The Spy

A short story

Photo by Devin Kaselnak on Unsplash

Robert Starlin carefully rotated the tension wrench and pick in the Schlage lock while illuminating it with the penlight he clenched between his teeth.

He had already disabled the spy camera a resident installed on the far side of the hallway with a second, infrared LED flashlight when he opened the stairwell door on the apartment building’s fourth floor.

Robert wore a black watch cap and a simple disguise of oversized tortoiseshell glasses and a costume mustache. Nobody would recognize him.

Everything’s coming along fine, he thought.

The dimly lit hallway reeked of beef and potatoes, thanks to the overweight, unemployed man in 4E who habitually opened his apartment door while cooking to vent the fumes. Robert wondered if his cooking fan was broken or if he was just weird. Probably just weird.

Fourteen seconds later, he was in. Not a drop of sweat beaded his forehead. Jack Ryan would be proud, as would 007, and Court Gentry.

Robert was quick and quiet as he closed the door, extracting his compact Woxu night-vision goggles from under his London Fog trench coat. He stood motionless as he scanned the living room-dining room. Once satisfied that the room was empty, he checked the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and closet.

Robert placed the goggles on the dinner table, flicked on the overhead light, and opened the blinds.

He strode into the kitchen, retrieved a Stouffer's chicken pot pie from the freezer, and slid it into the microwave. He set the timer for eight minutes—plenty of time to figure out his next read. He had just finished the latest Daniel Silva, and maybe tonight would be a good evening to revisit a classic spy novel. He ran his finger along the worn paperbacks that lined his floor-to-ceiling bookcase, passing Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, before settling on Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett.

The microwave beeped.

Tonight's practice lock picking made him hungry. But practice was good; it was necessary because unused skills atrophy.

He poured himself a Diet Coke—I’ll save the Vesper martini, the Bond martini, for when I’m on a mission, Robert thought—opened the paperback, and dug into the pot pie with his fork.

Although the company where Robert worked was three subway stops north of his Third Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street apartment building, Robert took a labyrinthine route that passed through Brooklyn and Queens: six trains and two buses, along with nearly a mile of cumulative walking along mostly deserted streets. His morning SDR—surveillance detection route designed to ferret out intelligence agents who might be following him—meant that he had to get up at five a.m. instead of seven. But there was no other way to be sure that nobody shadowed him. John Rain, the spy in Barry Eisner’s A Clean Kill in Tokyo, taught him that the more convoluted the SDR, the better.

He glanced at his black dial Rolex Submariner, the watch Sean Connery wore in Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger, and his father’s watch. His father, a toy company executive, died when he fell down a flight of stairs during a business trip to Zurich. Robert was only twelve.

He carried his father’s photo in his wallet.

The time was nineteen minutes to nine. Robert arrived at the office at a different time every morning.

Patterns are the enemy of safety.

Robert leaned back in his cubicle’s chair, careful not to put too much weight on it because it would likely break again. A year ago, he'd spent a frustrating week arguing with HR about a new chair. They insisted he pay for it before issuing him a new one.

He removed the SIM card from his phone and powered it down. No need to keep it on if he wasn’t going to use it—Alpha Insurance frowned upon personal devices. Besides, a phone turned on was a tracking device, and could even be an eavesdropping tool if a bad actor slipped a corrupted app onto it.

The bald head belonging to Anthony Gibbons loomed over the cubicle wall momentarily. It disappeared and reappeared as Gibbons, Robert’s manager, glided into his workspace. Gibbons scowled at Robert’s phone. “It’s off, right?”

“Yes, Mr. Gibbons.”

“You’re not going to use it as some kind of VPX again, are you?”

That’s VPN.

“No, Mr. Gibbons. I know the rules.” Six months ago, Robert connected his office laptop to his phone’s VPN, a virtual private network that disguised the computer’s IP address, effectively masking its location. A VPN made computers less susceptible to malware, spyware, and other dangers, but that was a company no-no. HR gave him a demerit and docked a week’s pay for violating computer-use procedures.

“And you’ll have the proofreading done on those contracts by five p.m.?”

“Yes, Mr. Gibbons.”

