Fiction

In The Year ‘007

A night in the life of the man

formerly known as

the World’s Greatest Secret Agent

By Chris Farnsworth

The man formerly known as the World’s Greatest Secret Agent sighs, and clicks off the hotel menu of pay-per-view porn. Once upon a time, he’d return to his room and find gorgeous supermodel operatives waiting to screw him to death. Now he’s seen all the skin-flicks the Ramada chain has to offer.

Besides, the last time he charged one to his bill, he had to endure a long scolding from Accounting. He sat there daydreaming about the 50 ways he could have killed the auditor with only the objects on the man’s desk.

Those are skills he never gets to use anymore. Mostly, his job has been reduced to this: waiting for a phone call on a bedspread made of the same stain-proof synthetic fiber as the carpet. It doesn’t bother him as much anymore. The world has moved on. He’s accepted it. But the little things can still touch him. Like when he packed for this trip, he found his tux at the back of the closet, wrapped in plastic from a dry-cleaner that’s long been replaced by a Starbucks.

Moments like that make him feel old and heavy.

He shakes it off, tries to remember what state he’s in. Ohio, he thinks. Or Maybe Iowa. Someone has stolen the room’s phone books, and he doesn’t feel like investing any more energy in the problem.

He’s not one of those dinosaurs who’s nostalgic for the days of the Cold War. Most nights, he wakes up in a cold sweat from dreams where he doesn’t manage to reach the cancel button on the doomsday device, where he cuts the blue wire instead of the red one, or where he’s just five seconds too slow on the draw with his laser-pistol. On those nights, he bolts upright in bed, the laughter of a madman ringing in his ears, telling him that this time, he’s finally failed.

You have no idea how close the world came to total annihilation. Almost no one does. Even the majority of generals and spooks are clueless; the secret wars, the real wars, were about eleven levels above their classification status. They honestly believed that a race that would risk nuclear war could be trusted to draw the line at Armageddon. Or perhaps they just suffered from a failure of imagination.

The players he faced built drills to crack open the earth’s mantle and choke the sky with volcanic ash. Engineered viruses like Moses Strain Ten, which would have been fatal only to every first-born child on the planet. Balanced giant mirrors between the moon and the sun that would have boiled the oceans dry. Men of unquestionable genius. They spent millions – billions, in today’s dollars – to create their doomsday toys. Occasionally, there were token demands for power or money, but they were fig leaves. Excuses. Never enough to justify the effort, the expense, the sheer cost in human life. They were designed only to cover their true motives. Their real aim was terrifyingly simple: they just wanted the world to die; to be the man who could say, if only for a second: Fuck God, I just murdered the whole of creation. Serial killers on a global scale.

In the end, it came down to evil. And all too often, it came down to him to stop it.

When he was younger, before he realized the stakes, he found the game challenging, in a way nothing else in his life had ever been. But as the missions racked up, each omnicidal maniac getting just a little closer to success than the last, he began to understand the odds against him. He was an expert gambler, and the math was simple. Stay at the table long enough, and you lose.

But for a short while, it looked like he would be able to quit while he was ahead. The Soviet Union collapsed, and with it, the secret organizations that financed his worst opponents lost their major source of funding. (Gorbachev was heard to remark, on one secret recording, that he could have kept communism going another fifty years for the cost of just one lunar-based death ray.) His superiors were glad to see the end of his work, too. There weren’t budgets big or black enough to hide him anymore.

And so, his department was zeroed out, his support team reassigned to other duties, and his operational clearances shifted or revoked altogether. They put him on training detail, behind a desk.

He protested. In his experience, evil was a tangible force, with its own laws of physics. It pushed and pulled men according to its own gravity and tides. It convinced them of the absolute purity of their causes. They fell in love with death the way a maggot loves a cadaver, working toward the heaven of hollow white bone underneath. The most dangerous threats, he knew, were the unimaginable ones.

He asked to remain on active duty. His superiors laughed, and turned him down. They smiled with perfect white teeth that had never been replaced to hold a cyanide capsule or a microdot. They said, the world just doesn’t work like that now. There are no super-villains left. There are no more great secret conspiracies. There’s just shit that happens. You were great at the big picture work, they said. Maybe too good. You got them all. Who’s left to destroy the world?

Until one morning in September, he clicked on the TV. And suddenly, there was the answer to that question. He could have stopped it. Without even using a jetpack. He knew it. And everyone else knew it, too.

Sometimes, being the only one to get it right in the covert world is a far bigger crime than making the same mistake as everyone else. He was reassigned. They hid him in the middle of America, where one strip mall looked pretty much identical to the next. He could scream “I told you so” from the rooftops out here, and they wouldn’t catch the echo.

He could have retired, he knows. But with the data in his head, he also knows they would never let him quietly rot in an Arizona golf community. One day he’d open the door to the FedEx guy, and then, 24 hours later, his body would be stuffed into a metal drum and buried in a salt cavern next to a shipment of spent nuclear fuel rods. As long as he keeps working, he keeps breathing. He doesn’t like living like this. But he likes living.

Screw it, he decides. He puts his pants back on, grabs his key-card – he can remember when something like it was high-tech, used to gain access to the secret lairs of a dozen villains, and then curses himself for being stupidly nostalgic again – and leaves the room. The call probably won’t come in the next hour, he tells himself.

The secret agent goes to the hotel bar – which is actually connected to the bowling alley next door. The lanes are almost quiet, except for one old man. He moves like rust, arthritis with an obvious grip on his body, seizing up his joints. Until he gets the ball in his gnarled old hand, and steps to the line. Then he’s a ballet dancer in rented shoes, and he hits a perfect strike. Then he shuffles back carefully to the ball return, to wait there, stooped and patient, to start the whole process again.

