there are no rings on them. I don't have any of these signs. I look less muscular than I actually am, my clothes are tailored to hide the interlacing muscles. This nose was broken three times, but you won't know it because I pay someone from Beverly Hills to put it back in place. I apply moisturizer to hide the damage of the desert sun or the arctic wind on my skin. On the third finger of my right hand, I wear a simple silver ring with an inscription engraved on the inside. When we get to know each other a little better, maybe I'll tell you what's written on it. I put my hand under my jacket and from a hidden holster I pull out the gun.
Agent 17, John Brownlow | Translation: Yoav Katz | Pen and Yedioth Books Publishing | 440 pages