“You know what, Bob? I don’t care if it’s done by five as long as you don’t go home until you complete the work.”

Robert knew he would be done before five o’clock, but he didn’t share that with Gibbons.

It’s always better when your adversaries underestimate you than vice versa.

He’d have plenty of time to shadow a random New Yorker while at the same time avoiding surveillance, one of the most complex kinds of spycraft to perform.

At exactly noon, Robert put his computer in sleep mode, powered on his phone, inserted the SIM card, and checked that the phone’s VPN was working. He wanted to use his phone during lunch, so he needed to keep it on. There were always tradeoffs; a spy who stayed in a mountain cabin all day and night was no spy.

His iPhone vibrated. There was a text from his ex-wife, Jasmine—a vague question about how he was doing.

I don’t need this now.

You live in a fantasy world, Robert. Even when Jasmine didn’t say it, he heard the words. Sometimes, when he had nightmares, he saw his divorce agreement filled with a single, repeating sentence: You live in a fantasy world, Robert.

He switched his phone off again.

She can think I died for all I care.

He glanced at his Rolex while waiting for the elevator: twelve-oh-five p.m. He had plenty of time to grab a bite at Kay’s Diner. He relished their turkey club on rye, which he ate almost every day. While there was a risk that somebody might learn his culinary predictability and poison the sandwich, that was a risk he was willing to take.

Robert claimed a booth facing the door at the diner’s far side. Never sit with your back to the door was the first rule he learned and remained one of the most important.

A woman with blonde hair, wearing a camel-colored wool jacket sat at the counter about a third of the way toward the door. She was around his age—late thirties. He noticed her because this was the second day in a row she had taken the same seat facing the mirror behind the counter, a position that allowed her to observe him through the reflection.

That alone would not have activated any alarms, but Robert also registered that her black hair was dyed blonde, an asymmetrical bulge under her jacket hinted at the possibility of a weapon, and she ate without looking at her phone.

But what could he do? Disarm her? (He’d devoured multiple books and watched numerous YouTube videos about martial arts.) Sidle next to her and casually engage in small talk to trick her into revealing her identity, his ears tuned to foreign or regional accents? Plant a tracker in her pocket?

He maintained a keen eye on her, finished his lunch, and returned to his desk at twelve-fifty-nine p.m.

Robert finished his work at four-oh-four and spent the rest of the time until it was permissible to leave visualizing his favorite spy novel scenes: Alton Grier escaping an enemy by scaling the outside of a Manhattan brownstone onto the roof during a violent thunderstorm, Petra Hudson inserting computer code at the last second, preventing a rogue Russian general from launching a nuclear missile at Paris, Guillermo Rodriguez teaching himself how to race cars so he could infiltrate the Monaco Grand Prix and ferret out an enemy agent.

He didn’t see or sense the woman who tailed him, and it was only when he entered the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant two blocks from his office (a route that would take him into the alley, the first part of his SDR) that he noticed her face reflecting off of a large, brightly polished pot.

The blonde-not-blonde from the diner.

Robert whirled to the woman, but she vanished as he turned. He snapped his eyes back toward the kitchen’s exit.

There she was, the tip of her nose nearly touching his, her arms wide to her side, a gesture that spoke, “I’m not here to harm you.”

“Whom do you work for?” She tilted her head, studying him.

Robert blinked.

“Are you a freelancer? Did the Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure hire you? The Mossad? We know you're a fourth-generation American but we can’t identify who trained you. I’ve been following you for a month. Your insurance company job—excellent cover. You made me at the diner. You’re good.”

Robert stood statue-like. He took slow, shallow breaths to slow his heart.

She leaned in, her lips to Robert’s ear. “I’m CIA. We want to hire you for a mission in Canada.”

His eyes went wide.

“I know, they’re our neighbor and friend, but a Chinese agent has embedded themselves in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, putting our agents at risk. Can you do this?”

“Yes, I can.”

I can.

“I know you can. You have your father’s blood.” A smile, the first Robert had seen from her, spread across her face. “Care to discuss the mission over a martini?”

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If you enjoyed The Spy, I think you’ll also like my story The Confession.