The bartender – a bearded guy in a sleeveless T-shirt – is clearing the taps when the secret agent steps up. It looks like it takes physical effort for the bartender to ask for his order.

The bartender insists he doesn’t know how to make a martini.

The agent decides to take him at his word. He settles for a bottled beer. Surprisingly, it’s perfectly chilled, cold enough to develop frost on the lip.

The bartender walks through a passage at the end of the bar that opens into the bowling alley’s cashier stand. From there, he calls to the old man, reminding him that it’s well past closing time. The old man doesn’t respond, just keeps knocking down those slow, perfect strikes. The bartender scowls, but doesn’t push it any further. He disappears into another nook, behind the cubby holes full of bowling shoes.

The secret agent finally gets curious enough to stand up and cross through the door into the bowling alley. He walks down the small steps, and takes a seat behind the old man as he works. The agent thinks of it as work, because something so serious, so mechanical, could never be considered play. The old man either doesn’t notice, or pretends not to. He moves so slowly that it takes the agent nearly five minutes before he turns around, and his face is revealed.

And then the agent suddenly feels old and heavy again.

It’s Richard Nixon. Terribly aged, but the unmistakable jowls and nose have only gotten more prominent with the years. Nixon looks at him blankly, and turns again, to wait for the ball to return.

The secret agent now knows why he’s here, in this little town, in this state he can’t remember.

Because it’s not Nixon, of course; the former president died years ago, and depending on which version of history you believe, was either finally roasting in Hell or sitting among a heavenly pantheon of American heroes with Lincoln. This was one of the NixonDupes.

During the last few years of the real Nixon’s reign, he believed assassins were waiting everywhere for him. He was sure the Kennedy family had hired international hit men to avenge Jack and Bobby. He became convinced that Charles Manson had trained a secret army of hippie killers and aimed them at him. One night the Secret Service found him hiding under the Oval Office desk, crying silently and stroking the briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes.

After that, a few million dollars went into R&D, and the NixonDupes were built by a team of Walt Disney’s top Imagineers (who later died in a freak monorail accident). Their robotic brains were programmed with a few standard Nixonian catch-phrases and the president’s EEG patterns. They weren’t bright – their electronic brains couldn’t hold much more information than a DVD – and their skin was latex wrapped over cold metal.

But nobody seemed to notice. They appeared at rubber-chicken dinners and county fairs, shook hands, kissed babies, smiled for the cameras. The night before he climbed aboard the chopper and waved good-bye to the presidency, Nixon released them all into the wild. He couldn’t bear to think of them being put down, he said later, and in the chaotic aftermath of Watergate, nobody noticed until it was too late.

Since then, they had managed to stay under the radar. Maybe they got some of their progenitor’s inborn sense of self-preservation. It was only as they got older that they slipped up and became a threat to national security. They began to glitch, to repeat one or two default behaviors over and over, until people started to notice. One of them stood in Central Park, raising both hands in the V-for-victory sign for nineteen hours straight. Another went around kicking dogs. One was caught chasing kids while screaming, “Sock it to me!” That was the closest they came to discovery; there were newspaper stories about the “scary clown” seen near elementary schools.

Only one went quietly: he was found dead, in his small-town law office, after working late to prepare for a trial. He’d married a local woman, and apparently was considered a strong candidate for the next city council election.

It was one of those pieces of the secret history of the 20th Century that someone decided the American people didn’t need to learn: how crazy the leader of the free world got in the final days. The secret agent’s standing orders are to put down any malfunctioning dupes still running, or collect the bits left when they aren’t. Like a combination of dogcatcher and garbage man. Nobody ever recognized the NixonDupes. They were ancient history. Just like the agent himself.

He wonders, and not for the first time: is it still a secret if no one cares enough to find out about it?

He stands, draws the pistol from his underarm holster. Screws the silencer onto the Glock 9mm. He lost his laser-pistol clearance after his last firearms certification. No worries. Just like a real, living person, one to the back of the head would do it. Sometimes they squealed, but not often. Usually, there was just the sound of static, like wrapping paper stuffed into a garbage bag the day after Christmas.

“Mr. President,” he says, quietly. It’s better to take them away from witnesses, if they still respond to the basic commands. There’s a whirring noise from the dupe. It turns, and something seems to go off behind its marble eyes. It straightens up with a jerky dance straight out of the Country Bear Jamboree.

“Hello there, son,” it says. It almost seems to recognize him. This is, of course, impossible. But the waxy lips pull back in a smile, and the crackling latex muscles offer a hand to the agent. “Great to see you again,” it says, the audio-track only slightly warped after all these years. “Care for a few frames?”

The agent prepares to lead the old toy gently out the door. And then he stops. He actually bowled with the real Nixon once. He was barely into his twenties then. Had just saved the world for only the second or third time; it was new enough to still be a thrill. And Nixon had just installed the White House bowling lanes.

Nixon mopped the floor with him. The man was quite a bowler.

He looks back. The bartender is still in the back room, probably watching TV and smoking a joint by now. He thinks of the phone in his hotel room, and how it’s probably still not ringing. He’s not saving the world anymore.

But then, he has to admit to himself, he’s not sure that the world wants to be saved. Or that it even deserves to be.

“What the hell,” he says. And then the man formerly known as the World’s Greatest Secret Agent spends the next hour bowling with the mechanical ghost of a dead president. He loses every game.

© COPYRIGHT CHRISTOPHER FARNSWORTH, 2007. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.